If you type ‘the planet has a fever’ into Google, it will return 3,120,000 results. And none of them are about Peggy Lee. Or even Aerosmith’s later song with the same name.
It’s famous because Al Gore said it. But what does it mean? I’ve spent the last couple of days trying to deconstruct the misleading use of symbols in climate communications–so far we’ve looked at polar bears, Antarctic ice and sea level. This is a related exercise, but it’s about mental images.
If you’ve got a fever, you’re sick. You need to do something. (I still can’t remember–is it feed a cold and starve a fever or vice-versa?) This is exactly what Al Gore said when he addressed Congress in 2008.
“The planet has a fever,” Gore said. “If your baby has a fever, you go to the doctor. If the doctor says you need to intervene here, you don’t say, `Well, I read a science fiction novel that told me it’s not a problem.’ If the crib’s on fire, you don’t speculate that the baby is flame retardant. You take action.”
I don’t know if he was the first, but he certainly wasn’t the last. The phrase has been picked up and bandied about everywhere.
But Earth is not human. Anthropomorphizing it really means we can’t talk about it accurately and honestly. It doesn’t breathe, go to the bathroom or watch TV.
To say it has a fever means that you know what the right temperature is. Do we know that about this planet? That’s a serious question, by the way–I’m not being rhetorical. I haven’t seen anyone say that the global mean temperature cannot exceed 17 degrees Celsius or we melt like the Wicked Witch of the West. Typing ‘best temperature for Earth into Google returns 26 million results–and slightly fewer answers. Most of them are variations on ‘I don’t know.’
To compare a planet to a sick human really reduces the level of discussion you can have about it. Especially if objecting to the question gets you labeled a flat-earther denialist.
But it’s an effective way of controlling the discussion and the agenda. Once you say something like that, the immediate question that pops into peoples’ minds is ‘How do we cure the fever?’ How do we fix this indeed?
When the issue is framed in this way, we don’t even discuss climate change or global warming any more. We start defining what type and level of medicine we need.
It’s brilliant corporate communications. It takes command of the issue, defines the parameters of legitimate discussion and cuts the ground from underneath people who would even question basic assumptions. Absolutely brilliant.
And absolutely despicable. A debate born from scientific discovery with consequences that will affect every living soul on this planet gets hijacked for a silly game based on an inadquate metaphor. And it is done intentionally, to paint opposition as those who want the planet to stay sick.
There are variations that are every bit as bad. Some say those skeptical of part or all of the science are like smokers waving away the X-rays the doctor brings of their lungs. Or like people with high cholesterol justifying their next cheeseburger.
Those could actually be worse, as they imply death by inattention and ignorance. And, like the simpler fever, it changes the conversation and our perception of those engaged in it.
A lot of people want to talk about global warming in ways that don’t involve science. They use analogies, metaphors and plenty of hyperbole. They say that it’s because we don’t understand science.
I think instead it’s because the science is inadequate for their cause. Not that it’s wrong, not that it’s stupid. It just isn’t finished yet. We’re still in the data gathering phase, having developed new tools over the past 30 years. We’ve found defects in previous data collection methods, most famously by our host here.
We don’t need substitutes for the science. We need the real thing.
Well said. Quite a good article.
I think this describes pretty well the ridiculousness of the Gaia claptrap.
It is about as scientific as anything out of Hans Christian Anderson … and yet its author is a ‘well respected scientist’ according to the BBC…
Tom,
As you have noticed at your blog, the true believers cannot even handle a critical review of their metaphors, much less their symbols.
To point out that their claims about polar bears or hockey sticks are less than accurate is to do so knowing they will simply, falsely, claim you are a liar.
To challenge the underlying metaphor of a planetary fever- the assumption that what we are experiencing means Earth is sick- is to strike at the heart of their faith.
Thank you for being bold enough to do so, and to do so accurately and honestly.
Pops
September 11, 2010 5:48 am
“A lot of people want to talk about alleged global warming in ways that don’t involve science. They use analogies, metaphors and plenty of hyperbole. They say that it’s because we don’t understand science.”
I knew Al would show up.
Brad
September 11, 2010 5:56 am
Poor Al Gore, even Tipper doesn’t like him anymore…
“We’ve found defects in previous data collection methods, most famously by our host here.”
True. However, there appears to have been no significant effort to “correct” the defects. Rather, the effort has supposedly been to “adjust” the defects away. In the face of a “requirement” to invest tens of trillions of dollars to “halt” and “reverse” anthropogenically induced climate change, an argument that we cannot afford to get the fundamentals right is ludicrous.
DirkH
September 11, 2010 6:05 am
“the
rules
of the
game
Recommendations to the Climate Change Communications Working Group:
Evidence base for the Climate Change
Communications Strategy
The game is communicating climate change;
the rules will help us win it.” http://www.futerra.co.uk/downloads/RulesOfTheGame.pdf
“17. Use emotions and visuals
Another classic marketing rule: changing behaviour by
disseminating information doesn’t always work, but emotions
and visuals usually do.”
They openly admit to using manipulative tactics. But; there is good PR and evil PR. futerra of course does GOOD PR, not evil PR. How do they know that? Well, they have a code of ethical conduct! From their “blog”: Is all PR evil? http://www.futerra.co.uk/blog/836
Ian H
September 11, 2010 6:08 am
The question about what is the ideal temperature of the world is a very good one.
As a thought experiment (and reality check) try imagining what would happen if the activities of mankind were lowering CO_2 levels in some fashion. Imagine writing the IPCC report. What dire predictions would lowered CO_2 levels and global cooling lead to. How about the following list
1. Shortened growing seasons
2. Colder summers
3. Slower growing plants due to reduced CO_2 levels
4. Reduced global precipitation (less rain) (cooler = drier)
5. The above four factors are a quadruple whammy that could be expected to dramatically reduce crop yields
6. Global famine – global war
7. Likely ice age
8. Mass extinctions
9. etc
Oh – you could have fun writing such a report. Indeed it would be a lot easier to fill such a report with dire predictions of calamity than the real IPCC report . Now bear in mind that increased CO_2 levels means the opposite to all the above. This is a problem how exactly?
BenAW
September 11, 2010 6:10 am
This Gaia story may have some merits 😉
CO2 levels have been dwindling since millions of years.
We’re pretty close to the point that the photosynthese proces will come to a halt due to lack of CO2. (~200ppm).
Perhaps Gaia put mankind on this earth to burn fossil fuels and release some of the bounded CO2?
Jim Barker
September 11, 2010 6:25 am
Gaia is just fine, humans however….
Dagfinn
September 11, 2010 6:26 am
I assume the idea of “fever” is derived from James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, and I know he’s use the fever concept to describe AGW. So it’s a sort of serious idea of considering the earth a living organism. Depending on how you define “living”, it might even be possible to defend that position in a rational manner, although I haven’t studied the particular reasoning in this case.
But fever implies more than alive, it implies a higher organism, a warm-blooded one. One that actively maintains its temperature. That’s a lot more far-fetched.
Also, the metaphor, when you make it explicit, seems to contradict the idea of runaway global warming. A warm-blooded animal maintains a specific body temperature and usually resists changes to that temperature. In this sense it’s more like Willis Eschenbach’s thermostat hypothesis. (http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/06/14/the-thermostat-hypothesis/)
Olen
September 11, 2010 6:26 am
You’re right, it is despicable that the debate is controlled by nonsense in the attempt to crush honest argument. And worse that opposing views are suppressed by the MSM working under the guise of a free press. That is why the warmers, if they can use words like that so can I, can make outrageous comments and slander opposition without being taken to task. And that is how they control the debate. To take it one step further, the congress and judiciary are willing accomplices, or should I say accessory to the fraud with law and regulation. Partners in crime.
tryfan
September 11, 2010 6:26 am
Some nitpicking: the phrase “the planet has a fever” actually turns up far fewer results – 161.000 when i tried.
Far too many, one might think, but still quite a difference…
A good post, otherwise!
latitude
September 11, 2010 6:28 am
Tom, everyone knows CO2 levels have been a lot higher in the past.
What “forced” CO2 levels then?
But as high as it was, it went back down again.
What caused that?
The planet does not know the source of CO2.
If you look at “average” temperatures, we are in the low part of average right now,
and only a small ppm of CO2 above the point where all life on this planet would die.
How in this world did warmer temperatures, longer growing seasons, CO2 levels a scant higher than death, become a bad thing?
Mussing on the prognosis of the patient, Mother Earth, as I sat here watching the life ebb and flow of TS Igor, I had a realization of sorts.
Planets have magnetospheres, that create aurora effects at the poles. The sun has a spheroid of solar wind effects extending to the heliopause, the leap of understanding flashed as I saw the possibility that it is simply the flexible, fluid, magnetosphere of the sun.
It is just that the plasma floating in the outgoing solar wind are the conductive medium that they used to call the ether, but saw it as static and not moving. The speed, density, and localized flow patterns are influenced by the electromagnetic conductance of the whole set of mediums.
The background galactic fields interacting with the heliopause also form an aurora effect on the forward side as the solar system as it moves through the galaxy. The slow long wave modulations of the coupling of the galactic wind as it passes through clouds of dust and gasses, will be affected by the electromagnetic conduction, density, and magnetic permeable content of said gas and dust clouds.
If periods of time when the surrounding galactic clouds acted to defuse the galactic field strength away from the solar system in it’s travels, then the couplings into the sun from the outside influences, would allow the solar system to become fluidly balanced and the SSB would be in the free fall condition Lief insists it is now.
What if all of the things we know about the sun being affected by the mass and angular momentum, and the resultant interactions between the sun, solar wind, activity levels with sun spots, flares, and CME’s, being tied to the interactions of these effects, but as a product of the ongoing changes in the local galactic weather so to speak.
This isolation of the solar magnetosphere, might then be the precipitator of the long periods of ice ages, any time the solar system moves through a cloud of ionized dust/gas that diffuses the magnetic fields around us.
In the current mode as the changes in galactic field flux shifts, it varies the phase of power that drives particles into the heliopause, causing the aurora effects recently discovered on the leading edge of the heliopause. Just as currents are inducted into the atmosphere of the earth, in geomagnetic storms, that follow ion conduction paths on tidally perturbed air masses, to effect weather spots on the surface.
So as the galactic fields drive the induction coupling into and through the solar system it alters the overall angular momentum content, that is transferred into to speed up the whole system, or out from the sun to slow down, through all of the conductive path ways out to the heliopause. The necessary transfers of angular momentum, in the resultant interactive changes between the planets, and their moons, take all five forms gravity, tidal, declinational orbital variances, electromagnetic, and it’s attendant homopolar induction results that run the LOD components as well as ion charge gradients across frontal boundaries.
The compounding of the base cycles is modulated by the dynamics of the interactions of the multiple bodies in the solar system. If we just look at it from the “sun is the center” aspect, we miss all of the nuances of the drag and push of the long term galactic field changes. I would suggest a study of the properties of the solar system local neighborhood, in regard to gas/dust populations and polarization properties due to residual effects viewable due to conductance of large scale galactic fields. To better get a handle as to how soon we could really expect the next ice age to start up again if at all.
Just because the sun’s orbit around the center of the galaxy, has in the past come into areas that are conducive to insulation from galactic field flux does not mean that it will always happen.
GogogoStopS-T-O-P
September 11, 2010 6:32 am
Rasputin, Timothy Leary, George Noori, the Reverend Moon, James Warren “Jim Jones,” the Pied Piper, etc, etc. There are just some people who will immediately connect with the oddest, weirdest stuff. There ego’s push them to revolt from whatever there perception is of authority. Or just to be down-right rebellious!
Vigilance is the never ending answer, of should I say chore. Independence from the will of others. Thanks for the great post.
Tom is so right about the use of the word fever. Rant warning – I am fed up with the constant framing of climate issues and the clever choice of language that pulls in additional unspoken, but nonetheless alarming context even if is it is totally unwarranted.
Anna v had a short rant about the term ‘forcing’ a few days ago (link to comment) on a another WUWT post. I think that is another term where the additional context is very useful to the AGW cause.
John Bennett
September 11, 2010 6:42 am
@tryfan:
I get over 3,000,000 results when typing ‘the planet has a fever’ (note the single quotes) in Google. Double-quotes give me 161,000 results. In the article, Thomas uses single quotes.
Tim
September 11, 2010 6:56 am
The scientific community can be very introverted. When will they encompass the world of marketing and public relations and stop preaching to the converted? Scientists talk in a different language to Joe Six Pack and will need to address this vast audience with easily digested and carefully crafted positioning statements and MSM-friendly messages. This means a concerted and consistent spend to get the best professionals in the marketing industry to translate scientific truths to the public in a powerful way. Gore et al do it with awesome skill and any successful corporation knows that it works.
Gnomish
September 11, 2010 7:07 am
Nice article, Mr. Fuller.
One does get sick of baby talk.
You’ve found a niche that can use a good scratch.
DocattheAutopsy
September 11, 2010 7:13 am
Seems like the Earth is in more jeopardy when it’s in an ice age than if it gets warmer.
R. Shearer
September 11, 2010 7:17 am
BenAW, your post above is a nice little gem, which I must ponder. Thanks
I had the pleasure to meet Jim Lovelock. He was incredibly interesting and an inspiration as a scientist whose work has somewhat overlapped.
I must confess that I like to imagine that the earth has some sort of consciousness. (I’m not saying that is what Gaia is about.) But rationally, those spouting that we must “save the earth” are simply childish in their thinking.
DirkH
September 11, 2010 7:17 am
Tim says:
September 11, 2010 at 6:56 am
“The scientific community can be very introverted. When will they encompass the world of marketing and public relations and stop preaching to the converted? ”
You are obviously a visitor from the past; accidentally fell into a puddle of liquid nitrogen and had to wait for 10 years until scientists were able to bring you back to life. Hello, visitor from the past! Futerra is a UK eco-PR agency and has published their “Rules of the game” in 2005:
Futerra Sustainability Communications – leading thinking – Rules of the Game Cover Futerra and The UK Department for Environment published the Rules of the Game on 7 March 2005. The game is communicating climate … http://www.futerra.co.uk/revolution/leading_thinking
latitude
September 11, 2010 7:26 am
OT because I can’t get the Tips thread to work.
Dr. Curry has her own blog up and running now: http://judithcurry.com/
Tom,
Good to see you writing this series. You might want to explore the trick of linkage to “bad guys” that Naomi Oreskes uses. While there certainly are bad guys who have promoted bad things for their own gain, she condemns skepticism of climate hype using guilt by dubious association.
Mike(One of the Many)
September 11, 2010 7:54 am
Thanks Again Tom, another good post -You seem a lot more rational than many of your brethren and given that we should be concentrating on the science, not the hype, that’s much appreciated – Keep up the good work and welcome
Severian
September 11, 2010 7:55 am
The whole concept of “the planet has a fever” and dwelling on global mean temperature (or anomaly) is painfully wrong. It is a simplistic, frankly stupid metaphor that has nothing to do with science or true climatology, as you note, but everything to do with slick marketing. The whole concept of a mean temp is about useless as well, when presented as just a number with no variance stated. What does that mean, even outside the context of if the planet has a “right” temperature? I can show you a mean temp of, say, 300 K, where the whole planet is at that temp, and one where half the planet is at 100 K and the other half at 500 K, both have the same mean, but there is no way they are the same. It’s a nearly useless metric in the first place (especially considering the difference in actual heat content between the ocean and the air), and more especially when auditing of the “adjustments/corrections” and surface station siting shows the grotesque errors in the way the data is collected and massaged.
Focusing on it is part and parcel of the whole deliberately manipulated message in the AGW alarmist approach to selling their ideas.
DaveF
September 11, 2010 7:58 am
Thomas Fuller:
“Is it feed a cold and starve a fever or vice-versa?”
I remember it as, “Feed a cold and drown a fever.”
Best wishes, Dave.
On “forcing”: I agree entirely. its a meaningless word (in any scientific context other than thos involving mass, acceleration etc.)
Personally, I would reject any paper I reviewed for publication if it contained that word. it shows sloppy thinking.
I have seen it actually given units (W/m^2). There are perfectly valid terms having those units already. The problem is, the “forcings” being used don’t work in the ways that those terms imply. It is some entirely different mechanism, which seems to generate energy out of thin air.
As far as I am concerned, any paper or explanation that has to resort to “forcing” is cargo cult science.
Sean Peake
September 11, 2010 8:20 am
The only prescription is more cowbell
Tim
September 11, 2010 8:23 am
DirkH says: “You are obviously a visitor from the past…”
Yes, thanks Dirk for the info. However, I don’t remember sighting any such AGM rebuttals in the Australian media for the last 5 years apart from independent journo’s work. However, I must say these people are trying, although speaking as one from the industry, I would not hire them to sell my message or product. Nor would I use ad hominem comments on a blog site … It would weaken my status and therefore my message and make me look like an ego eco.
John Whitman
September 11, 2010 8:24 am
Tom Fuller,
You said “We don’t need substitutes for the science. We need the real thing.”
How to get the real thing? That is the question. I would like to see less (approaching zero eventually) government involved in research funding and overall leadership (no IPCC, etc). I would be more comfortable if leadership for climate science resided solely in a consortium of top tier private universities. Regarding public (government sponsored) universities, I think they would be OK only in a supporting role under the private. CAGW has made me distrustful of politics/government in any key role.
On a humorous note: I hope you don’t have copy write problems with the following other “real thing” : )
John
rbateman
September 11, 2010 8:24 am
The fortunes of Al Gore have a fever:
He lost to Bush.
Monckton made a fool of him in debate.
His Carbon Market is crashing.
Tipper took the dog and left him.
Anybody can look at the latest pic of the Arctic on Google’s Planet Earth and see it’s not ice-free in 2010.
TomT
September 11, 2010 8:40 am
Thank you for bringing up something I’ve asked several times. What is the earths normal temperature? And who determined what the normal temperature is? And what is the criteria they used to figure out the normal temperature?
All three of those questions must be answered before people can really claim that there is critical warming. After all we know that in the past rain forests covered much of North America, and at different periods deserts covered it. Other times massive ice sheets have covered things. So knowing what the “normal” temperature is would be very helpful for any discussion that involved mans roll in the warming/cooling cycle.
And you will note that the “normal” temperature is something that proponents of the AGW theory don’t want to address.
D. Patterson
September 11, 2010 8:40 am
BenAW says:
September 11, 2010 at 6:10 am
CO2 levels have been dwindling since millions of years.
latitude says:
September 11, 2010 at 6:28 am
Tom, everyone knows CO2 levels have been a lot higher in the past.
What “forced” CO2 levels then?
But as high as it was, it went back down again.
The Earth originated with an atmosphere primarily composed of the hydrogen and helium found in the primordial cloud of gas and dust from which it was formed. The Earth’s gravity was not strong enough to prevent the loss of most of the hydrogen and helium to interplanetary space as the Sun began to awaken and its solar wind began to strip the lighter gas from the Earth’s atmosphere.
The remaining atmosphere is described as Earth’s second atmosphere, and some very high percentage of it, up to 98%, was carbon dioxide. Nitrogen, ammonia, and other gases were trace gases by comparison to carbon dioxide in this second atmosphere. This second atmosphere was about one hundred times more massive than today’s third atmosphere, and there was virtually no free oxygen in this second atmosphere.
Today’s third atmosphere formed when most of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere became dissolved in the formation of the hydrosphere and life caused it to become deposited in the lithosphere while liberating enough oxygen to become a substantial perfentage of today’s atmosphere. Carbon dioxide was once the overwhelmingly predominant gas in the Earth’s atmosphere, and it is now a trace gas so insignificant in its percentage of the atmosphere as to be very difficult to measure with accuracy. Portraying carbon dioxide as a menace to life on the Earth in effect denies the existence of carbon-based life and its role in removing enough carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to reduce the atmosphere’s mass by about 99 percent.
Life created the present atmosphere, and photosynthesis cannot continue and life on the planet cannot continue to exist if the trace levels of carbon dioxide were to be reduced much more than half of today’s levels. Life flourishes and biodiversity increases in higher levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide and atmospheric temperatures that are normally 10C warmer than today. Life dies and biodiversity diminishes in lower levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide and atmospheric temperatures that are now 10C lower than they have normally been during most of the existence of metazoan lifeforms on the Earth. Efforts to diminish carbon dioxide below present and past levels in the atmosphere experienced by metazoan lifeforms are consequently suicidal for all life on the Earth that depend upon the photosynthesis of plant life for their sustenance.
James Sexton
September 11, 2010 8:59 am
But Earth is not human. Anthropomorphizing it really means we can’t talk about it accurately and honestly. It doesn’t breathe, go to the bathroom or watch TV.
Mother Gaia is gonna strike smite you for that one!send a heat wave towards you. be really mad at you.
jaymam
September 11, 2010 9:17 am
In the interests of accuracy, if I search Google for ‘the planet has a fever’ I get results such as “Football fever hits Formula One | Planet F1 | Formula One | News”.
Google ignores the single quotes. If you want to search for a phrase you must put double quotes around it, like this: “the planet has a fever”.
Harry Bergeron
September 11, 2010 9:42 am
Your fellow citizen is unlikely have access to the power of reason, so it’s understandable that faulty analogiy and fake metaphor work well on them.
JPeden
September 11, 2010 9:45 am
It’s brilliant corporate communications. It takes command of the issue, defines the parameters of legitimate discussion and cuts the ground from underneath people who would even question basic assumptions. Absolutely brilliant.
I know what you mean. But, in contrast, when I first heard the Kindergarten-lite “The Earth has a fever” meme, I instead took it as an indication of the stupidity of its purveyors: either they were extremely dull, or they thought we were, which in my book amounts to the same thing.
On the bright side of their case, such people are indeed living proof that disease agents involving Anthropogenic ‘forcings’ and ‘perturbations’ really do exist!
John Whitman
September 11, 2010 10:49 am
Harry Bergeron says:
September 11, 2010 at 9:42 am
Your fellow citizen is unlikely have access to the power of reason, so it’s understandable that faulty analogiy and fake metaphor work well on them.
————-
Harry Bergeron,
And a corollary of that on a more positive note is: All men have the capacity for reason, though unused in some. Reason is an extremely infectious vector; just ask religious adepts . . . a tiny little bit of the reasoning virus allowed inside the belief system’s defenses is very destructive and can be fatal to it. Persistence ad nauseum : ) .
John
kadaka (KD Knoebel)
September 11, 2010 10:50 am
Al Gore? I thought “the planet has a fever” was an Arnold Schwarzenegger line! It’s very memorable for how the California Governator said it with his cute native Austrian accent.
☺
I would argue that we CANNOT know the temperature of the planet; that if we could develop a sensor network to tell us, it would approach the atmosphere itself in size and complexity, and the error rate would be astronomical — a signal-to-noise ratio approaching 1; and if we COULD derive a figure from all of that, it would essentially be meaningless.
M
nc
September 11, 2010 12:05 pm
I have questions, What kind of an organization surrounds Gore? How was his power point put together? Who are the people involved? How do they come up the ideas? Do they know what they are doing with the facts? Can they be charged with anything now or in the future along with Gore? What kind of protection has Gore given himself?
Has anyone in his organization ever come forward with information of the inner workings? They should start thinking of coming forward to plea bargin ahead of the collapse.
tryfan
September 11, 2010 12:26 pm
@ john Bennet
In the article, Thomas uses single quotes.
——————————–
‘So he does, but that’s a rather meaningless way to google’.
Search for the phrase I just wrote, with the single quotes, and it will give you 988.000 hits 😉
But, as I said, that’s nitpicking. It was a good post!
In the last 110 years there have been two global cooling and two global warming episodes. The next global cooling cycle has left the on-deck circle and is heading for the batters box.
Between 2009 and 2012, the Sun is reorganizing itself (Duhau and de Jager, 2010). We are now offically underway into the Landscheidt Grand Solar Minimum, or Little Ice Age II.
Just how many decades of freezing to death will it take for Al Gore to have an epithiny?
latitude
September 11, 2010 1:24 pm
D. Patterson says:
September 11, 2010 at 8:40 am
————————————————-
Thanks D., that was an excellent post!
Stephen Brown
September 11, 2010 2:11 pm
With regard to the feeding or otherwise of a cold or a fever I must admit that I have found that the liberal application of a decent single malt whisky is most efficacious. Food is not required!
galileonardo
September 11, 2010 2:23 pm
This would seem the appropriate time to break out my gorehog rendition again, or is it a groundgore? Either way, Punxatawney Al emerges again. http://i632.photobucket.com/albums/uu44/themaverickone/Punxatawney_Al_Hi.jpg
Feel free to use it if you want. I’m going to try to embed it here below, likely to no avail due to my inherent lameness.
[IMG]http://i632.photobucket.com/albums/uu44/themaverickone/Punxatawney_Al_Hi.jpg[/IMG]
Z
September 11, 2010 2:29 pm
@ D. Patterson says:
September 11, 2010 at 8:40 am
You forgot to mention the possible atmosphere loss when the moon was formed via something big and hard hitting the earth.
Steve M. from TN
September 11, 2010 4:49 pm
TomT says:
September 11, 2010 at 8:40 am Thank you for bringing up something I’ve asked several times. What is the earths normal temperature?
Obviously: the average temperature of 1950-1980 And who determined what the normal temperature is?
Michael Mann And what is the criteria they used to figure out the normal temperature?
well placed thermometers in a nice, neat gridded network spread out world wide /sarcoff
Dave Springer
September 11, 2010 5:37 pm
@fuller
You’re getting a bad rep for making stuff up as you go along.
There are 161,000 hits on Google for “the planet has a fever” not the 3.1 million hits you claim in the first line of your article. http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGLL_enUS382US382&q=%22the+planet+has+a+fever%22
The best thing I can say is you’re a google illiterate if you don’t know the difference in results between searching for an exact quote or all the words outside of quotes.
Next thing, in the same sentence is a claim that none of these google hits refer to Aerosmith’s “song by that name”. Well technically that’s true and if you add “aerosmith” to the previous search you get 60 hits (about half of them links to this article) and a quick perusal of the rest of the hits (which is an absurdly low number for any any Aerosmith song title) you’ll find that none of these actually refer to a song by that title because, your second mistake in the first line, Aerosmith recorded no song by that title nor had that in any song lyric. The Aerosmith song is simply entitled “Fever” and there is no reference to the planet in the lyrics.
I’d like to stop reading your error laden articles but they hold the same kind of quality that a passenger bus plunging over a cliff has. You know you don’t want to look at the tragic results but something compels you to do it anyway. http://www.google.com/search?q=%22the+planet+has+a+fever%22+aerosmith&hl=en&rlz=1T4GGLL_enUS382US382&ei=lxyMTLX9HoSClAfi-Lhg&start=0&sa=N
Lastly, STILL in the same sentence is the false claim that Aerosmith has a song named “the planet has a fever”. The title of the song is “fever”.
John R. Walker
September 11, 2010 5:39 pm
When I was a kid, body temperature was 98.4 F. When Centigrade/Celcius came along that equated to 36.9 C. Some clowns decided that 36.9 was too difficult for people with years of education to remember so they arbitrarily made it 37 C and changed 98.4 F to 98.6 F.
If we can’t even trust the no-marks to get our body temperature right, we haven’t a prayer they’re ever going to get a global average right…
latitude says:
September 11, 2010 at 6:28 am
…
How in this world did warmer temperatures, longer growing seasons, CO2 levels a scant higher than death, become a bad thing?
Good question.
As I’m sure you realize …ever since the U.N., and nearly all governments and their agencies realized that almost all energy sources involve the release of CO2 and that this would be a nearly inexhaustible source of taxation/income for them if it [CO2] could be transformed into a “bogeyman.”
There is no limit to governmental appetite for spending other people’s money.
D. Patterson
September 11, 2010 8:57 pm
Z says:
September 11, 2010 at 2:29 pm
@ D. Patterson says:
September 11, 2010 at 8:40 am
You forgot to mention the possible atmosphere loss when the moon was formed via something big and hard hitting the earth.
[/blockquote]
The collision between the primordial and still molten Earth and the molten Theia is currently a much argued hypothesis, so I chose to omit mention of it in this instance. At the time of the hypothesized collsion somewhere about 45 million years after an arbitrary date for the coalescence of the Earth, the very early and molten Earth would still have had its first atmosphere composed mostly of around 200-250 atmospheres of hydrogen, helium, carbon dioxide, ammonia, nitrogen, and of ther trace gases. The hypothesized collision with Theia and the Late Heavy Bombardment likely hastened the loss of the lighter atmospheric gases, but they did not change the general pattern in the Solar System where the planetary bodies who lost their atmospheric hydrogen and helium to the Solar winds and other events were subsequently shrouded in atmospheres composed mostly of carbon dioxide.
Earth differed from these other planets when this secondary atmosphere dominated by carbon dioxide was transformed by Life into a third atmosphere have only trace amounts of carbon dioxide unconsumed remaining. This circumstance may suggest that extrasolar terrestrial planets lacking carbon dioxide may be places where similar carbon-based Life has also removed the carbon dioxide from their own atmospheres.
jaymam
September 12, 2010 4:46 am
“Communicating Global Climate Change”
“The Science is Settled”
“Global Warming is Real and Humans are Causing it”
“Overwhelming Scientific Consensus on Climate Change”
Those are some of the phrases used in the propaganda war.
Can anybody think of others?
Can anybody invent some phrases supporting a sceptic point of view?
I think I’ve found a way to influence G**gle for such phrases!
spepper
September 12, 2010 5:24 am
…..meanwhile, ALGORE is “feverishly” attempting damage-control when the veil was lifted on his scam (Climategate) by blaming the veil-lifters (all of US)– how dare we expose his carbon-trading scam for the swindle and fraud it is, based on government-sponsored propaganda, which also makes it a tax-funded fraud as well? DEMAND A REFUND BY VOTING APPROPRIATELY, THIS NOVEMBER– VOTE THEM ALL OUT!
Gail Combs
September 12, 2010 5:27 am
PJP says:
September 11, 2010 at 8:18 am
On “forcing”: I agree entirely. its a meaningless word (in any scientific context other than thos involving mass, acceleration etc.)
Personally, I would reject any paper I reviewed for publication if it contained that word. it shows sloppy thinking…..
___________________________________________
I absolutely hate that word. The other word I can not tolerate is “robust” neither word has any place in a scientific paper.
Gail Combs
September 12, 2010 5:48 am
Seems to me GAIA prefers a temperature about 6 to 10C lower than present – In other word ICE AGE. Graph
Is that what Gore, Hansen, Jones, Mann and the rest want, for us to cool poor GAIA down to her preferred ice age temperatures??? Get rid of the majority of humans investing the biosphere like lice? Sometimes I think that is the real goal of these humanity haters.
Roger Knights
September 12, 2010 9:05 am
The term I was familiar with prior to encountering climatology was “drivers,” not “forcings.” The term was evidently chosen for its emotional impact; i.e., its use is evidence of a propagandistic motivation in “climate science.”
I have always been led to believe that it’s:
“[if you] feed a cold [then you will have to] starve a fever”.
From my experience, that seems to make sense to me.
D. Patterson
September 12, 2010 10:50 am
Gail Combs says:
September 12, 2010 at 5:48 am
Seems to me GAIA prefers a temperature about 6 to 10C lower than present – In other word ICE AGE
Since the establishment of the Earth’s curent and third atmosphere, it has generally maintained air temperatures about 10C warmer than present with atmospheric concentrations of about 1,000 to 2,500 ppm of carbon dioxide. The exceptions have been during the occurences of the ice ages at which time the temperatures are about 10C or a little more lower as they are at the present time and the most recent 1 to 20 million years of the present ice age. These ice age intevals represent only a samll percentage of the Earth’s total existence, the existence of the third atmosphere, or the Phanerozoic Eon in which metazoan life proliferated.
In the normal course of events, it is to be expected that the present warm interglacial period would soon end anytime between now and the next thousands of years, and the full effects of the ice age and lower temperatures would resume for another 180,000 thousand years more or less. Upon the end of the present ice age in the next million or more years, the global temperatures would return to normal or about 10C higher than present temperatures, the Arctic Circle would experience a cool temperate climate, and the Arctic Sea would once again have no icecap. These normally warmer conditons could last for tens of millions or a hundred million years or more if the past patterns were to continue as before.
In the meantime, there is ample opportunity for Alarmists and doomsayers to blow both Hot and Cold for many many years to come, so long as they have a credulous audience.
E.M.Smith
Editor
September 12, 2010 2:44 pm
DaveF says:
Thomas Fuller:
“Is it feed a cold and starve a fever or vice-versa?”
I remember it as, “Feed a cold and drown a fever.”
Best wishes, Dave.
I love it! I’ll have to try drowning my next fever… (Anyone got a heating pad I can borrow? 😉
FWIW, I learned why one ought to starve a fever, I believe. I once had a 105 F fever and as I was growing some corn then, made a corn chowder to tide me over (simple to make, easy to consume, even with a sore throat).
Bottom line is that at about 30 years old I ended up with a significant allergy to corn (that I’d eaten my whole life with no problems).
My thesis is that with the immune system hyped up and looking to pound ANYTHING foreign, it latches onto any alien proteins around and goes nuts on them.
So now when I get a fever, I only eat foods I positively hate and never want to eat again and completely avoid any of my favorite foods 😉
jaymam
September 12, 2010 7:46 pm
E.M.Smith says:
September 12, 2010 at 2:44 pm
“My thesis is that with the immune system hyped up and looking to pound ANYTHING foreign, it latches onto any alien proteins around and goes nuts on them.”
That is OT but very important. I discovered the same thing years ago but I’ve not seen it mentioned anywhere. Is there a name for getting a new allergy while having an allergic reaction? That explains why some people become allergic to almost everything in their homes.
As every mother should know, new foods should be introduced in tiny amounts to a baby, or the baby may become allergic to that food.
Great post, Tom. Spot on.
Well said. Quite a good article.
I think this describes pretty well the ridiculousness of the Gaia claptrap.
It is about as scientific as anything out of Hans Christian Anderson … and yet its author is a ‘well respected scientist’ according to the BBC…
Oh, Yes sir, -74 °C. Fever
http://www.wunderground.com/geo/InfoboxBannerPromo_both/global/stations/89606.html
Tom,
As you have noticed at your blog, the true believers cannot even handle a critical review of their metaphors, much less their symbols.
To point out that their claims about polar bears or hockey sticks are less than accurate is to do so knowing they will simply, falsely, claim you are a liar.
To challenge the underlying metaphor of a planetary fever- the assumption that what we are experiencing means Earth is sick- is to strike at the heart of their faith.
Thank you for being bold enough to do so, and to do so accurately and honestly.
“A lot of people want to talk about alleged global warming in ways that don’t involve science. They use analogies, metaphors and plenty of hyperbole. They say that it’s because we don’t understand science.”
I knew Al would show up.
Poor Al Gore, even Tipper doesn’t like him anymore…
“We’ve found defects in previous data collection methods, most famously by our host here.”
True. However, there appears to have been no significant effort to “correct” the defects. Rather, the effort has supposedly been to “adjust” the defects away. In the face of a “requirement” to invest tens of trillions of dollars to “halt” and “reverse” anthropogenically induced climate change, an argument that we cannot afford to get the fundamentals right is ludicrous.
“the
rules
of the
game
Recommendations to the Climate Change Communications Working Group:
Evidence base for the Climate Change
Communications Strategy
The game is communicating climate change;
the rules will help us win it.”
http://www.futerra.co.uk/downloads/RulesOfTheGame.pdf
“17. Use emotions and visuals
Another classic marketing rule: changing behaviour by
disseminating information doesn’t always work, but emotions
and visuals usually do.”
They openly admit to using manipulative tactics. But; there is good PR and evil PR. futerra of course does GOOD PR, not evil PR. How do they know that? Well, they have a code of ethical conduct! From their “blog”: Is all PR evil?
http://www.futerra.co.uk/blog/836
The question about what is the ideal temperature of the world is a very good one.
As a thought experiment (and reality check) try imagining what would happen if the activities of mankind were lowering CO_2 levels in some fashion. Imagine writing the IPCC report. What dire predictions would lowered CO_2 levels and global cooling lead to. How about the following list
1. Shortened growing seasons
2. Colder summers
3. Slower growing plants due to reduced CO_2 levels
4. Reduced global precipitation (less rain) (cooler = drier)
5. The above four factors are a quadruple whammy that could be expected to dramatically reduce crop yields
6. Global famine – global war
7. Likely ice age
8. Mass extinctions
9. etc
Oh – you could have fun writing such a report. Indeed it would be a lot easier to fill such a report with dire predictions of calamity than the real IPCC report . Now bear in mind that increased CO_2 levels means the opposite to all the above. This is a problem how exactly?
This Gaia story may have some merits 😉
CO2 levels have been dwindling since millions of years.
We’re pretty close to the point that the photosynthese proces will come to a halt due to lack of CO2. (~200ppm).
Perhaps Gaia put mankind on this earth to burn fossil fuels and release some of the bounded CO2?
Gaia is just fine, humans however….
I assume the idea of “fever” is derived from James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, and I know he’s use the fever concept to describe AGW. So it’s a sort of serious idea of considering the earth a living organism. Depending on how you define “living”, it might even be possible to defend that position in a rational manner, although I haven’t studied the particular reasoning in this case.
But fever implies more than alive, it implies a higher organism, a warm-blooded one. One that actively maintains its temperature. That’s a lot more far-fetched.
Also, the metaphor, when you make it explicit, seems to contradict the idea of runaway global warming. A warm-blooded animal maintains a specific body temperature and usually resists changes to that temperature. In this sense it’s more like Willis Eschenbach’s thermostat hypothesis. (http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/06/14/the-thermostat-hypothesis/)
You’re right, it is despicable that the debate is controlled by nonsense in the attempt to crush honest argument. And worse that opposing views are suppressed by the MSM working under the guise of a free press. That is why the warmers, if they can use words like that so can I, can make outrageous comments and slander opposition without being taken to task. And that is how they control the debate. To take it one step further, the congress and judiciary are willing accomplices, or should I say accessory to the fraud with law and regulation. Partners in crime.
Some nitpicking: the phrase “the planet has a fever” actually turns up far fewer results – 161.000 when i tried.
Far too many, one might think, but still quite a difference…
A good post, otherwise!
Tom, everyone knows CO2 levels have been a lot higher in the past.
What “forced” CO2 levels then?
But as high as it was, it went back down again.
What caused that?
The planet does not know the source of CO2.
If you look at “average” temperatures, we are in the low part of average right now,
and only a small ppm of CO2 above the point where all life on this planet would die.
How in this world did warmer temperatures, longer growing seasons, CO2 levels a scant higher than death, become a bad thing?
Another great post Tom. Many thanks.
Mussing on the prognosis of the patient, Mother Earth, as I sat here watching the life ebb and flow of TS Igor, I had a realization of sorts.
Planets have magnetospheres, that create aurora effects at the poles. The sun has a spheroid of solar wind effects extending to the heliopause, the leap of understanding flashed as I saw the possibility that it is simply the flexible, fluid, magnetosphere of the sun.
It is just that the plasma floating in the outgoing solar wind are the conductive medium that they used to call the ether, but saw it as static and not moving. The speed, density, and localized flow patterns are influenced by the electromagnetic conductance of the whole set of mediums.
The background galactic fields interacting with the heliopause also form an aurora effect on the forward side as the solar system as it moves through the galaxy. The slow long wave modulations of the coupling of the galactic wind as it passes through clouds of dust and gasses, will be affected by the electromagnetic conduction, density, and magnetic permeable content of said gas and dust clouds.
If periods of time when the surrounding galactic clouds acted to defuse the galactic field strength away from the solar system in it’s travels, then the couplings into the sun from the outside influences, would allow the solar system to become fluidly balanced and the SSB would be in the free fall condition Lief insists it is now.
What if all of the things we know about the sun being affected by the mass and angular momentum, and the resultant interactions between the sun, solar wind, activity levels with sun spots, flares, and CME’s, being tied to the interactions of these effects, but as a product of the ongoing changes in the local galactic weather so to speak.
This isolation of the solar magnetosphere, might then be the precipitator of the long periods of ice ages, any time the solar system moves through a cloud of ionized dust/gas that diffuses the magnetic fields around us.
In the current mode as the changes in galactic field flux shifts, it varies the phase of power that drives particles into the heliopause, causing the aurora effects recently discovered on the leading edge of the heliopause. Just as currents are inducted into the atmosphere of the earth, in geomagnetic storms, that follow ion conduction paths on tidally perturbed air masses, to effect weather spots on the surface.
So as the galactic fields drive the induction coupling into and through the solar system it alters the overall angular momentum content, that is transferred into to speed up the whole system, or out from the sun to slow down, through all of the conductive path ways out to the heliopause. The necessary transfers of angular momentum, in the resultant interactive changes between the planets, and their moons, take all five forms gravity, tidal, declinational orbital variances, electromagnetic, and it’s attendant homopolar induction results that run the LOD components as well as ion charge gradients across frontal boundaries.
The compounding of the base cycles is modulated by the dynamics of the interactions of the multiple bodies in the solar system. If we just look at it from the “sun is the center” aspect, we miss all of the nuances of the drag and push of the long term galactic field changes. I would suggest a study of the properties of the solar system local neighborhood, in regard to gas/dust populations and polarization properties due to residual effects viewable due to conductance of large scale galactic fields. To better get a handle as to how soon we could really expect the next ice age to start up again if at all.
Just because the sun’s orbit around the center of the galaxy, has in the past come into areas that are conducive to insulation from galactic field flux does not mean that it will always happen.
Rasputin, Timothy Leary, George Noori, the Reverend Moon, James Warren “Jim Jones,” the Pied Piper, etc, etc. There are just some people who will immediately connect with the oddest, weirdest stuff. There ego’s push them to revolt from whatever there perception is of authority. Or just to be down-right rebellious!
Vigilance is the never ending answer, of should I say chore. Independence from the will of others. Thanks for the great post.
Tom is so right about the use of the word fever. Rant warning – I am fed up with the constant framing of climate issues and the clever choice of language that pulls in additional unspoken, but nonetheless alarming context even if is it is totally unwarranted.
Anna v had a short rant about the term ‘forcing’ a few days ago (link to comment) on a another WUWT post. I think that is another term where the additional context is very useful to the AGW cause.
@tryfan:
I get over 3,000,000 results when typing ‘the planet has a fever’ (note the single quotes) in Google. Double-quotes give me 161,000 results. In the article, Thomas uses single quotes.
The scientific community can be very introverted. When will they encompass the world of marketing and public relations and stop preaching to the converted? Scientists talk in a different language to Joe Six Pack and will need to address this vast audience with easily digested and carefully crafted positioning statements and MSM-friendly messages. This means a concerted and consistent spend to get the best professionals in the marketing industry to translate scientific truths to the public in a powerful way. Gore et al do it with awesome skill and any successful corporation knows that it works.
Nice article, Mr. Fuller.
One does get sick of baby talk.
You’ve found a niche that can use a good scratch.
Seems like the Earth is in more jeopardy when it’s in an ice age than if it gets warmer.
BenAW, your post above is a nice little gem, which I must ponder. Thanks
I had the pleasure to meet Jim Lovelock. He was incredibly interesting and an inspiration as a scientist whose work has somewhat overlapped.
I must confess that I like to imagine that the earth has some sort of consciousness. (I’m not saying that is what Gaia is about.) But rationally, those spouting that we must “save the earth” are simply childish in their thinking.
Tim says:
September 11, 2010 at 6:56 am
“The scientific community can be very introverted. When will they encompass the world of marketing and public relations and stop preaching to the converted? ”
You are obviously a visitor from the past; accidentally fell into a puddle of liquid nitrogen and had to wait for 10 years until scientists were able to bring you back to life. Hello, visitor from the past! Futerra is a UK eco-PR agency and has published their “Rules of the game” in 2005:
Futerra Sustainability Communications – leading thinking – Rules of the Game Cover Futerra and The UK Department for Environment published the Rules of the Game on 7 March 2005. The game is communicating climate …
http://www.futerra.co.uk/revolution/leading_thinking
OT because I can’t get the Tips thread to work.
Dr. Curry has her own blog up and running now:
http://judithcurry.com/
OT – but get this if you like cool astronomy photos:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11213528
Tom,
Good to see you writing this series. You might want to explore the trick of linkage to “bad guys” that Naomi Oreskes uses. While there certainly are bad guys who have promoted bad things for their own gain, she condemns skepticism of climate hype using guilt by dubious association.
Thanks Again Tom, another good post -You seem a lot more rational than many of your brethren and given that we should be concentrating on the science, not the hype, that’s much appreciated – Keep up the good work and welcome
The whole concept of “the planet has a fever” and dwelling on global mean temperature (or anomaly) is painfully wrong. It is a simplistic, frankly stupid metaphor that has nothing to do with science or true climatology, as you note, but everything to do with slick marketing. The whole concept of a mean temp is about useless as well, when presented as just a number with no variance stated. What does that mean, even outside the context of if the planet has a “right” temperature? I can show you a mean temp of, say, 300 K, where the whole planet is at that temp, and one where half the planet is at 100 K and the other half at 500 K, both have the same mean, but there is no way they are the same. It’s a nearly useless metric in the first place (especially considering the difference in actual heat content between the ocean and the air), and more especially when auditing of the “adjustments/corrections” and surface station siting shows the grotesque errors in the way the data is collected and massaged.
Focusing on it is part and parcel of the whole deliberately manipulated message in the AGW alarmist approach to selling their ideas.
Thomas Fuller:
“Is it feed a cold and starve a fever or vice-versa?”
I remember it as, “Feed a cold and drown a fever.”
Best wishes, Dave.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_%28singer%29
Keith: 98.6.
On “forcing”: I agree entirely. its a meaningless word (in any scientific context other than thos involving mass, acceleration etc.)
Personally, I would reject any paper I reviewed for publication if it contained that word. it shows sloppy thinking.
I have seen it actually given units (W/m^2). There are perfectly valid terms having those units already. The problem is, the “forcings” being used don’t work in the ways that those terms imply. It is some entirely different mechanism, which seems to generate energy out of thin air.
As far as I am concerned, any paper or explanation that has to resort to “forcing” is cargo cult science.
The only prescription is more cowbell
DirkH says: “You are obviously a visitor from the past…”
Yes, thanks Dirk for the info. However, I don’t remember sighting any such AGM rebuttals in the Australian media for the last 5 years apart from independent journo’s work. However, I must say these people are trying, although speaking as one from the industry, I would not hire them to sell my message or product. Nor would I use ad hominem comments on a blog site … It would weaken my status and therefore my message and make me look like an ego eco.
Tom Fuller,
You said “We don’t need substitutes for the science. We need the real thing.”
How to get the real thing? That is the question. I would like to see less (approaching zero eventually) government involved in research funding and overall leadership (no IPCC, etc). I would be more comfortable if leadership for climate science resided solely in a consortium of top tier private universities. Regarding public (government sponsored) universities, I think they would be OK only in a supporting role under the private. CAGW has made me distrustful of politics/government in any key role.
On a humorous note: I hope you don’t have copy write problems with the following other “real thing” : )
John
The fortunes of Al Gore have a fever:
He lost to Bush.
Monckton made a fool of him in debate.
His Carbon Market is crashing.
Tipper took the dog and left him.
Anybody can look at the latest pic of the Arctic on Google’s Planet Earth and see it’s not ice-free in 2010.
Thank you for bringing up something I’ve asked several times. What is the earths normal temperature? And who determined what the normal temperature is? And what is the criteria they used to figure out the normal temperature?
All three of those questions must be answered before people can really claim that there is critical warming. After all we know that in the past rain forests covered much of North America, and at different periods deserts covered it. Other times massive ice sheets have covered things. So knowing what the “normal” temperature is would be very helpful for any discussion that involved mans roll in the warming/cooling cycle.
And you will note that the “normal” temperature is something that proponents of the AGW theory don’t want to address.
The Earth originated with an atmosphere primarily composed of the hydrogen and helium found in the primordial cloud of gas and dust from which it was formed. The Earth’s gravity was not strong enough to prevent the loss of most of the hydrogen and helium to interplanetary space as the Sun began to awaken and its solar wind began to strip the lighter gas from the Earth’s atmosphere.
The remaining atmosphere is described as Earth’s second atmosphere, and some very high percentage of it, up to 98%, was carbon dioxide. Nitrogen, ammonia, and other gases were trace gases by comparison to carbon dioxide in this second atmosphere. This second atmosphere was about one hundred times more massive than today’s third atmosphere, and there was virtually no free oxygen in this second atmosphere.
Today’s third atmosphere formed when most of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere became dissolved in the formation of the hydrosphere and life caused it to become deposited in the lithosphere while liberating enough oxygen to become a substantial perfentage of today’s atmosphere. Carbon dioxide was once the overwhelmingly predominant gas in the Earth’s atmosphere, and it is now a trace gas so insignificant in its percentage of the atmosphere as to be very difficult to measure with accuracy. Portraying carbon dioxide as a menace to life on the Earth in effect denies the existence of carbon-based life and its role in removing enough carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to reduce the atmosphere’s mass by about 99 percent.
Life created the present atmosphere, and photosynthesis cannot continue and life on the planet cannot continue to exist if the trace levels of carbon dioxide were to be reduced much more than half of today’s levels. Life flourishes and biodiversity increases in higher levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide and atmospheric temperatures that are normally 10C warmer than today. Life dies and biodiversity diminishes in lower levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide and atmospheric temperatures that are now 10C lower than they have normally been during most of the existence of metazoan lifeforms on the Earth. Efforts to diminish carbon dioxide below present and past levels in the atmosphere experienced by metazoan lifeforms are consequently suicidal for all life on the Earth that depend upon the photosynthesis of plant life for their sustenance.
But Earth is not human. Anthropomorphizing it really means we can’t talk about it accurately and honestly. It doesn’t breathe, go to the bathroom or watch TV.
Mother Gaia is gonna
strikesmiteyou for that one!send a heat wave towards you.be really mad at you.In the interests of accuracy, if I search Google for ‘the planet has a fever’ I get results such as “Football fever hits Formula One | Planet F1 | Formula One | News”.
Google ignores the single quotes. If you want to search for a phrase you must put double quotes around it, like this: “the planet has a fever”.
Your fellow citizen is unlikely have access to the power of reason, so it’s understandable that faulty analogiy and fake metaphor work well on them.
It’s brilliant corporate communications. It takes command of the issue, defines the parameters of legitimate discussion and cuts the ground from underneath people who would even question basic assumptions. Absolutely brilliant.
I know what you mean. But, in contrast, when I first heard the Kindergarten-lite “The Earth has a fever” meme, I instead took it as an indication of the stupidity of its purveyors: either they were extremely dull, or they thought we were, which in my book amounts to the same thing.
On the bright side of their case, such people are indeed living proof that disease agents involving Anthropogenic ‘forcings’ and ‘perturbations’ really do exist!
————-
Harry Bergeron,
And a corollary of that on a more positive note is: All men have the capacity for reason, though unused in some. Reason is an extremely infectious vector; just ask religious adepts . . . a tiny little bit of the reasoning virus allowed inside the belief system’s defenses is very destructive and can be fatal to it. Persistence ad nauseum : ) .
John
Al Gore? I thought “the planet has a fever” was an Arnold Schwarzenegger line! It’s very memorable for how the California Governator said it with his cute native Austrian accent.
☺
I would argue that we CANNOT know the temperature of the planet; that if we could develop a sensor network to tell us, it would approach the atmosphere itself in size and complexity, and the error rate would be astronomical — a signal-to-noise ratio approaching 1; and if we COULD derive a figure from all of that, it would essentially be meaningless.
M
I have questions, What kind of an organization surrounds Gore? How was his power point put together? Who are the people involved? How do they come up the ideas? Do they know what they are doing with the facts? Can they be charged with anything now or in the future along with Gore? What kind of protection has Gore given himself?
Has anyone in his organization ever come forward with information of the inner workings? They should start thinking of coming forward to plea bargin ahead of the collapse.
@ john Bennet
In the article, Thomas uses single quotes.
——————————–
‘So he does, but that’s a rather meaningless way to google’.
Search for the phrase I just wrote, with the single quotes, and it will give you 988.000 hits 😉
But, as I said, that’s nitpicking. It was a good post!
In the last 110 years there have been two global cooling and two global warming episodes. The next global cooling cycle has left the on-deck circle and is heading for the batters box.
Between 2009 and 2012, the Sun is reorganizing itself (Duhau and de Jager, 2010). We are now offically underway into the Landscheidt Grand Solar Minimum, or Little Ice Age II.
Just how many decades of freezing to death will it take for Al Gore to have an epithiny?
D. Patterson says:
September 11, 2010 at 8:40 am
————————————————-
Thanks D., that was an excellent post!
With regard to the feeding or otherwise of a cold or a fever I must admit that I have found that the liberal application of a decent single malt whisky is most efficacious. Food is not required!
This would seem the appropriate time to break out my gorehog rendition again, or is it a groundgore? Either way, Punxatawney Al emerges again.
http://i632.photobucket.com/albums/uu44/themaverickone/Punxatawney_Al_Hi.jpg
Feel free to use it if you want. I’m going to try to embed it here below, likely to no avail due to my inherent lameness.
[IMG]http://i632.photobucket.com/albums/uu44/themaverickone/Punxatawney_Al_Hi.jpg[/IMG]
@ D. Patterson says:
September 11, 2010 at 8:40 am
You forgot to mention the possible atmosphere loss when the moon was formed via something big and hard hitting the earth.
TomT says:
September 11, 2010 at 8:40 am
Thank you for bringing up something I’ve asked several times. What is the earths normal temperature?
Obviously: the average temperature of 1950-1980
And who determined what the normal temperature is?
Michael Mann
And what is the criteria they used to figure out the normal temperature?
well placed thermometers in a nice, neat gridded network spread out world wide /sarcoff
@fuller
You’re getting a bad rep for making stuff up as you go along.
There are 161,000 hits on Google for “the planet has a fever” not the 3.1 million hits you claim in the first line of your article.
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGLL_enUS382US382&q=%22the+planet+has+a+fever%22
The best thing I can say is you’re a google illiterate if you don’t know the difference in results between searching for an exact quote or all the words outside of quotes.
Next thing, in the same sentence is a claim that none of these google hits refer to Aerosmith’s “song by that name”. Well technically that’s true and if you add “aerosmith” to the previous search you get 60 hits (about half of them links to this article) and a quick perusal of the rest of the hits (which is an absurdly low number for any any Aerosmith song title) you’ll find that none of these actually refer to a song by that title because, your second mistake in the first line, Aerosmith recorded no song by that title nor had that in any song lyric. The Aerosmith song is simply entitled “Fever” and there is no reference to the planet in the lyrics.
I’d like to stop reading your error laden articles but they hold the same kind of quality that a passenger bus plunging over a cliff has. You know you don’t want to look at the tragic results but something compels you to do it anyway.
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22the+planet+has+a+fever%22+aerosmith&hl=en&rlz=1T4GGLL_enUS382US382&ei=lxyMTLX9HoSClAfi-Lhg&start=0&sa=N
Lastly, STILL in the same sentence is the false claim that Aerosmith has a song named “the planet has a fever”. The title of the song is “fever”.
When I was a kid, body temperature was 98.4 F. When Centigrade/Celcius came along that equated to 36.9 C. Some clowns decided that 36.9 was too difficult for people with years of education to remember so they arbitrarily made it 37 C and changed 98.4 F to 98.6 F.
If we can’t even trust the no-marks to get our body temperature right, we haven’t a prayer they’re ever going to get a global average right…
@fuller
If want to analyze a legitimate iconic expression relating to Al Gore try this one which gets (full exact phrase) 3.6 million hits on google… LOL
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1T4GGLL_enUS382US382&q=%22crazed+sex+poodle%22
Good question.
As I’m sure you realize …ever since the U.N., and nearly all governments and their agencies realized that almost all energy sources involve the release of CO2 and that this would be a nearly inexhaustible source of taxation/income for them if it [CO2] could be transformed into a “bogeyman.”
There is no limit to governmental appetite for spending other people’s money.
“Communicating Global Climate Change”
“The Science is Settled”
“Global Warming is Real and Humans are Causing it”
“Overwhelming Scientific Consensus on Climate Change”
Those are some of the phrases used in the propaganda war.
Can anybody think of others?
Can anybody invent some phrases supporting a sceptic point of view?
I think I’ve found a way to influence G**gle for such phrases!
…..meanwhile, ALGORE is “feverishly” attempting damage-control when the veil was lifted on his scam (Climategate) by blaming the veil-lifters (all of US)– how dare we expose his carbon-trading scam for the swindle and fraud it is, based on government-sponsored propaganda, which also makes it a tax-funded fraud as well? DEMAND A REFUND BY VOTING APPROPRIATELY, THIS NOVEMBER– VOTE THEM ALL OUT!
PJP says:
September 11, 2010 at 8:18 am
On “forcing”: I agree entirely. its a meaningless word (in any scientific context other than thos involving mass, acceleration etc.)
Personally, I would reject any paper I reviewed for publication if it contained that word. it shows sloppy thinking…..
___________________________________________
I absolutely hate that word. The other word I can not tolerate is “robust” neither word has any place in a scientific paper.
Seems to me GAIA prefers a temperature about 6 to 10C lower than present – In other word ICE AGE. Graph
Is that what Gore, Hansen, Jones, Mann and the rest want, for us to cool poor GAIA down to her preferred ice age temperatures??? Get rid of the majority of humans investing the biosphere like lice? Sometimes I think that is the real goal of these humanity haters.
The term I was familiar with prior to encountering climatology was “drivers,” not “forcings.” The term was evidently chosen for its emotional impact; i.e., its use is evidence of a propagandistic motivation in “climate science.”
I have always been led to believe that it’s:
“[if you] feed a cold [then you will have to] starve a fever”.
From my experience, that seems to make sense to me.
Since the establishment of the Earth’s curent and third atmosphere, it has generally maintained air temperatures about 10C warmer than present with atmospheric concentrations of about 1,000 to 2,500 ppm of carbon dioxide. The exceptions have been during the occurences of the ice ages at which time the temperatures are about 10C or a little more lower as they are at the present time and the most recent 1 to 20 million years of the present ice age. These ice age intevals represent only a samll percentage of the Earth’s total existence, the existence of the third atmosphere, or the Phanerozoic Eon in which metazoan life proliferated.
In the normal course of events, it is to be expected that the present warm interglacial period would soon end anytime between now and the next thousands of years, and the full effects of the ice age and lower temperatures would resume for another 180,000 thousand years more or less. Upon the end of the present ice age in the next million or more years, the global temperatures would return to normal or about 10C higher than present temperatures, the Arctic Circle would experience a cool temperate climate, and the Arctic Sea would once again have no icecap. These normally warmer conditons could last for tens of millions or a hundred million years or more if the past patterns were to continue as before.
In the meantime, there is ample opportunity for Alarmists and doomsayers to blow both Hot and Cold for many many years to come, so long as they have a credulous audience.
DaveF says:
Thomas Fuller:
“Is it feed a cold and starve a fever or vice-versa?”
I remember it as, “Feed a cold and drown a fever.”
Best wishes, Dave.
I love it! I’ll have to try drowning my next fever… (Anyone got a heating pad I can borrow? 😉
FWIW, I learned why one ought to starve a fever, I believe. I once had a 105 F fever and as I was growing some corn then, made a corn chowder to tide me over (simple to make, easy to consume, even with a sore throat).
Bottom line is that at about 30 years old I ended up with a significant allergy to corn (that I’d eaten my whole life with no problems).
My thesis is that with the immune system hyped up and looking to pound ANYTHING foreign, it latches onto any alien proteins around and goes nuts on them.
So now when I get a fever, I only eat foods I positively hate and never want to eat again and completely avoid any of my favorite foods 😉
E.M.Smith says:
September 12, 2010 at 2:44 pm
“My thesis is that with the immune system hyped up and looking to pound ANYTHING foreign, it latches onto any alien proteins around and goes nuts on them.”
That is OT but very important. I discovered the same thing years ago but I’ve not seen it mentioned anywhere. Is there a name for getting a new allergy while having an allergic reaction? That explains why some people become allergic to almost everything in their homes.
As every mother should know, new foods should be introduced in tiny amounts to a baby, or the baby may become allergic to that food.