UPDATE: This morning (Monday) brings sad news that Dr. Schneider has died, due to complications of cancer, apparently a heart attack. I was unaware that he was ill. While I strongly disagree with Dr. Schneider’s viewpoints, I am saddened by his passing, and my best wishes and sympathies go to his family. Andrew Revkin at Dot Earth has the story. The interview in Stanford magazine below may be one of his last, if not the last one. Therefore, out of respect for his family, I have decided to close comments at this time. – Anthony
Professor Stephen Schneider in Stanford Magazine.
The professor says:
We know that there are probably hundreds of tipping points. We don’t know precisely where they are. Therefore you never know which ones you’re crossing when. All you know is that as you add warming, you cross more and more of them.
It’s a target rich quote environment in the interview that he gave, for example, “blogs may cause civil war”:
Here’s the blog problem: We build up a trust [based] on which blogs just say what we like to hear. At least in the old days when we had a Fourth Estate that did get the other side—yes, they framed it in whether it was more or less likely to be true, the better ones did—at least everybody was hearing more than just their own opinion. What scares me about the blogosphere is if you only read your own folks, you have no way to understand where those bad guys are coming from. How are you going to negotiate with them when you’re in the same society? They’re not 100 percent wrong, you know? There’s something you have to learn from them and they have to learn from you. If you never read each other and you never have a civil discourse, then I get scared.
It’s fractionation into preexisting belief without any chance of negotiation and reconciliation. I don’t want to see a civil war, and I worry about that if the blogosphere is carried to a logical extreme.
Or how about this one, dissing the average American citizen as “incompetent to judge”:
We know we have a rough 10 percent chance that [the effect of global warming] is going to be not much; a rough 10 percent chance of ‘Oh, My God’; and everything else in between. Therefore, what you’re talking about as a scientist is risk: what can happen multiplied times the odds of it happening. That’s an expert judgment. The average person is not really competent to make such a judgment.
Yes but professor, the average American citizen is chosen by government to sit on capital murder cases as jurist as part of our constitutionally protected freedoms and civic duty. Such cases involve weighing hundreds of hours of testimony, forensic science, sometimes DNA evidence, and most certainly to decide if the truth is being told or not.
Yet those same citizens are unable to decide for themselves whether climate science is proved beyond a “reasonable doubt”? They can’t decide the magnitude of risk?
Most certainly, in the same proud California sitcom tradition as the ill fated Happy Days episode, professor Steven Schneider of Stanford has “jumped the shark“.
Read the entire interview at Stanford Magazine.
Schneider: We know that there are probably hundreds of tipping points. We don’t know precisely where they are.
Steven, let me help you. When the bottle of tequila in your hand is emptying down your throat, you’ve met the tipping point. And by the sound of your alarmist caterwalling, you really have found hundreds of tipping points.
You guys are really giving science a bad reputation.
Bulldust says:
July 18, 2010 at 9:59 pm
Isn’t Stanford supposed to be one of your better colleges
CRU is supposed to be one of the better schools in the UK too.
I used to visit RC fairly regularly for a while. My personal best for having a question remain in a thread was about ten minutes before it went *poof* — which made some of the commenters who answered it look a tad delusional, because *their* comments remained intact.
Professor Schneider: “That’s an expert judgment. The average person is not really competent to make such a judgment.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
And that “average person” pays your salary at Stanford… let’s see if we “average persons” can find some legal way to rid you of that salary, Dr. “Expert” Schneider.
Your on and on in the 1970’s of “the world is about to end from the coming ice age caused by industry” sticks to you like tar. I can’t believe you are still around in “professional” circles. Just shows how phony those “professional” circles really are, lots of wasted public money going down the drain. It is in order for the upcoming new legislatures to really do some serious house cleaning around this country.
( Chris, guess I’m a copycat, thanks for a good format! 🙂 )
“”It’s fractionation into preexisting belief without any chance of negotiation and reconciliation. I don’t want to see a civil war, and I worry about that if the blogosphere is carried to a logical extreme.””
Is he saying the antics over at real climate is going to p*ss off enough people to generate a civil war, or with the realization of what’s been done to them, the general population, upon pulling their heads out of the sand, is going to be that angry with the perps?
Maybe he just watches too much of the show “Cops”. Most cases of megalomania come as over compensations for deep seated inferiority complexes, and resultant paranoia projected outward, as a defense mechanism.
Or is he still just projecting a linear trend line from past experiences, “to a logical extreme”?
Schneider was “certain” in the mid 70’s that an ice age was coming, he’s in the same league as Gore in thinking that it’s ok to lie, and he participated in authoring the blacklist.
Forgive me for considering him as thoroughly ignore-worthy.
One of the staples of cheap news organizations is things that are really deadly but you can’t see, hear, taste, or smell them coming. A perfect news story would be something like a dark matter object headed straight for Earth that nobody can detect (except by some gravitational method) that would, if it hit, completely destroy the Earth … but it misses.
Now, it might be nearly impossible to prove that such a thing existed even if it did. All it would take, though, is one impressive sounding scientist making enough people believe it exists to get ad revenues through the roof as people glued themselves to the latest “coverage”.
Now that is priceless. What he is saying here is “don’t believe your lying eyes because you are not competent to know/believe what you are seeing. You must listen only to me, or those who I validate as competent. Your opinion is invalid.”
This is a control technique used by abusive people and dictators everywhere. The “shut up, you can’t possibly know what you are talking about” is quite effective against many people because it plays on their personal insecurities. They aren’t quite sure of themselves and so they DO shut up. But it also says “You aren’t capable of understanding even if I tried to explain it to you” so it eliminates that pesky need to even try to explain.
This is so arrogant, so narcissistic, so absolutely repugnant on so many levels that I am at the same time both surprised and yet not surprised that Stanford would even publish such a thing. I am surprised because of how absolutely stereotypically elitist it is. Then I am not surprised because I then realized that the people who publish this are probably of the same mindset themselves. And even if they themselves don’t understand it, they will nod as if they do lest they portray themselves as one of the riffraff or something.
This gyration of thought is absolutely precious:
What an absolute moron!
More jumping the shark: Giving Mork & Mindy a son, who turns out to be…Jonathan Winters. Letting the Battlestar Galactica reach Earth, where the space children all, it turns out, have super-powers. And so on. I’m certain that behind each of the many JTS examples was a Hollywood guy in a beret, hawaiian shirt, sandals with white sox, and tweed knickers, saying: “It can’t miss, Baby!!” Maybe it was the same guy in every case….
REPLY: I stopped watching Battlestar Galactica the moment I heard them use “microns” as a unit of time. More unit absurdity here – Anthony
All this and fear of the Blogsphere, and who is clinging to absolute values?
I like pulling words from a quote (any quote) e.g. subjugation, violence, kill, UN plot, crazy radical, to see how these words stand by themselves, do they enhance the argument?, if they do not, then drop them as they are merely alarmist and manipulative . Journalists play this emotive game constantly. These are not words that I would use if I were in Prof. Schneiders position giving an interview, these words are the hallmark of desperation.
This comment is completely inappropriate.
I used to go to real climate whenever I wanted to get a laugh, but it has actually gotten to the point where its so absurd its passed the point of laughing…its now a question of whether I want to go cry or not. Last time I was there, I was so shocked I thought it was a joke website and I had typed in the wrong address…
I now go to the luke-warm websites, and they are not quite as funny, but at least its something different from a different angle. Lots of people post there who would never post here for instance.
As for jumping the shark, I think its when they go past the point of entertainment and into the realm of making you want to cry about how bad it is.
Just like happy days, It went from nyucknyuck to just /sad in the matter of a couple days (one episode in the case of Happy Days). Not sure when the “tipping” point occurred, but to me it seems it happened much sooner then this particular sad article. Anyone have any thoughts on that?
I almost think it occurred roughly the same time all the “luke warmers” became big. Here is a group that can have a civil conversation, can take some of the beatings, and comes away with their dignity mostly in-tact. I may myself be rather antagonistic to them as well…but shrug, we all have our faults …. And I may disagree with them, but I am sure most of us here do…
Or to explain the reference a little better, as the show started to go downhill and become less entertaining, it jumped the shark and became just pitiful. No one wants to cry about how such a good show became pitiful, and I guess the same is true for real climate. For me it was always entertainment and laughter, and I can say that its been past that for a long time.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OY-t4b59XSg&rel=0&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xd0d0d0&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&fs=1]
The assertion by Professor Schneider that “The average person is not really competent to make such a judgment” is particularly irksome. I, for one, do not doubt the ability of the ‘average’ citizen, when called upon to do so, to apply sound reasoning and make good judgements – even when issues are complex. The assumption that the ‘average’ citizen has this faculty, and should be encouraged to apply it, is central to our concept of liberal democracy as well as, of course, our legal institutions.
Amino Acids in Meteorites says: “CRU is supposed to be one of the better schools in the UK too.”
No, no. CRU is part of UEA (known as University of Easy Access because of the low grades required of its student intake) which is one of the UK’s third rate universities, set up in the 1960s.
I second Cassandra’s point about “tipping points.”
I see references to “tipping points” more and more, as it becomes obvious that linear extrapolation of trends does not produce a sufficiently scary scenario. E.g. if sea level rises 3 mm a year, well, a 1-foot rise by the year 2100 will probably require higher levees in New Orleans and perhaps other sensitive locations, or other adaptations. No huge “Lucifer’s Hammer” tidal waves drowning coastal cities.
So these hypothetical tipping points are proposed. E.g., http://www.pnas.org/content/106/13/5041.full.pdf . No evidence that these exist in reality and can be triggered by any reasonable trajectory of CO2 emissions etc. But as long as they can be hypothecated, they can be used as bogeymen. Since they’re not quantified, they’re not falsifiable — one can always say “well, we haven’t seen any tipping points yet, but I’m sure there’s one just around the corner.”
Dr. Schneider admits that “[w]e don’t know precisely where [the tipping points are.” Yet he can state that there are “probably hundreds” of them. Without evidence.
One might just as well assert that there’s another Chicxulub-type asteroid/comet on a collision course with Earth. Well, yes, as far as we can see with our telescopes, there are none visible — but one could be just outside the detection range! We’d better invest a few trillion dollars to construct an asteroid deflection system, based on the precautionary principle. After all, what’s a few percent of GDP if it means the safety of your grandchildren?
I have also never been able to get a comment past the censors at Realclimate. Dr. Schneider may have a point about blog readers tending to only read blogs that confirm their own bias. However, if you really want to CONFIRM your bias against AGW, I suggest that one does check out RC and CP and any other pro-AGW blog for a good, long read. You’ll come away realizing just how ridiculously in DENIAL of the evidence at hand the AGW True Believers really are. They employ every logical fallacy and rhetorical sin in a vain attempt to justify the impossible. Plus they completely lack any sense of good humor and fair play.
Stanford seems happy to promote quasi scientific silliness. They still let Paul Ehrlich run around lecturing to Stanford folks about “overpopulation” when all European countries and Russia are far below replacement level in child births. Consequently, they are becoming extensions of various Islamic countries as immigration takes the place of the native population. They will proudly field this guy’s propaganda even when the snow fills Lake Lagunita.
July 18, 2010 at 10:18 pm
“REPLY: Yes, but most Americans can easily judge the quality of the work done in building a house, fixing a car, or filling a tooth.”
Only later on when the work in question actually fails. One of the sites I like to visit to see if there’s been a warming trend in recent years is Roy Spencer’s, if I plug in the graphs for recent years there’s a clear warming trend in the “near surface layer (ch04)” but if I look at posts at sites like this one I could be forgiven for thinking that Dr. Spencer must have his graphs all wrong, here I’m told the science is sloppy, that the warming trend is exaggerated.
Schneider also has a case that too many sites today don’t allow or encourage dissenting views, there are too many echo chambers out there with people not listening or even hearing other perspectives, while he’s largely correct, well done to WUWT for avoiding such censorship.
Steven “Chicken Little” Schneider: Brraaack! The sky is falling, the sky is falling! Brraaack! Tipping points, tipping points! Brraaack! We need a Black List, we need a Black List! Brraaack! Blogs cause civil war, blogs cause civil war! Brraaack! Brraaack! What scares me, what scares me! Brraaack!
That poor goose. Somebody give him a valium, and a nice warm padded cell.
Andrew W says:
July 18, 2010 at 10:18 pm
Schneider was probably just being rational, after all, most Americans aren’t competent to build a house, fix a car or fill a tooth, it could only the most irrational (actually lunatic) who could claim they’re all climate experts.
But i think know when they are trying to sell me a badly build house, and if i am not sure (wich is rather normal) I will bring an expert that can asess the state of the house and its attached value. And if we compare this to the climate sciences than the housebroker is not going to allow that expert entrance to the house to asses the value of that house. No trust me, there is nothing wrong with this house, these are not the droids you are looking for. The Jedi Mindtrick does not work upon those who do not believe in the “Climate” force.
Did the original guy only jumped over the shark – rather than on the shark? I am disappointed! That’s a completely realistic scene…
If there were hundreds of tipping points as Schneider likes to say, they would form a quasi-continuum and they wouldn’t really be tipping points. One would have to describe the system using different concepts because a larger number of tipping points would also mean that each of them is less consequential.
A civil war would become a genuine threat – but it would be a threat not because of the existence of blogosphere but because of the existence of an aggressive political movement whose goal is to cripple basic human freedoms, much like in the case of Nazism and communism. The new movement that threatens the world in this way is called global warming alarmism.
Schneider has been saying the same sort of things for years. The reason they are now coming across as absurd is the shark was jumped some time ago and now most people are wise to it.
The moment the shark was jumped was when the IPCC published the hockey stick. That lead a lot of people who know something about climate of the past to openly question AGW. It took ten years for the rest of society (climate gate was the tipping point) to get wise to the tricks of the hockey stick, but now it has reached critical mass.
The manipulators haven’t changed their message. We just now hear it very differently.
Phillip Bratby says:
July 18, 2010 at 11:02 pm
No, no. CRU is part of UEA
just laying in bed now realizing it’s East Anglia not CRU. DOH!
ann r says:
July 18, 2010 at 11:12 pm
“overpopulation”
I did a math quiz for myself one time. If the population of the world was 7 billion, and each person stood in a square 10ft. x 10ft., with the squares laid out like a checkerboard, one square per person, the total size needed to hold all people on the checkerboard is slightly smaller than Lake Victoria. Silly to think the world is overpopulated. Some cities are overcrowded. But the problem doesn’t go any farther than that.
Overpopulation should be judged in terms of carrying capacity, not in in terms of living space.
I’ve heard that humans are now utilising about 40% of the planets photosynthetic capacity.
How in the heck did we let things get this insane?