I’ve never done a double feature before where our Climate Craziness of the Week and Quote of the Week are one and the same. 350.org’s Bill McKibben gets this unique honor.
From the what universe does Bill McKibben live in department? While going on about heat waves, he comes up with the ultimate “I don’t understand science” zinger. How long before people stop listening to this guy? I would not have believed he’d be disturbed enough to write this if I hadn’t read it as a direct quote written by his own hand.
Hat tip to Tom Nelson.
Here’s the quote, its “Big Oil” irrationality on steroids:
…this industry, and this industry alone, holds the power to change the physics and chemistry of our planet , and they’re planning to use it. – 350.org’s Bill McKibben
I’m reminded of this:
Source: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708473/quotes?qt=qt0198370
Here’s some excerpts from McKibben’s Rolling Stone article:
Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math | Politics News | Rolling Stone
warmest May on record for the Northern Hemisphere – the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe.
…
Scientists estimate that humans can pour roughly 565 more gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by midcentury and still have some reasonable hope of staying below two degrees. (“Reasonable,” in this case, means four chances in five, or somewhat worse odds than playing Russian roulette with a six-shooter.)
…”The new data provide further evidence that the door to a two-degree trajectory is about to close,” said Fatih Birol, the IEA’s chief economist. In fact, he continued, “When I look at this data, the trend is perfectly in line with a temperature increase of about six degrees.” That’s almost 11 degrees Fahrenheit, which would create a planet straight out of science fiction.
…
We have five times as much oil and coal and gas on the books as climate scientists think is safe to burn. We’d have to keep 80 percent of those reserves locked away underground to avoid that fate…Most of us are fundamentally ambivalent about going green: We like cheap flights to warm places, and we’re certainly not going to give them up if everyone else is still taking them. Since all of us are in some way the beneficiaries of cheap fossil fuel, tackling climate change has been like trying to build a movement against yourself – it’s as if the gay-rights movement had to be constructed entirely from evangelical preachers, or the abolition movement from slaveholders.
…Given this hard math, we need to view the fossil-fuel industry in a new light. It has become a rogue industry, reckless like no other force on Earth. It is Public Enemy Number One to the survival of our planetary civilization. “Lots of companies do rotten things in the course of their business – pay terrible wages, make people work in sweatshops – and we pressure them to change those practices,” says veteran anti-corporate leader Naomi Klein, who is at work on a book about the climate crisis. “But these numbers make clear that with the fossil-fuel industry, wrecking the planet is their business model. It’s what they do.”…this industry, and this industry alone, holds the power to change the physics and chemistry of our planet, and they’re planning to use it.
…
There’s not a more reckless man on the planet than Tillerson…In December, BP finally closed its solar division. Shell shut down its solar and wind efforts in 2009. The five biggest oil companies have made more than $1 trillion in profits since the millennium – there’s simply too much money to be made on oil and gas and coal to go chasing after zephyrs and sunbeams.
…Until a quarter-century ago, almost no one knew that CO2 was dangerous…if their college’s endowment portfolio has fossil-fuel stock, then their educations are being subsidized by investments that guarantee they won’t have much of a planet on which to make use of their degree. …we have met the enemy and they is Shell.
No, Bill, its you, and you may very well be insane. Get help.
Jay says:
July 19, 2012 at 1:21 pm
LOL! I missed that, thanks! That’s why they teach journalists at school to never ever use numbers.
McKibbles and Bits statistical background is evidently limited to coin-flipping probability.
DirkH
Bill obviously meant the chance/probability of the consecutive hot months was 10 to the minus 99 (very small), but due to his lack of mathematical training (or foaming at the mouth) , he mistakenly conflates that with the number of stars.
His lack of understanding of correlated data aside, what he meant to say is there is one chance in 10 to the +99, which is greater than the number of stars.
Using McKibben mathematics every graduate of the government-education industry’s public-funded dropout factories will lower the average IQ and per capita GDP.
The number of stars in the universe as 10E80 is from Eddington’s Large Number Hypothesis, itself an expansive version of Dirac’s LNH. See perhaps Barrow and Tipler’s The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (1998 Oxford)
What Scotty actually said.
“Ye canny birl the lozzafiziks.”
I get all my physics from the Rolling Stone, and all my music from the Geophysical Research Letters.
Well at least ole’ Bill got that one correct (GRIN)
The Climate Research Unit (CRU) in the UK was set up in 1971 with funding from Shell and BP. As of 2008 it was still funded by Shell, and BP… from James Delingpole link
Muller & Associates has as an advisor “Marlan Downey, ” who is the former President of the international subsidiary of Shell Oil…..” http://www.mullerandassociates.com/marlandowney.php (Muller is part of the BEST fiasco.)
Even more interesting is a VP of Shell, Ged Davis, is evident in a Climategate e-mail. He wrote Sustainable Development Scenerio (B1) and was connected to the IPCC and the United Nations. see my old comment on the connections.
Here is some more info on Ged that I just found.
And another bio
GEE there is good old LSE and Stanford University again busy rearranging our lives for us.
So it certainly looks like Bill McKibben got one thing correct but I doubt that he had this particular set of information in mind. (snicker)
Just to throw a spanner into the discussion, say I was trying to grow blueberries and planted them in 75% peat and they thrived. The following year, say, I worked a few pounds of powered chalk into the soil at the base of each plant. That would change the pH of the soil and the blueberries would not like that. One might say I or the chalk changed the chemistry of the soil. I’ll let you work out your own physics example.
Nevertheless, I do think Bill Mc. is beyond help and would do his cause the most good by simply shutting up.
Arrgh. You don’t pay attention. Bill McKibben never suggested we could ‘change physics’. Of course we can’t.
“the fossil-fuel industry […], and this industry alone, holds the power to change the physics […] of our planet”
That much power, you see, is only held by them, and them alone.
REPLY: Oh, please. Us/we/them whoever, nobody can change the physics.
Bill McKibben
The real 1970 Pogo quote was:
…this industry, and this industry alone, holds the power to change the physics and chemistry of our planet , and they’re planning to use it. –
Is he talking about the chemical make up of the atmosphere, or the laws of nature? If the latter, well they were fixed before he arrived on the scene.
Jeremiah 33
New International Version (NIV)
25 This is what the Lord says: ‘If I have not made my covenant with day and night and established the laws of heaven and earth,
I see that McKibben is now affiliated with the renamed Schumacher Society–http://neweconomicsinstitute.org/organizations
The initiative to reorganize society and the economy around sustainability has these people redefining science as a social process among scientists instead of a body of knowledge. That was supposed to quietly become a practice that would change how future voters thought. Not become a topic of conversation on internationally accessible blogs by people also wondering why IPCC cooked the books and the models reject reality.
Nobody was supposed to actually read those Planet under Pressure policy briefs and then start looking up the unknown acronyms. Plus Corporations are groups of people not doing business in their own name. It’s not hard to find out who is involved once you know the names. I get they made the Beverly Forum an informal lobby of funders for a reason. Then don’t issue a Challenge announcing your transformative intentions.
Print literacy may be an area of deliberate deemphasis now in education but we are not a nation or world of illiterates yet. We can still follow a trail of evidence and recognize a first rate political power grab and rent seeking scheme when we see it. Hopefully in time although Big Business still believes it can push this agenda alone according to the advocacy book Capitalism at the Crossroads.
What concerns me is the number of college campuses this man speaks at. Where the students feel and believe what this man says and his very presence on campus adds legitimacy to what he says.
What if he teams up with the Capitalism at the Crossroads author? Who there will recognize the nonsense being spun into gold speaking fees.
Yes, a mind is a terrible thing to waste. Worse still, is that he wastes it in our general direction.
birl
I know I shouldn’t laugh at the mentally infirm but in this case I couldn’t help it, My apologies.
Re: 3.7 x 10-99, it could be that someone was using the “-” symbol in place of the more conventional “^” [“to the power of”]. I wouldn’t crucify the user for using the minus sign…..
IanM
Temperatures have been rising steadily since the end of the little ice age with the exception of the last 15 years in which they have been essentially flat.
And this genius actually finds it surprising that the current temperatures are above the average for the 20th century.
Man, these guys can’t even do simple, grade school level statistics.
Argh! Someone put a blanket over his cage, he’s giving me a headache…
” – the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99″
Whenever someone refers to the odds of an event occurring “randomly” or “by simple chance” without specifying the assumptions and parameters of the stochastic model they are comparing against you can simply ignore them for the rambling idiot that they are demonstrating themselves to be.
Here, McKibben repeats the errors of last week’s NCDC/Jeff Masters affair: Assuming that temps have no autocorrelation, comparing against the ‘no climate change whatsoever’ strawman, falsely claiming that refuting the strawman proves the CAGW claim, etc, etc, etc.
Given the repetition, it would appear that this ‘new math’ meme is the new warmist propaganda strategy. It is terrifying, but not for anything climatological. The scary part is the abject innumeracy of the activists and the sheople they are influencing with these lies.
McKibben writes science fiction so the cartoon from the 1960’s Star Trek over the top appropriate. Even discredited religious leaders have followers. His major short coming is a very poor plot line.
I went all the way WUWT for some substantial counter-analysis of McKibben’s piece in Rolling Stone and all I got was a partial quote, excerpts and zero meaningful commentary from Watts beyond, “Jeesh, that McKibben – what a bozo!”
Later in the article McKibben writes, “If people come to understand the cold, mathematical truth – that the fossil-fuel industry is systematically undermining the planet’s physical systems – it might weaken it enough to matter politically.”
See that part about “physical systems?” I suspect that was the tree he was barking up because, well, if you look up the definition of “physics” you’ll find it can include gems like “The behavior of a given physical system, especially as understood by a physical theory.” That’s from the American heritage dictionary. You can find similar elements of the definition elsewhere too.
So, Anthony, his use of the word “physics” is applicable. Now get off your duff and do some real work debunking his spiel!
Steve C says:
July 19, 2012 at 1:04 pm
To acknowledge Rolling Stone’s roots … far out, man.
AND Naomi Klein “at work on a book about the climate crisis”.
Can’t wait!
—————-
Yeah Naomi. Another climate expert chimes in.
/sarc
I laughed so hard I had tears in my eyes. I thought I was beyond laughing about Climate Silliness… Thank you Bill McKibben!
What can we do to help the guy continue to produce this priceless material for now and future comedians?
Wow, what a loony tune. If BIG OIL can change the laws of physics and chemistry then I suggest they start more fundamentally with mathematics. I would like them to change mortgage amortization so that the bank pays me.