Guest Post by Thomas Fuller
After the tragic events in Maryland on Wednesday of this week, where a man took three hostages and tried to make The Discovery Channel a vehicle for publishing his manifesto, there have been accusations and counter accusations in the global warming world about taking advantage of this to advance political goals.
In particular, Joe Romm of Climate Progress harshly criticized Anthony Watts for the title of his blog post alerting readers to the situation. Personally, I think Anthony’s choice was mistaken, but not malicious–I’ve made worse editorial decisions myself.
And this may be one of them. The deluge of catastrophic predictions regarding global warming and its consequences have reached almost everyone on the planet, and perhaps unintentionally have replaced Cold War bomb scares as the primary source of doomsaying.
The messages are well-thought out and prepared by professional communicators, with disturbing and graphic images of a post-apocalyptic scenario lifted from Mad Max, and with about as much connection to reality.
In March of this year, a couple in Argentina shot their two children before committing suicide over fears of global warming. On Wednesday, in Maryland, James Lee apparently committed ‘suicide by cop’ after taking three hostages in an attempt to force the Discovery Channel to alter its programming to suit his fears over the environment.
At what point will we call to account those who have preached ‘the end of the earth as we know it’ to countless people? How many people will be driven to desperation by those who distort the science?
The IPCC’s AR4, published in 2007, painted a future with global warming as a serious, multinational problem that we should face together. You may agree or disagree with their findings–I agree with most of it, not all.
But nowhere does the work of thousands of scientists in peer-reviewed literature say that we are doomed, that civilization is at risk, that there is no future for us.
That falls to several groups of committed lobbyists, scientists, environmentalists and politicians who began saying the IPCC report was too conservative almost the day it was published. The evidence they bring forward for that claim is nowhere near as robust as the science referenced by the IPCC.
They are scaring people to death. How many more lives will be blighted or destroyed before they understand that their propaganda has real world effects?
It’s hard to work up too much sympathy for Mr. Lee–he took hostages, threatened to detonate an explosive device, and pretty much guaranteed his fate. And his worries weren’t confined to global warming. He was equally concerned with overpopulation, another scare story put out by some of the same people pumping hysteria over global warming.
At any rate, what these people are doing is despicable, if not murderous.
Sea levels are not going to rise by 20 feet. Or 10. Or five. There is not going to be a climatic tipping point that pushes our planet into a spiral of ever-increasing temperatures. Global warming is not going to cause the extinction of half the species on this planet, or even 1%.
And it is long past time that respected members of the scientific community publicly acknowledge those facts and helped bring this debate back within the realm of reality.
My father met Jim Jones briefly before he moved to Guyana with his flock, and described him as intelligent and persuasive, able to talk reasonably about a multitude of subjects. We don’t need more smooth talkers preaching the language of despair. We can now see the results. In their zeal to communicate their fears of the effects of global warming that go far beyond the predictions of mainstream science, those who Anthony called ‘warmistas’ in his blog title and who I call alarmists and sometimes hysterics have created a library of disturbing words and images that can influence the vulnerable.
Are these people responsible for the tragedies in Argentina and Maryland? No. But did they act responsibly, caveating their predictions as personal fears instead of the verdict of science. No. They were trying to scare you. They succeeded too well.
It’s time to stop the hysteria.
Thomas Fuller http://www.redbubble.com/people/hfuller
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The CAGW/CC movement isn’t based on science, but emotion. Take away the hysteria, and the whole thing would fall flat on its face. Remember Stephen Schneider’s famous quote: ”we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have.” He was right, they did have to, but it only works for a while.
Here’s a quote by Andrew Bolt, from 2007: “One day all the charlatans, scare-mongers and assorted scientists who decided to tell lies for a green cause will be held to account. I suspect that shaming day is coming faster than many realise.” How prescient he was. Their lies are now coming home to roost.
Science czar Holdren pretty much in his book covers the same issues as the ecobomber,
http://zombietime.com/john_holdren/
Coincidence? Parasite babies? Compulsory abortions?
I used to think about Limbaugh’s proposition that obortion would be the cause of the next civil war in this country. Nah. Then I used of what would be the cause, if any, of the next big war, and peak oil for me has been replaced by AGW. Doesn’t the Nupty of Nashville, et al,’s theory of AGW, as presented to rent-a-crowd in recording studio/theater, lay down the gauntlett to under developed countries to ‘do something about it’. In WWII, the British leadership was able to rally the entire British citizenship to brace for war, because their destruction was camped over the channel in France. Doesn’t AGW do the same for the under developed countries today.
I watched a French political puppet show which depicted Bush in the White House with Stallone as defense secretary, Stallone as Secretary of State and Stallone as chief of staff…..war anyone?? Here is an article on the answer to all our problems…
(hopefully ANNA can tell us a little bit about Thorium)
from AEP @ur momisugly Telegraph:
‘…….We could then stop arguing about wind mills, deepwater drilling, IPCC hockey sticks, or strategic reliance on the Kremlin. History will move on fast. Muddling on with the status quo is not a grown-up policy. The International Energy Agency says the world must invest $26 trillion (£16.7 trillion) over the next 20 years to avert an energy shock. The scramble for scarce fuel is already leading to friction between China, India, and the West. nThere is no certain bet in nuclear physics but work by Nobel laureate Carlo Rubbia at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) on the use of thorium as a cheap, clean and safe alternative to uranium in reactors may be the magic bullet we have all been hoping for, though we have barely begun to crack the potential of solar power. Dr Rubbia says a tonne of the silvery metal – named after the Norse god of thunder, who also gave us Thor’s day or Thursday – produces as much energy as 200 tonnes of uranium, or 3,500,000 tonnes of coal. A mere fistful would light London for a week. Thorium eats its own hazardous waste. It can even scavenge the plutonium left by uranium reactors, acting as an eco-cleaner. “It’s the Big One,” said Kirk Sorensen, a former NASA rocket engineer and now chief nuclear technologist at Teledyne Brown Engineering. “Once you start looking more closely, it blows your mind away. You can run civilisation on thorium for hundreds of thousands of years, and it’s essentially free. You don’t have to deal with uranium cartels,” he said. Thorium is so common that miners treat it as a nuisance, a radioactive by-product if they try to dig up rare earth metals. The US and Australia are full of the stuff. So are the granite rocks of Cornwall. You do not need much: all is potentially usable as fuel, compared to just 0.7pc for uranium. After the Manhattan Project, US physicists in the late 1940s were tempted by thorium for use in civil reactors. It has a higher neutron yield per neutron absorbed. It does not require isotope separation, a big cost saving. But by then America needed the plutonium residue from uranium to build bombs. “They were really going after the weapons,” said Professor Egil Lillestol, a world authority on the thorium fuel-cycle at CERN. “It is almost impossible make nuclear weapons out of thorium because it is too difficult to handle. It wouldn’t be worth trying.” It emits too many high gamma rays. You might have thought that thorium reactors were the answer to every dream but when CERN went to the European Commission for development funds in 1999-2000, they were rebuffed. Brussels turned to its technical experts, who happened to be French because the French dominate the EU’s nuclear industry. “They didn’t want competition because they had made a huge investment in the old technology,” he said. Another decade was lost. It was a sad triumph of vested interests over scientific progress. “We have very little time to waste because the world is running out of fossil fuels. Renewables can’t replace them. Nuclear fusion is not going work for a century, if ever,” he said. The Norwegian group Aker Solutions has bought Dr Rubbia’s patent for the thorium fuel-cycle, and is working on his design for a proton accelerator at its UK operation. Victoria Ashley, the project manager, said it could lead to a network of pint-sized 600MW reactors that are lodged underground, can supply small grids, and do not require a safety citadel. It will take £2bn to build the first one, and Aker needs £100mn for the next test phase.
The UK has shown little appetite for what it regards as a “huge paradigm shift to a new technology”. Too much work and sunk cost has already gone into the next generation of reactors, which have another 60 years of life. So Aker is looking for tie-ups with the US, Russia, or China. The Indians have their own projects – none yet built – dating from days when they switched to thorium because their weapons programme prompted a uranium ban. America should have fewer inhibitions than Europe in creating a leapfrog technology. The US allowed its nuclear industry to stagnate after Three Mile Island in 1979. Anti-nuclear neorosis is at last ebbing. The White House has approved $8bn in loan guarantees for new reactors, yet America has been strangely passive. Where is the superb confidence that put a man on the moon? A few US pioneers are exploring a truly radical shift to a liquid fuel based on molten-fluoride salts, an idea once pursued by US physicist Alvin Weinberg at Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee in the 1960s. The original documents were retrieved by Mr Sorensen. Moving away from solid fuel may overcome some of thorium’s “idiosyncracies”. “You have to use the right machine. You don’t use diesel in a petrol car: you build a diesel engine,” said Mr Sorensen. Thorium-fluoride reactors can operate at atmospheric temperature. “The plants would be much smaller and less expensive. You wouldn’t need those huge containment domes because there’s no pressurized water in the reactor. It’s close-fitting,” he said.
Nuclear power could become routine and unthreatening. But first there is the barrier of establishment prejudice. When Hungarian scientists led by Leo Szilard tried to alert Washington in late 1939 that the Nazis were working on an atomic bomb, they were brushed off with disbelief. Albert Einstein interceded through the Belgian queen mother, eventually getting a personal envoy into the Oval Office.
Roosevelt initially fobbed him off. He listened more closely at a second meeting over breakfast the next day, then made up his mind within minutes. “This needs action,” he told his military aide. It was the birth of the Manhattan Project. As a result, the US had an atomic weapon early enough to deter Stalin from going too far in Europe.
The global energy crunch needs equal “action”. If it works, Manhattan II could restore American optimism and strategic leadership at a stroke: if not, it is a boost for US science and surely a more fruitful way to pull the US out of perma-slump than scattershot stimulus. Even better, team up with China and do it together, for all our sakes…………………………………………………………………………………………………….’
Bad news, not sure where to post this, its OT, but saw this on the web:
Looks like another rig exploded with one person missing…
http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2010/09/02/rescue-efforts-underway-after-oil-rig-accident-in-gulf/?hpt=T2
Well said.
It’s long past time for the ‘over the top’ rhetoric by the AGW high priests to cease.
A temperate debate requires temperate speech.
There has been little of the former, and even less of the latter.
The events of yesterday are the fruit of many years of intemperate claims and outright LIES.
The firebombing of SUV’s & buildings, bombs to ‘enemies of environment’, the toppling of a radio tower…the commonality in spirit of these deeds (to name a few) only differentiate in magnitude, and the tools employed. Period.
In the time of my youth, words had weight, deeds had consequences, arguments advanced on the merits of verifiable facts, and a refusal to debate honestly and openly meant disrepute.
You reap what you sow.
That truism has not lost it’s weight, and pretending otherwise will not sweeten the bitter bread sitting before you.
The reality check has come due.
Alarmists hate all life.
The poster boy after all, is Michael Mann’s Hockey Stick. Yeah, he turned out to be an incompetent statistician, and that is no scientist. But what was he directly saying? He was saying that tree growth had taken an “alarming” jump upward. What?
Trees are growing faster than ever before and for that we are supposed to “wake up” as Algore put it and trash our economy to the tune of $4000/year/family according to some estimates, and delete our cheapest fuels and switch to bird-killers (wind farms) and IQ destroyers (nuclear–see Ernest Sternglass book Secret Fallout–available for free download on the web) and on and on.
Idsos and others’ research on plants confirms that CO2 will cause faster tree growth–and fast growth of other plants as well. Trees benefit the most, but we get more grasses and food also, and Mann is saying this is terrible? WUWT?
As a biologist and ecologist, I know that biodiversity depends on many factors, of which the most important single factor is “primary production,” plants. Food for all else. So biodiversity will be rising and that means extinctions? More animals equals extinctions? Huh?
I can confirm that such illogic really is being taught to today’s biology students, but it is not illogic that is the heart of the problem. I spent 13 years in Scientology, and learned a number of critical things from them. One is that if you assume everybody means well, “you will make a dog’s breakfast of it.” When someone means ill, you must face it and say so or the evil will continue.
Alarmists are out to destroy ALL life–trees, plants, biodiversity, animals, “overpopulation” and YOU.
They are a real danger. I have seen proposals, for example, to fill the skies with aluminum to deflect sunlight and cool the Earth. I have also seen some evidence that they may actually be doing that in Chemtrails sites (not credible, but I don’t discount them completely). Now, most biologists do not take “Inorganic Chemistry,” but I did and recommend it to all who would enhance the life of the Earth. Sure, I learned about speakers and electronics–but I also learned about solubilities and poisons. Aluminum is one of the most abundant elements in Earth’s crust but it is normally 100% tied up in clays and NOT available to life forms as an ion to metabolize. We did not evolve with it and cannot handle it. It is toxic to life. Throwing it into the atmosphere would result in a real ecologic harm. After a while, it would chemically degrade back into clay, and then life could recover. In the meantime, the harm could be awesome.
Similarly other “remedies” for low ice or whatever are also devastating. In 2008, millions starved in agony as farmland was used for biofuel–corn ethanol, and thus removed from food production. “Carbon credits” today often involve taking marginal farmland from poor farmers and planting fast-growing–but useless–trees on it.
It is time to face reality. Alarmists are out to destroy ALL life–trees, plants, biodiversity, animals, “overpopulation” and YOU.
Who preaches hysteria?
It’s Fox News that preaches hysteria. Fox News sends back half of the fellow citizens to the medieval ages.
REPLY: I guess then this must be the Medieval Internet we are communicating on then 😉 -Anthony
Lee said he experienced an ‘‘awakening” when he watched former Vice President Al Gore’s environmental documentary ‘‘An Inconvenient Truth.”
“Hey – it’s a planetary emergency, a climate crisis. We have only a few years, or months even. The tipping point is here. This summer’s extremes confirm it. So action has to be taken!
“Nothing is more important than saving … the Lions, Tigers, Giraffes, Elephants, Froggies, Turtles, Apes, Raccoons, Beetles, Ants, Sharks, Bears, and, of course, the Squirrels. The humans? The planet does not need humans.”
They hate people. Animals for food consumption are also despised.
One of the great repercussions of the “Age of the Web and Cell Phone” is that Chicken Little has a front row seat and a great big mouse with all the superduper features that no one else can afford. He’s subsidized! If (write this down, I feel a classic line coming on) we don’t steel ourselves to ignore his everpresent screams, we will not survive! (Well.. it wasn’t that great was it?)
PS: When everything and everyone in the whole wide world is riding on a see-saw, in the middle of a cyclone, the safest place is in the middle. Think about it. Believe nothing you hear (or read or see on the web) and only half of what you see actually happening live, within 100m, in front of you, with your own little eye-balls.
A thoughtful post, Mr Fuller, but the world has always had it’s share of crazy people who lose touch with reality and one more reaching a personal tipping point is no surprise. If Mr Lee had not written his rather odd ‘manifesto’ along the lines that he did, he would have cited other factors as the cause of the world’s ills. For any of us to point out the fallacies behind the reasoning of such a highly disturbed person is not very productive.
Politicians desperate to manufacture a tax windfall and those supporting them with pseudo-science that is more akin to Shamanism are merely a part of the general silliness and venality of the human race, which does like the delicious thrill of frightening itself with imagined bogeymen of any age. Fears of global warming will pass, as will fears of overpopulation, mass starvation and whatever may be in vogue at any particular time. In the late 19th century, my Grandparents’ generation worried about a Russian invasion of New Zealand and the coastal fortifications are there still there
Tom Fuller and Anthony Watts,
If Anthony’s “Warmista” post was the precipitating cause of this post by you Tom, then it speaks for the resulting benefit of Anthony’s post, whether everyone agrees with some of Anthony’s editorial choices or not.
Thanks Anthony and Tom.
John
Tom, thoughtful post.
There is a certain type of cause driven person that is always yearning inside for a life or death struggle. If it isn’t environmentalism or AGW it could’ve been human rights in China, abortion clinics (Rudolph) animal rights (Gisborne), whaling, lab animal testing, fear of the US federal government (McVeigh), development (Kaczynski) communism or whatever.
Not that these causes aren’t worthy of protest but some people are just wired to explode for a cause. If AGW had never even been hypothesized he still likely would have had a manifesto.
People are forgetting the kid in Australia a couple of years ago who committed suicide because of his fears about global warming.
@Curiousgeorge That was an old platform in 300 feet of water that dated from 1980. All rescued, and probably no ecological damage. The platform was not producing, but they continued to do routine maintenance on it. The WSJ has no comment on what caused the explosion, but if the BP platform had not gone boom, this would not have even made the news. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704206804575467600528128386.html
Joe Romm, the pot calling the kettle black…
FergalR says:
September 2, 2010 at 9:45 am
“disturbing words and images that can influence the vulnerable.”
You are getting confused by the word “vulnerable” and linking it falsely to ‘soft in the head”. James Lee’s intelligence is no fig leaf for AGW’s shared guilt in his actions.
Take 911 as a comparator.
19 or so Saudi degree educated professionals hijacked airliners and committed mass murder. Their driving ideology was Islamic Jihad; the root of Jihadi violent motivation is fear of catastrophe – the idea that Islam is besieged and unjustly under attack and its future existence is in danger. Combined with an extravagent dose of self-righteous superiority.
CAGW has both these – a narrative of danger of future catastrophe closely linked with a self-righteous morality.
All terrorist acts require above average competence, discipline and intelligence. Does that mean they cannot be motivated by hate-filled ideology? Cojones!
paulw says:
September 2, 2010 at 9:59 am
Who preaches hysteria?
It’s Fox News that preaches hysteria. Fox News sends back half of the fellow citizens to the medieval ages.
Oh – that’s useful. They can get some first hand data for us on the medieval warm period.
Zeke the Sneak says:
September 2, 2010 at 9:24 am
Yesterday night I was told by History channel that we all are going to die of OBESITY!. They say that never in the past the world has had such a big amounts of food available so as we are prone to unconscious consumption we’ll surely die weighing more than a thousand pounds.
Then if we do not die because of Al Baby’s Global Warming, we have the alternative choices of dying because of a falling comet or a falling asteroid or dying from obesity.
Fact is, that THEY are already wandering zombies, scarcely living corpses, pretending to be scientists, like” maked up” rossy cheeks Al Baby or dead walking “patchy”, a not so well disguised voodoo zombie.
So let us remember them the biblical words:
“And then there will be crying and screeching teeth ”
Tradition tells that there are two gates to cross after death: One the ASURA LOKA, the devils’ gate, and the other, the DEVA LOKA, de god’s gate.
Wonder which one you will be crossing through?
Personally, I don’t give much of a hoot what Joe Rom m thinks.
phlogiston says:
September 2, 2010 at 10:24 am
…and DATA will be SPIN FREE!
It sure seems some people have an innate need to have some object to resist/overcome/fear. In the Cold War days it was the Soviets (or the Imperialists, if you were Russian) or Nuclear War, God-fearing Christians have Satan (and God!), GWB had terrorists, and lots of people have CAGW.
Instead of trying to convince people that climate change won’t be catastrophic, perhaps we should offer up an alternative fear for them to focus on. Like nations collapsing under the weight of their national debt. (I wonder how Greece is getting along these days.) Perhaps the Tea Party movement could adopt a sales pitch something like “Don’t sweat the climate change – it won’t matter if the country goes broke!”
I pop over here every now and again, just to see what is going on. When I read the comments I frequently don’t know whether to laugh or cry, or even to cry from laughing.
Now I haven’t read all of the comments, just a few. But I would be interested to find out the opinions of the Powers That Be, i.e. Anthony, Tom, maybe Willis et al on posts like that from Lady Life Grows, after all isn’t this meant to be the Number One Science Blog.
I coined the term ‘The Warmista’. It doesn’t take the plural, it is a collective noun.
It’s from the Italian. Fascista (“Fascist Youth”) was a magazine designed for youth in Italy under Benito Mussolini’s Fascist state.
I got annoyed with ‘denier’ and decided to fight fire with fire.
sherlock says:
September 2, 2010 at 9:36 am
This is the central reality: the “Enviro-Marxist complex” is a multi-billion dollar business, and its goal is the weakening of Western culture, and specifically American power.
No shit, sherlock! You hit it right on the head, and at least half of us Americans are willing participants.
phlogiston says:
September 2, 2010 at 10:21 am
……………
———————–
The quote was from the post. I’m pretty sure Japanese kamikaze pilots were as sane as any of us, took their responsibilities more seriously than any of us and in the culture of the time and place were saner than most of us.
They were indoctrinated to sacrifice their lives for an ideal.
You can indoctrinate sane people into killing themselves for an ideal.
Case closed.