Luboš Motl writes about the alarming opinion from the German Climate Adviser published in the Spiegel. If you’ve ever doubted that Climate Science has become politicized, this should end any doubt. – Anthony
By Luboš Motl
In his previous life, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber used to be a fairly good theoretical physicist. For example, he would solve the Schrödinger equation with an almost periodic potential in 1983. He has spent a year or so as a postdoc at KITP in Santa Barbara (1981-82).
But the times have changed. For a couple of years, he has been the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and the main German government’s climate protection adviser. What he has just said for Spiegel, in
is just breathtaking and it helps me to understand how crazy political movements such as the Nazis or communists could have so easily taken over a nation that is as sensible as Germany. A few rotten steps in the hierarchy is enough for a loon to get to the very top. He is proposing the creation of a CO2 budget for every person on the planet, regardless whether they live in Berlin or Beijing. Let us allow him to speak:
Humankind has to limit itself to emit only fixed amount of carbon into the atmosphere until 2050. […] Because the industrialized nations have already exceeded their quotas if you take into account past emissions. […] With the current output you see that Germany, the US and other industrialized nations have either already used up their permissible quota, or will do so within the next few years. […]
The industrialized nations are facing CO2 insolvency. This means that they have to notch up their efforts to reduce climate change, otherwise they will use up the CO2 budget actually designated to poorer countries and future generations.
Question: So industrialized nations would have to pay massive sums of money?
Yes. Up to €100 billion ($142 billion) annually. If the richest sixth of the world’s population were to pay this amount, each person would have to pay €100 per year. The West would give back part of the wealth it has taken from the South in the past centuries and be indebted to countries that are now amongst the poorest in the world. It would, however, have to be ensured that the poorer nations use the money for the proposes it is intended — namely to help them to develop a greener economy.
Of course, Schellnhuber is not the first hardcore nutcase of this kind who has been saying such things, pretending that he is oh so smart. Many of you may remember Richard Feynman’s popular book, Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman, where he also described a crazy “interdisciplinary” conference where a similar “thinker” has been proposing the same “reparations” paid to the poor countries, based on the same assumptions that Mr Schellnhuber has used.
In order for me to save some time, let me just copy Feynman’s entertaining description of the crazy conference he attended in the 1950s. The amount and basic types of pompous fools haven’t changed: they have just taken over many institutions that apparently include the German government:
There was a special dinner at some point, and the head of the theology place, a very nice, very Jewish man, gave a speech. It was a good speech, and he was a very good speaker, so while it sounds crazy now, when I’m telling about it, at that time his main idea sounded completely obvious and true. He talked about the big differences in the welfare of various countries, which cause jealousy, which leads to conflict, and now that we have atomic weapons, any war and we’re doomed, so therefore the right way out is to strive for peace by making sure there are no great differences from place to place, and since we have so much in the United States, we should give up nearly everything to the other countries until we’re all even. Everybody was listening to this, and we were all full of sacrificial feeling, and all thinking we ought to do this. But I came back to my senses on the way home.
The next day one of the guys in our group said, “I think that speech last night was so good that we should all endorse it, and it should be the summary of our conference.”
I started to say that the idea of distributing everything evenly is based on a theory that there’s only X amount of stuff in the world, that somehow we took it away from the poorer countries in the first place, and therefore we should give it back to them. But this theory doesn’t take into account the real reason for the differences between countries — that is, the development of new techniques for growing food, the development of machinery to grow food and to do other things, and the fact that all this machinery requires the concentration of capital. It isn’t the stuff, but the power to make the stuff, that is important. But I realize now that these people were not in science; they didn’t understand it. They didn’t understand technology; they didn’t understand their time.
The conference made me so nervous that a girl I knew in New York had to calm me down. “Look,” she said, “you’re shaking! You’ve gone absolutely nuts! Just take it easy, and don’t take it so seriously. Back away a minute and look at what it is.” So I thought about the conference, how crazy it was, and it wasn’t so bad. But if someone were to ask me to participate in something like that again, I’d shy away from it like mad — I mean zero! No! Absolutely not! And I still get invitations for this kind of thing today.
When it came time to evaluate the conference at the end, the others told how much they got out of it, how successful it was, and so on. When they asked me, I said, “This conference was worse than a Rorschach test: There’s a meaningless inkblot, and the others ask you what you think you see, but when you tell them, they start arguing with you!”
Even worse, at the end of the conference they were going to have another meeting, but this time the public would come, and the guy in charge of our group has the nerve to say that since we’ve worked out so much, there won’t be any time for public discussion, so we’ll just tell the public all the things we’ve worked out. My eyes bugged out: I didn’t think we had worked out a damn thing!
Finally, when we were discussing the question of whether we had developed a way of having a dialogue among people of different disciplines — our second basic “problem” — I said that I noticed something interesting. Each of us talked about what we thought the “ethics of equality” was, from our own point of view, without paying any attention to the other guy’s point of view. For example, the historian proposed that the way to understand ethical problems is to look historically at how they evolved and how they developed; the international lawyer suggested that the way to do it is to see how in fact people actually act in different situations and make their arrangements; the Jesuit priest was always referring to “the fragmentation of knowledge”; and I, as a scientist, proposed that we should isolate the problem in a way analogous to Galileo’s techniques for experiments; and so on. “So, in my opinion,” I said, “we had no dialogue at all. Instead, we had nothing but chaos!”
Of course I was attacked, from all around. “Don’t you think that order can come from chaos?”
“Uh, well, as a general principle, or…” I didn’t understand what to do with a question like “Can order come from chaos?” Yes, no, what of it?
There were a lot of fools at that conference — pompous fools — and pompous fools drive me up the wall. Ordinary fools are all right; you can talk to them, and try to help them out. But pompous fools — guys who are fools and are covering it all over and impressing people as to how wonderful they are with all this hocus pocus — THAT, I CANNOT STAND! An ordinary fool isn’t a faker; an honest fool is all right. But a dishonest fool is terrible! And that’s what I got at the conference, a bunch of pompous fools, and I got very upset. I’m not going to get upset like that again, so I won’t participate in interdisciplinary conferences any more.
Feynman’s book continues with a story involving the young rabbis whose main concern was whether electricity was fire.
I wonder how Feynman would feel if he had to be talking to not just a few nuts of this kind but e.g. to 2,500 similar nuts who would be moreover described by the media as good scientists, if not the best ones in the world. 😉
maybe we should send a better staufenberg to stop them?
The problem in voting them out is that someone else comes in. All the major UK parties are busy trying to “out green” each other. Kiss a baby, kiss a green.
Strange really in that you may have thought that the conservatives at least would recognize “green” for what it is. Where do they think the hard left in the UK went after the collapse of the USSR? Recognised the error of their ways and all re-trained as chefs?
This is the sort of garbage they are bowing to in order to appear greener (sick bags at the ready)…
Mr Cameron only slightly blotted his copybook by arriving at the meeting in a gas-guzzling Vauxhall Omega, a government car supplied to him in his role as Leader of the Opposition. He excused himself by saying that he frequently cycles to work, or takes the bus or train, but yesterday his crowded schedule forced him to go by car. He is hoping to swap the Vauxhall for a more environmentally friendly model.
Well past time that someone in UK politics grew a spine.
I’m often reminded of the Futurama episode “a head in the polls” (Jack Johnson and John Jackson debating on TV – don’t let their identical DNA fool you … they differ on some key issues)
The bloke’s a nutcase!
Pierre Gosselin (05:50:17) :
I hate to tell you all this, but Schellnhuber is also Chancellor Angela Merkel’s closest advisor on climate issues and policy.
Both are physicists…or metaphysicists? = far away from empirical reality.
The problem with the author “playing the nazi card” here isn’t just the comparison per se, but the ill-founded claim that this is something uniquely German. After all, who are the priests bringing the AGW theory out of the realms of science and into a mass hysteria? It’s the americans mr. Gore and mr. Hansen!
And comparing to stalinism or nazism is not really valid until agw-ists start to argue that /murder/ is a necessary means to the end. Until then, I suggest that those who want a serious and scientifically sound discourse resort from Reductio ad Hitlerum and leave that to mr. Gore (http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/07/07/gore-and-nazis/) and mr. Hansen (http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/02/15/hansen-on-death-trains-and-coal-and-co2/).
Rest assure that Putin has enough intelligence to shut the gas pipe to germany the next winter also….Get warm with your windmills germans!
What we are dealing with here (Schellnhuber) is the elevation of a very narrowly educated physicist to a position of influence. It has little to do with national socialism or communism except that in those regimes, propaganda was the order of the day and no critical thinking tolerated – it is to this latter issue that our intellect would be better directed. Schellnhuber is much more than a scientist – he is a career administrator – moving from one institute to the next, and is chosen for those positions because of those skills, not his ability to master complex social, political and natural ecologies.
The world is full of such people – except today, they tend to be scientists. It was on this WUWT site that I first heard of Eisenhower’s additional warning to the threat of the military industrial complex to dictate foreign policy – that scientists would also begin to direct policy – as is now the case with a climate policy that affects almost every area of the economy, lifestyle and natural environment. It is not Obama’s climate bill – he is a lawyer and knows little other than how to present arguments – it comes from the policy people like Holdren (feted over here as a leading climate scientist – he is nothing of the kind – he is another career administrator and from a narrow physical/technology background). In the UK, we have had numerous ‘chief’ scientific advisors with extremely narrow educations (chemists, for example) arguing policies way beyond their comprehension with regard to their social and economic and even environmental impact.
These people are NOT idiots – they are intelligent and well-meaning, but exceptionally naive and uninformed. Sadly, because they are so narrow, they are averse to critical discussion – and this is where any comparison with ideologues such as Marxists, is valid – they repeat their mantras such as ‘settled science’ and ‘no proven solar influence’ without actually knowing the science. Schellnhuber edited a volume of climate science (and chaired the conference) of a major international review here in the UK commissioned by Tony Blair (I reviewed it in ECOS, the journal of the British Association of Nature Conservationists – reference not to hand, but if people google and email, I am sure the editor will provide a file) – in that volume were 52 papers – not ONE made any reference to the work of Henrik Svensmark and the Danish school of thinking on solar-climate interactions whose papers are in the peer-reviewed journals of Solar and Terrestrial Physics (among others) and in conference proceedings of the European Space Agency.
It is this process of exclusion and narrow thinking that underpins the current carbon madness.
The danger is that this institutional failure COMBINES with something much deeper and psychological and which should not be dismissed – the yearning among many millions of Europeans (and I would expect a good few million Americans) to do something effective to correct the huge imbalance of wellbeing in what used to be called the First World and the Third World (largely Africa and South America) – the Second World was never clearly defined but we might use the term BRICs – countries like Brazil, Russia, India and China that have enough resources, capital and schooling to reach for the same living standard as the First World. The Third World has little to play with – except to sell forests and minerals, or recently, food/biofuel acreage to soveriegn funds of China and the Middle East (1.5 million acres of Madagascar bought by China so far!).
There is an underlying sense of GUILT among many First World intelligent people and this can be and is being manipulated – albeit unconsciously (at present) by the legions of administrators, accountants, brokers, auditors, and lobbyists – all of whom probably share the guilt. This blinds them not only to the realities of climate change, it blinds them to their own self-interest in pushing the agenda (i.e. their career interest).
Its a complex and NEW phenomenon for which we do not yet have all the right words – using the old categories will not help and may simply cause offence and even further closure of discussion.
In all of this carbon-sharing, the glaring fact that the ‘West’ not only emits most of the carbon, but also makes most of the goods that the other worlds want to buy, is seldom admitted by the lobbyists. The USA became the bete noire for 25% of emissions, but nobody points out it produces 25% of tradeable goods, and that the rest of the world depends upon a sound US economy. China will soon have this unenviable leading position.
What narrrowly educated scientists like Schellnhuber can’t see is that there really is little point in curtailing carbon allowances in the West and giving them to the Third World (the Second World has already made a grab and is unlikely to limit itself) – because the Third World does not have the technological history embedded in the West to make the goods.
This mismatch also demands the other side of the Schellnhuber blindspot – the denial of reality with regard to renewable energy sources fuelling the Western world’s production of goods as they limit their own carbon – they can’t – the figures don’t add up (nor can nuclear power make them add up).
So – what is the answer? Renewables – properly integrated and with environmental safeguards, might reach 20% of current supply but can’t go beyond because of both environmental and cost constraints – and western governments need to stop being in denial of this. I am no fan of nuclear power – having studied in detail and published papers on the social and environmental costs of a major aerial release (as at Chernobyl) – and ALL reactors are fallible. Fusion is a quasi-religious scientific pipe-dream (I first heard this from my doctoral level Oxford colleague when he left the Culham research centre to work with our group). We all need to get real. Nobody is going to cut demand significantly – it is too bound up with economic growth. Only higher prices cut demand and no government will introduce significant carbon taxation – they prefer ‘trading’ because it lets industry off the hook now (the tightening that is promised will never come) and the brokers and bankers love it (our UK government has a high tax-take from this kind of activity) – broker pays $2 per tonne for a credit from a Phillipino pig farmer who installs a methane digester, sells it to a bank for $10, bank sells it to industry for $15 (industry avoids $50-100/tonne abatement costs) and the consumer gets the final bill (including tax hike to fund government subsidies).
Look to Denmark for the future. It has 20% renewable supply and electricity costs 300% of that in the UK (including 50% government tax). Danes have the one of the highest GDPs in the West, a small educated population and no fuel-poverty underclass (people who pay more than 10% of their income for keeping warm) and so can afford this. In the UK, 30% receive some kind of government income support, and fuel poverty is a desperate issue affecting 20% of households.
The future is HIGH cost and falling demand, with a real potential to limit economic growth and create major social unrest. It is how we manage this that will determine our own wellbeing and our humanity with regard to the Third World – which will be hit harder by the high costs, but might adapt more readily.
In a future where energy demand is 50% less in the West – I have no idea what kind of political economy will evolve under these circumstances or how long that will take – carbon emissions take care of themselves – high cost limits them – and China takes the economic lead because of its command economy and huge coal reserves. Global emissions will probably peak as the Western economies falter, but be maintained by China and India’s burgeoning economies. The Copenhagen meeting is unlikely to agree limits for those economies.
Only when this rather dystopian but essentially very probable future reality is admitted and not denied, will we begin to get beyond the naive carbon-scary-climate story –
sorry for the long polemic – I need to write another book!
Not to worry. Somewhere around this site I read that with furthur industrialization China and India will go into “spontaneous decarbonization”.
How this works is not too clear to me but it appears to be a political reality.
Here in British Columbia, Canada we have lots of trees, actually lots and lots of trees. Some bright buisness people have discovered a ingenious way to develop carbon credits. They buy land with scrub trees, Alder and Maple. They remove the trees and sell the wood. They then plant coniferous trees, generating carbon credits based on future carbon sequesteration. They then sell the carbon credits to airline passengers who wish to be seen to off-set their air travel carbon emissions.
Our provincial government needs to look at this revenue generating mechanism to off-set the current budget deficit as the government owns lots and lots of trees..
Sent this to my Brother, who finished his Phd at age 57, 30 years after his MS. (Teaches Chemistry at a community college in ILL.)
He’s comment was: “If you define yourself as an ‘intellectual’…don’t worry,
you are NOT one!”
I’m quoting him, as I don’t “define” myself as an “intellectual” (just an ENGINEER!) and to use it directly would be “intellectually dishonest”.
Thanks to my Brother for this defining moment..
Marx
No. When hysteria reaches a peak it collapses and catharsis follows although traces of the hysteria continue to rumble away for many years.
I judge CO2 and AGW hysteria is coming to a peak and will quite suddenly go out of fashion. Whether that happens in time to avoid serious economic damage in the Western world remains to be seen.
For straws in the wind and the consequent backpedalling see link below. And remember New Scientist has been assiduously pushing the CO2 AGW agenda for nearly 20 years.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17742-worlds-climate-could-cool-first-warm-later.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news
Kindest Regards
Espen (07:36:02) :
However, this is history:
http://www.spunk.org/texts/places/germany/sp001630/peter.html
“When hysteria reaches a peak it collapses and catharsis follows although traces of the hysteria continue to rumble away for many years. I judge CO2 and AGW hysteria is coming to a peak and will quite suddenly go out of fashion. ”
No chance. This is a battle for control of resources and population control and they’re not going to give in until someone gets shot, there’s massive regular protest against the rise of Marxism or someone gets caught on tape privately saying things Stalin would be proud to say. Van Jones is just the gravy on this dish.
@ur momisugly Marx Hugoson (07:55:58)
My mother finished her masters at 70. She’s still plugging along and talking about her PhD at 79, but I know she’ll never do it because she has no time – she’s having too much fun (spending our inheritance, but hey, so would I!).
Apparently those of her age are increasing their life expectancy by a year every year they live. That means we don’t know how long they will live, but they are doing very well indeed. Anything to do with the wealth (and medical treatment) created by burning all those evil fossil fuels? I think so….
“Nogw (07:41:26) :
Rest assure that Putin has enough intelligence to shut the gas pipe to germany the next winter also….Get warm with your windmills germans!”
Why do you think the Russians have so much to gain from this CO2 hysteria? Their paid for lackeys in the EU bend over backwards for their Russian paymasters. Oleg Deripaska, a gangster who is banned from entering the US, was one of the authors of European climate regulation because if countries like Poland, Germany and Britain stop using coal they’ll have to start using more Russian oil and gas, and that means sucking on the Kremlin’s teet.
One thing is Knowledge another Being, if Being is low and Knowledge is high then you have a monster.
Let’s do a simple back-of-the-envelope exercise: The average world life expectancy is 65 years. Herr Schellnhuber is 59 years old. So his personal CO2 quota from simply breathing is within ten per of hitting its limit. What are his plans for continued respiration when it becomes someone else’s turn six years from now?
Was Schellenhuber the guy who advocated forced abortions? It was a governement science advisor, was it not? Should one call this Nazi stuff?
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Michael (01:25:56) :
But one thing in Motl’s blog that I strongly object to is his rather dumb comparism of Schellnhuber’s mindless ramblings to the rise of the Nazis.
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He wasn’t comparing those. He was making the point that the MECHANISM of rise of Schellnhuber and the “Green” movement to power can be attributed to the same sort of social mechanism that enabled the rise of Nazism.
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Michael (01:25:56) :
But one thing in Motl’s blog that I strongly object to is his rather dumb comparism of Schellnhuber’s mindless ramblings to the rise of the Nazis.
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He wasn’t comparing those. His point was that the MECHANISM that has propelled Schellnhuber and the “green” movement to power was the same social mechanism that did the same for Nazism.
Dear all
until today I thought this to be a interesting climate blog. Those of you sitting comfortably in front of your notebooks,drinking lots of beer and swaggering in half phrases on German history please notice: You may damage your scientific credibility by absurd statements on other subjects.
“..There is no difference between the West bombing democracy into Iraq, and the West smothering Africa with ‘carbon’ cash. Neither of these get you the result you want, and they create a hell of a mess in the meantime. The people you’re trying to do it to don’t want what you want…
The greens of the West should please just try asking the rest of the world what all these different peoples want…”
Stefan
A problem with asking is that a typical third-world country (hey, ANY country) will reply ‘Yes Please’ to any attempt to give them carbon cash. Or any other cash. And similarly, they would say ‘Yes Please’ to any offer to bomb, so long as they could define the target as their internal enemies.
What people want and what they need are two different things…
The age of catastrophic thinking:
http://www.azure.org.il/article.php?id=504
Those scientists who are sincere and well-meaning would, in the best case, be advocating a “tyranny of the model”. Simply raising the price of carbon is not precise or fair enough, but modeling everyone’s significant carbon footprint is a fair and scientific way to achieve particular CO2 reduction goals. Using a model, the biggest uses of carbon: staying warm, staying cool, and transportation will be highly weighted. Perhaps these could be offset by moving to a high density dwelling or allowing the outside regulation of the thermostat. Obviously a long solo commute by car would be penalized. Using small electric fans in the summer, instead of cooling the whole house, would be rewarded and subsidized.
Other discretionary uses will have their weights bumped up in the recognition that a certain amount of staying warm is not optional. Therefore one would be penalized for buying imported goods made and shipped using extra energy if those goods are determined to be discretionary and not long-lasting. Those purchases could however be offset with the right kinds of alms to the poor countries who have been denied the same optional luxuries (the model would probably have some political correctness or bourgeois guilt programmed in).
Growing some trees on a small acreage might qualify. Burning wood to stay warm (an unbeatable level of comfort IMO) would require about 10 acres to stay even with proper harvesting and planting. Eating local food would help along with high density transported food (e.g. fresh imported fruit would be bad, but dried imported fruit would be better). Keeping an old car running would almost certainly produce more carbon credit than destroying the old car and having a new one built (at least that might eliminate some political rent seeking and outright stupidity).
What are the drawbacks of such a tyranny? The most basic one is that an automated tyranny could ultimately be far more damaging than a human-based tyranny. Also scientists may cheat for their own benefit or more likely for a perceived general benefit. But an honest model would show that no polar bears or low lying countries will be saved with a typical carbon sacrifice. The reality of zero benefits for nonzero sacrifice would ultimately prevail.
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Eric (skeptic) (09:22:09) :
Those scientists who are sincere and well-meaning would, in the best case, be advocating a “tyranny of the model”.
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How about this model? We get rid of government regulation in the US and ignore the UN completely. We have targeted regulation of nuclear, but not enough to discourage it or make it more expensive than truly necessary to be safe. We allow private enterprise to determine what energy we use and allow people freedom to use as much or as little as they please. I think that would work for the best.
Peter Taylor,
“The future is HIGH cost and falling demand, with a real potential to limit economic growth and create major social unrest.”
OOh, you ARE a pessimist, aren’t you. I’m only glad you’re not a political leader. My take on the AGW thing is that it’s taken a scientific curiosity (CO2 is an IR absorber) and hyped it way above what is commensurate with science, history or experience. There is no reason for HIGH future energy costs except if in our hysteria to “do something” we make them so.
“Fusion is a quasi-religious scientific pipe-dream (I first heard this from my doctoral level Oxford colleague when he left the Culham research centre to work with our group). ”
But fusion works. You only have to look up into the sky. The fact that Tokamaks don’t work is a separate issue. As a leading researcher (Kroeller I think) said, “We spent $15 billion dollars on Tokamaks and one thing we learned is that they’re no damn good!”