MSNBC reports that the lack of temperature rise in the last 12 years has convinced environmentalist James Lovelock ( The Gaia Hypothesis) that the climate alarmism wasn’t warranted.
From his Wikipedia entry: Writing in the British newspaper The Independent in January 2006, Lovelock argues that, as a result of global warming, “billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable” by the end of the 21st century.
He has been quoted in The Guardian that 80% of humans will perish by 2100 AD, and this climate change will last 100,000 years. According to James Lovelock, by 2040, the world population of more than six billion will have been culled by floods, drought and famine. Indeed “[t]he people of Southern Europe, as well as South-East Asia, will be fighting their way into countries such as Canada, Australia and Britain”.
What he has said to MSNBC is a major climb down. MSNBC reports in this story:
James Lovelock, the maverick scientist who became a guru to the environmental movement with his “Gaia” theory of the Earth as a single organism, has admitted to being “alarmist” about climate change and says other environmental commentators, such as Al Gore, were too.
Lovelock, 92, is writing a new book in which he will say climate change is still happening, but not as quickly as he once feared.
He previously painted some of the direst visions of the effects of climate change. In 2006, in an article in the U.K.’s Independent newspaper, he wrote that “before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.”
However, the professor admitted in a telephone interview with msnbc.com that he now thinks he had been “extrapolating too far”…
…
“The problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books – mine included – because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn’t happened,” Lovelock said.
…
“The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium. Twelve years is a reasonable time… it (the temperature) has stayed almost constant, whereas it should have been rising — carbon dioxide is rising, no question about that.”
This won’t sit well with many. McKibben has a whole movement based on alarm for example. Watch the true believers now trash him in the “doddering old man” style we’ve seen before.
hat tip to Steve Milloy at junkscience.com
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As far as I’m concerned he lost all of his credibility along time ago. I won’t be seeking out his book .. It’ll be plain crap!
I think gnomish encapsulates sheeple behavior quite well.
Billions of people are still going to die from lack of food because of unavailable energy and increasing cold. So for the greenies this is a win-win situation. What ever happens now the population will be reduced.
Lovelock should probably edit his Wiki article before old age catches up with him, and hope that Connolley has the decency to leave it alone…
Note once again how the ice sites have frozen data to 4 days ago probably means ice has now definitely gone well over the normal line and they are trying to work around it to hide more inclines
The stragegist in me says: “now is the time to make sure every politician knows about this”.
The sceptic in me says: “so what?”
What accolade can you give to someone who supposedly bases what they say o the evidence who now realises are years of fire & brimstone preaching that the evidence doesn’t support what they said?
Let’s put it this way: what does one say to a criminal who for years has gained a very good lifestyle through crime, who seeing the police closing in, declares: “I have seen the light … some crime is bad”.
Do we:
a) Give them a nighthood
b) Applaud them.
c) Lock them up and throw away the key unless or until they admit their whole life was based on crime and make suitable recompense.
Arise Sir Lovelock … defender of the status quo.
The thing which always surprised me about Lovelock’s stance is that his Gaia hypothesis is one of the most holistic-, self-sustaining, self-regulating, return-to-equilibrium theories around. But his global warming stuff was that of stretching a spring beyond Hook’s Law……
Lovelock should be well capable of examining climate as an holistic system and see what theories he comes up with as a result……
Big man to say what he has said though…..
@R. Shearer
So he helped cause the death of millions from malaria through the global outlawing of DDT. Good job, well done. /sarc
I find it hard to aggree with those here who applaud Lovelock for changing his mind and being a ‘good scientist’, if the dogmatic nature of his previous statements are as quoted.
It is possible to be legitimately wrong in science. If I calculate say, a 75 percent chance of some event, I could reasonably say “It is likely that…” If then the opposite, with a 25 percent probability occurs, then I am wrong about the outcome but not necessarily wrong in my understanding. If however I were to say “This WILL happen”, as Lovelock is quoted as saying, then I imply a 100 percent chance, and if then another outcome results, it must be that I am wrong in my understanding. If he now believes his own hypothesis is wrong, this implies one of two things, either the data he based his original opinions on were wrong, or he was wrong to come to a absolute conclusion based on the data he had. the third possibility, that the data were correct and complete, cannot be consistent with his change of mind, what he said before then must either be considered advocacy or bad science.
I note that the Guardian lists email addresses to contact every single editorial team direct apart from one. Can you guess which one it is….
Open journalism…my left cheek.
In 2006, in an article in the U.K.’s Independent newspaper, [Lovelock] wrote that “before this century is over billions of us will die…’
Given his advanced age, I would think Mr Lovelock might be among those billions destined to die before the end of this century – along with most everyone else alive today. I expect this surmise to be true regardless of what the weather (sorry, climate) does.
wmconnolley –
Global ice normal. Air and temperature and OHC static. Sea levels static or declining.
Sun quiet.
Now go away.
rossbrisbane says:
April 23, 2012 at 5:31 pm
‘As I climb into the eagles nest and remove my blinders I begin to see the far off horizon. And we know. We sense it. We smell it in the air. It is that sudden glimpse on the distant horizon that tells me not to rest my head too easy.’
Yes, the wind is coming ross.
Hey, wouldn’t it be nice if Michael Mann seconded Lovelock’s pronouncement?!
In an earlier comment I referred to an interview that James Lovelock had given to the Guardian in the wake of ‘climategate’.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2010/mar/29/james-lovelock
For those who are not familiar with this man, here are some more of the quotes from that interview which many readers here will find surprising.
“Science, not so very long ago, pre-1960s, was largely vocational. Back when I was young, I didn’t want to do anything else other than be a scientist. They’re not like that nowadays. They don’t give a damn. They go to these massive, mass-produced universities and churn them out. They say: “Science is a good career. You can get a job for life doing government work.” That’s no way to do science….Science was always elitist and has to be elitist. The very idea of diluting it down [to be more egalitarian] is crazy. We’re paying the price for it now.
I would only have been too pleased if someone had asked me for my data. If you really believed in your data, you wouldn’t mind someone looking at it. You should be able to respond that if you don’t believe me go out and do the measurements yourself. You don’t hide data.
We tend to now get carried away by our giant computer models. But they’re not complete models…. They don’t take into account the climate of the oceans to any great extent, or the responses of the living stuff on the planet. So I don’t see how they can accurately predict the climate. It’s not the computational power that we lack today, but the ability to take what we know and convert it into a form the computers will understand. If you make a model, after a while you get suckered into it. You begin to forget that it’s a model and think of it as the real world. You really start to believe it.
The great climate science centres around the world are more than well aware how weak their science is. If you talk to them privately they’re scared stiff of the fact that they don’t really know what the clouds and the aerosols are doing. We haven’t got the physics worked out yet.
We’re very tribal. You’re either a goodie or a baddie. I’ve got quite a few friends among the sceptics….there are some sceptics that I fully respect. Nigel Lawson is one. He writes sensibly and well. He raises questions. I find him an interesting sceptic. What I like about sceptics is that in good science you need critics that make you think…If you don’t have that continuously, you really are up the creek. The good sceptics have done a good service, but some of the mad ones I think have not done anyone any favours.
It’s deplorable for the BBC whenever one of these issues comes up to go and ask what one of the green lobbyists thinks of it. Sometimes their view might be quite right, but it might also be pure propaganda.
We do need scepticism about the predictions about what will happen to the climate in 50 years, or whatever. It’s almost naive, scientifically speaking, to think we can give relatively accurate predictions for future climate. There are so many unknowns that it’s wrong to do it.
I don’t know enough abut carbon trading, but I suspect that it is basically a scam. The whole thing is not very sensible. “
Brent Hargreaves says:
April 24, 2012 at 2:17 am
Hey, wouldn’t it be nice if Michael Mann seconded Lovelock’s pronouncement?!
——-
If it isn’t before a judge at his incarceration hearing, then I suspect he, too, will be in his 90s before he admits it…
The impetus for this revelation was the unpredicted halt in warming. I believe Hansen is STILL fudging by claiming the on-going halt in warming is caused by Chinese aerosols. Others are fudging by claiming it’s a purely natural slowdown (due to ocean cycles previously not accounted for) which will be overcome by AGW in the coming decades (always forgetting that a natural uptick would have been preceded the downtick and how that would affect previous assessments of attribution and feedback response). You can’t help but sense that they are grabbing at straws, and always have been.
The trolls have been sent here in force, I see. Their increasing desperation is palpable.
Pointman
rossbrisbane says:
April 23, 2012 at 11:14 pm
” The man’s prophetic utterances have been touted as rubbish even from the CAGW camp.”
He was one of the founding fathers of your cult as I documented above, so this statement from you means you throw the Great Prophet under the bus.
“As Joe Romm presented on his web site (NOW) backed up by 2009 statements, he has headlined appropriately: “James Lovelock Finally Walks Back from His Absurd Doomism, But He Still Doesn’t Follow Climate Science”.”
And Crazy Joe throws him under the Bus.
Now, suddenly, he was always too alarmist for you sensible warmists.
Never bothered the lot of you as long as you thought extreme scares would be working.
“The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium. Twelve years is a reasonable time… it (the temperature) has stayed almost constant, whereas it should have been rising —
Henry says
For those of you who like statistics: you might find this interesting…
It has actually been cooling down since 1994
http://www.letterdash.com/henryp/global-cooling-is-here
Lovelock has been “awarded the prestigious Edinburgh Medal” which Hansen received lately.
Very “prestigious” obviously.
Bill Tuttle says: April 23, 2012 at 11:29 pm
Allan MacRae says: April 23, 2012 at 9:57 pm
Better (really) late than never…
“When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?
– John Maynard Keynes
Bill said:
When the facts change, I’ll change my mind. Since the facts have remained the same, I’ll just continue to cultivate my curmudgeonly image…
______________
Make that a double Bill. As I’ve said previously, my position on the science of global warming has remained the same – specifically: “there is no global warming crisis”.
I first started studying the alleged global warming crisis (CAGW) circa 1985, and thought it was wrong then. Since then, the CAGW BS pile has grown huge and odiferous. I finally got the courage to write about it in ~2002, and wrote some of the first anti-global warming articles in the National Post and other papers and journals.
My articles discussed climate science and energy, and were respectful of the other side, since I initially assumed that the warming alarmists were just scientifically misguided.
In this regard I now think I was wrong – the ClimateGate emails and much other evidence points to a deliberate campaign of conspiracy, deceit and fraud by a close-knit cabal centered at CRU, GISS and the IPCC. The Mann-made global warming hockey stick was obviously false from inception (due to “grafting” of dissimilar datasets), although it took some time for the shocking deception now called the “Divergence Problem” to appear, and for Steve McIntyre and others to dissect the many more falsehoods hidden in that work.
The CAGW fraud was obvious long before the ClimateGate1 emails appeared. By circa 2003 or 2004 I was certain that CAGW was a deliberate lie. It has been a difficult decade, as the scoundrels and imbeciles of CAGW squandered a trillion dollars of scarce global resources on an obvious fraud.
It appears the CAGW tide is turning, Not only is the world refusing to warm, but it may soon cool. I predicted imminent global cooling in a 2003 article, but I really hope I am wrong. Global cooling will not be good for humanity or the environment.
If global cooling is severe, mankind will suffer greatly, and ironically, we will be woefully unprepared – just one more legacy of the CAGW fraudsters.
pat says:
April 23, 2012 at 3:01 pm
China backs down too, which is putting a spanner in Australia’s emissions trading scheme dream:
24 April: Business Spectator: China delays plans for carbon trading scheme
Further details on China’s plans for a carbon trading scheme undermine Labor’s contention that Australia’s carbon pricing plan was necessary because other countries, like China, are also taking tough action on climate change, according to a report by The Australian Financial Review.
The details suggest that China’s plan, which has been delayed, won’t see energy companies directly taxed under its carbon trading scheme.
Plans to launch a national emissions trading scheme in 2015 have instead been delayed until at least 2016, according to the project’s top official….
http://www.businessspectator.com.au/bs.nsf/Article/China-delays-plans-for-carbon-trading-scheme-pd20120423-TMQ7B?OpenDocument&src=hp6
====================gee thanks for that one Pat,
only today on ABC National we had ??carr? over in china, telling us how they were making such big headway in renewables and how theyd sold US in aus so many direct drive Birdshredders as well. the full rave up on their big moves to carbon Ets etc..
well this blows that away:-)
So Monty, where were you and these other scientists when Lovelock was making the wildly alarmist claims? And where will you be when others continue to make them?
You silently take the benefits of the alarmism (power, recognition, government grants etc), you share the shame. At least Lovelock has shown some integrity.
I’ll certainly give him credit for publicly admitting that he was wrong. This is something sadly lacking in the climate change community.
Unfortunately Lovelock has written so much drivel in the past that it’s difficult to take him seriously.
Chris
> Sean McHugh says> So Monty, where were you and these other scientists when Lovelock was making the wildly alarmist claims?
Dunno about Monty, but I’ve already provided an answer to that
* me
* James Annan
This comment thread isn’t write-only, you know.