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.
It seems to me that the Professor was making a fairly accurate general observation about the internet.
You have only to visit some of the more extreme websites to find really, really violent language and (often) the depths of perversity.
Even more innocuous websites are invaded by “trolls” flaming at moderate and reasonable opinion. The corruption of public discourse and the polarization that results should be fairly obvious to all.
I think that the Professor is partly right. The comments here so far seem to average out to its a battle over, Anthony’s followers think skeptics are winning. But, the high ground is still held by the AGW people. Politicians have to take advice, and while NASA, AAAS, UK Royal Society etc etc say one thing, it wouldnt matter if 10,000 bloggers say something else.
Consider Anthony’s heroic visit to Australia. Welcomed by his friends. But, AFAIK almost no mention in the MSM. Did Anthony meet and seriously talk to anyone senior from the CSIRO? From the Australian Met Bureau? from the Aust AAS? from any of the high scientific bodies advising Aust politicians? That would have added enormous value to his trip.
I have never been able to get a comment past the gate keepers at realclimate, either.
I sometimes go there to see what the topic of the week is, but it is closed to those that want to provide a different point of view, especially if that point of view includes peer reviewed contrary opinions.
Luboš Motl says:
July 18, 2010 at 11:48 pm
here’s what ‘jump the shark’ came to mean, and ‘Fonzie’ talking about that scene:
@Andrew W says: July 18, 2010 at 11:15 pm July 18, 2010 at 10:18 pm
“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.”
I guess you don’t come here very often. Actually both the posts Anthony puts up and the readers’ comments cover a wide base of skeptic opinion from lukewarmist to hard line “denier and proud of it” opinion. In fact there have been a few brave warmist souls (Judith Curry for one) who have risked ostracism or worse by coming on here.
This is one of the strengths of WUWT.
In fact there has been a warming trend. Very few commenters on here would deny that.
How much of a warming trend? After considering all the obviously bad stations, the ‘march of the thermometers’, the tendentious cherry picking-adjusting-homogenisation AND stripping out the UHI effects AND all the obvious hyperbole; it is a very moot point what the warming actually is.
More than natural variability? Possibly.
Caused by Man made CO2? A little bit of the little bit of warming just might be although there are more compelling hypotheses.
Cause for alarm? I suggest you need only to look at half a dozen of the most popular shroudwaving doom predictions to realise that all these are a complete crock.
Also that the unimaginable amount of resources planned to be completely wasted by going to a “low carbon energy” scenario, using “renewable resources” that actually, measurably, don’t work, would be far better spent on mitigating the effects of anything that MIGHT happen (sea level rising a few millimeters per year?) and in alleviating poverty.
I have to admit that I seldom read alarmist blogs line RC. Not because I’m not interested in the arguments but because I come to WUWT or CA as an antidote to the constant ‘blah, blah, blah’ of the Climate Change mantra epitomised by Shneider’s article.
I also think that the hatred and extremism required fir civil unrest are absent in those on the rational side of the argument. We don’t see AGW as a big problem so why would we even contemplate taking up arms to enforce our position. It’s people like Shneider who scare me.
Also, I met The Fonz in Birmingham a few weeks ago. Charming man. We didn’t discuss sharks.
It became obvious to me that overpopulation was no problem for the future when I first considered that NYC with 1 million population was incredibly more overcrowded than NYC with 8 million population.
Amino Acids in Meteorites: July 19, 2010 at 12:04 am
I did a math quiz for myself one time…the total size needed to hold all people on the checkerboard is slightly smaller than Lake Victoria.
My high school science teacher (in 1962) approached it a bit differently — he gave everyone in the world a 50’x50′ plot of land on which to build a small hut and grow a garden, then asked us how much land they’d require. We did the math and were a bit surprised to find that everyone would have fit comfortably in Texas, with a couple of counties left over.
These are the rambleings of a demented fool. It is an incoherent conversation with himself in front of the press office.
I still go to RC occaissionally. All my attempts at comment have been blocked. I must say that it gives me a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach as I wonder how the hell Gavin et al can steel themselves to spend time replying to the half-witted questions that do get through. And, have you noticed how many of them have silly 3 word names. paul barton levenson for example.
Uh, this guy is a scientist? Really? In what alternate reality?
Perhaps we should commission a new phrase that is more in context with the subject matter, such as “Jumped the Polar Bear.”
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0pFaQluCZo&hl=en_US&fs=1]
@Luboš Motl says: July 18, 2010 at 11:48 pm
“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.”
This is absolutely spot on. And it must be said that all the trendy rich-kid leftists in the West, keen to beat up working class cops in Paris in 1968 and careful to say nothing when Czechoslovakia was raped in the same year, are there in the cAGW camp today. Danny Cohn-Bendit for one.
It is a bit of a laugh when a completely discredited hubristic “scientist” like Schneider starts warning about the blogosphere causing civil war. In fact, if I was in his shoes, I might be worried. Not by the blogosphere but at the prospect of the cheated peasants, pitchfork and flaming torch in hand, massing towards his comfortable ivory tower.
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?
He’s a scientist isn’t he? what’s he worrying about social issues? We have politicians to handle that fiasco, his whole rave is about social issues, nothing about his flawed science.
You know, I’d wager the opinion of your average American citizen drinking at the bar watching Fox News’ coverage of a murder case is far different than that of the same American citizen when drafted in to a lengthy murder case as a juror. His opinion formed on a snippet of information from a popular media source is not reliable enough to make a call… that is why they have juries and not phone polls or web-polls to decide the fate of the accused.
The member of the jury has a much greater understanding of the case than your average American citizen. Reading blogs is like watching the TV news… and most people watch a news station that follows their personal politics, so in that regard I think that the Prof is spot on.
There are some very strange dudes in US climatology, and most of them have German names.
Due to political interference, science in general has got itself into a position where a large section of the public no longer have trust in their prognostications. Many many hypotheses and theories trying to explain the world around us are failing to produce acceptable predictions, with CAGW being the leading failure in this respect.
The problem climate scientists face is that they only have poor quality regional data to guess what historic climate looked like. They only have GCM to try and predict the future, but due to the deterministic chaos inherent in our climate system, these have no predictive power. Therefore, they are left with examining the entrails of current weather conditions to try to support CAGW, but all indications show no statistical global warming for the last 15 years!
Climate science is between a rock and a hard place. No wonder they try to revive the corpse of this falsified theory by ever more strident and stupid prophecies. Prof. Steven Schneider, along with many other true believers, is in denial.
The end of the CAGW scam is nigh.
WOW!! People here abuse me about not bringing enough science to the table. Apparently to work at Stanford one does not even have to have a clue.
Remember that Schneider was very worried 30 years ago about a global tipping point: Global cooling. That is one shark that has been successfully avoided
One day, Steven Schneider may come across one of those juries. What will he say then?
Ecotretas
I was doing my usual search for “global warming” news, and something struck me today. Global warming is no longer the news stories … it is something to tag onto the end of another story to help fill the column.
What I mean is that back in the hay days of global warming hysteria, global warming was the story, how it was going to kill this or that animal, drown this or that area, lead to the end of mankind (and sometimes womenkind). These days its “mankind is really bad .. we are doing all these things, pollutions, global warming, etc.”
So, I can understand why Schneider is so miffed with the bloggers: as far as they can see they’ve been vindicated by the “inquiries”, yet the press are giving them the cold shoulder, and as all they ever cared about was the PR rather than the science, they know that means they have lost.
And when they look around, all they can see of the “enemy” is a few bloggers … so in the same leap of nonsense as linked CO2 to global temperature, they conclude: “the bloggers have beaten us”.
We didn’t win the war … they lost it! Or to be more precise … the public just got bored!
What a self loving bastard! This quote may not be very scientific, but it is heartfelt. That is more than you can say about his statements.
““The average person is not really competent to make such a judgment”
The average person probably isn’t qualified to land a man on the moon but we aren’t talking rocket science here. We are talking tree rings and thermometers. We are talking about the real life personal experiences of older people that can tell us what the climate was like in the 1940s. The average person is indeed qualified to make judgement on such matters.
I would point out that it wasn’t the average person that invented the internal combustion engine and developed it to its present level of usefulness. You could, therefore, readily claim that it is elitist science that has caused these alleged environmental risks and that it has an outrageous cheek to point the finger of blame at the rest of us. But then scientists have “previous”. They diverted attention away from themselves when the science of evolution led directly to the science of eugenics. They did the same over the nuclear bombs dropped on Japan. No doubt when they cause the next environmental disaster they will do the same again. Anyone like to guess what new dangers these elitist scientists might be most likely to expose us to? I’m opting for genetic engineering as the science most likely to kill over a million people in one go.
Friends:
Comments like those of Schneider can be expected to become more frequent because they are a shroud intended to obscure sight of the corpse of the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) scare.
The CAGW scare is dead. It continues to run around like a headless chicken, but – like the chicken – it is dead while still moving with an appearance of life. And the movement will be obvious in Mexico later this year.
The CAGW scare is a bandwagon carrying a variety of researchers, politicians, carbon traders, and etc. in a direction they all want to go. But the scare has been killed by Climategate, the failure of negotiations in Copenhagen, and the failure of global temperature to rise as CAGW said it would over the last decade.
So, the wheels are falling off the CAGW bandwagon.
Those with any wit can see they need to get off the bandwagon before it grinds to a complete halt.
In the meantime, those riding the bandwagon need a screen to cover its wobbly wheels. And the screen only has to be sufficient for it to last until the wheels have fallen off the CAGW bandwagon and its riders have found another bandwagon (ocean acidification?) and have climbed aboard it.
The screen is the Oxborough, Muir Russell and etc, enquiries together with extreme assertions such as those of Schneider and Hansen. The screen is a shroud to cover the corpse of the CAGW scare, and a shroud does not need to last for long. It will not take long for the screen to be seen through, but it only needs to last until after the IPCC Meeting in Mexico.
But, the important point is that the CAGW scare is dead: its continuing movement is merely an appearance of it still having life.
However, like the ‘acid rain’ scare of the 1980s, the smell of the corpse of CAGW will continue to pollute energy and economic policies for decades to come.
The ‘acid rain’ scare’ is dead, too. Nobody announced its death (and nobody will announce the death of CAGW) but few remember the ‘acid rain’ scare unless reminded of it.
And the ‘acid rain’ scare should act as a warning because it is very similar to the CAGW scare.
It was based on dubious ‘science’ that anyone could see was flawed.
It was denied by empirical evidence.
It was promoted for political and economic reasons.
‘Greens’ adopted it and promoted it as a method to attack industrial civilisation.
It was the major environmental concern in its day.
It was quietly forgotten when its political use had been fulfilled.
But the stench of its corpse pollutes the political scene to this day.
The Large Combustion Plant Directive (LCPD) of the European Union (EU) is one good example of the stench from the corpse of the ‘acid rain’ scare. The LCPD was established in response to the ‘acid rain’ scare, and it sets limits to emissions of oxides of sulphur and nitrogen (SOx and NOx) permitted from power stations. The civil servants who were put in place to operate the LCPD need to justify the continuing existence of their jobs, so they keep reducing the emission limits. There are no valid scientific reasons – and no valid reasons of any other kind – for these reductions. But the latest reductions will force closure of all except two of the UK’s coal fired power stations in 2014.
The power stations could continue to operate if they were fitted with flue gas desulphurisation (FGD). Some have sufficient land available for them to fit FGD but others do not. More importantly, FGD adds about 20% to the capital cost and about 10% to the running cost of a power station.
A power station has to recover its capital cost over the entire ~30 years of its scheduled life. This recovery of capital cost becomes difficult when the capital cost is increased by ~20% and the power station’s running cost is increased by ~10%. The recovery of capital cost becomes impossible when the FGD is retro-fitted to a power station that is 5-years old so only has about ~25 years of its scheduled life remaining. Hence, closing the power station (with large resulting losses) costs less than fitting FGD to keep it running.
So, as a result of the ‘acid rain’ scare, in 2014 the UK will be forced to choose between leaving the EU or having its lights go out.
The CAGW scare is dead but it has yet to lie down and be forgotten.
There will be a temptation to forget the CAGW scare as it fades away. But – as the effects of the ‘acid rain’ scare demonstrate – this temptation needs to be resisted.
Richard
A little over the top even by alarmist standards. As someone said earlier “I can’t believe a read the whole article”, but at least these types of comments show the climate sceptics’ arguments are winning – and of course it hurts. It especially hurts arrogant climate ‘scientists’ living comfortable lifestyles courtesy of the US taxpayer, as the gravy train may be about to stop.
As Winston Churchill once said: “It may not be the beginning of the end, but it certainly is the end of the beginning.”
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Steve Schneider’s main claim to fame seems to be having honestly to admit that many climate scientists are intentionally misleading the public to get their message across.
He apparently sees it as a dilemma to get the right balance between being honest and being effective.
This is not a dilemma for a scientist , who would not be seeking to “be effective” in this sense. His dilemma and that of many who claim to be climate scientists is that they are trying to play a dual and conflicting role as part-time eco-activist.
If they stuck to what they are trained and payed to do there would be no dilemma and they would be presenting the true science about climate not distorting it.
I think that admission from Schneider , an IPCC insider at the time, was probably his greatest contribution to the debate.
Thanks for a moment of honesty Steve!