Regular WUWT readers know of the issues related to Arctic Sea Ice that we have routinely followed here. The Arctic sea ice trend is regularly used as tool to hammer public opinion, often recklessly and without any merit to the claims. The most egregious of these claims was the April of 2008 pronouncement by National Snow and Ice Data Center scientist Dr. Mark Serreze of an ice free north pole in 2008. It got very wide press. It also never came true.
To my knowledge, no retractions were printed by news outlets that carried his sensationally erroneous claim.
A few months later in August, when it was clear his first prediction would not come true, and apparently having learned nothing from his first incident (except maybe that the mainstream press is amazingly gullible when it comes to science) Serreze made another outlandish statement of “Arctic ice is in its death spiral” and” The Arctic could be free of summer ice by 2030″. In my opinion, Serreze uttered perhaps the most irresponsible news statements about climate second only to Jim Hansen’s “death trains” fiasco. I hope somebody at NSIDC will have the good sense to reel in their loose cannon for the coming year.
Not to be outdone, in December Al Gore also got on the ice free bandwagon with his own zinger saying on video that the “entire north polar ice cap will be gone within 5 years“. There’s a countdown watch on that one.
So it was with a bit of surprise that we witnessed the wailing and gnashing of teeth from a number of bloggers and news outlets when in his February 15th column, George Will, citing a Daily Tech column by Mike Asher, repeated a comparison of 1979 sea ice levels to present day. He wrote:
As global levels of sea ice declined last year, many experts said this was evidence of man-made global warming. Since September, however, the increase in sea ice has been the fastest change, either up or down, since 1979, when satellite record-keeping began. According to the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.
The outrage was immediate and widespread. Media Matters: George Will spreads falsehoods Discover Magazine: George Will: Liberated From the Burden of Fact-Checking Climate Progress: Is George Will the most ignorant national columnist? One Blue Marble Blog: Double Dumb Ass Award: George Will George Monbiot in the Guardian: George Will’s climate howlers and Huffington Post: Will-fully wrong
They rushed to stamp out the threat with an “anything goes” publishing mentality. There was lots of piling on by secondary bloggers and pundits.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I got interested in what was going on with odd downward jumps in the NSIDC Arctic sea ice graph, posting on Monday February 16th NSIDC makes a big sea ice extent jump – but why? Then when I was told in comments by NSIDC’s Walt Meier that the issue was “not worth blogging about” I countered with Errors in publicly presented data – Worth blogging about?
It soon became clear what had happened. There was a sensor failure, a big one, and both NSIDC and Cryosphere today missed it. The failure caused Arctic sea ice to be underestimated by 500,000 square kilometers by the time Will’s column was published. Ooops, that’s a Murphy Moment.
So it is with some pleasure that today I offer you George Will’s excellent rebuttal to the unapologetic trashing of his column . The question now is, will those same people take on Dr. Mark Serreze and Al Gore for their irresponsible proclamations this past year? Probably not. Will Serreze shoot his mouth off again this year when being asked by the press what the summer ice season will bring? Probably, but one can always hope he and others have learned something, anything, from this debacle.
Let us hope that cooler heads prevail.
By George F. Will, Washington Post
Friday, February 27, 2009; A17
Few phenomena generate as much heat as disputes about current orthodoxies concerning global warming. This column recently reported and commented on some developments pertinent to the debate about whether global warming is occurring and what can and should be done. That column, which expressed skepticism about some emphatic proclamations by the alarmed, took a stroll down memory lane, through the debris of 1970s predictions about the near certainty of calamitous global cooling.
Concerning those predictions, the New York Times was — as it is today in a contrary crusade — a megaphone for the alarmed, as when (May 21, 1975) it reported that “a major cooling of the climate” was “widely considered inevitable” because it was “well established” that the Northern Hemisphere’s climate “has been getting cooler since about 1950.” Now the Times, a trumpet that never sounds retreat in today’s war against warming, has afforded this column an opportunity to revisit another facet of this subject — meretricious journalism in the service of dubious certitudes.
On Wednesday, the Times carried a “news analysis” — a story in the paper’s news section, but one that was not just reporting news — accusing Al Gore and this columnist of inaccuracies. Gore can speak for himself. So can this columnist.
Reporter Andrew Revkin’s story was headlined: “In Debate on Climate Change, Exaggeration Is a Common Pitfall.” Regarding exaggeration, the Times knows whereof it speaks, especially when it revisits, if it ever does, its reporting on the global cooling scare of the 1970s, and its reporting and editorializing — sometimes a distinction without a difference — concerning today’s climate controversies.
Which returns us to Revkin. In a story ostensibly about journalism, he simply asserts — how does he know this? — that the last decade, which passed without warming, was just “a pause in warming.” His attempt to contact this writer was an e-mail sent at 5:47 p.m., a few hours before the Times began printing his story, which was not so time-sensitive — it concerned controversies already many days running — that it had to appear the next day. But Revkin reported that “experts said” this columnist’s intervention in the climate debate was “riddled with” inaccuracies. Revkin’s supposed experts might exist and might have expertise but they do not have names that Revkin wished to divulge.
As for the anonymous scientists’ unspecified claims about the column’s supposedly myriad inaccuracies: The column contained many factual assertions but only one has been challenged. The challenge is mistaken.
Citing data from the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center, as interpreted on Jan. 1 by Daily Tech, a technology and science news blog, the column said that since September “the increase in sea ice has been the fastest change, either up or down, since 1979, when satellite record-keeping began.” According to the center, global sea ice levels at the end of 2008 were “near or slightly lower than” those of 1979. The center generally does not make its statistics available, but in a Jan. 12 statement the center confirmed that global sea ice levels were within a difference of less than 3 percent of the 1980 level.
So the column accurately reported what the center had reported. But on Feb. 15, the Sunday the column appeared, the center, then receiving many e-mail inquiries, issued a statement saying “we do not know where George Will is getting his information.” The answer was: From the center, via Daily Tech. Consult the center’s Web site where, on Jan. 12, the center posted the confirmation of the data that this column subsequently reported accurately.
The scientists at the Illinois center offer their statistics with responsible caveats germane to margins of error in measurements and precise seasonal comparisons of year-on-year estimates of global sea ice. Nowadays, however, scientists often find themselves enveloped in furies triggered by any expression of skepticism about the global warming consensus (which will prevail until a diametrically different consensus comes along; see the 1970s) in the media-environmental complex. Concerning which:
On Feb. 18 the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center reported that from early January until the middle of this month, a defective performance by satellite monitors that measure sea ice caused an underestimation of the extent of Arctic sea ice by 193,000 square miles, which is approximately the size of California. The Times (“All the news that’s fit to print”), which as of this writing had not printed that story, should unleash Revkin and his unnamed experts.
tommoriarty (17:50:12) :
Gee, Tom you beat me to it.
However, there is a new article in the Feb 21, 2009 Winnipeg Free Press where Barber is again interviewed and predicts there will be no ice in the summertime between 2013 and 2030.
http://www.ecoearth.info/shared/reader/welcome.aspx?linkid=119295
If you read the article his explanations of meteorology leave a bad taste in you mouth. He seems to make up the explanations as he goes along. Try ” The warmer water also attracted bad weather, as storms that would have usually travelled over the continent were steered towards the open ocean, bringing with them lots of snow.” Looks like he has not heard of the levels the steering flows are located.
WestHoustonGeo (16:12:40) :
I’m another of the old geezers who remember the “inevitable” approach of the next ice age, which apparently began during the Eisenhower administration. I remember sitting with my farmer father in an ag extension meeting in Illinois, with a whole bunch of flat-earthers (seriously, have you seen central Illinois? Flat, really flat.) while the smart guy from the University of Illinois told us to expect a huge influx of Canadian farmers who wouldn’t be able to grow wheat in all that cold. We didn’t know much about Canadians, but if they were farmers, we could probably get along. The general agreement was that we would do our best to feed and house them as they fled south, and try to get their men-folk decent jobs. These Canadians were Midwestern sons of the soil, like my dad, and his generation and theirs had just fought a war to get rid of Nazis. So we’d share our bounty, shoulder their burdens, too, and make do somehow. Just one thing, though.
We’d rather they didn’t speak French. Especially around the children.
Joel Shore,
Please don’t cite anything by William Connolly. He is incredible. As in not credible. Connolly is the prime reason that Wikipedia articles on AGW and global warming are worthless; they are generally propaganda, with Connolly as the gatekeeper.
You may have been a youngster in the ’70’s, but I clearly recall the continual hyperventilating about the imminent specter of global cooling. Anyone who believes that human nature was different then, and who believes that the consensus wasn’t chasing grant money, is naive.
Here is a very typical article citing studies done, and also citing the NOAA’s view: click
Here is another article showing the ebb and flow of media stories, which alternate between global warming and global cooling alarmism: click
Anyone claiming that in the 1970’s there was not a consensus that global cooling was approaching is either ignorant of the facts, or devious. In William Connolly’s case, there’s no doubt that it’s the latter. Connolly has an agenda. Please don’t refer to him again.
Joel Shore (18:24:45) :
It is interesting how everyone jumps up and says “not me” when they do not want to be associated with a particular view. In the mid 1970’s a colleague and I showed a film to the public about the coming Ice Age. It was based on ice cores and some other items. I would like to find it now but they likely chucked out the 16mm films from the library. At that time I did not have any clear opinion one way or the other, but the Canadian government seemed to be more concerned with cooling than warming in those years so we did our duty. I still have the copy of the 1976 National Geographic which featured an article on the concern over possible cooling. The comments there were split.
Well I was studying geology in the late 70’s early 80’s and can tell you that the coming ice age was the general prediction.
Joel Shore (18:03:05) : said:
“{Actually, there are other materials like Al and Cu that they derive shorter years-to-depletion based on exponential growth in usage but none of these are predictions but merely pointing out that we can’t continue growing our use of these materials forever and/or have to recycle and that even if the known reserves turns out to be several times greater than the current estimates, the nature of exponential growth means that it doesn’t change the story as much as you might expect.]”
Aluminium??????
Sorry but wiki (and elsewhere says that ‘Aluminium is the most abundant metallic element in the Earth’s crust (believed to be 7.5 to 8.1 percent)” It might be true that the cheap sources will be depleted, but we will run out of water before running out of aluminium on earth.
27 June 2008
North Pole notes
Filed under: Reporting on climate Arctic and Antarctic Instrumental Record Climate Science— gavin @ur momisugly 3:04 PM
I always find it interesting as to why some stories get traction in the mainstream media and why some don’t. In online science discussions, the fate of this years summer sea ice has been the focus of a significant betting pool, a test of expert prediction skills, and a week-by-week (almost) running commentary. However, none of these efforts made it on to the Today program. Instead, a rather casual article in the Independent showed the latest thickness data and that quoted Mark Serreze as saying that the area around the North Pole had 50/50 odds of being completely ice free this summer, has taken off across the media.
The headline on the piece “Exclusive: no ice at the North Pole” got the implied tense wrong, and I’m not sure that you can talk about a forecast as evidence (second heading), but still, the basis of the story is sound (Update: the headline was subsequently changed to the more accurate “Scientists warn that there may be no ice at North Pole this summer”). The key issue is that since last year’s dramatic summer ice anomaly, the winter ice that formed in that newly opened water is relatively thin (around 1 meter), compared to multi-year ice (3 meters or so). This new ice formed quite close to the Pole, and with the prevailing winds and currents (which push ice from Siberia towards Greenland) is now over the Pole itself. Given that only 30% of first year ice survives the summer, the chances that there will be significant open water at the pole itself is high.
The actuality will depend on the winds and the vagaries of Arctic weather – but it certainly bears watching. Ironically, you will be able to see what happens only if it doesn’t happen (from these web cams near the North Pole station).
This is very different from the notoriously over-excited story in the New York Times back in August 2000. In that case, the report was of the presence of some open water at the pole – which as the correction stated, is not that uncommon as ice floes and leads interact. What is being discussed here is large expanses of almost completely ice-free water. That would indeed be unprecedented since we’ve been tracking it.
So why do stories about an geographically special, but climatically unimportant, single point traditionally associated with a christianized pagan gift-giving festival garner more attention than long term statistics concerning ill-defined regions of the planet where very few people live?
I don’t really need to answer that, do I?
Share This 45 blog reactions
827 Responses to “North Pole notes”
Andy Gates Says:
27 June 2008 at 3:11 PM
Already the denial community is giving credit for Arctic melting to the sea-bed volcanic activity (eg: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-06/haog-fut062508.php). It would be great to have an analysis of that idea with actual numbers and science.
[Response: That’s hilarious (if unsurprising). I’ll see what I can do… – gavin]
Richard Pauli Says:
27 June 2008 at 3:17 PM
Ah ! Finally RC moves from atmospheric sciences to human psychology. Much deeper, impossible to know, and still interesting.
Bill Durbin Says:
27 June 2008 at 3:19 PM
Gavin, I’ve been hoping you would do a post on Jim Hansens’ testimony before the Congressional Committee on the 20th anniversary of his appearance in 1988. Would you consider doing so? I have found it to be somewhat bizarre that there has been so little follow up in the press.
Andy Revkin Says:
27 June 2008 at 3:19 PM
There’s a very simple answer to why this got traction: Drudgereport.com. TV producers sift it continuously, then rush coverage.
You can find out more (and see links to my earlier coverage of Arctic sea-ice trends, and what’s going on with sea ice at the other end of the planet) in my latest post on Dot Earth.
More on how the media could do much better covering climate can be found in one of my two book chapters on the media and climate, which the radio show On the Media posted online.
pat neuman Says:
27 June 2008 at 3:21 PM
My bet is that this year’s Arctic Sea ice extent ice will not fall below
last year’s minimum (4.28 or 2.77), because last year’s minimum was very
low in comparison to all other years of record (1979-current).
ftp://sidads.colorado.edu/DATASETS/NOAA/G02135/Sep/N_200709_area.txt
Arctic sea ice monitoring at NSIDC
http://npat.newsvine.com/_news/2008/05/27/1514154-arctic-sea-ice-monitoring-at-nsidc
Mark C. Serreze Says:
27 June 2008 at 3:31 PM
Gavin:
I hope that I will not be pilloried by the community for being a part of this story. From what I can gather, it started with a piece in “National Geographic Online”, moved to a piece in “The Independent”, another piece on CNN, and then quickly grew out of all reasonable proportion. A positive feedback process. I’ll be the first to agree that losing the ice at the north pole this summer would be purely symbolic, but symbolism can be pretty darned powerful.
[Response: As we are seeing! We should perhaps tap into it more often. – gavin]
For those who missed the Newsweek article:
http://austrianeconomists.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/the_cooling_world_newsweek_2.jpg
It seems to me that someone with a PhD, and I refer to Dr. Mark Serreze, should recognize that it is necessary to be very careful and accurate when issuing a statement to the press.
To many I may be splitting hairs, but one of the things that stands out to me is his use of the phrase, “North Pole.” There are several magnetic North Poles, but only one Geographic North Pole.
Then saying, “This raises the spectre — the possibility that you could become ice free at the North Pole this year.” No Marc, I don’t think I’ll, “… become ice free at the North Pole this year,” because I don’t intend to ever travel to a North Pole again.
I know that is not what he meant, but that is certainly what he said. This does not seem to me to be the type of pronouncement that should be expected out of a PhD in any scientific field.
I agree with Anthony, Serreze was ‘shooting from the hip,’ or firing for effect!
at 20km (50mb) AMSU temps showing lowest recorded temps on record Feb 2009. (compared with recorded years on graph since 1979? Can anyone elaborate?
About the Antarctic ice melting faster, the AP article that appeared in the Detroit Free Press states that the study has been conducted over the last two Antarctic summers. It is not all that uncommon for ice to melt in the summer on the western coasts. That it may be melting faster I would think would be hard to detect only studying it for two years.
Consider this sentence:” By the end of the century, the accelerated melting could cause sea levels to climb by 3 to 5 feet–levels substantially higher than predicted by a major scientific group just two years ago.” This is pure speculation. There is zero evidence that this ‘accelerated melting’ will continue for 91 more years. This kind of arbitrary speculation is the same thing Anthony is up against with Mr. Serreze. It’s not hard to understand though when one considers that government granting agencies are handing out millions of taxpayer dollars to study potential, possible disasters. We have to keep the money rolling in you know.
Way to sock it to ’em George!
Mr. Will has always been one of the VERY best journalists and columnists around.
His secret weapon?? Logic.
Pure unadulterated logic….and an incessant quest for the TRUTH. (Hmm….sounds a lot like the Scientific Method.)
Its a crying shame that THAT does not rule the day in our publicly-funded government-owned scientific organizations.
We should be leading the world in scientific advancement!
But we don’t because bureaucrats control science in our modern day.
New Term: “Bureaucra-scientist”.
I don’t need to name names for examples…. JAMES HANSEN.
Oops sorry. Turretts Syndrome here.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
I’ll be the first to agree that losing the ice at the north pole this summer would be purely symbolic, but symbolism can be pretty darned powerful.
No doubt you are taking that statement entirely out of context… 😉
Who wrote this?
There are at least two, maybe three misquotes.
First, Mark Serreze did not make a prediction – he made a statement about a possibility and, given the context, it was indeed true that there *was* a significant possibility – so he was correct, and there is no need for a retraction.
I have read many, many articles that reported his words verbatim, and then went on to also give an estimate of probability – from right here where it was estimated to have a low probability, to others that gave it a high probability. ALL were correct, and those that gave the points to support their estimate were even valuable.
Yes, the media does get it wrong, and they *should* be careful in what they say and how they say it. I did read at least three articles that got it wrong; one that misquoted him as saying it *would* be ice-free this past year, and two that referred to the *arctic* and not the *north pole*. Oh, and quite a few articles by writers *here*, that misattributed it as a ‘prediction’… no retractions yet, any idea when we can expect them?
Then, #2:
The quote from this article:
“Serreze made another outlandish statement of “Arctic ice is in its death spiral””
The actual quote:
“”No matter where we stand at the end of the melt season, it’s just reinforcing this notion that Arctic ice is in its death spiral””
Not the same. To a careless reader it may look nearly the same, perhaps, and certainly dramatic (perhaps overly dramatic) but undeniably true. Whether the ‘notion’ is justified or not, the last two years ice-minimum record does reinforce it.
#3: The video of Al Gore… the quote from the article “in December Al Gore also got on the ice free bandwagon with his own zinger saying on video that the “entire north polar ice cap will be gone within 5 years“. There’s a countdown watch on that one.” is clearly inaccurate.
I could not make out what he was saying while the German newsreader was overtalking the video, but it appeared to me that he was saying “completely gone”, not “will be gone”, and there were clearly several words in between “entire north polar ice cap” and “completely gone in five years” – not only that but this was a predicate phrase, we have no idea what the objective phrase was, of that sentence… why was that cut off? It could be he said
“I will bet you one trillion dollars that the entire north polar ice cap is guaranteed to be completely gone within five years”
or it could be
“If we have a particularly active solar cycle 24, the entire north polar ice cap could possibly be completely gone within five years”
Neither one is likely, but without the full and accurate translation we don’t *really* know what he said. (I happen to believe your quote *could* carry the gist of his message – but I wouldn’t guarantee it as Gore usually parses his statements verrry carefully.)
You point out that the media often misquotes and gets things wrong, on the alarmist side (and you’re right). Why join them? Do you think misquoting in the other direction somehow increases overall accuracy?
I made a critcal post a week or so ago about the tenor of some of the writers here, while still giving you credit… and much to my satisfaction, either everyone redeemed themselves, or you did a great job moderating the day or two of discussion around Meier’s note to you about the satellite data.
To be absolutely honest, many of the articles I’ve read here, and the in-depth links, are causing me to evaluate what I am reading from the AGWers with a more critical eye – mainly because I find most of your articles both credible and well-supported, and have come to expect more of the same.
This one is not.
p.s. perhaps the rest of the article had some further good information, but with a lead-in like the first three paragraphs (and being very familiar with actual quotes cited), I took a pass on the rest. I didn’t see a byline – who wrote this?
Here’s another scientist making a ice-free artic prediction. This one says summer 2009 is the date:
“……The frightening models we didn’t even dare to talk about before are now proving to be true,” Fortier told CanWest News Service, referring to computer models that take into account the thinning of the sea ice and the warming from the albedo effect – the Earth is absorbing more energy as the sea ice melts.
According to these models, there will be no sea ice left in the summer in the Arctic Ocean somewhere between 2010 and 2015.
“And it’s probably going to happen even faster than that,” said Fortier, who leads an international team of researchers in the Arctic looking for clues to climate change…..”
http://www.canada.com/topics/news/national/story.html?id=c76d05dd-2864-43b2-a2e3-82e0a8ca05d5&k=53683
Smokey, you are a trip! You complain about ad hominem attacks and then you build a whole post around them. When you have posted things from garbage sites like ICECAP, I have in specific and gory detail explained what is deceptive about them. Yet, all you do here is whine and complain and throw in a few links to a few popular press articles that everyone including Connolley have already acknowledged exist. Why don’t you try responding to his actual points rather than inventing strawmen to respond to?
And, by the way, the article by Connolley is peer-reviewed, which is a lot more than we can say for almost all of what you post.
Whoops…My mistake for referring to an article in a peer-reviewed journal like BAMS when you would prefer to refer to articles on the website of a political think-tank! And, note how their article, like Will’s, cherry-picks one New York Times article from 1975 while ignoring the other written 3 months later! Quality research that is!
…Or they are looking in the peer-reviewed scientific literature or reading the National Academy of Sciences report rather than cherry-picking a few articles from the popular press.
don’t know if mr. serreze is deliberately briefing poorly trained press and poorly trained individuals like mr. gore with a hidden agenda.
however, he starts with “The set-up for this summer is disturbing”, what i find is rather disturbing, as nasa blamed winds and ocean currents as the main factors for sea-ice loss, and even the hadley center admitted recently that the receeding ice may have just been caused a natural variability.
short term natural variability is not disturbing.
for dummies however, a “disturbing” news of an ice free north pole may sound like an ice free arctic. some may even be aware that this would only happen for a very short time in september.
I am yet another voice from the 60’s and 70’s, as I remember all the hype about the looming Ice Age. We also had to read the Limits to Growth propaganda in chemical engineering school, as part of the Environmental class. (Club of Rome). It was a classic howler, as we could easily discredit the assertions.
I agree with the comment earlier — Running out of Aluminum???? On THIS earth??? We might run out of cheap aluminum (bauxite, actually), and begin recycling in earnest if and when the cost of recycling equals the cost of new bauxite mining.
Club of Rome is a huge joke…stating we will be running out of capital to invest (it keeps growing and growing), out of water (it never disappears, folks…and we can purify it easily). Running out of food, energy, land, and all the others. None of it came anywhere close to reality.
Which brings me to my point: the greenies learned a lesson back then. Now we are seeing the new approach. The scientists in the 70’s may have published global warming is coming, I don’t know about that. I was studying chemistry and chemical engineering, not atmospheric science. But, their scientific studies and conclusions did not get much main-stream press coverage. What did get covered, obviously, were “The Ice Age Is Coming” stories.
What is so interesting is, the greenies now pooh-pooh the 70’s Cooling stories as being found only in the MSM. Yet, they go out of their way today to put the Global Warming (oops, Climate Change) stories in that same MSM.
This time around, the greenies are making certain that their scientists get frequent and front-page coverage of the scariest Warming projections even where the data is doubtful, highly questionable, and downright wrong.
What the Club of Rome never took into account is the tendency of men (in the most general sense, no offense ladies) to step up and modify their environment to suit the times. No food shortages occurred because better yielding crops and growing methods were developed. No metals shortages arose because we developed cheaper methods to find and refine the stuff. No energy shortage arose (except for political issues) because, again, we developed technology to find and extract oil, and some nuclear plants were built. No water shortages developed across the globe because we developed better ways to husband our water supplies, such as conservation and recycling and desalination where we could justify the cost. Indeed, in many places there is too much water (floods) at inopportune times.
As I frequently write, Geeks and Engineers. Saviors of Society.
And, to the two or three AGW proponents on WUWT, please, how do you respond to Dr. Pierre Latour’s statements that the earth’s average temperature can never be regulated by manipulating the level of CO2 in the atmosphere?
Here is an excerpt from an interview with Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace. His website is greenspirit.com
http://www.agbioworld.org/biotech-info/articles/biotech-art/moore.html
from
New Scientist
December 25, 1999
By Michael Bond
Why after 15 years of activism did you start to become disenchanted with the environmental movement?
Partly it was the fact that foot soldiers often become diplomats. I don’t think anybody should be required to be in confrontational environmental politics for their whole lives, especially when they start a family. But it was partly the movement’s refusal to evolve. I’m in favour of civil disobedience in order to bring about justice where something really bad is going on such as nuclear testing or toxic dumping. But I’m a Gandhian through and through-I believe that peaceful civil disobedience and passive resistance movements are great shapers of social change. But when industry and government agree that the environment needs to be taken into account in policy making, and when there are ministries and vice-presidents of the environment, it seems to me it would be a good idea to work with them. When a majority of people decide to agree with you, it is time to stop hitting them over the head.
How has the environmental movement got it so wrong?
The environmental movement abandoned science and logic somewhere in the mid-1980s, just as mainstream society was adopting all the more reasonable items on the environmental agenda. This was because many environmentalists couldn’t make the transition from confrontation to consensus, and could not get out of adversarial politics. This particularly applies to political activists who were using environmental rhetoric to cover up agendas that had more to do with class warfare and anti-corporatism than they did with the actual science of the environment. To stay in an adversarial role, those people had to adopt ever more extreme positions because all the reasonable ones were being accepted.
But hasn’t environmentalism always been about opposing the establishment?
Environmentalism was always anti-establishment, but in the early days of Greenpeace we did not characterise ourselves as left wing. That happened after the fall of the Berlin wall when a whole bunch of left wing activists, who no longer had any role in the peace, women’s or labour movements, joined us. I would go to the Greenpeace Toronto office and there would be an awful lot of young people wearing army fatigues and red berets in there.
*****************************************************************
My comments:
I’ve been studying the science of climate change since the mid-1980’s. It continues to be a fascinating endeavour.
The politics of global warming are much less attractive, and the lack of balanced, rational debate on this important subject is, at best, tiresome.
Frankly, after avoiding AGW politics for years, I have more recently come to the conclusion that the warmist side of this debate is never going to honesty discuss this subject.
The easy lies, like the Mann hockey stick, just keep on coming. As soon as one such falsehood is discredited, another three take its place – the latest is West Antarctic warming…
I have abandoned the notion that this is an honest debate among sincere people – the warmist side has demonstrated itself to be entirely disreputable.
The cost to humanity of warmists’ falsehoods has been great, and will be even greater, until the weight of their lies ultimately proves their undoing.
That will be a good day, but one problem will remain. After the warmists have discredited environmentalism, who will speak for the environment, and will anyone listen?
http://nsidc.com/arcticseaicenews/
I see they conveniently left in the flat line stretch that started in mid January where they already admitted the errors began.
That graph now has zero credibility.
It’s entirely reasonable to suspect the global fix is in progress.
When one ponders the massive agenda and revenue that relies upon sea ice degradation validating AGW it’s easy to imagine any means necessary to retain and bolster the hoax.
History is full of examples of eggregious steps taken for lesser causes.
I suspect conversations have taken place between AGW stakeholders which have covered the prospect of their being shown to be horribly wrong about ALL of the enormous AGW crusade.
Probably some screaming, threatening and finger pointing was laced through the panic to plot some new tactics.
Of course I could be wrong and the acrtic ice cap could be gone by 2014.
Wow, when George Will opens fire, he doesn’t miss.
A few notable alarmists must be smarting.
That’s like getting tasered. George Will, well I’ll be.
Agreed.
Re: cabrerski (16:46:23)
I too had been in the habit of attributing all sorts of bad happenings to global warming when one day my mother got sick of it and asked me if I couldn’t come up with something else to blame whatever it was on.
So I blamed it on Women’s Lib.
That didn’t go over well.
But, on a positive note, she’s come to accept that global warming is to blame for everything. 😉
Joel Shore:
I didn’t post anything from ICECAP. Ever. Which should cause folks to question your other assertions.
If you are actually trying to argue that there was no consensus in the 1970’s that global cooling was the threat du jour, then you are being willfully blind. I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt here. Not so William Connolly, who is in the same camp, and every bit as corrupt and devious, as Maurice Strong.
And regarding the stacked-deck peer-review process in the climate sciences, as we know the system has been gamed, and only those touting the AGW/CO2 meme have an easy time being published [specific citations on request].
Finally, Joel Shore, as I have asked you before: please have those whom you have converted from questioning the repeatedly falsified AGW/CO2 hypothesis, to being new believers in that hypothesis, to step forward here and identify themselves as global warming converts. Failing that, why do you constantly post 24/7/365 to readers of the Best Science site your interminable arguments that convince nobody?
Anthony,
Here is the current Arctic sea ice as developed from the AMSR-E sensor.
I notice it’s not on your resource page. Might as well evolve from cryosphere now, since they will be following shortly.
http://www.iup.uni-bremen.de:8084/amsr/arctic_AMSRE_visual.png