Over at Bishop Hill’s blog, he posted this graph below which is an output from a special Google Labs search query. It lists the percentage of books that are about nuclear war and climate change.
Fittingly, the climate change graph (blue) is a hockey stick.
Bishop hill came up with what I consider to be a stunningly great caption, and this is well worthy of submitting to graphjam if somebody wants to do that. He called it:
“Conservation of worry”
…which is really one of the best labels I’ve read in a long time.
You can run this query yourself.
Here’s the link.
Taking that a step further, let’s add “global warming” to the mix.
It seems that term is falling out of favor compared with “climate change”, but we knew that.
Unfortunately it seems this query only covers data up to 2008. It will be interesting to see if there’s a recent decline after that given Climategate. Adding that word to the mix yields no hits, so it apparently is not in the database. Ditto for “climate disruption”.
But there is another word trend that seems to mirror “global warming” but may have peaked:
We live in interesting times.
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Joe Lalonde says:
January 22, 2011 at 4:58 am ,
Climate science only follows the temperatures to generate a pattern to project a prediction.
===============================================
Exactly Joe
Temps go down for a while and “if this trend continues”, they try to predict an ice age.
Temps go up for a while and “if this trend continues”, they predict global warming.
Sea temps increase, and “if this trend continues”, they predict sea level rise.
Arctic ice goes up or down, and “if this trend continues”
That is this “science” in a nut shell…
…and for this they need a $30 million computer
The whole time exaggerating and hyping everything so they get more money…..
Anyone that steps back can see how lame this really is.
latitude,
The sad thing is they missed all the action happening in the oceans looking for temperatures.
steveta_uk says:
January 22, 2011 at 5:49 am
You want alarming?
The strong correlation between climate change and prostate cancer, with climate change leading shows a definite cause and effect relationship. Another problem that can only be solved by halting production of CO2.
You should add “climate hoax” and “climate fraud”
Joe, I don’t think they missed anything.
Ramping up the hype on global warming, tells me they know their time is up, so they’re pulling all the stops at the last minute.
What I think is sad, is these “scientists” are making science look like a fools game and unfortunately taking serious scientists and serious science down with them.
As long as our governments are hell bent on financing all this, someone needs to put in for money to study how many scientists still wet the bed……………
I tried to find out where the hysteria is headed, so i compared with biodiversity. No takers yet. Recession? No, it’s dropping since 2008. Terror? Bingo.
http://www.google.com/trends?q=global+warming%2C+climate+change%2C+biodiversity%2Crecession%2C+terror&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0
Oh, that looks terrible ! What if the trend will continue in the future ? All libraries will be full of books on climate bchange, so that there will be no room for other books !
Imagine the scene: books on climate change everywhere, the supermarkets will have only books, and all books will be about climate change… Every house will be full of those books, everywhere…you open the freezer, and a book on climate change slips out !
It’s a tragedy for the planet !
What ? A trend may change in the future ? No danger ? Tell it to the fans of the AGW hypothesis… 🙂
Angry Exile says:
January 22, 2011 at 7:11 am
“Now add ’2012′ and ‘Y2K’. Hmmm. Is it me or do we have some weird, deep seated need to find something to crap ourselves about every few years?”
Most definitely. Normal human instinct is to look out for dangers. That’s also why dystopian science fiction sells. Or take your usual Hollywood blockbuster. And it’s not that weird; it’s a necessary part of our nature to prepare ourselves for the next problem. It’s only that some people go and pick non-problems like saving Gaia when they should better think about their career or their savings or other real problems in their own lives…
I have this idea that even the Malthusians fulfill a useful role in Julian Simon’s idea of the way we deal with limited resources. Simon says that we use three ways of dealing with limited resources: Finding new resources, increasing our efficiency, and substituting the dwindling resource with an alternative solution.
So, the substitution process usually picks up steam once the price of the resource becomes too high. The Malthusians and warmists want to accelerate that process for coal and oil and gas; which is not economically necessary at the moment, but might become necessary some time in the future. So, as long as they put their own money where their mouth is, investing, for instance, in renewable technology before they are economically viable, i’m all for it. Somebody must be first. Needless to say, most of the early investors will lose their money.
Wonder if plotting “nuclear war,” “climate change/AGW” et al. against “apocalypse,” “Armageddon,” “The Rapture” and so forth would show a similar peak in early 1980s followed by relative tail-off though today?
As aging Boomers link to the end of a 65-year post-WWII era, “alarmism” on various fronts probably reflects mortal awareness of their own impending doom. See William James’ “Varieties of Religious Experience” (Gifford Lectures, Edinburgh, 1901 – ’02), esp. his chapter on the Anabaptists of Munster, a 16th Century doomsday cult with close affinities to the contemporary Thanatist psychopathology exhibited full-flower by such as Paul Ehrlich, John Holdren, James Hansen and Keith Farnish.
“Nothing is changed, John Brown… nothing is changed.”
Grumpy Old Man says:
“Was it Kipling who wrote a story forecasting nuclear weapons in the late 18th century?”
No. Rudyard Kipling lived from 1865 – 1936.
Try to graph Global Warming, Global Cooling! It reflects people’s misconception about damages that warming suppose to have over the cooling.
izen says:
What is the source of the small blip around 1900 ?
How about, Google has crap metadata, and a few books are erroneously dated a hundred years earlier than their actual date?
I found an interesting blog post by a librarian on this, discussing the resulting popularity of the internet in 1905, but I’m damned if I can find it again.
Steinar Midtskogen wrote:
“I wonder who wrote about nuclear war around 1808.”
Either Napoleon must have had some very far-sighted scientists or his enemies did!
There is a startling tactical resemblance between the ‘nuclear winter ‘ campaign , which more emphasized PR than science ,and present efforts to discount climate science for political ends. One wonders if sites such as this will last any linger than that defunct proto-blog , ‘Nuclear Winter News’ .
It is of course embarassing to see Tony and his cohort following in Carl Sagan’s footsteps , but the scientifically clueless continue to outnumber prophets of doom who fail to deliver.
Dan Lee says:
January 22, 2011 at 6:54 am
“…there is another word trend…”
Wait, what’s that word in yellow?
Sometimes I think “they” are just trying to see if you are paying attention . . . .
I sure got a good jolly from the chart . . . very funny . . .
Peter H.
Just because you call someone a scientist, doesn’t make him one. Actions are what make scientists. Based on that your nominee doesn’t make the first cut. Measurements, care with errors and error bounds, re-measuring, improving measuring methods, cross checking measurements with laboratory references, re-measuring again, acknowledging mistakes, correcting them, publishing the detailed methodology, publishing the raw data, responding to criticism, changing methodology to respond to critiques of the current, demonstrating equivalence, these are the hallmarks of a scientist. Nowhere does it say that a press release is equivalent to a thoroughly vetted, critically reviewed publication.
Read the piece below on Metrology, there’s a lot to be learned there. None of it will involve hidden, convoluted computer programs.
The early nuclear war reference was from the book by HG Wells: The World Set Free
I think it was published around 1910.
Nuclear weapons.
Another topic where predictions and solutions touted by the usual suspects were way off the mark.
Move along,nothing to see here.There is a new game in town.
Environmentalism.
Hmmm… Trading the fear of something that can absolutely and directly kill you for the fear of something that can’t kill you directly and probably can’t kill you indirectly. Very interesting.
Are we, as a whole, also more afraid of second hand smoke than Islamic Terrorists? I wouldn’t be surprised.
Global Warming Panic explained
Here’s an interesting one. A comparison of deadly gasses – Carbon Dioxide vs. Carbon Monoxide vs. Hydrogen Cyanide
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=hydrogen+cyanide%2Ccarbon+monoxide%2Ccarbon+dioxide&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3
What about the Y10K Problem when computers will have to go from a 4-digit year to a 5-digit year?
one two three four
I call a google war
http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=%22climate+change%22&word2=%22global+warming%22
CAGW vs ordinary GW: click
noaaprogrammer says:
January 22, 2011 at 10:00 am
What about the Y10K Problem when computers will have to go from a 4-digit year to a 5-digit year?
I ask, . . . . Are you telling me that a boot up batch file was not written to add one new field for the next year everytime all the digits hit 9 in all the existing fields.??? When it comes to the date. . . . ???