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.
Boy, that Eisenhower was plenty smart, eh?
We know that there are probably hundreds of tipping points. We don’t know precisely where they are. ( Alarm bells.) Anthony do you by any chance have a Tipping Point Detector amongst your weather instruments? I refuse to rely on the oracular pronouncements of the professor and his crew, I don’t care how many PHDs they possess.
Blogospheres starting a civil war??? How about one that helped start the American Revolution? Thomas Paine, an immigrant (sponsored by Ben) wrote “Common Sense”. But that was not the only little blurb he wrote. He was one of our early American (and in this case foreign born) founders who, in today’s world, would be known as a blogger. Would that Schneider had such common sense.
Tenuc:
Re: your post at July 19, 2010 at 4:55 am.
To be clear, my post at July 19, 2010 at 2:08 am was not making any judgement (pro or anti) about the EU. The crux of my post was its conclusion; i.e.
“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
“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%!”
You could stop the funding to all of them. The free-market will fund science where it is needed most, and the rest could be handled by keen amateurs. We really don’t need socialist science.
@Tenuc says: July 19, 2010 at 4:55 am
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.”
Well, amen to that!
But, on a point of detail, the EU has had to defer the implementation of the Large Combustion Plant Directive until 2020. I don’t think by any means the UK would have been the only EU country to shiver in the dark without that delay!
In a sense it is a pity. I happen to believe that no matter how conclusive is the proof that the whole cAGW agenda is riddled with dogma, incompetence and malice, those in power have their snouts so deep in the gravy train that they will carry on brushing every objection under the carpet.
But when the population at large does find themselves shivering in the dark, then look forward to lots of politicians and media guys pointing out how they had always warned that the science isn’t so robust, after all.
But, on the other hand, ten years isn’t so much if you want new nuclear plants. And there’s no real prospect for them even starting in the next five years.
There are experts that fix hearts or make bridges that don’t fall down, and then there are intellectual elites. Read the book “Intellectuals” by Paul Johnson, especially the conclusion where he says (paraphrased) that asking your average Joe on the street is more likely to result in a reasonable suggestion than asking a panel of intellectuals. The same applies to Schneider and his buddies, I think. Intellectuals who don’t fall in line get ejected from the elite.
Has anyone ever shown any evidence any of these tipping points actually exist?
Maybe the good professor can tell us just what it is like to have athlete’s foot in the mouth. And people wonder why there is such a distrust of academics today?
With the greatest respect, around half of the American population believes in creation, if polls are to be relied on, young earth creation at that. This doesn’t really give one confidence in the average US citizen’s scientific understanding.
Stephen Schneider is the guy who said :
“So, we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have.”
From there, there is no need to listen what he says, he already said he is untrustable.
My grandfather fixed his own false teeth when broken, reshaped hearing aid molds when he got an ear sore, fixed the hearing aid electronics when shorted out, fixed his own watches and clocks, welded things back together (not pretty but durable), and could sing and play the fiddle with the best. And he could also shoot your eye out at 200 yards.
But we jes dumb folk caint know thu diffr’nce butwixt liers, cheaters, and smart aliky types!
Basically, Schneider repeats the anti-democratic cravings of Lovelock. Next stop Hansen i say.
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.
This is a very astute and rare observation. It exemplifies a misconception which has magnified many (if not most) of the problems humanity has faced over the ages. Humans are born ignorant and it’s only through education and discipline that this condition is reversed. The courtroom example is great in that it demonstrates a situation where a group of people, ignorant of the facts, can be educated enough to make life and death decisions. With the advent of blogs people have a renewed opportunity to do their own research, to promulgate their own education, their own ideas. This is something which bothers many (most?) in academia and in the mainstream media. Education is power, yet self-education is both powerful and liberating.
I am a free thinker. I’ll make my own mind up, thank you. And who is he (Schneider) to say I don’t listen? I’ll listen to whom I wish, when I wish. I will decide what is truthful and what is honorable. This is my heritage as an American. So long as I live and breathe that heritage is not lost.
The creation thing has to do with giving the right answer that coincides with your faith, not the answer that coincides with scientific knowledge. These questions are loaded with emotional turmoil by those that believe faith is an important part of a civilized society. Faith in something is part of our human existence and may even be part of our genetic drives. That one has faith in a Christian God means that this particular question is not a scientific one for them. It is a faith based question. And is therefore answered from faith’s perspective.
The fact that a person says “I believe in creation” does not mean that they are scientifically dumb. Please trust me on that one. The question cannot be used to measure scientific understanding.
“At some point people get fed up with sloppy work and reject it. That is what is happening to climate science today.” – Anthony (in reply at 10:18)
Not to put too fine a point on it, but personally I think they crossed the line from sloppy to just plain deceit some time ago. While people will occasionally put up with sloppy work (you get what you pay for), once someone has been proven to be dishonest most people will figure that he has indeed “jumped the shark”, as all of his previous work will also come under a cloud.
This is why, Anthony, your work with surface stations is so threatening. You’re revealing not sloppy work, but dishonest work. You might disagree with that assessment and still be giving them the benefit of the doubt, but in my opinion when obvious errors are pointed out yet go uncorrected, more than just sloppy work is afoot.
I believe this is also the unstated justification for the recent “whitewashes” of Climategate. If all that needed correction was some sloppiness, they would have reported honestly. But the needed corrections involve uncovering lies and distortions, and once the insiders go that route the game is over. Or, in the current vernacular, the entire AGW crowd will have “jumped the shark” together. Given that most of them probably honestly believe that AGW is a real threat, they aren’t willing to sacrifice the perceived good along with the bad; hence the whitewashing. Of course, “whitewash” is just code for covering up, i.e., dishonesty in and of itself, even if what is being whitewashed was just sloppy work.
Sir Walter Scott’s “Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive” pretty well sums up my view of the matter. I don’t know when the first strands were cast, or who cast them, but the web had until recently been growing rapidly with help from many quarters. Then along came Anthony and others with their little brooms; and now with bigger brooms…
Schneider apparently doesn’t know how bad expert judgment can be — look at World War I, for instance.
Nuke says:
July 19, 2010 at 6:45 am
Has anyone ever shown any evidence any of these tipping points actually exist?
========================================================
Yes, the computer games say so…………
Schneider is quoted as follows:
“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.”
Of course, Schneider is talking about “theoretical” risk. That is all he knows. Being a tenured professor, the only risk that he has run since receiving tenure is that his contact at the NSF might be replaced by someone who thinks clearly. Like everyone who lives the life of “theory,” Schneider looks down upon the ordinary business person as someone of very limited talent who is not capable of understanding risk. Of course, the ordinary business person is a genius at managing risk, not “theoretical” risk, and proves it daily by surviving in a competitive environment rife with risk and the associated anxiety. Schneider should get out more or at least read the papers. Some of the people most disturbed by Obama’s “Wall Street Reform” are corn farmers in Iowa who fear that their use of the financial planning instruments known as derivatives will be curtailed. Schneider should publish an essay that reveals the extensive incompetence of these simple folk as they struggle to deal with risk, not “theoretical” risk.
Mike asks:
“How many regular WUWT readers also regularly read pro-AGW blogs like Climate Progress or RealClimate?”
I continue to read RealClimate because I suffer from rapture of hubris, but they will not let me post. I post at the Guardian’s Environment blog, but it is dominated by a gang of say twelve AGW zealots who behave like Pit Bulls in their efforts to create noise and change the subject. The Pit Bull phenomenon is something that I have explained to the editors of that forum. There are more examples. In general, the CRU phenomenon of circling the wagons and viciously responding to all queries or criticisms is now universal for pro-AGW bloggers.
There is at least one prof from Stanford that makes sense…
Stanford University physicist Robert Laughlin…
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/please-remain-calm-the-earth-will-heal-itself/article1642767/
UK Friend said:
Creationism isn’t influencing policy decisions to anything like the degree that climate alarmism is. Nor does it provide ample investment opportunities for decision makers.
Richard Hill writes:
“I think that the Professor is partly right. [snip] 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.”
What an undemocratic thought. Ask Senator Rockefeller from WVA why he introduced a bill that would delay for two years implementation of the EPA’s ruling on CO2. He might not admit it but the answer is 10,000+ emails from bloggers.
From the interview:
“Even if this reversed in 10,000 years, that’s effectively irreversible on any meaningful civilization time scale. So that’s what we worry about. We call them tipping points.
What do we know? We know for sure that there are thresholds in nature. The obvious one that everybody knows is 0 degrees Celsius, 32 Fahrenheit: Ice starts to melt. So that’s a tipping point.”
So Schneider uses “tipping point” in the usual sense of offering scare scenarios, and as irreversible, and in the next sentence he uses it to describe a simple and reversible state change. So he’s contradicting himself in these few sentences and we will never know how he really defines tipping point, let alone how climate science (the AGW kind) defines tipping point. This could explain why he sees hundreds of tipping points; according to his second use of the word, cloud formation is another tipping point etc.
Humpty-Dumpty comes to mind; tipping point is THEIR word and it means whatever THEY need it to mean.
I thought the seventies were in the past. Not in Prof Schneider’s mind, obviously. The seventies were a time of rollicking insanity from Paul Erlich, Schneider and others, who were lionised by university staff around the world who wanted some of that glory. The seventies have long ago passed into history and the professor should realise that his fifteen minutes of fame were used up decades ago.