From The End is Near department comes this video documentary from lefty talk radio guy Thom Hartmann that claims we are on the verge of a “mass extinction” due to climate change. Only one problem; the IPCC says “no” to his scenario. Ooops.
From the YouTube description, bold mine:
“Last Hours” is the first in a series of short films that explore the perils of climate change and the solutions to avert climate disaster. Each subsequent film will highlight fact-based challenges facing the human race, and offer solutions to ameliorate these crises. The initial short film series will culminate in a feature film to be presented prior to COP21, the 2015 UN Conference on Climate Change in Paris.
An asset for the climate change movement, “Last Hours” will be disseminated globally to awaken modern culture worldwide about the various dangers associated with climate change.
“Last Hours” describes a science-based climate scenario where a tipping point to runaway climate change is triggered by massive releases of frozen methane. Methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, has already started to percolate into the open seas and atmosphere from methane hydrate deposits beneath melting arctic ice, from the warming northern-hemisphere tundra, and from worldwide continental-shelf undersea methane clathrate pools.
Burning fossil fuels release carbon that, principally through greenhouse effect, heat the atmosphere and the seas. This is happening most rapidly at the polar extremes, and this heating has already begun the process of releasing methane. If we do not begin to significantly curtail the use of carbon-based fossil fuels, this freed methane threatens to radically accelerate the speed of global warming, potentially producing a disaster beyond the ability of the human species to adapt.
This first video is designed to awaken people to the fact that the earth has experienced five major extinctions in the deep geologic past — times when more than half of all life on earth vanished — and that we are now entering a sixth extinction. Industrial civilization with its production of greenhouse gases has the ability to trigger a mass extinction; in the extreme, it could threaten not just human civilization, but the very existence of human life on this planet.
The world community and global citizens urgently need to chart a path forward that greatly reduces green house gas emissions. To take action and follow the pathway to solutions to the climate crisis, you can explore this website and you can also sign-up for future updates. Thank you.
It’s the old “methane emergency” meme again.
But here’s the problem.
Apparently Thom never got the memo from the IPCC AR5. Note the third and fourth items in Table 12.4 from the IPCC:
Definitions for this table can be found in the section “TFE.5: Irreversibility and Abrupt Change” in the draft report. They say:
“Abrupt climate change is defined in AR5 as a large-scale change in the climate system that takes place over a few decades or less, persists (or is anticipated to persist) for at least a few decades, and causes substantial disruptions in human and natural systems.”
But alas, IPCC says Clathrate methane release is very unlikely, and they have high confidence in that assessment. Permafrost doesn’t seem to be much of a problem either, as it doesn’t seem to have the potential for abrupt climate change.
Looks like Thom Hartmann will have to rework his video.
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Why should he revise his video? The purpose of this propaganda piece was to gin up the skeer on AGW. It was never about science or the truth. It’s like calling back the cannon ball once the cannon is fired. All the damage has been done and you can’t undo it. “An Inconvenient Truth” was debunked how many times? It’s still playing on some cable channels and lots of people still believe it.
Being totally debunked, exposed as a hypocrite and exposed as a money-grubbing charlatan numerous times hasn’t hurt Gore’s credibility with the faithful, so why should Hartmann worry?
From what I have been reading on the internet, it is severe cold we have to worry about, not CAGW!
For anyone who is taken in by this rubbish, can you please recollect the following: Y2K, SARS, AIDS, Mad Cow Disease, a new Ice Age! The human race has survived all of these things, the Earth has not warmed for 17 years. The only thing that may finish the human race off is panic if we all take as literal all the predictions of impending doom!
absorption bands be damned
It’s the last days of the CAGW movement (Hartmann’s own word), and that’s all it ever was. They are becoming increasingly desperate to simply hang onto the faithful True Believers, who are the only ones left who are brainless enough to belief this sort of crud.
The Permian Extinction event (caused by the Siberian Traps volcanoes) happened at a time when global temperatures Dropped by up to 9.0C (it did not go up). The CO2 level was mostly stable at about 2,000 to 3000 ppm over the period, having already increased about 15 million years earlier (when there was no extinction event). Nice Zoom-in of the numbers.
http://s17.postimg.org/93bes725b/Permian_Extinction_Temp_CO2_Zoom_In.png
But, he won’t
This is getting to be like listening to the people who believe “The Rapture!!!” is about to occur on the 27th of next month. It’s a purely religious belief that depends on their on psychological pathology, and has no relationship with reality, or even with rationality, for that matter.
There’s really no point in trying to talk directly to them, you’re not going to make any headway with people who have gone round the bend, psychologically speaking. It is a shame they work so hard to prey upon the gullible, but then this kind of act is as old as witch doctors.
The threat of a mass extinction is an effort to rush through energy control and rationing globally despite the climate not co-operating with previous scare stories.
The first I heard of it was when Bob Geldof’s outburst was publicised.
He is at the heart of the celebrity culture that supports the ‘alarmosphere’ so if he comes out with it in public one can be sure that it is an agreed strategy that is likely to be given a very hard push in the media in the near future.
It is now all about the manipulation of public perceptions in order to accrue power.
I expected some nice disaster porn and all I got was a 10 minute wavetable synthesizer drone (is it still 1990?) and a bunch of Lovelock wannabes.
More explosions and dying critters; and please license Requiem For A Dream or something like that, guys.
Everything in the video will come true if…
And my granny would be a wagon if… she had wheels.
I’m gonna back the IPCC this time and go with highly unlikely for the video and my dear old granny.
According to Table 12.4 from the IPCC, there is nothing catastrophic which will happen with any level of confidence, other than the melting of the Arctic sea ice within the next few decades. The IPCC is not suggesting catastrophic climate change at all. I guess the IPCC leaves the nonsense up to the nuts gone loose in society.
BTW, the Lovelock wannabes still have to explain why the Methanocalypse didn’t happen during the Holocene Climate Optimum. Each subsequent climate optimum including today got progressively colder.
The Methane clathrates do not care why it’s warm; they should have dissolved 8000 years ago already.
As the cltathrates are under the sea they can’t know what temperature the atmosphere has. The heat capacity of the oceans is 1,200 times the one of the atmosphere. Even if the atmosphere warmed up by 6 deg C, it would take a while for the ocean to swallow that heat; and only result in a warming of 0.005 deg C.
Well, let’s see whether the climate pornsters get the public mobilized. Interest in climate change in google trends still at a 6 year low after the peak in 2007 (when Al Gore was warning of the
housing crisisend of the world).A couple of other Extinction Events;
– the Ordovician which was probably the coldest period on Earth in the last 600 million years (-7.0C with CO2 at 4,500 ppm or what should have been +12.0C according to global warming theory) which was caused by glaciation on Gondwana as it was centred over the South Pole at the time; and,
– the Triassic-Jurassic extinction which lead to the rise of the dinosaurs and was probably caused by the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province which erupted in the centre of Pangea and lead to its unzipping/splitting apart, eventually creating the Atlantic Ocean.
http://s14.postimg.org/7keqi3mwx/Ordovician_Extinction_Temp_CO2_Zoom_In.png
http://s22.postimg.org/ohnz5qvch/Triassic_Jurassic_Extinction_Temp_CO2_Zoom_In.png
JimS says:
October 13, 2013 at 7:50 am
“I guess the IPCC leaves the nonsense up to the nuts gone loose in society.”
The IPCC itself is a political organisation, controlled by governments and subverted by their Green NGO goons. The IPCC and the climate pornsters are both controlled by the same puppetmasters and form the extremes of the dialectic; where the IPCC is made to look reasonable by contrasting them with the climate pornsters. This is designed to obfuscate the fact that the IPCC itself is already a propaganda organisation.
In fact, the know-nothing little believers still take the IPCC seriously and still trust government science; so that part of the manipulation strategy works. (I know because several colleagues were all worried by the latest “findings” of the IPCC. Of course they only read some journalistic processing of the summary for policymakers where the journalists cooked up the hysteric points and ignored everything else.)
Another ‘mankind is doomed’ extinction event disaster is pending, you say?
Yawn….
Just another spiv / cheat / liar / conman / snake oil salesman / tax inspector / agenda pusher / political activist / dickhead*.
Put on ignore list.
*Indicate as appropriate.
What is runaway climate change? I know what runaway warming is but that is soooo yesterday.
All we need is a Solar Cycle 24 repeat of the “Carrington Event,” and no one will care about AGW. Or pro sports, politics and everything else. If we want to spend money we don’t have, we should spend it to harden our grid against a massive CME.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/08/02/about-that-almost-carrington-event-two-weeks-ago/
What a loathsome and despicable video. Is this the way tyrants, dictators, genocidal maniacs, claimed the fears and imaginations of their adherents? Sure looks like it doesn’t it? Sounds like it too, with that appropriately religious hymnal replicating, but foreboding soundtrack. So people, give up all the hard won freedoms are ancestors fought for. Give them up to this god of carbon mitigation. Give up your low cost and readily available means to travel, to move. Give up the ability to choose where to live. Give up your ability to choose your own home and how you wish to ornate it. Give up the ability to choose the temperature you wish to set your own habitation at: Shivering in the winter? – live with it. Sweat stinging your eyes; prickly heat on your chest; gasping the heavy air; too bad; don’t turn on the AC – live with it. Change your diet. And tithe the vast majority of your hard earned money to the administrators, the prophets of this god of doom. Do so and be spared. Oh, and don’t speak out against this, don’t criticize it. Do not blaspheme the god. That is not allowed. It is an emergency after all.
I have to wonder about the Eemian interglacial and methane hydrate release. This is because the quote above says it has already started and we are doomed.
@Jimbo – check your email
Doesn’t warrant any sensible discussion does it !
The IPCC is a poor standard for comparison. Both it and Thom Hartmann are selling snake oil, but Thom at least gives us some excitement in his pitch.
There’s a name for this.
Climate p0rn.
wws says:
”This is getting to be like listening to the people who believe “The Rapture!!!” is about to occur”
In addition, like bible code “researchers”, climastrologists egg the rapture doomsayers on by finding all sorts of alarming signals hidden in the noise.
– – – – – – – – –
Well more than 26 months planning.
An impressive far point strategy is pretty evident by the intellectual leaders of the ideology behind the CAGW movement.
It begs the question of where is the far point strategy of the broader skeptical intellects in the general climate science community if they are not complicate in the ideology?
Who is strategically watching where the scientifically skeptical hockey puck is going to be 2 to 5 years from now and 5 to 10 years from now?
The word fragmented floats to the surface of my consciousness, unbidden.
John
Uh…looks like there is an inconvenient “pause” in methane…
http://www.windows2universe.org/earth/Atmosphere/images/methane_atmosph_concentr_1984_2004_big.gif