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
I can hear 2,000 keyboards being clicked to prove good old Lovelock wrong. My God, he’s a treacherous, hell-ridden turncoat, a deserter of the good cause! He’s even ceased sweating away during the sweltering winters we were told to experience!
Anyway, I’ll ask my loving granny to knit a few more pairs of the best socks ever derived from virgin wool … just to be on the safe side in case Love
joylock recants.As you know, brethren in Christ: You never know with these guys. 🙂
Lovelock is back with a new position, not out of a realisation that his previous pronouncements were ridiculous, but because of his new book.
You can’t sell a new book saying the same as the last. Spouting alarmist nonsense in the earlier book gave him lots of attention. Abruptly changing his position will provide him with more media attention.
He was an idiot before… I doubt he’s “recovered”.
@wmconnolley says: April 23, 2012 at 3:26 pm
using Tamino as a source? You merely demonstrated your incompetence to edit Wikipedia – and proved the posters point. If it is in Tamino – it is wrong.
Maybe said recanter has been watching sea ice graphs. The catastrophic, anthropogenic, canary-in-the-mine, tipping point, downward sea ice spiral so often pictured with stranded “poor lil’ poley bars” appears to be reversing its spiral back the other way. It’s almost as if Gaia wanted us to run around screaming that the sky was falling just so she could say “syke”.
I see the Warmist spinmeisters are busy spinning and moving goal posts:
“Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring and attribution at the U.K.’s respected Met Office Hadley Centre, agreed Lovelock had been too alarmist with claims about people having to live in the Arctic by 2100.
And he also agreed with Lovelock that the rate of warming in recent years had been less than expected by the climate models.
However, Stott said this was a short-term trend that could be within the natural range of variation and it would need to continue for another 10 years or so before it could be considered evidence that something was missing from climate models.”
In their fevered imaginations, this is just a lull. The warming is on a coffee break, taking a breather, and will be back later, stronger than ever. Anything to keep the CAGW gravy train chugging along just a bit further, at least until retirement. Imagine the legacy they are building for themselves.
Lovelock has said many things in the past, many of them crazy, such as climate alarmism he has been ramping for over a decade now.
But Connolley is introducing his own fallacy here. Sometimes brilliant people say crazy things. Sometimes crazy people say brilliant things. Each statement must be assessed on its merits, and we should not dismiss (or accept) one thing because another thing they said was crazy (or brilliant).
In this instance, we can all agree that Lovelock’s climate alarmism was unfounded (well except for some diehard enviros, I guess). But that doesn’t make his most recent statements crazy or irrational at all. If we are being objective, we should assess each comment on its merits; and Lovelock’s latest are actually pretty reasonable. Which I accept is unusual for him, but all the same: he’s right here.
Connolley hypes sea ice in the same way Al Gore hyped hurricanes. North Atlantic hurricanes spiked up in 04/05 so Gore (at many climate scientists) cherry picked and claimed a link. That link is now long since debunked by Maue, so the alarmists move on to the next data set that has spiked – this time, sea ice spiked down around 07/08. With moderate probability, in five years time the sea ice meme will look as stupid as the hurricane meme does now. The alarmists will have moved on to whichever data set looks most anomalous, but by then they will have long lost the general public.
Connolley doesn’t get that. Tamino doesn’t get that. And they never will, because their advocacy blinds them to it.
“Holy Dingbats, Batman! Lovelock has connected the dots!”
“Quickly, Robin! Launch the ad hominem missiles!”
“Shall I fire up the solar-powered Batbus?”
“Great green boondoggles, no, Robin! We must throw him under a bus that runs faster than he does.”
> Spence_UK says> But Connolley is introducing his own fallacy here…
Dunno what fallacy you’re attributing to me. I certainly didn’t say what you’re claiming.
> Connolley hypes sea ice
You don’t know what you’re talking about. Try http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2011/06/betting_on_sea_ice_10000.php (and actually read it before replying).
There seem to be quite a few “skeptics” here dissing Lovelock for past sins. Odd that I’ve never seen many of these skeptics here before. I suspect at least some of them are gleicking.
wmconnolley seems to believe in warming “pipelines”. They “know” it’s there, somewhere, just waiting to jump out at us and say boo! Maybe if they click their heels together and wish hard enough, it will happen.
James Lovelock was an idiot before and remains an idiot now. He is able to change his mind so quickly because there is so little in it. Even though he now speaks an obvious truth, I wouldn’t bother lisening too much to him.
Icarus62 is correct, but for the wrong reasons. There has been no decrease in anthropogenic global warming because as far as our data show, the rate still remains at zero, where it has always been since the inception of this nonsense. The data are inconclusive for any truly GLOBAL warming at all, let alone anthropogenic warming. I applaud Dr. Lovelock for remaining true to our older professional ethical standards and telling the truth as his data and his impartial analysis thereof lead him to see it.
He got the money then, who cares now…
An alarmist fruitcake becomes a skeptical fruitcake. Except for propaganda purpose, I see nothing of benefit here as I am not in favor of science propaganda for any reason, cause or agenda. It is evidence of nothing. Reality simply IS. It is enough. GK
Old Shooter says:
because as far as our data show, the rate still remains at zero, where it has always been since the inception of this nonsense.
Henry says
sorry man.
even that statement I now find wanting.
I checked it out myself. Technically we are cooling, if I look at it averaged globally,
actually already since 1994…
http://www.letterdash.com/henryp/global-cooling-is-here
We have cooled about 0.2 degrees in the past 12 years.
Spence_UK says:
April 24, 2012 at 6:37 am
Pragmatic, logical, fair. You’ve schooled a few with that post. Thank you.
HenryP says:> Technically we are cooling, if I look at it averaged globally, actually already since 1994
Only if you have a truely weird defn of “cooling”: http://woodfortrees.org/plot/wti/from:1994/plot/wti/from:1994/trend/plot/uah/from:1994/plot/uah/from:1994/trend
As an “old school” Green and systems designer I’ve always had a soft spot for Jim Lovelock and the concept of a homeostatic planet. I him at a “Revenge of Gaia” talk he gave here in Cornwall 4 or 5 years ago, and it was actually the shock of what he said in that talk which first got me interested in Global Warming, and then through Icecap and WUWT I found that not everyone agreed with it, which led me to want to find out more directly myself. So, FWIW, you can pretty much thank Lovelock directly as the root cause of the creation of WoodForTrees 🙂
As what you might call a scientific Gaia-ite – that is, believing that ecosystems can evolve homeostasis as well as species (sorry, Dawkins, I part company with you there) – one of the reasons I felt uncomfortable with Lovelock’s predictions of calamity was that it seemed to go against the whole idea of stable negative feedbacks which is the core of the Gaia concept. But one thing he said in that talk got me seriously worried, and that worry hasn’t gone away.
The problem is, he pointed out, is we are destroying the negative feedback mechanisms themselves; for example, through deforestation and soil loss we are removing the capacity both to regulate the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and cloud seeding from bacteria and evapotranspiration. So negative feedbacks may well be saving us now, but may not survive forever if we keep sabotaging them. That to me suggests that all those traditional Green issues are still worth thinking about…
Best wishes
Paul
It is true that “Billions will die by the end of this century”. Old age and what.
Are you saying that Bill is an optimist? Digging into the pile of poop, all the while proclaiming “I know there is a pony in there somewhere”? 😉
wmconnoley says:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/04/23/breaking-james-lovelock-back-down-on-climate-alarm/#comment-965838
Henry says
so, in your graphs, where are the red and blue trendlines?
Are you saying my sample was not random?
http://www.letterdash.com/henryp/global-cooling-is-here
Yeah, I gathered that.
I didn’t quote you, so I didn’t make any explicit claim about what you did or did not say. I explained in some detail the anatomy of the spin in your commentary, which is more about context. Nice red herring though.
woodfortrees (Paul Clark) says: April 24, 2012 at 7:45 am
The problem is, he (Lovelock) pointed out, is we are destroying the negative feedback mechanisms themselves; for example, through deforestation and soil loss we are removing the capacity both to regulate the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and cloud seeding from bacteria and evapotranspiration. So negative feedbacks may well be saving us now, but may not survive forever if we keep sabotaging them. That to me suggests that all those traditional Green issues are still worth thinking about…
__________
Hello Paul,
Without necessarily agreeing with Lovelock and his concepts, which I have not studied, I can agree with you that “traditional Green issues are still worth thinking about”.
The problem is that valid environmentalism has been hijacked for political and financial gain by the global warming alarmist movement. The real environmental issues have not gone away – some are getting better and many are getting worse.
Meanwhile, the radical environmental movement has diverted political focus to fantasies like catastrophic manmade global warming (CAGW) and real, serious social and environmental issues have been left in the dust.
deliciouslygrey says: @ur momisugly April 23, 2012 at 4:26 pm
….Icarus62: “Also, greenhouse gases are accumulating in the atmosphere faster than ever.” If you are looking at the Keeling Curve of the rise in concentration, you may be mixing up rate of increase and concentration. Interestingly, with 2011 likely being the year with the highest rate of CO2 production from fossil fuels (2010 was the previous high), the rate of increase was 1.88 ppmv/yr for 2011, last I checked. This is essentially the rate of CO2 increase that Hansen et al proposed for Scenario B (holding emissions at 1988 levels). Yet, global emissions have increased from 6.0 to 9.1 GtC/yr. What gives?
__________________________________
My WAG is plants.
Given decent growing conditions (water, fertilizer, sunlight & temp) the limiting factor on plant growth seems to be CO2. That is why greenhouses use 1000ppm or higher. The wheat experiment seems to indicate the plants will suck down as much CO2 as they can grab lowering the ambient CO2 to the point where the amount is too low for use ~ 250 -300 ppm. Wheat is the less efficient C3 type of plant. In C4 plants photosynthesis is 6 times faster than in C3 plants. C4 plants use a reaction way called C4 way. This reaction is followed by C3 way. The C4 way provides more CO2 to the C3 way.
CAM plants also use C3 and C4 ways. The difference is that the stomata of CAM plants are opened during night and CO2 is stored for use during the day. C4 plants are more efficient at fixing carbon dioxide under conditions of high light and temperature… One aspect of C4 plants is a specialized leaf anatomy, where mesophyll cells (light green) surround bundle-sheath cells (dark green)… The mesophyll cells contain a CO2 “pump”, which concentrate carbon-dioxide in the bundle-sheath cells
Experimental results show corn plants (C4) seem to be able to suck CO2 down to levels of about 265 ppm during the day depending on the height above the plant. http://eprints.nwisrl.ars.usda.gov/482/1/60.pdf
If Callender was correct and the earth was originally at 270ppm before we started burning fossil fuels, I am sure the plants are thanking us for providing them with a much needed nutrient.
James Lovelock wins Observer lifetime achievement at ethical awards
Originator of the Gaia theory honoured at Observer Ethical Awards
(2011)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jun/10/james-lovelock-observer-lifetime-achievement-award