Guest Post by Thomas Fuller
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.
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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.
@ur momisugly 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?