Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
As reported in the Guardian (so it must be true), we are treated to some great news:
World headed for irreversible climate change in five years, IEA warns
If fossil fuel infrastructure is not rapidly changed, the world will ‘lose for ever’ the chance to avoid dangerous climate change
Figure 1. Ominous looking clouds coming from smokestacks symbolize our uncertain future … or some nonsense like that. Photo from the Guardian article.
So … why is this good news?
Well, think about it. If the world “loses for ever” the chance to avoid dangerous climate change, then at least we’ll be rid of the thousands of people clutching their pearls and whining because of the understandable lack of action in response to the Boy Who Cried Wolf. Plus, we’ll be rid of the eponymous Boy himself, I’ll be glad to see his back.
And we’ll be rid of people wanting to pick our pockets to further their anti-development agenda under the guise of worrying about climate. If we get to where it’s “irreversible”, we won’t be bothered by them trying to take our bucks to reverse it.
Think about how peaceful that will be without that alarmism … bliss.
Then we can get back to the job we should have been doing all this time, which is trying to protect people now from climate disasters now. That way, whether or not CO2 turns out to be “teh eevil”, we will be protecting people as much as we can, and as soon as we can.
Only five more years until peace breaks out! I can hardly wait!
w.
PS—The headline itself was a howler too. Any climate change is indeed irreversible … to mangle the Rubaiyat,
The moving finger writes, and having writ, Moves on, nor all your piety nor wit, Can call it back to cancel half a clime Nor all your tears wipe out a word of it ...
Not only is any climate change irreversible, climate change is also inevitable … but please, don’t tell the IEA. They’re on a good path, we just have to stay schtumm for five years and we’re there.
PPS – I don’t think Willis will mind my pointing out that the deadline when Copenhagen COP16 was going on in 2009 was 10 years according to the Met Office:
Click image for story.
It seems that between 2009 and now, 3 years went missing. It must be worse than we thought.
I also made a screencap of the Guardian story for posterity, should it disappear.
– Anthony
Lets be nice to them and give them at least 10 years. 🙂 Will it matter in any case, as 4.7 billion of us are due to die in the next 7 weeks with the effects of GW.
Idiots.
Its amazing how gullible people can be, its always NOW that is the last chance. Isnt this rather convenient?
It would be funny, if these kind of statements and documents werent handed to the Australian PM by the Chief scientist eg “The critical decade”. These scientists will have a lot to answer for.
This sounds like a conclusion of ‘Fear-Forced Science’ (Post-Normal Science) where its proponents say the consequences of inaction are so terrible, in the off-chance their theory proves to be correct, that all skepticism must be laid aside.
Sheesh !!
Yet another “tipping point’ !!!
In 5 years, get ready to post this in the “Fail” section !!
IEA was set up in 1974 after the post-Israeli war OPEC oil crisis. See Wiki entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Energy_Agency. It started life, apparently, as a boring and sensible OECD intergovernmental body responsible, as much as such organisations can ever be, for advising the G7 and now the G20 on energy security. More recently (2008?) it’s been taken over by greens, and peddles the ‘peak oil’, ‘renewables-are-easy-and-cheap, and other crazy myths. Like many intergovernmental bodies, it’s joined the eco-apocalypse main stream. I guess that’s where the ‘smart’ money is nowadays. It’s certainly where the international pork-barrel is.
The Wiki IEA entry starts off reasonably factual, and then goes all strange, mainly due to something called the Energy Watch Group (EWG), a pro-renewables lobby group. I don’t know why Wiki pretends to be neutral. On energy, climate and environmental issues it joins the BBC, the UN and all Western liberal papers in the endless eco-porn-fest that passes for ‘news’.
One weird recent claim by IEA, is that renewables are undercut by the huge state subsidies for fossil fuels. I’ve seen this claim elsewhere. It’s clearly bonkers, and made-up but does anyone know the basis of this claim, and who made it up?
I had always suspected that climate alarmism was being driven by the nuclear power industry, and I warned the greenies about that years ago.
5 years. Gosh, as long as that. It must br true that there has been some hiatus of the warming since change is obviously happening far slower than originally thought. Back in 2009, it use to be only 50 days to save the world. ” Gordon Brown said negotiators had 50 days to save the world from global warming and break the “impasse”.” See http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8313672.stm
Of course those 50 days have long since passed and guess what, the world is still here. It has survived.
Why do people/organisations peddle such nonsense. It merely makes them look ridiculous. Some how, the skeptics should keep on reminding the world of previous predictions that have not stood the test of time. This would show the average reasonable person how crazy these green organisations really are.
As far as I am concerned, in the climate field, wolf has been cried too many times.
Interesting how the Grauniad haven’t the courage to allow comments on that piece 🙂
“it is still a fine newspaper, one of the best in the world, so please don’t condemn it….” which explains it’s ‘massive’ readership I suppose. Well, since it’s the consumate reference document for the BBC you can make your own mind up.
Same old image-propaganda techniques. The “smoke” coming out of the stacks in the Guardian pic is almost all condensed water vapor. Ooowww, scary.
They should have used the even more impressive standard propaganda pic of cooling towers emitting harmless steam.
There’s a piece in http://www.mnn.com/green-tech/research-innovations/blogs/sustainability-is-a-process-of-creative-destruction?hpt=hp_bn12 talking about this as “creative destruction”, and how it’s a good thing. Some twisted logic involved.
“But until then, we have five more years of undiluted excuses and alarmism that grow lamer and more desperate by the day…”
“When nobody listens to the doom merchants they have to resort to more and more alarmism to get people to listen.”
Yes, no doubt about it…
http://autonomousmind.wordpress.com/2011/11/12/where-there-is-uea-there-is-climate-change-propaganda/
They want you to take it on the word of Fatih the need to immediately “revolutionize” the international energy sources, literally, the pronouncements of the economist of the International Energy Agency, Faith Birol.
Monbiot Meets…Faith Birol is a video in which Faith is examined by Monbiot, who discovers you cannot expect the assumptions of Faith to remain consistent from one year to the next.
Willis Eschenbach says:
November 11, 2011 at 11:50 pm
I probably should have put in the [sarc] tags, so people would know that this is not serious …
w.
Oops, too late – I’ve already set a reminder in my calendar for the Ides of November, 2016.
🙂
Many years ago, someone put in a classified advert simply saying: “Your last chance to send in your one dollar”, giving an address where to post the one dollar bill. He recieved over 50,000 dollar bills through the post.
Your last chance to save the planet…………………………………
TWE says:
November 12, 2011 at 12:22 am
“They said the same thing 5 years ago! Warmists moving the goalposts again.”
I agree with TWE. The climate science industry has some of the BEST goalpost movers in all of science, be it an “ice free” arctic [heh], devastating sea level rise, glacier melt-offs, ocean life die-offs…
And you can be sure that whenever there are press releases of some impending climate cataclysm, there is some huge amount of climate ca$h that is desired to be transferred from the taxpayers of the world to the greedy (and hypocritical) climate industry hacks…
By the way, when mention is made of the billions in Climate Ca$h, our warmist visitor friends are usually strangely silent…why is that?
UK Dissenter: your
One weird recent claim by IEA, is that renewables are undercut by the huge state subsidies for fossil fuels. I’ve seen this claim elsewhere. It’s clearly bonkers, and made-up but does anyone know the basis of this claim, and who made it up?
The IEA published some. The vast majotrity of the subsidies are for consumers in 3rd world countries, to keep the price of gasoline or power down.
Real subsidies for producers in the west (as opposed to tax breaks), are mostly for coal in Germany and France (go figure), and for alternate energy or carbon capture (again, go figure).
The Canadian “subsidies” are not subsidies in the normal sense of the word. Most of what they call subsidies are tax deferals. These deferals also expire in 2015. Much of the real subsidies is for CO2 research. One program is labelled as a subsidy, but its intended purpose is to increase government revenue! The Alberta Royalty regime is also called a subsidy, which is strange, as it increased royalties. The fall in royalty revenue after is due to reduced production which was caused by increased royalties.
Governments and NGOs don’t seem to understand this. If you want more of something, reduce the taxes. If you want less, increase its tax rate.
http://www.worldenergyoutlook.org/docs/weo2010/key_graphs.pdf
http://www.iea.org/files/energy_subsidies_slides.pdf
http://www.globalsubsidies.org/files/assets/ffs_awc_3canprovinces.pdf
http://www.oecd.org/site/0,3407,en_21571361_48776931_1_1_1_1_1,00.html
Dear Willis,
Another memo you did not get!
That boy who cried wolf is back and he is now a fully grown mann!
But beng, water is a global warming gas you know. Unless it becomes a cloud in which case it might be a global cooling gas. Anyway, we need it to store all those missing joules of energy in the lowest part of the Marianas Trench. Gotta be there because they couldn’t find it in shallower water.
ArsTechnica is in on the fun too:
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/11/were-screwed-limiting-emissions-to-a-2c-temperature-rise-is-almost-beyond-reach.ars
Its fun reading their echo chamber comments on that site.
The moving finger writes, and having writ,
Moves on, nor all your piety nor wit,
Can call it back to cancel half a clime
Nor all your tears wipe out a word of it …
—
Deeply dissatisfied. I was waiting for the rhyme with clime — dime? grime? slime? crime?
The point they are trying to make is that we shouldn’t be building any energy infrastructure that produces CO2 because that infrastructure will have a lifetime / will be in use for 40 years. If the energy infrastructure in use 35 years from now is still emitting CO2, we won’t be able to stay below 450 ppm (which will produce dangerous climate change of +2.0C according to some made-up formula).
And the IEA would like lots of funding so they can study these issues and protect their phoney-baloney jobs and perks (being an autonomous international agency with lots of high-paying jobs and meetings in warm places during the winter).
This is the same mindset that those trying to stop the Keystone oil pipeline have. They don’t want ANY energy infrastructure built or ANY new power plants or new coal mines or new fracking natural gas sources or any fossil fuel energy infrastructure of any kind, anywhere.
Because they all believe Hansen’s theory.
The theory is the issue.
Every five years, they say “in the next five years…” shouldn’t someone be going to jail for this fraud? It’s time for us to speak up and hold those accountable for the AGW hoax. It’s costing us taxpayers millions.
What we really need now is a “consensus” on the five (5) year alarm so we can all consider it “settled science” and then a big countdown clock in Times Square so we can all know how much time we have left (or not).
@ur momisugly jaymam
Your damn right jaymam.
I bet those greens wouldn’t like to hear that.