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.
I think his comment about blogs having the possibility of becoming an echo chamber is fair but that is why there are plenty of blogs to peruse. I check ‘Climate Debate Daily’ for a balanced look at what pro and skeptical AGW people are thinking/opinionating about.
Cheers
This is yet another half-wit who thinks the world began 50 years ago. ‘Tipping points’ eh. What happens when world temperature rises? we know, it cools down again. What happens when CO2 concentration rises? We know, it goes down again.
The only ‘tipping points’ apparent in the geological record are self correcting mechanisms. Sea-levels rise and sea-levels fall. Mountains go up and mountains go down. A reputable scientist is one who understood this and worked to understand why. A quack scientist just pushes the usual alarmism.
But even if the 10% normal, 10% doomed were other than a top of the head tabloid soundbite this guy as usual with alarmists leaves no room for anything to be better. All change is change for the worse. This is so much understood and assumed by him that I am sure it never crosses his mind that warmer in many circumstances is better.
This appeal to authority from Steven Schneider is unworthy of scientific endeavour.
What is to be done can only be done with a proper consensus between the people, experts and politicians. The politicians will grab any opportunity for power and far too many ‘experts’ with skin in this game are advocates rather than scientists.
The public have not been given access to all the information nor have the ‘experts’ bothered to explain things in a straightforward manner. The IPCC itself sets out to distort the science of climate change and the effect man can have on it by cherry picking the science to suit a pre-determined outcome. I bet many experts themselves don’t understand the whole thing either but for the sake of their careers and future funding they keep their scepticism and questioning of the ‘science’ to themselves.
Mike Borgelt says:
July 18, 2010 at 9:59 pm
Sadly I’ve come to the conclusion that 90% of academics are not worth feeding. Would anyone notice if we stopped their funding?
—————–
Hey Mike you’re right – we just don’t know which 90%!
“”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.””
How do we know there are probably hundreds of tipping points? Which ones have we crossed since 1860 that we’ve noticed? I’ve not noticed anything in my 60 years.
How do you know you cross more as you add warming? Since once we all vapourise we will cross no more so the number must decrease as we warm. Or maybe the number will peak and then start to decrease.
It’s Monday morning Stephen, I’m full of energy and I need a bit more scientific & mathematical meat to back your statements.
This guy’s got form as most here are aware.
“To capture the public imagination, we have to offer up some scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements and little mention of any doubts one might have. Each of us has to decide the right balance between being effective, and being honest.” – Leading greenhouse advocate, Dr Stephen Schneider (in interview for “Discover” magagzine, Oct 1989) http://www.john-daly.com/schneidr.htm.
He shows himself to be particularly adept at conflating imaginary catastrophes set in the distant future such as a “flip the Gulf Stream” and the melting of the Greenland ice sheet with probable events which have happened in the past and inevitably will happen in the foreseeable future like “super heat waves” (I assume here by “super”, he means extreme and not pleasant or excellent — although I’m not sure), “hurricanes that will take out parts of Miami and Shanghai” and “fires in the West”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tropical_cyclones_1945_2006_wikicolor.png
If you live in areas prone to these hazards, you prepare for them as the Japanese prepare for earthquakes.
The word righteous come to mind for this man, this is usually for the religious. I am reminded that it was the righteous men that conducted the inquisition. The righteous preachers of Islam are sending out bombers. Righteous is not a good scientific position to argue from, this man is a loon. That anyone in the science community accepts him in their fold, say’s heaps for their character also. What a sad human.
One need look no further than Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. How does a reputable university justify continuing to employ such a person?
*WAG’s Tipper Reached:
“… by noon I ended up being the municipal expert and gave several interviews,” MacLellan says.”
“But really, my role is reaching out to those who have the expertise.”
…-
“*Giant hogweed ‘tip of the iceberg’”
“But when surprising and sometimes dangerous foreign plants and insects come to town, MacLellan finds himself involved.
“In the case of giant hogweed, at 9 o’clock in the morning on Monday I had never heard of it and by noon I ended up being the municipal expert and gave several interviews,” MacLellan says.
“But really, my role is reaching out to those who have the expertise.”
Last week, when not battling giant hogweed, he was dealing with HRM’s response to the Renewable Electricity Act and the city’s greenhouse gas inventory.”
http://thechronicleherald.ca/Metro/1192637.html
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/014453.html
H/T: WAG* Whither Al Gore? (Formerly AGW)
The “hundreds of tipping points” sounds very much like Al Gore’s answer to the question “And how hot is it down there?” “Oh, millions of degrees…”
I don’t think Schneider has any understanding of system dynamics.
” The average person is not really competent to make such a judgment.”
Given that – “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.” –
then, no one living is competent to make a “judgment”.
All that is possible in the absence of any dependable data, is a considered opinion. The person who takes the trouble to give matters due consideration is as qualified to form an opinion as is the most highly qualified scientist, albeit that his opinion will have been influenced by a wide range of researchers. At the end of the day, if drastic action based on the advice of those who “don’t know precisely” is to be avoided, we desperately need “the average person” to give matters his earnest consideration, and to give voice to his judgement.
Mattb: July 19, 2010 at 1:05 am
…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.
Nope. A member of the jury just has more *information* about the case. It still comes down to the ability of the average citizen to decide which of two conflicting sets of information (the prosecution’s and the defense’s) is most-likely correct, and more often than not, they get it right.
What Professor Schneider is saying is that the average citizen should not be allowed to decide which of the two claims — AGW or natural variation — is most-likely correct, even when provided with the arguments from both sides.
The dispute is not between bonehead bloggers denying the science and harrassed scientists trying to do the science but between a minority of scientists trying to get published and a majority of climate scientists, or rather a representative clique, deciding what papers are worthy of publication.
Any intelligent adult who makes the effort can follow the arguments over the reality and reliability of the climate data and its implications for planetary habitability. In my judgement, not much of any – and much of that not much is actually likely to prove, on balance, positive for humankind.
Steven Schneider says:-
“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”. [sorry for the edit, of your warmist mindset – KenB]
Steven Schneider..
That is exactly what the sceptics have been saying to you!!, but you aren’t listening, you guys live in your ivory towers and feel the need to scare the world into believing your view, you first tried to shout out the sceptics and when that failed you didn’t even have have the basic intelligence or commonsense to step into our shoes and walk the proverbial mile and take another more sceptical look at the poorly modeled “science” you are trying to sell with your overblown estimates and risk scenarios . If you had taken the time to remove your Real Climate Blog tinted glasses, you might have realised how stupid your comments are.
Yes, you are crossing and creating tipping points, but the most comprehensive risk, is that your much despised taxpayers will become so dismayed with academia they will stop listening to your irrational statements and cut off the funds you so wilfully waste!!
The sad part is that other genuine and concerned scientists may well suffer needlessly for your stupidity!!
More power to the Judith Curry’s and the fine scientific minds that contribute and participate in true scientific discussion here, in contrast to your locked and tortured mind.
Bit of pot and kettle mentality in all of us I’m afraid.
As some of these distinguished scientists approach retirement, I expect we’ll see more of these types of claims. I think he’s correct to say there are many tipping points, but they’re usually to tip our cash into their money pits.
I’m curious if this is why some pro-AGW people appear to be getting desperate. If some of them have invested in green schemes, they may have become heavily leveraged in anticipation of vast future profits, and a happy retirement. Big example is posibly the WWF and their REDD scheme here:
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2010/03/amazongate-part-ii-seeing-redd.html
with a lot of money already invested. If investors want their money back, advocates like Schneider and the WWF need rent seeking policy implemented. From the WWF’s annual report, their own finances aren’t looking too brilliant with the value of their investments plummenting and individual donations falling.
Our side should counter the use of “tipping points” by using the term “pushback points” — i.e., levels at which negative feedbacks are activated. It is that sort of feedback that dominates the climate system.
The “Average Person” can only go by what information they are bombarded with. It is a matter of trust and if you break it, you’ll never be believed again.
Speaking of global warming in a snowstorm in an odd month brings up question marks, so hype the propaganda in a heatwave and hope it lasts.
Schneider’s “[right-wing] blogs will cause civil war” is the latest left-speak meme about the conservative right that has recently emerged in liberal media as yet another excuse why the world will be damned if we don’t all jump on the victimhood train of the liberal left. A couple of “right-rage” books are currently making the coffee-table circuit which purport to show that conservative”extremists” (not to be confused with liberal extremists, who are just normal, accepting folk, apparently…).
This essay has been causing some consternation amongst the liberal fauxtelligentsia: http://spectator.org/archives/2010/07/16/americas-ruling-class-and-the .
Schneider is correct in his assessment of people listening to themselves – that’s tribalism and its been, and will be, part of our makeup for a good many generations to come . OTH, how much time do sane people want to spend conversing with the babblers? Even the most loving primary school teachers yearn for adult conversation once in a while. Schneider should recognise that such criticism is a really just a mirror of his own climate science reality.
What is truly disturbing are the number of liberal scientists and politicians with a Messiah complex. While there is truth in the common phrase “opinions are like …, everybody has one”, the emergence of so many “saviors” speaks to a serious pollution of the gene pool. Most of these lesser gods aren’t visionaries, they’re nut cases.
Richard S Courtney says:
July 19, 2010 at 2:08 am
“/…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…”
Every cloud has a silver lining 🙂
My expectation is the the EU will have imploded long before 2014. It made sense in some ways as an economic union, but trying to lever it into becoming a political super-state is doomed to failure.
Stephen Schneider is the Yugo of climate science.
Alexej Buergin says:
July 19, 2010 at 1:16 am
“There are some very strange dudes in US climatology, and most of them have German names.”
I’m a German in Germany and most people i meet here are so brainwashed they stare at me in disbelief when i dare to mention that CO2 is harmless. It just never crossed their minds that there might be a doubt about the evil global warming potential of CO2.
Critical thinkers they are not.
Schneider should thank God every day for tenure.
Andrew W says:
July 18, 2010 at 10:18 pm
Hold it right there – I lost a filling and after quite a bit of difficulty managed to get some temporary filling product to stick and reasonably well shaped. On the emergency visit to the dentist, he looked at it, said it could wait a couple days and scheduled enough time to fix it right. I asked him about replacing my temporary filling and he said I did such a good job there wasn’t any need to.
So there – average people can fill their own teeth!
” The average person is not really competent to make such a judgment.”
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He thinks scientists and politicians are not average.
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“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”
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He’s the one that needs to get out more, then he would see just how stupid scientists and politicians can be.
Perfect example of elitist.
Excuse me Mr. Watts, but is it climate science that has to be proved? I thought that that there is no experimental proof that CO2 causes global warming, there is no proof that there is global warming and global average temperature has no meaning in fact.