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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@noaaprogrammer
What about the Y10k ? No problem, I’ll fix the problem. I helped fixing the Y2k bug, so I have experience. Come back before year 10000 and I’ll show you how I fix that problem. Don’t forget, year 10000 is not so near…in any case call me a few months before, in case I forgot. 🙂
’twas I who sent the graph to Andrew, and I have long been a believer in the notion that total anxiety is a conserved quantity. Ngrams is a source of endless fun
Another interesting correlation can be seen here
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=Dirac,Heisenberg,Schrodinger,cannabis&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3
Laurie Bowen:
We are indeed paying attention; “they” need not worry. I’m with Dan.
John the Schoolteacher
Just proves that there is always a market for fiction and science fiction.
RE: CO2 vs. CO vs. HCN
I wonder if the integral of the curves would be representative of an LD50.
Another old fear to put in: antichrist.
BTW: I wonder if this will make it through RC moderation in their annual Hansen 1988 prediction “review”:
John W says:
Your comment is awaiting moderation.
22 Jan 2011 at 2:08 PM
“So to conclude, global warming continues. Did you really think it wouldn’t?”
No, I figured it would. I study history, which tells me we have another 400 years or so of Global Warming to go with the occasional two or three decades of slight cooling here and there.
What I find disturbing is that if Congress had instituted the draconian emission restrictions being recommended in ’88 then these observations through 2010 could be used now to pat ourselves (as in the USA/UN/whoever imposed draconian CO2 restrictions) on the back for avoiding “certain” warming.
The other thing that bothers me is that if one of the lines of evidence for the current warming having man’s fingerprint is that the models without man’s influence do not coincide with reality that is warmer. This being the inverse should imply man’s influence is negligible since the closest match to reality is with draconian emission restrictions that didn’t happen.
juanslayton says:
January 22, 2011 at 10:59 am
Laurie Bowen:
We are indeed paying attention; “they” need not worry. I’m with Dan.
John the Schoolteacher
“Golly Gee” . . . . I hate when “they” jerk my chains . . . .
“Economic Growth” vs “Climate Change” would suggest a collision between the two is inevitable
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=economic+growth%2Cclimate+change&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3
Dan Lee says:
January 22, 2011 at 6:54 am
“…there is another word trend…”
Wait, what’s that word in yellow?
Come on Anthony, I use your site to help counter what my kids are taught in school. Up until the “Shrinkage” post I never worried about anything. Now I have to check first. Is this a new trend? Or have I missed this kind of stuff until now?
———————-
Dan, it must be that your dad did such a good job shielding you from such terrors that you just didn’t see them.
If you can protect your children to the same degree, you’re going to have to do that yourself. Asking everyone around you to bowdlerize their every utterance is unlikely to achieve what you’re after.
Something interesting. If you simply put in the word “climate”, it shows a downward trend.
That’s really interesting. Maybe people can only be scared about one planet threatening crisis at a time.
The generally accepted phrase for which Anthony has called worry is “moral panic”.
People have listed a few, although you left out the satanic cult panic of twenty years ago. I would add alien abductions (though doubtless some members here believe in them). Smut on telly and in films. Subliminal advertising had a brief kick too. Every era has them, they’re not even remotely new.
Be aware though that moral panics are not necessarily based totally on nothing. There is currently a panic about paedophiles. People will drive their kids to school in order for them to be safe, but without seatbelts – thereby dramatically increasing their actual danger. Kids will be left with a family member to avoid being unsupervised – which doesn’t actually reduce the risk. The danger of paedophilia has reached panic precautions, so that it is inflated out of all realistic bounds. But underneath there is a real risk, albeit much lower than lots of other things people don’t worry about.
Likewise, there is clearly evidence of a huge moral panic over global warming. The dangers are ridiculously inflated and “solutions” are given that would be worse than the cure. However, that is not proof that there is no cause for concern. Many panics are based on nothing (satanic cults, subliminal advertising) and others on real problems but raised out of proportion (paedophilia, smut on TV).
The Wikipedia page on moral panic is rather skimpy, but you will see that a key concept is “consensus” among believers. Tee-hee.
AGW Progress Report: Update.
…-
“State of emergency declared in remote Ont. town”
“Cold dips to – 40C amidst prolonged power outage”
“MOOSONEE, Ont. — A state of emergency has been declared in a remote northern Ontario town to deal with a prolonged power outage, as temperatures loom around -40C.
The power has been out since about 3 a.m. Saturday in Moosonee on the James Bay Coast, and officials say it is unknown when power will be restored. A state of emergency was declared at about 10 a.m.”
http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Canada/2011/01/22/16993496.html
…-
“Snow, chopper foils dim-witted thief
A dim-witted crook was arrested after the stolen truck he was driving got stuck in a farmer’s field east of Calgary early Saturday.”
(canoenews)
…-
TO Report:
“If you’re north of the city, things will be even worse: Environment Canada says parts of northern Ontario could reach lows of up to -50 C.”
(canoenews)
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/mt/mt-comments.cgi
AGW popularity will have it’s day then fade way like other pseudo religious cults. Some time ago on WUWT a poster wrote the following. The comment resonated with me and id like to share it again. I didn’t retain the handle of the poster but h/t to you.
————————————————–
“Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. En-vironmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it’s a re-ligion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.
There’s an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there’s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a re-sult of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment.”
AGW theory has become part and parcel of this growing Pantheist ideology.
@Oliver
No, been there, done more than many, and the kids are well aware of the world. But juvenile language and imagery is not as widely appreciated as one might think, nor is it routinely acceptable in all households.
I know this site is better than that, a “family site” I’ve read on occasion, but I felt that if nobody said anything it might become yet another alarming trend. 🙂
———-
luca turin,
Thanks.
Would you think that ‘worry’ is a scaled phenomena that is dependent on the world population? Likewise, I would think that the number of books written is scaled to world population.
John
Erroneous seach results pickup stuff like the following which features a story about a nuclear war in 1808 and the involvement of UFO aliens and so forth.
THE HIDDEN TRUTH ABOuT UFOS AND THE ENERGY CRISIS
by DR. Tamerlane A. Edvardssonn
Fiction describing weapons with a capability for the destruction of cities and worlds by great weapons is as old as the first cities built to resist attackers. Early science fiction stories such as Jules Verne, The Begum’s Millions (1879); The Inhabitant, The Great Romance (1881); Jules Verne, Facing the Flag (1896) include super weapons with enough destructve power to destroy cities and worlds. Atomic weapons appear in the literature beginiing with the first 19th Century discoveries of the atom.
Concerning the yellow line:
Sunstein, Cass, and Timur Kuran. “Availability Cascades and Risk Regulation.” Research. Social Science Research Network, October 7, 2007. http://www.law.uchicago.edu/files/files/364.pdf
From Dacron Mather on January 22, 2011 at 9:06 am:
True, when one looks at formerly-premier sites like UnRealClimate and ClimaticProgressive as they cut down and smear true climate science experts like Dr.s Spencer and Lindzen, and Watts and Morano, and pursue abusive censorship and silencing of criticism… One gets the impression they possibly might have actually been worth something without that politicized nonsense, you know? As it stands, it looks like they may still linger a bit longer.
True, it was terrible to see former UK Prime Minister Blair fall like that, his leadership was so promising, with so many promises about combating global warming. But he and Prince Charles fell for the hype, didn’t question the one-sidedness of the presentation, didn’t seek out the opposing views, and now they lie exposed to ridicule. Soon they may be exposed to shivering cold, having set the path for the UK to trade dependable fossil fuel energy sources for “when it’s there” renewables in a time of record-breaking winters.
It’s a good thing that you, as the synthetic great-times-eight grandchild of Cotton Mather, have such a wonderful artificial family history to draw such perspectives from.
☺
What struck me in the timing of the graph is that the downtrend in the nuclear war worry and the uptrend of the global warming panic happened right about the time that Soviet communism fell. I’ve heard it said that environmental extremism is the new communism…
Add CO2 and climate to the ‘mix’ and the results are rather interesting:
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=CO2%2Cglobal+warming%2Cclimate+change%2Cclimate&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3
they are steady if not dropping (hide that decline) except for Global Warming and Climate Change. Most interestingly, research on CO2 is drooping while research on climate change is growing,. That tells me a story!
and if you ever thought it was about energy, not politics, see:
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=global+warming%2Cclimate+change%2Csolar+energy%2Cwind+energy%2Cneuclear&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3
where solar and wind energy have a blip around 1980 and drop of real fast!
I put in the word ‘consensus’ – it shows a steep rise throughout the second half of the twentieth century. At first I thought it was linked to CO2 but I couldn’t account for a rapid decline after 1998. Is that when scepticism set in?
Yes, worry indeed.
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/prepare-for-looming-disasters-by-saving-for-them-20110120-19xu3.html
Not sure how one can prepare for a disaster of any given type and when considering we can’t even predict the weather, but lets extract more tax from everyone.
@ur momisugly John Whitman
My understanding is that the counts are normalised to the total mass of words and therefore do not scale with number of books. There is an article by John Bohannon in ScienceNow last week that gives more info.
Try running NGRAM with the word “anxiety”. It dwarfs the other words tested, but seems to have been relatively flat for the last 50 years — evidence in support of the conservation hypothesis.