From National Review online, the story a modern opera, though not by Wagner.
Image from Wikimedia
Exaggeration and alarmism have been a chronic weakness of environmentalism since it became an organized movement in the 1960s. Every ecological problem was instantly transformed into a potential world-ending crisis, from the population bomb to the imminent resource depletion of the “limits to growth” fad of the 1970s to acid rain to ozone depletion, always with an overlay of moral condemnation of anyone who dissented from environmental correctness. With global warming, the environmental movement thought it had hit the jackpot — a crisis sufficiently long-range that it could not be falsified and broad enough to justify massive political controls on resource use at a global level. Former Colorado senator Tim Wirth was unusually candid when he remarked in the early days of the climate campaign that “we’ve got to ride the global-warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing — in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.” (Not surprisingly, after Wirth left the Senate and the Clinton administration he ended up at the United Nations.)
The global-warming thrill ride looks to be coming to an end, undone by the same politically motivated serial exaggeration and moral preening that discredited previous apocalypses. On the heels of the East Anglia University “Climategate” scandal have come a series of embarrassing retractions from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) regarding some of the most loudly trumpeted signs and wonders of global warming, such as the ludicrous claim that Himalayan glaciers would disappear within 30 years, that nearly half of the Amazon jungle was at imminent risk of destruction from a warming planet, and that there was a clear linkage between climate change and weather-related economic losses. The sources for these claims turned out to be environmental advocacy groups — not rigorous, peer-reviewed science.
Read the complete essay at National Review Online
Tim Wirth ended his political career here in Colorado when he challenged the press to catch him messing around with his other woman. They promptly did and put an end to Colorado politics for him, I guess it was on to bigger and better things at the U.N. Come to think of it, he fits in perfectly .
It is obvious that the authors of the IPCC AR4 Summary for policymakers never read or completely ignored AR4 WG1. The Section ( 8.6) in Wg1 on forcings feedbacks and climate sensitivity concludes:
” Moreover it is not yet clear which tests, are critical for constraining future projections,consequently a set of model metrics that might be used to narrow the range of plausible climatefeedbacks and climate sensitivities has yet to be developed.”
What could be clearer – the IPCC science section itself admits that we dont yet even know how to test climate models let alone make accurate future temperature projections. ( Not even predictions)
This makes WG2 and Wg3 and the Summary merely idle speculations because at this time the anthropogenic CO2 – Climate sensitivty can’t be calculated.
Yet the summary happily proceeds to produce temperature predictions out to 2100 and attributes a human influence “with a high degree of confidence”.
The whole AGW scare is a complete farce put forward for political ends (power and taxes) and profits for the Carbon traders.
Hardly anyone on either side seems actually to read WG1.
The ‘tipping point’, so beloved of climate alarmists, will indeed occur: but it will be in politics not in the climate. Once politicians see that >50% of the voters reject the alarmism they will ‘tip’.
rbateman (12:03:38) : For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction (a simplification of course). The backlash on this one is snowballing.
Book of Revelation (Christian Bible) says “The dragon was getting angry because he knew his time would shortly be up” – oh yes, the dragon who had conned the whole world, with “miracles” – read “sleights-of-hand with data” in this context
What were Churchill’s words? “this is not the end, not even the beginning of the end. But it is the end of the beginning” – right on I think for this situation.
Wärmerdämmerung?
ps Great picture Anthony. As always.
Name one religion that could vanish without hot spots here and there. Even if we removed all the priests-er-warmists scientists, I shudder to think of the wreckage lying around. And show would we keep bits and pieces from
entering the mainstream. We need IPCC and the UN out of the climate projection business. If we set up a “Climate” organization from scratch, perhaps we could minimize the number of warmists without setting up anorganization that could
readily evolve into an upposite tyrany. After World War Two, we tried something like that and it was partially auccessful, even if unqualified personnel sometimes
held positions.
btw the article says The Guardian is turning on the climate campaigners with deserved vengeance but I don’t see an inch of that here
The words of former Colorado senator Tim Wirth show the elitist thinking of those who use science as a propaganda tool to control the world:
“. . . we’ve got to ride the global-warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing — in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.”
Are citizens to be manipulated by politicians and scientists?
Do the citizens have any right to know the truth?
What happened to self-governance?
Fascism? Communism?
Stalin? Hitler?
What a sad state of affairs,
Oliver K. Manuel
Emeritus Professor of
Nuclear & Space Science
Former NASA PI for Apollo
Roger Knights (14:21:46) :
…
The earth is more likely to have a built-in thermostat (negative feedbacks) in the form of clouds. So the “simple underlying physics” is a misleading half-story. If that was All there was to it there would be no debate.
————
Reply:
And, by extension, the earth probably wouldn’t be hospitable to life as we know it. What they fear would already have happened.
“Roger Knights (14:21:46) :
[…]
There is a diminishing effectiveness as thickness is added to the blanket. (Logarithmic effect.) The blanket is diffuse .”
Forget “blanket”. Using CO2 as a blanket doesn’t work. You don’t build a greenhouse by building it without a roof and replace the roof with a warming layer of CO2. Why not? Because convection will make your layer of CO2 go away. Convection, not radiation, is the cooling mechanism of the atmosphere. A greenhouse stops convection with glass panels. CO2 diffuses. It’s not even remotely a blanket. As the russian climatologist with the name i can’t remember says: Hot greenhouse gases rise in the atmosphere. He’s got a point there. I wonder if any GCM models updrifting CO2.
Harry, Harry, Harry, THAT’S not really possible (just hyperbole from a lawyer) …
.
.
@geoff pohanka (12:41:12) :
“…The warmers will not give up easily….Expect a long and hard fight, much like our victory over Germany and Japan in the War….”
Exactly. ClimateGate and IPCCGate are equivalent to say, the battles of Midway and Guadalcanal. There are many more battles, islands to be taken, massive invasions, etc. to be fought in all this. Obama and the EPA remain resolute, but there is hope on our side.
The “nuclear option” in this war is to figure out how to take the politics and the money awarded to those who side with the politics, out of the equation. How can scientists win grants to do science that isn’t responsive to some political objective?
R. Gates (12:42:59) :
I will read and cherish this forever, and pass it on to my grandchildren
You have bred offspring? How very selfish of you, don’t you realise in your philosophy humanity is the problem and you have added to it?
Either the earth is taking in more net energy from the sun each day than it is emitting back into space or it is not and if it is not, then either that imbalance is being caused by an increasingly dense blanket of CO2 and methane or it is not, and if is, then either that dense blanket of CO2 is human caused or it is not. These are simple questions, and have nothing to do with political leanings…
The simple answer is that the planet appear to be radiating heat just fine.
The “warming” measured ( is that 0.8C er 1.4F? ) over the last 100 years appears to be within the margin of error of the measuring method and that is without the egregious manipulation of the data.
Another poster has pointed you at the fascinating work that has been done by Ferenc Miskolczi, ( it has been published in a peer review journal despite your kinds’ best efforts ).
You have started pointing at natural factors like PDO, AO, GCR’s and the activity of the sun to try to bolster your argument despite the preposterous claim that these factors have no discernible long term effect on climate.
[snip -] [easy now.R.T. – Mod]
In late 2001 I attended a UN conference in which the keynote speaker read a cryptic statement before concluding. It was something to the effect that: “Exaggeration leads the coalition of disbelief.”
We have discovered that computer models and cries of catastrophe are a poor substitute for the real world. You would think that hard-core environmentalists would be the first to reject artifice. Computer sims, robotic mantras, illusory crises. Oddly, they embraced it, like saccharin and RP Gaming software.
The sad result is the distrust of things green and ecological. Exaggeration, the campaign that cried wolf, has damaged societal will to preserve wilderness, wildlife and forests. Militant marxism infiltrated the conservation movement caring little about environment and certainly not energy independence. Their political agenda replaced conservation with global control, NWO and “behavior modification.”
When warned this approach would fail as it was an affront to human nature – the reaction was hostile. Intractable. The Algores and Soroses, MoveOns and Schmidts, knew what human beings needed, and it was a strong dose of totalitarian control. When these early efforts repeatedly failed the team refused to accept their mistakes, insisting that they would force the agenda down our throats if necessary. Admitting error to a common man was beneath grandiose conjurers of the arcane.
And so in the end it is their pride that undoes climate scientists. Had they re-configured the campaign and tempered their approach – they may have won the hearts and minds of men. They did no such thing and so are now… discredited. Pride. Not just human frailty; the Achilles heel of gods.
That’s robust.
Ain’t dat da truth.
I still well remember how alarmist they were in the run up to the Clean Air and Water Act of 1970. Now, that act has been a really good thing. Our air sucked back then, and our rivers and lakes were not being taken care of very well.
However, the one total freaking exaggeration that still has me fuming over those lousy stinking lying SOB tree-huggers.
I lived in Cleveland, and the mantra was that if we didn’t put one more drop of pollutants into Lake Erie for TEN THOUSAND YEARS, only then would the lake clear itself up from all the pollutants that were already in it.
Well, the exaggerations worked. The bill was passed into law.
TEN SINGLE YEARS LATER, with the pollution entering the lake still at 25% of what had been going into it before, lo and behold! The lake had cleaned itself up 90%! It was a MIRACLE!
That was one alarmist lie that I will never forgive those bastards for. Zero pollutants for 10,000 years vs 75% reduction for 10 years. They can kiss my arse now. I don’t believe a word they say unless it is vetted to high heaven.
And the thing is, I am basically on their side. But liars are liars, and I don’t trust them.
Meanwhile it’s Frozen Wasteland on close to 2/3 of the U.S. mainland.
Baba O’Reily AKA Teenage Wasteland, originally meant to be part of a rock opera.
DirkH (15:26:23) :
I have A scientific paper that argues this, but it is not a Russian. It is two German scientists, Gerhard Gerlich and Ralf D. Tscheuschner (2007), entitled Falsifi cation Of The Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within The Frame Of Physics.
Perhaps a Russian also wrote this up.
While I agree with the points made in the paper, I honestly am not sure they are correct in the overall premise. I THINK so, but it is something I’d have to see in order to be convinced.
I think, and hope, that the CAGW scare is dead scientifically and politically. Now my greatest fear is what this will do to the layperson’s belief in science and legitimate environmental concerns. Environmentalism as practiced for most of the last 30 years has been mostly religious zealotry but may God help us all if we completely ignore what we are, or could be, doing to the earth or each other via careless use.
I fear the backlash against science and real environmentalism.
geoff pohanka (12:41:12) : “The warmers will not give up easily. They are too heavily invested in their cause.”
Agreed. This is far from over.
“These people, or at least some of them, have an end game in mind, the complete and radical ‘change’ of society and our political system as we know it. Global warming is a means to this end for some.”
And if “global warming/climate change/climate chaos” loses its cachet, then it will be ocean acidification, depletion of resources, overpopulation, or some other boogeyman that “forces” an elite group of self-styled saviors to rescue us from ourselves. CAGW is only the latest ailment to be “cured” by the snake oil salesmen; there will be others. The same skepticism we’ve developed toward CAGW should be applied in every aspect of our lives.
But it won’t stop until we, the taxpayers, the people, stop giving the political classes, our money.
Government is almost stealing tax money under false pretenses now. Government is wasting so much money it is criminal…. If that money was left in the pockets of the motivated people it originally came from… it would do ten times the work and benefit.
It’s amazing that in this age of enlightenment, we still yearn for a political class to rule over us and to bow to….
A government is not society…. its people are. Time we took responsibility.
crosspatch (12:21:12) :
Yes, I caught the 80cents of every green stimulus dollar going overseas.
Maybe we should call it Tap and Charade, instead of Cap and Trade.
We now have a working example of where the money from the C02 Energy legislation will end up. The goal of the Bill is to attach our economy for the purpose of growing our competitors economies.
Deforestation is a problem worldwide. Brazil has declared itself in a state of national emergency over its situation with deforestation. Over half of the worlds rainforests have been estimated to be cleared and from satellite observations the amount of the Amazon which has been cleared was shown to be about double what scientists had expected. There is a real emergency when it comes to the amount of forest clearance has occurred and it does not in any way do us good to allow it to continue. It is a requirement that we have solutions to real problems such as these where global warming can take a back seat to the immediate and obvious problems associated with such easily measurable and solvable situations. Global warming doesn’t cause the destruction of the forests… cattle ranching does, and a minor contributor is logging.
Can anyone come up with a Malthusian Doom and Gloom prediction that was ever correct?
The Simon – Ehrlich wager is a classical example
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon-Ehrlich_wager
Its the end. Every reasonable person who has questioned this global warming thing, has been viciously attacked and hysterically acused of hating the planet,. at some point or other.It hurts.We remember being assured that the science was overwhelming,but we must be too stupid to understand it.Well now we know,the science made no sense,because there is no science supporting the central claims.The claims from authority are doomed,the lying is now exposed and the backlash is starting.My govt is complicit or stupid (probably both) in a failure to protect the national interest. Propoganda attacks on citizens. Horrific waste of tax dollars.And thats just the global warming scam. I am so sick of climate change, that term is as useful as water wet or rock=hard.Its meaningless,climate is a process,that always changes. My thanks to the regulars of this site,I have learnt alot over the last years and have been encouraged by the sanity and willingness to list the data by you who post here.The civility and striving for truth has made WUWT stand out from the activist and “official” websites. For those like me who normally just browse thro,the tip jar is above, its thro paypal .Give . Without these guys we would be about to give a whole lot more. JRR Canada