This is from MTR 1377 radio today. Our regular feature, “Quote of the Week” just doesn’t work here. Neither does decade or century. No, a whole new category all by itself is reserved for this quote from the newly appointed Climate Commissioner of Australia, Tim Flannery, noted zoologist and author of the book The Weather Makers.
Here it is, brace yourself:
If we cut emissions today, global temperatures are not likely to drop for about a thousand years.
Lest you think that is an errant remark out of context, here’s the follow up from Flannery:
Just let me finish and say this. If the world as a whole cut all emissions tomorrow the average temperature of the planet is not going to drop in several hundred years, perhaps as much as a thousand years because the system is overburdened with CO2 that has to be absorbed and that only happens slowly.
Crikey! So much for the “think of the grandchildren” argument used by Dr. James Hansen.
Read the entire transcript and listen to the audio here
h/t to Lawrie Ayres and Scarlet Pumpernickel
Crispin in Waterloo says:
March 24, 2011 at 10:40 pm
LOL. I had the same thing happen, with ol’ Flim-Flam’s book “The Weathermakers”. A family member “loaned” it to me (really, more convinced me to just take it and read it), perhaps thinking I would see the light. If anything, it had the opposite effect. They got it back with lots of commentary in the margins or any blank spaces, written in red. I didn’t make it all the way through either, though I made a valiant effort.
The corollary to Tim’s hyper-Alarmist statement is that failure to “cut emmissions” would necessarily result in planetary disaster of biblical proportions, or Thermageddon.
Re Shevva says:
March 25, 2011 at 1:05 am
For the UK and OZ it’s a race to the bottom.
Trouble for the Ozzies is they don’t have help like us in the EU.
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Too true, as the excellent Der Spiegel article showed. By far the biggest threat to the environment are our politicians.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,751469,00.html
Though in the UK I reckon Scottish First Minister Salmond (with an eye to EU/UN promotion no doubt) is leading the race over the cliff to economic suicide. His relentless pro wind turbine anti-nuclear policies have already succeeded in increasing fuel poeverty from 1 in 4 Scottish households in 2007 to 1 in 3 in 2009.
(See section 56 of this report)
http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/s3/committees/eet/documents/ClimateChange-RPP-webversion.pdf
Hardly surprising though when many of its policies seem to be driven by such bodies as WWF Scotland . (After all the EU doesn’t just fund the research for CAGW, it also funds those lobbying against it – helps the EU claim its laws are brought in by popular demand!!!)
http://www.hoover.org/publications/policy-review/article/43291
Bolt with all the other nuts.
Andy West says:
March 25, 2011 at 1:50 am
GregO says:
March 24, 2011 at 9:26 pm
“Ultimately, it is the high uncertainty in the science that allows this to happen.”
When the uncertainty is high enough it is no longer science. It is a collection of hunches. That is the case with climate science.
Orwell was better at prediction than Hansen, Jones, the whole bunch.
Alexander K says:
March 25, 2011 at 3:44 am
“To read some really scary stuff, grab some books that describe the Puritan era in the UK – they were truly scary buggers who just knew the Devil was everywhere.”
Today in the USA they are the PC Thought Police, who are everywhere and who find an evil mind behind every non-authorized bit of speech or writing. For example, the lady down the hall from me owns a Prius. She suspects that I am a denier who fails to respect her beliefs and her sanctified purchase of the Prius. Of course, I dare not admit under intense questioning what I think about her and her Prius.
Perhaps Mr. Flannery is greasing the skids to refocus the “need” for carbon taxes from that of reducing CO2 production to that of mitigation of effects.
The propaganda folks running the show must have decided that the selling of the need to lower production of CO2 was losing its effect. Too much scare (for now). If they focus on mitigation, a whole new campaign that can harness the excitement of new civil engineering projects, and high tech homes and such opens up to them. They can certainly insert some scare stories now and then, but taking on an overall positive message for use of the new taxes is a great opportunity, especially for the more creative graphic artists and PR spinmeisters.
RE:
Brendon says:
March 25, 2011 at 4:38 am
Gee if only that were backed by research.
Oh, what do we have here … http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090127163403.htm
“The authors relied on measurements as well as many different models to support the understanding of their results. They focused on drying of particular regions and on thermal expansion of the ocean because observations suggest that humans are contributing to changes that have already been measured.”
That’s good enough for me. “Legs off, fins on, add a bit of gold paint, made good, and you have a wonderful goldfish.” (Monty Python) The same goes for GCMs and the addition of a few bits of real science to lend them authenticity. Fortunately, we know that they are all drunk on [CO2] and are having none of it.
…because the system is overburdened with CO2…
This is pure speculation and renders the entire comment to be BS.
Clearly anyone agreeing with this sort of assertion can be placed into the ‘religious kook’ category and needs to be merely observed for dangerous behavior.
Unfortunately a great number of people who agree with this sort madness are either in power or influencing decision makers today.
So there is a lot of dangerous behavior to be observed: mindless policies, taxes and enterprises that only work if the masses are forced to pay more and more.
I like my “carbochondriac” better because:
1. It’s alliterative.
2. It’s a stronger sneer (a hypochondriac, and by extension any -chondriac, is a bedwetting hysteric, not merely -phobic (avoidant)).
But I thought we were all supposed to die of acid rain ..? then it was changed to warming and floods, and now it bloody cold.
Honestly, keeping up with this world-about-to-end lark is doing my head in
Brendon says:
March 25, 2011 at 4:38 am
Gee if only that were backed by research.
Oh, what do we have here … http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090127163403.htm
Thanks for that bit of “research” Brendon, backed by playstation modeling. Gee, if only it were actual science.
The AGW movement is a akin to the Y2K crisis. There is no crisis however there is an opportunity to spend billions of dollars.
We are carbon base life forms. Increased atmospheric CO2 causes the biosphere to increase, desertification to reduce. (Two mechanisms: There is more precipitation world wide if the planet warms with most of the warming at high latitudes and plants reduce the number of stomata on their leaves which enables them to loss less water. During the glacial cycle 2/3 of the Amazon forest turned to savana due to the low CO2 and lower global temperatures. There is 15 fold increase in dust from transported from deserts deposited on the ice sheets during the cyclic glacial phases.)
The AGW propaganda continues. Multiple the amount of warming expected by a factor of 5 to 10. Tell people the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheet will melt. Manipulate the data.
When basis financial analysis shows benefits do not justify the cost, tell the public that we are too busy to do the financial analysis. Say doing benefit analysis is not necessary. Science also is not necessary. Write books about a fictional dystopia, “The Day after Tomorrow” or Tim Flammery’s Weather Makers.
“Bolt: Look, we’ve got that argument…. I’ll ask just one last time… If you don’t know just say so, but if you do know, I know it’s got all those caveats, but just tell us how much the world’s temperature will fall if we do what you recommend and what Julia Gillard plans.
Daley: As I said, we haven’t run the numbers on how much it will make a difference if Australia acts completely alone.
Bolt: You should have.
Daley: The reason we haven’t done that is because Australia is not acting alone. Therefore it’s not a very helpful thing to analyse.
“Not helpful” means you’d realise the pain is not worth the gain. Whever we do – whatevery anyone does – hardly seems worth it, really.
And by “not helpful”, the people pushing the schemes say they’d rather not tell you the truth. You might ask too many awkward questions.
That is why no one yet pushing an ETS or a carbon tax will answer our question. And why we drew exactly the same blank a fortnight ago with Jill Duggan, from the European Commission’s emissions trading scheme. “
The Aussies here will understand this, Flannery is a bloody liar by deception and an appeal to authority !
I, by chance, happened to see a bit of the meeting today in Geelong where the first Government educational lecture was given by all these experts, including Flannery.
Here he was, claiming he was a member of a “Board at Oxford” and they were all experts on this, AGW, and Blah, blah, blah.
So I checked, 10 seconds on Google.
The internet is like God, sees all and forgets nothing.
From Google, “Oxford Geoengineering Research was established as a Community Interest Company in September 2009. It is based in Oxford and while not formally affiliated with the University of Oxford….”
“The founding director of Oxford Geoengineering Research is Tim Kruger, who is currently researching a technique to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere………”
From their home page,
“Mission
This organisation seeks to facilitate the attainment and distribution of knowledge about geoengineering to scientists, governments, NGOs, corporate entities and the wider public. It is not advocating geoengineering, but rather seeking to carefully research all the implications of geoengineering approaches so as to assess their potential and the risks they carry.”
With a little economical use of the truth, he had everyone believing he was on some Oxford University Board. The AGW crowd know exactly what words to leave out or put in, to change the meaning of what they are saying. What he should have said was that he was a member of the “Oxford Geoengineering Research Board”, a completely different kettle of fish.
You have to hand it to this guy, he conned $90million out of the Australian Government for his “geothermal experiment” that promptly failed, and now, today the bores they drilled are sealed up with concrete.
Hey I’ve been pushing the carbon phobia thing all week. I was hoping it would catch on.
Here’s my guide:
‘co2 phobic’ – short form. As in ‘you’re just a co2 phobic. Drink a can of coke to get over your fear’.
‘c02 phobia’ – descriptive. As in ‘that weird guy with the composting toilet had the worst case of co2 phobia I’ve ever seen. He even burped into a plastic bag and buried it in the garden – said he was sequestering co2 to save his grandchildren’.
‘carbon dioxide phobia’ – long form, descriptive. Usage ‘if you lot don’t get over your collective carbon dioxide phobia, we’ll be shivering our behinds off and cooking with twigs in a couple of years’
Although I do like carbonachondria. I just don’t like to opt-in to the usage of ‘carbon’ without adding the ‘dioxide’. I also suspect some of the brainwashed may not be able to decipher it, and I don’t want to give any oxygen (pun intended) to the memes of ‘carbon tax’ and ‘carbon pollution’ and ‘carbon economy’.
If you want to go nuclear, drop the ‘carbon dioxide nazi’ tag. Because like ‘denier’, ‘nazi’ doesn’t contain any literary baggage from the war, does it? /sarc
If you jump off the roof and break your right leg, it will takes weeks to heal, even if you refrain from jumping off roofs in the future. Of course if you do jump off the roof again you may well break both legs. All Flannery is saying is that we should stop jumping off the roof and let the planet heal.
There is nothing new in Flannery’s statement. Obviously the CO2 we have pumped into the atmosphere will take awhile to dissipate and cause warming until it does. If we pump more CO2 into the atmosphere the worse it will get. (And it will take even longer for ocean pH to return to normal.)
I cannot even fathom by what logic one could conclude that this shows a lack of concern for future generations.
Every society needs a religion, whether communist or capitalist. Every religion has a bogeyman to keep the insolent in line and the communicant in fear. Since we got rid of Satan, the new bogeyman is CO2. No matter how it defies all the facts that CO2 is not a problem, the shadow of fear overwhelms all. Then there are the outcasts, the excommunicated, heretics and the witches that are persecuted and hunted – today the new enemy are the “deniers”.
Just let me get this right. So we’re never going to know, if it made the blindest bit of difference… &. all those tax dollars later.
How convenient.
He said we’re dealing with probabilities here. Any competent psychiatrist could come up with a better more appropriate word for what they are dealing with than probabilities. And so could competent police inspectors and public prosecutors.
Which millennium?
That’s an amazing delusion he’s got going there. For his sake I hope he’s at least enjoying his fantasy in high-definition. There’s no reason to cut costs on the instrument of your deception, you might as well enjoy the ride.
According to the World Climate Widget, the UAH “global temperature anomaly” (as meaningless as that is) is below the 30 year average. So what the heck is Flannery talking about? We’re already back to 1979 temps!
I wonder if Mr. Flannery has ceased to use any modern convenience, or any manufactured item. Surely he practices what he preaches. No?
An acquaintance of mine, an emeritus biology professor, has mentioned Flannery’s book “The Weather Makers” to me many times with the same reverence the pope gives to the bible. I didn’t figure Flannery was a moron but the quote in the OP sure makes me wonder.
Flannery: Just let me finish and say this. If the world as a whole cut all emissions tomorrow the average temperature of the planet is not going to drop in several hundred years, perhaps as much as a thousand years because the system is overburdened with CO2 that has to be absorbed and that only happens slowly.
Watts (or Bolt?): “Crikey! So much for the “think of the grandchildren” argument used by Dr. James Hansen.”
I think Watts (or Bolt?) is talking nonsense here. If we stopped emissions today, our grandchildren would be happy. The climate of today’s earth is what we are seeking to preserve. to the best of our knowledge, if the global temperature goes up only a little it should be OK. What we are concerned about are temperature increases in excess of 2C, which would be associated with big changes in regional climates in a short time, with large scale extinctions of species, as well as displacement of many millions of people.