Global Warming Chorus Discord Rising To Feverish Pitch
By Larry Bell in Forbes
Some leading voices in the Global Warming Gospel Choir are now abandoning the old climate crisis hymnal. One is James Lovelock, the father of the “Gaia” theory that the entire Earth is a single living system who predicted that continued human CO2 emissions will bring about climate calamity. In 2006 he claimed: “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 climate remains tolerable.” Time magazine featured Lovelock as one of 13 “Heroes of the Environment” in a 2007 article (along with Al Gore, Mikhail Gorbachev and Robert Redford).
Recently, however, he has obviously cooled on global warming as a crisis, admitting to MSNBC that he overstated the case and now acknowledges that: “…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 pointed to Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” and Tim Flannery’s “The Weather Makers” as other alarmist publications.
The 92-year-old Lovelock went on to note, “…the climate is doing its usual tricks…there’s nothing much happening yet even though we were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now.” He added, “The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium. Twelve years is a reasonable time.” Yet the temperature “has stayed almost constant, whereas it should have been rising…carbon dioxide has been rising, no question about that.”
Fritz Vaherenholt, a socialist founder of Germany’s environmental movement who headed the renewable energy division of the country’s second largest utility company, has recently coauthored a new book titled “The Cold Sun: Why the Climate Disaster Won’t Happen”. In it he raises a man-made blizzard of criticism charging the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) with gross incompetence and dishonesty, most particularly regarding fear-mongering exaggeration of known climate influence of human CO2 emissions.
Dr. Vahrenholt’s distrust of the IPCC’s objectivity and veracity took root two years ago when he became an expert reviewer for their report on renewable energy. After discovering numerous errors, he reported those inaccuracies to IPCC officials, only to have them simply brushed aside. Stunned by this, he asked himself: “Is this the way they approached climate assessment reports?” He came to wonder: “…if the other IPCC reports on climate change were similarly sloppy.”
Read the full article by Larry Bell here at Forbes
It looks like a list is forming of big “climate science” names who have turned, if not skeptical, at least away from alarmism. It will be worth quoting when confronted yet again with the great number of departments and scientists “they can’t be all wrong” attitude. Surely more reporters in the MSM will start to take note and actually ask serious questions. It must be getting hard to keep looking the other way.
“if the other IPCC reports on climate change were similarly sloppy.”
We used to have a French humorist (Coluche) who has said
“En voila une question qu’elle est bonne ! ” (meaning this is a good question, in a very heavy countryside style, used by simple minded farmers who however have a good common sense)
Well, they have wrecked the economies of the West, they can go home now.
Thank goodness the majority of people still care more about money than the environment or supposed castastrophes….
Hitting them in the back pocket (wallet) is still the surest way to get someone to do anything.
Also, the related articles on the side are hilarious… example:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2012/04/29/hellfire-and-heresy-global-warming-hotheads-inflamed-about-skeptical-challengers/
“Author Michael Crichton articulated the essence of this creed in a 2003 speech whereby “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 from eating from the tree of knowledge; and as a result of our actions, there is a judgment day coming for all of us. We are energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment, just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs imbibe.””
Lovelock was and remains a loon. His opinions count for nothing to anyone in the debate, whether they’ve changed or not.
The right answer for the wrong–or not even wrong–reason is still wrong.
“We thought we knew 20 years ago.That led to some alarmist books . . . . but it hasn’t happened.”
That’s pretty rich for James Lovelock to say: if the Wiki entry is correct, his last book ‘The Vanishing Face of Gaia’ was published in 2009, and ‘The Revenge of Gaia’ in 2006, etc.,etc.
I don’t call that 20 years, I call that milking a worriesome scenario for all it’s worth until the game’s up.
At least 6 billion people will die this century anyway; what’s new?
Nice article Larry….. I enjoy reading you at Forbes.
Larry seems to have some of his dates wrong. 1900 should be 2000, and right after that a date of 2000 should be 2100.
I hope you guys stateside can access this.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01h666h
I really do find the BBC a most irritating socialist organisation, except for BBC radio four. This station is probably, no certainly is the most enlightened in the world.
James Lovelock on “life scientific” this evening was a joy to listen to. I even had to stop cycling home and park up at a field gate to make sure I did not miss one second of the interview.
Before this century is over billions of us WILL die. Overwhelmingly so because everyone born this year will be 88 years old by then.
Zac says:
May 8, 2012 at 3:27 pm
“James Lovelock on “life scientific” this evening was a joy to listen to. ”
Oi. He’s as creepy as it gets.
That is a great article. This passage is priceless
Too bad the EPA can not be nailed like that.
Zac says:
May 8, 2012 at 3:27 pm
“James Lovelock on “life scientific” this evening was a joy to listen to. ”
Oi. He’s as creepy as it gets.
But he was not the slightest bit creepy and made total sense. He is full on for nuclear power and described windmills as just as hazardous. Al Gore should be afraid, very afraid.
As others have noted, billions will die before the end of this century and I will undoubtedly be one of them.
What pees me off is that billions will die early because of energy poverty imposed by these cretins!
Zac! Lovelock is still creepy. I listened to that interview. He’s still tied to that stupid Gaia thing without realising that purely physical processes can explain what he describes. Water is the Gaia theory. It explains just about everything about why we’re not now boiling, despite a warming Sun. (See Willis’ thermostat.) He’s still alarmist although he’s pegged it back a few notches, what’s new?
DaveE.
At Jo Nova’s blog, there was mention of the German book (i.e. The Cold Sun) and I asked the following – perhaps someone here knows the answer?
“I was thinking about this the other day. Checking Google only gives hits from around the time of the time of the book release, talking of things like “a body blow to the German global warming movement”. Is anyone aware if the book and the newspaper articles at the time have had any impact on German (Austrian, Swiss, Liechtensteinian (?)) opinion on global warming / climate change?”
I don’t think we should underplay the public statements from Lovelock. This really is big news and if it had happened 3 years ago it would have made the MSM. The warmist squealers would have been reduced to lumping him with Dyson because of his age, unable as they are to counter his arguments.
I take it as a sign it is becoming reasonable to express caution and even doubt. Soon it will be de rigeur.
For what it is worth, I’m in the same category. By the mid-1990s I was sure we were frying the world and ready to accept major changes in our way of life to avert it. Only within the last five or six years, as I returned to look critically at the data, and evaluate the knowledge stances of various parties to the dispute, did I realize that there’s better science here on watt’s up than in the warmist camp. The difference between Lovelock (and, it would seem, Vaherenholt) and Michael Mann is that Lovelock is a real scientist. From what I can tell, Mann is a sham and a demagogue
As unpopular as it might make me in some present company, I’m still an environmentalist — although sobered by the fallacies that have infected the movement. To me one of the biggest follies of the global warming movement is that the backlash may cause us as a species to ignore *real* environmental crises, like overfishing of the oceans — which unlike global warming is a real and present danger with potentially catastrophic implications.
The Gaia theory is nearly as worthless as the human caused GW. A rock in the middle of space, turning into a living being, causing its own ice ages and warm periods, actually fanning the flames and creating life???…no need to look for science there. Pretty much anything the guy says is comprimised. Puny little humans, if concentrated together could all fit in the state of Texas, causing worldwide weather changes? Am I the only one who can see from 20, 000 miles? Yes, we can pump oil from some miles deep, will it last forever, no…if we pump at the same rate with 7% growth per year, we will pump the entire mass of the earth in 350 years…so no, there is not that much oil left. Am I being too simple, is the math that easy..seems like the infinite growth model of companies sort of hit the exponential math wall pretty quickly. What will we run out of first? Oil, rare earths, copper, I saw a story about bat guano, so is this what we call science these days?
DavidH says:
May 8, 2012 at 4:47 pm
“Is anyone aware if the book and the newspaper articles at the time have had any impact on German (Austrian, Swiss, Liechtensteinian (?)) opinion on global warming / climate change?””
The interests of the population here are at the moment:
1) When will the Euro collapse and how do I prepare
2) Nuclear power is evil. Great that we have switched off half of the nukes.
3) What was our wedding anniversary again?
….
999) Global Warming.
Steveo says:
May 8, 2012 at 6:00 pm
“Am I being too simple, is the math that easy..seems like the infinite growth model of companies sort of hit the exponential math wall pretty quickly. ”
You should read something by Ray Kurzweil. kurzweilai.net . He’s been analyzing exponential trends for ages and will happily tell you that they all go into saturation, turning into a sigma shaped curve after a while. Only to be supplanted by new technologies that are still in their early exponential ramp-up. BTW, no company plans to grow infinitely. I don’t know if you know any people who actually run companies but the ones I learned to know aren’t blithering idiots.
DavidH says:
May 8, 2012 at 4:47 pm
Check here for full updates on European Climate Change news in English written by an English speaking German:
http://notrickszone.com/
Enjoy!
Kaboom says:
May 8, 2012 at 3:28 pm
Before this century is over billions of us WILL die. Overwhelmingly so because everyone born this year will be 88 years old by then.
Ah, but this is The Great Shift of the Ages. Whether this is the time predicted by sundry religions for millennia can be debated, but science has discovered telomerase and hormone releasing factors and antioxidants and so on, so aging is becoming optional or a thing of the past.
The limits on human well-being and growth are
1) truth challenges
2) wars and ancient hatreds.
3) feeding everybody. ALL food comes from the reduction of carbon dioxide. With Sonic Bloom (R) and permaculture, among other things, the technology is here. Births peaked a dozen years ago, so are not really much of a factor. But the global warmist liars threaten human and animal life with their dishonest crap. It is not just economics,but your very life that you are fighting for here.
gregole says:
May 8, 2012 at 6:15 pm
“Check here for full updates on European Climate Change news in English written by an English speaking German:”
Pierre is in fact an American expat married to a German wife.
You are a truth seeker, that is all we care about. Depending on your definition of an “environmentalist”, I dare say, most of us are environmentalists. How can we not be? Everyone cares about our environment. How we achieve proper balance is where disagreement arises. Most here are realistic environmentalists or rather environment realists. Follow the data that’s all anyone can ask. GK
The climate scientists who predicted doom will now have to find a way to “ease” out of what they said while still maintaining their title of “scientist”. If I was one of them, I’d say something like this: “At one point the science was telling us that things were looking very bleak for the Earth’s future environment. However, new data is telling us something different. Does that mean we were engaged in hoodwinking the public? Absolutely not! We were simply following the science. The fact that we’ve changed our minds now, based on the new scientific data, means that we are indeed “true” scientists. That’s something our denier friends never understood. This has been a wonderful 25 years for science and our most shining example since we discovered that Piltdown Man was a fraud”.
rstritmatter says:
May 8, 2012 at 5:56 pm
As unpopular as it might make me in some present company, I’m still an environmentalist — although sobered by the fallacies that have infected the movement. To me one of the biggest follies of the global warming movement is that the backlash may cause us as a species to ignore *real* environmental crises, like overfishing of the oceans — which unlike global warming is a real and present danger with potentially catastrophic implications.
————–
Many of us here are environmentalists and share your sentiments, and share your dismay that so much money has been squandered on fake science whilst real problems abound. I’m always glad to see recognition of overfishing as a major environmental problem. It’s a travesty that whilst climate scientists have been given money to scare people with, underfunded fisheries biologists are trying to grapple with huge issues in fish population fluctuations. Illustrative of their problems are the facts that the supposedly well-managed Pacific haddock stocks are plummeting; yet the Sockeye salmon, which were hovering on the endangered list for commercial species, experienced a record run in 2010. Like climate scientists, fisheries biologists simply have not got a handle on how the natural systems work, let alone how human activities are affecting fish populations. Unlike climate science, however, the issues they are dealing with are not bogus.
The word “environmentalist” has become a dirty word. Too many political quacks have sullied the once pristine topic. I mean, once you speak of your fellow man as “vermin,” you are going to have a hard time winning any sort of sainthood. When I get to the Pearly Gates, I doubt I’ll confess I ever called myself an “environmentalist.” Instead I’ll call myself a “naturalist.”
Regarding the side-topic of fisheries, I’ve noticed “fisheries biologists” can have the same problems “climate scientists” have, though the funding hasn’t bred the same degree of corruption. They have a bad habit of looking down their noses at fishermen, when the fishermen actually have hands-on experience no college classroom can give a man.
If “fisheries biologists” want to do something other than alienate fishermen, they ought do something that works. Unfortunately all they have done fails to work. They blame over-fishing, and fishermen, but cut-backs on cod fishing haven’t made the slightest difference in cod populations. Not even a blip. So, do they then confess they had it wrong? And maybe shouldn’t have blamed (and disregarded) the fishermen? Nope.
Why not? I imagine they fear they might lose their funding, if they confess they haven’t a clue why cod fish populations don’t recover.
They ought try out some new idea, like floating ocean hatcheries. After all, a female cod fish lays four million eggs. The first week of a codfish’s life has them the size of plankton, getting eaten by fellow plankton. If “fisheries biologists” could get a couple batches of four million eggs through that first week alive, and uneaten, then they might actually make a difference in fish populations, for a change. Fishermen might even like them.
It sure would do more than hopelessly whining about fishermen all the time. I think it the hopeless whining that defines “environmentalists” as defeatists, and unhelpful, and in some cases headed straight to hell.
Zac, BBC Radio 4 WAS the best radio station to listen to, but it’s become a joke in so many ways. They’re obsessed with sport, religion, Anne Atkins, Ian McMillan, Bejamin Zephrenia, oh and climate change.
Did my last comment get grabbed by the spam filter? If so, what bad word did I use?
[ Fished it out. My guess would be the hades reference. -ModE ]
Interesting to note that despite LoveLock’s status as the godfather of green, the way the Guardain and other environmental friendly media have totally failed to mention his recent views , well the BBC have just picked up on this but very quietly. Does anyone think if he gone the other way and pushed the panic button the same press would have been this silent?
Yet all the environmentalists can’t stop the imminent extinction of the Rhino. Pathetic.
Yes of course our stewardship of the Earth leaves a lot to be desired, yes we should do better/try harder. But in doing so we shouldn’t overlook the fact that some earth-raping activities are not quite as disastrous as is often presented – exhausted mining areas can be restored; trees having been felled, does not mean a new forest cannot be grown etc etc. And while we should be wary of the wickedness of big oil/mining/timber, we shouldn’t forget that they do what they do always with the connivance of local governments. The more the eco-loons overstate their case, in respect of climate as well as other environmental issues, the more likely they are to create perverse outcomes. An atmosphere of hysteria is not a solid basis for good stewardship.
The comments by James Lovelock DID make it into the Toronto Sun and other places. See
http://www.torontosun.com/2012/04/27/apocalypse-postponed
“Apocalypse postponed
The godfather of global warming says he, and Al Gore, have been ‘alarmist’ about its effects”
It is called “saving face”.
Who will be the first to take the Japanese solution to dishonour and where will they get the samarui sword ?
No comment.