Note: if the name below is familiar to you it is because of this article from Monday. This will be a sticky post for a day or two, new stories will appear below this one– Anthony
Guest essay by Jonathan Abbott
Please allow me to recount the details of my personal path to CAGW scepticism. I have never previously found myself at odds with the scientific mainstream and at times it feels quite odd. Perhaps others here have similar experiences? I am curious to know how fellow-readers came to their current views. If some have gone from genuine scepticism to accepting CAGW, I would find that especially fascinating.
My own story begins at school in England in the early 80s. Between playing with Bunsen burners and iron filings, I remember being told that some scientists predicted that we would soon enter a new ice age. This sounded quite exciting but I never really thought it would happen; I was too young then to have seen any significant change in the world around me and it all seemed rather far-fetched. A nuclear war seemed far more likely. Soon enough the whole scare melted away.
I grew up into a graduate engineer with an interest in most branches of science but especially physics. I read the usual books by Sagan, Feynman and later Dawkins (whose The Ancestor’s Tale I simply can’t recommend highly enough). I also dipped into philosophy via Bertrand Russell. I like to think this reading helped build upon the basic capabilities for critical thinking my education had provided.
I suppose it was in the early 90s that I first noticed predictions of global warming and the associated dire warnings of calamities to come. Some of these emanated from the Met Office and so I knew should be treated with a pinch of salt but other sources included NASA, which I then personally still very much respected; despite the space shuttle evidently being the wrong concept poorly executed, their basic scientific expertise seemed unquestionable. In general I was looking forward to the warmer climate predicted for the UK, and assumed that the overall effects for the globe wouldn’t necessarily all be bad.
Now, being English I knew all about the vagaries of the weather, but the warnings about CAGW always seemed to be made in the most certain terms. Was it really possible to predict the climate so assuredly? The global climate must be an extremely complex system, and very chaotic. I had recently heard about financial institutions that were spending vast sums of money and picking the very best maths and programming graduates, but still were unable to predict the movements of financial markets with any confidence. Predicting changes to the climate must be at least as difficult, surely? I bet myself climate scientists weren’t being recruited with the sort of signing-on bonuses dangled by Wall Street. I also thought back to the ice age scare, which was not presented as an absolute certainty. Why the unequivocal certainty now that we would only see warming, and to dangerous levels? It all started to sound implausible.
The whole thing also seemed uncertain on the simple grounds of common sense. Could mankind really force such a fundamental change in our environment, and so quickly? I understood that ice ages could come and go with extreme rapidity, and that following the scare of my childhood, no one seriously claimed to be able to predict them. So in terms of previous natural variability, CAGW was demonstrably minor in scale. It seemed obvious that if natural variability suddenly switched to a period of cooling, there would be no CAGW no matter what the effect of mankind on the atmosphere. Even more fundamentally, how could anyone really be certain that the warming then taking place wasn’t just natural variability anyway? The reports I read assured me it wasn’t, but rarely in enough detail to allow me to decide whether I agreed with the data or not.
The other thing that really got me thinking was seeing the sort of people that would appear on television, proselyting about the coming tragedy that it would imminently become too late to prevent. Whether from charities, pressure groups or the UN, I knew I had heard their strident and political use of language, and their determination to be part of the Great Crusade to Save the World before. These were the CND campaigners, class war agitators and useful fools for communism in a new guise. I suddenly realised that after the end of the Cold War, rather than slinking off in embarrassed fashion to do something useful, they had latched onto a new cause. The suggested remedies I heard them espouse were always socialist in approach, requiring the installation of supra-national bodies, always taking a top-down approach and furiously spending other peoples’ money. They were clearly eager participants in an endless bureaucratic jamboree.
Now don’t get me wrong: a scientific theory is correct or not regardless of who supports it. But recognising the most vocal proponents of CAGW for what they were set alarm bells ringing, and made me want to investigate further. I had always been somewhat sympathetic towards Friends of the Earth but much less so towards Greenpeace, by that time obviously a front for luddite socialism and basically shamanistic in outlook. I had deep personal concerns about the environment, having seen reports of terrible industrial pollution in developing countries and the former Eastern Bloc. I had also sailed across the Atlantic twice in a small yacht, and seen for myself floating plastic debris hundreds of miles from land. (I also saw an ‘eco warrior’ yacht in Antigua, lived on by a crusading hippy and daubed with environmental slogans. It was poorly maintained and leaked far more oil into the water than any other boat present.)
So I was quite passionate about the environment, but my focus was on keeping it clean and safe for all life to live in. I wanted people to stop overfishing and manage fish stocks sensibly, I wanted agricultural land to produce the best long-term yields possible, to provide enough food without encroaching on wilderness and wild spaces. I wanted people everywhere to have clean air to breathe and water to drink. I had hoped that the CAGW crusade would somehow also lead to more urgent progress in fighting pollution, and the other environmental issues I cared about. If anything it did the reverse. Why the absolute fixation on reducing CO2 emissions, why was it taken for granted that this was the only way to proceed? Where was the public debate about the balance between prevention and mitigation? The CAGW protagonists always came up with solutions that were anti-industrial, anti-development and always, always required more public money. Where was the encouragement for inventors and entrepreneurs to discover and develop new technologies? And most of all, why oh why not spend some of the huge sums of money thrown at CO2 instead on getting effective pollution controls enacted in developing countries?
It had become quite clear to me that the BBC and similar media organisations would never even discuss whether the science underpinning CAGW was really robust. It had simply become a truism. An occasional doubting voice would be offered a sliver of airtime in the interests of supposed impartiality, but a proponent of CAGW would always be allowed the (much longer) last word. But, if NASA kept having to adjust their course calculations as the Voyager probes entered the outer reaches of the solar system (an utterly trivial problem compared to the complexities of the global climate), how could the science possibly be settled as claimed? Surely the great joy of science is in admitting ignorance, in taking a finely honed theory and sharpening it still further, or even better in realising a fundamental mistake and stepping aside onto a new path? The claimed certainty itself seemed unscientific.
Then in 2007 I saw a trailer on television for the forthcoming documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle. I watched it excitedly, for here finally were people publicly addressing the science and the data, but drawing alternative conclusions to the mainstream. There was none of the usual hand-waving and appeals to trust the experts, who magically seemed to be the only doubt-free scientists in recorded history. The backlash against the program told its own story too, being mainly outraged appeals to authority and conscience.
Having recently become a regular user of the internet, I started digging around looking for more information and so, soon after he started it, I found Warren Meyer’s excellent web site climate-skeptic.com. Oh, the joy! Here were links to data I could see and evaluate myself; here was critical dissection of reports and papers accepted elsewhere without demur. From there, I moved onto WUWT, Bishop Hill, Climate Audit and all the other sites that have become part of my daily round of the internet whenever I have access. However late to the party compared with many regulars at WUWT, I could now see fully both sides of the argument.
When the Climategate emails were released, some further scales fell from my eyes. I had hitherto assumed that most of the most prominent scientists supporting CAGW were well intentioned but wrong, akin to those opposing the theory of continental drift. I have taken part in many lengthy email exchanges concerning technically complex projects, and instantly recognised familiar methods used by those playing the political and bureaucratic game, for whom the data is infinitely malleable in order to reach a pre-determined goal. I had fought against this kind of factual distortion myself.
Now at this point, I am sure some (perhaps many?) readers are thinking, ‘Great, an inside view of how someone becomes a believer in a conspiracy theory, perhaps I’ll base a research paper on this idiot’. My response is that like most people I have at times stumbled upon the real conspiracy theory nuts lurking on the internet. But on WUWT and other CAGW-sceptic sites criticism of the position of the website founder isn’t just tolerated but often encouraged. ‘Prove us wrong! Please! It would be fascinating!’ There are many articles and views published on WUWT that I treat with suspicion, or even downright disagree with, but it is all stimulating and usually well argued. Plus, I am an experienced professional engineer and know what real science looks like, and when people are misusing it as a smokescreen. Neil Armstrong was a great man, and most certainly did land on the moon. Right or wrong, WUWT is a site that considers real scientific issues.
So I now find myself wondering where we go from here. The global climate will continue to change, as it has always done, and although I tend to expect some cooling I am pretty agnostic about it. Nature will assuredly do its own thing. The CAGW scare is in the process of burning out, but I do not expect an outright or imminent collapse. I hope to see the deliberate manipulators of data punished, but doubt very much it will ever come to that. Whatever happens next, it will undoubtedly be interesting, and stimulate much discussion and widely varying viewpoints. This is good news, because it means that we are back to doing science.
I am an academic and have been around for a while. While the specifics of climate science are outside my field of interest, I have seen this kind of the unethical behavior several times before. That was the trigger for me.
My story appears to be a common one. I am a science graduate, reading Natural Sciences (mostly Earth Sciences with some physics) in the mid 1990s. At that time there was increasing concern that human burning of fossil fuel was causing the atmospheric proportion of CO2 to rise and that this would trap heat and warm the climate. At the time it was not a source of great concern in the Earth Sciences department of a world-class university, more of curiosity.
When the whole idea started to develop exponentially in politics and news media I was busy in my career, but generally accepted that there was an issue and that it was worth using fuels with caution. However as the advocates used more and more hyperbole I started to take notice. Not because I was worried, but because of the obvious over-excitement.
We were constantly told that the evidence showed CAGW, that the debate was over. Every time I heard that I thought “what debate?” but could see none having taken place; I would think “what evidence?” but none was ever actually described, let alone made available.
I dug further and realised the gaping flaws. The whole edifice was built on the sands of models, with no discernible empirical evidence. Furthermore the “scientists” would not publish either models or raw data, so what they were doing is not science. If another person cannot repeat your calculations, follow your method to confirm results and check that the method is sound then what you are doing is not science. I learnt in the first year of secondary education that an experiment should be documented to include method and all data before any conclusion.
The models were shown false by radiosonde data. UHI was assumed negligible. Warming was anything but unprecidented. The IPCC publish summaries edited by politicians and NGOs after the scientists had been consulted.
Most importantly the whole panic relied on strong net positive feedback. Not only is this unlikely (stable systems rarely have much positive feedback) and an unwarranted assumption (there appears to be no empirical evidence for this) but most importantly of all this is never mentioned by the warmists. They talk all the time about the simple physics, proven greenhouse effect of CO2, dishonestly implying that this is what they are suggesting as likely to lead to CAGW. This dishonesty is the crucial blow to the warmist cult: if you have to lie, even implicitly, to further your argument then you have no argument,
I was always a sceptic (at my university that was still considered a positive thing when I was studying). By the beginning of 2009 I was a sceptic who was did not believe a word the catastrophists were saying; the CRU emails gave specific details but revealed nothing unexpected to me. This was just the evidence supporting my hypothesis. Since then I have asked every true believer whom I have debated to just describe to me the empirical evidence
in addition,
claiming the GISP2 data from Richard Alley claims the medieveal warm period is higher than today is a complete fabrication.
as shown here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/03/08/marcott-et-al-claim-of-unprecedented-warming-compared-to-gisp-ice-core-data/
where they attach the marcott curve to the GISP curve where it ended (about 110 years ago now)
As though Greenland temperatures are global temperatures, a common lie produced on this site.
The Greenland temperatures are currently 3 degrees C higher than the end of the GISP2 series, much higher than the medieval warming period and as warm as the Minoan warming period (which wasn’t global by the way.
again, confusing Greenland temperatures with global temperatures because you don’t like what the global temperatures say isn’t science it is cherry picking and lies.
here is the actual GISP currently updated curve values.
http://diggingintheclay.wordpress.com/2010/12/30/dorothy-behind-the-curtain-part-2/
I can see how you are all following the path of Goebbels , “it doesn’t matter what you say as long as you say it again. . .and again and again.
where adults who don’t have the time and/or energy capability to research the lies you promote over and over again will then teach it to their children. Trying to convince them that they have nothing to fear.
That global warming isn’t a threat.
simply a pathetic existence if you ask me.
I’m sorry to say that my personal journey has been far less interesting and much less considered…… I watched an interview with the Hockeystick Mann and thought to myself, “what an unpleasant, conceited, self opinionated arsehole”. That was that. How anyone can take the idiot seriously is quite beyond me.
I became a skeptic at the earliest stages of the CAGW craze. In 1992, I was working on a Masters Degree in Space Studies at the Univ of N Dakota. I took two classes back to back – Planetary Geology with Dr. Grady Blount and Global Human Imapcts with Chuck Woods. Grady’s class made the following arguments for global cooling: 1) the Milankovitch cycles of 10,000 year long inter-glacial cycles followed by 100,000 year plus ice ages. Our current interglacial period is a bit past 10,000 years which problably isn’t a good thing for mankind. 2) A simple thought experiment – is the atmosphere more or less humid as global temperature changes. Is winter dryer than summer? If the atmosphere becomes dryer as a planet cools, then you’d expect deserts to grow and rain forests to shrink – both things which have been happening over the last 5,000 years. Chuck Woods class, by contrast, tried to show how human activities caused 1) desertification, 2) mass extinctions in the Americas and 3) rising global temperatures. I found the evidence for nearly every argument absolutely bogus or worse purposefully manipulated. The worse examples were 1) a graph showing population declines of whales. The chart showed a dip to zero during WWII and precipitous decline since the 1970’s. When queried about the WWII, it came out the graph was based on commercial whaling catches. Therefore, the decline after 1972 was based on the banning of whaling. 2) charts showing fossil finds of large new world mammals (giant sloths, mammoths, saber tooth tigers) and how they disminished with Mongols coming over the Siberian land bridge. The charts looked like vertical voice prints – the reason, the data points were doubled. Worse, each data point was huge – with some chart have an N of 12.
I came to respect the evidence for global cooling over the fear of CAGW. Try having that conviction (faith, not knowledge) since the early nineties – needless to say I endured a bit of ridicule. One other point concerning the 97% of scientist agreeing. We’ve been measuring climate accurately for the last two hundred years – which is what percentage of time since the beginning of this inter-glacial period? Even worse, no scientist can say what causes the Milankovitch cycles. How can we draw any conclusions with any degree of certainty – much less 97%!
I find it interesting that many in the cAGW camp claim that skeptics are on the right side of the political spectrum. There is no question that the poor are hurt the most with the policies that have been implemented and proposed by the proponents of cAGW. This would suggest that the skeptics are on the left side of the political spectrum in their defense of the poor.
Jai Mitchell
How do you account for the multiple, often co-ordinated instances of dishonesty among the people informing your view of climate science?
Peter Gleick; “Hide the Decline”; the conspiracies to corrupt peer review, both by preventing publication of sound papers and having poor papers published; supporting papers (such as Mann’s original hockey stick) in public while privately proving it is an artefact; Mann’s own lies about other hockey sticks supporting his, and his dishonest claims that fossil fuel companies organise and pay sceptics; the use of data by Mann and others that the originator says may not be used; cherry picking of tree-ring data by Mann and others (get the idea that Mann is the most dishonest? perhaps); the fraudulent paper Jones co-authored using Chinese data to rule out UHI effect; the dropping of thousands of temperature sites from official records; the “adjustment” of old temperature data in the USA, Australia, NZ, Iceland and the Netherlands (that we know of), always downward to exaggerate the trend; the dropping of some Russian stations to produce a trend where the mass do not; the whitewash reports on the CRU emails; the conspiracy to break FOI legislation and EDRs; the dishonest insistence the CO2 is a greenhouse gas which no-one disputes while failing ever to mention feedback which is the core of the debate; the lie that he debate is over; the continued claims about 97% based on utter misrepresentation; the lies about increasing extreme weather; the current claims that the pause in warming is not real because the heat is going into deep oceans, stated as fact when in reality it is pure speculation.
Those are just the ones that spring to mind. Why are the people you think are right so dishonest?
In a similar vein, why do they still live profligate lives, as if burning carbon-based fuel was convenient and uncontroversial? They all burn far more than I can afford to, yet they demand taxes to force me to use even less while they enjoy as much as they will at the expense of us taxpayers. Why do they cheer when invited to conferences on distant tropical islands? Why not castigate Gore for his use of private jets (I have a friend who chartered him one, a big one to cross the Atlantic)?
Mosh, I no longer believe in giving “scientific” credence to this..there’s nothing scientific about it
Oh, and Jai, one more thing, what is the empirical evidence for strong positive feedback in temperature? How was the temperature stable for Mann’s famous 1000 years despite this positive feedback? Natural systems don’t often demonstrate positive feedback, stable ones very rarely indeed as tuning must be very fine. You mention yourself runaway with non-Milankovich warming, but how does the climate system know that it is warmer because of Milankovich?
“I am curious to know how fellow-readers came to their current views. ”
First, I too recall the “Ice Age coming” scare. Coincided with the “Nuclear Holocaust” scare. Ok the latter was worse, but didn’t materialise, except for the participants managing to nuke themselves and the rest of the world to some extent.
Also, I had a “classical” education. Some awful old tyrants handing it out, but they were certainly consistent in teaching one thing: HOW to think, not WHAT to think.
I have some expertise in energy efficiency, climate-responsive design (mostly related to the tropics), mathematical modelling and process simulation.
This was/is largely project based, eg if you get it wrong, the customers don’t come back …
I have years of regulatory responsibility as well as design experience regarding extreme weather events. I confess to having categorised this as “response to climate change”, but have now switched to using the term “climate sameness”.
A few milestones:
First realisation came as a result of looking at the nuts and bolts in GCMs (climate modelling). As a recent (presumed dangerous) post-graduate in the early 1970s, I had managed to avoid making the howling errors being made by the climate modellers.
Realisation that what was being “allowed for” regarding urban heat island/land use change did not fit what I knew from my own observations from 1998 on.
Realisation that if the “tropical hot spot” and “back radiation” stuff was correct, we would have noticed it here.
Climategate: the Team caught with their fingers in the till, trying to coordinate their defence etc.
Last straw?
Cate Blanchett standing in front of a backdrop of Battersea Power Station as I clearly remember it pre 1958, trying to convince everyone that a carbon tax was a good idea.
http://people.aapt.net.au/jclark19/climatealarmism.pdf
I was skeptical from the start. It just plain didn’t make sense to me. It DID make sense to me that the Earth self-regulates, that there have been huge natural temperature fluxes in the past, and that human influence is much, MUCH small than we like to think it is.
I thought the scientists pushing the CAGW notion were misguided. I could not believe how big the whole thing became – it was like everybody had lost the plot, everyone had caught the disease. Was no one thinking straight? Of course Climategate blew the door off the hinges and proved to me it was all very deliberately done, these people are not/were not misguided at all.
To be honest, I didn’t want to check out the Internet, I didn’t want to drown in CAGW nonsense, I couldn’t bear reading about it or hearing about it. It seemed to be everywhere. Then I came across a book by Iain Plimer titled “How to get expelled from school” and I read that with great relief that there was at least one person out there who had grasped the truth and was willing to speak it.
That started an interest in seeing the truth fighting back. More bold than I, my husband got onto the Net first and said he found some good sites. He suggested I check out WUWT at the very least.
Well, WUWT is now my home page and has been for a couple of years now. I visit (at regular intervals) daily. I have a bunch of other favourite sites, too. I like WUWT best because there is a LOT of stuff here, heaps of links to scientific papers and data, but most of all, there’s plenty of good old fashion discussion. I’m with like-minded people here. I feel very comfortable here.
By the way, thanks again, Anthony. 🙂
Thanks for sharing your story, Jonathan. I think what got me started on the road to scepticism was growing irritation at the continual mantras of impending doom, always “even worse than we thought”, and the attribution of every newsworthy weather event to man-made climate change as if these phenomena were unknown in earth history until years after I was born. I was still reluctant to engage with climate scepticism, though, assuming it was emanating from a group of eccentrics or conspiracy theorists with some kind of free-market political agenda. After I retired from work 3 years ago, I promised myself I would bone up on basic climate science and read the books and blogs from both sides of the debate. To my astonishment, I found that evidence and logic favoured the sceptics rather than the warmists/alarmists. Unlike many here, my political views are liberal-left on most issues, and I find myself in strange company in the sceptic community, most of whom seem to be on the right of the political spectrum. But so be it – the truth is what it is. Like you, Climategate was an eye-opener for me: by that time I was already veering towards scepticism, but I had no idea that the elite of ‘consensus’ climate science were so mean, petty-minded, vindictive and arrogant – and so determined to keep their data and methodology secret, so that nobody could confirm or disconfirm their hypotheses. I’m grateful to Anthony and all the other bloggers who continue to sling stones at the AGW Goliath – your efforts haven’t been in vain!
I only disagree with one point that you made. You said, “This is good news, because it means that we are back to doing science.” Unfortunately, I predict that the same people will just find another bandwagon to jump on, and the whole process will repeat ad nauseum. You even said it yourself, the current lot are just the same lot from the Cold War with a new agenda.
For years, I have been telling my friends AGW is a crock. At the risk of being laughed off the board, I feel compelled to explain why I never trusted it.
(A) I have read the Bible through entirely. Twice. AGW goes contrary to the first divine general instruction to man: Be fruitful and multiply and subdue the earth. If we accept AGW as true and follow it to its logical end, then we should wipe ourselves off the face of the earth. Anyone who pushes the AGW agenda has bats in their belfry, to put it mildly. Now mind you, I’m not saying that mankind has reached environmental nirvana, but I’m old enough to remember the days when cars and trucks all emitted noxious fumes and pollution was an evil everyone could recognize. In contrast, modern vehicles (heck! even my 20+ year old ride) emit minimal amounts of pollution.
(B) I worked in advertising for 5 years. One of the basic principles advertisers operate by is the axiom “Sizzle sells.” In other words, appeal to people’s emotions and you will bypass their cognitive processes and motivate them to buy whatever it is you’re selling. All the AGW propaganda I ever subjected myself to always came off as supremely “slick” and designed to be swallowed at face value. It asks, no DEMANDS, that people abandon all the things that protect us from the elements, and all the things that protect us from our government, and do — what? Jump off a precipice? AGW seems to demand that we give up everything to gain — frankly, nothing! What’s up with that?
(C) The sheer hypocrisy of its proponents was mind-blowing. Most readers here are well able to fill in the blanks on this item.
(D) AGW smacked too much of a primitive strategy for claiming that the only way to prevent the world from ending was to kill off all the things that extend our influence in the world. I keep having the image come to mind of a tribal people executing someone on top of a pyramid, just because someone said that will prevent the world from ending.
(E) It was based on a concept that ordinary people cannot test for themselves. I mean, who has equipment to test the amount of carbon dioxide their activities generate? (as if it even mattered) If ordinary people cannot test for a problem themselves, then they are forced to “trust” the authorities and/or pay “indulgences” based on what the authorities said, whether it’s based on truth, or not. IMHO, there’s just too much of that sort of thing going on nowadays. Other posters have mentioned cholesterol as another thing that we have been brainwashed into believing is an evil poison. Do you know what the primary symptom of so-called “high cholesterol” is? It’s feeling good! I’m just not willing to sacrifice that in the pursuit of a number on a blood test.
I guess that’s enough for now. I know these arguments are not scientifically rigorous as many of the ones others have mentioned, but they matter to me.
Loads of interesting stuff here, and I’m enjoying comparing it with my own views and experience.
Unlike most of you, I can readily recall some of the interesting weather of the early 1930s in the UK, and of course the really nasty war-years winters. Also the variable summers, with rain, heat and disappointing “coolth”. My professional life was spent as an “industrial scientist”. In industry you either get things right or you are very likely to be looking for a new job. (I tended to get things right, so now have been comfortably retired for 30 years). This clearly isn’t the case in academia, which is where the “warmists” seem to reside, since they seem to be able to continue to produce stuff that doesn’t stand up to the realities of the world with impunity. It is my great hope to still be around when the doom-mongers are finally exposed and their arguments and influence are relegated to the dustbin of history.
I became interested in climate, especially temperature, in 1991, I think, having been enlisted by my engineer son to examine the Greenwich/Kew monthly temperature data to help with his calculations on heating/air-conditioning for a major construction project. Analysing this data I soon found with the help of people from Kew that despite careful observations, immaculately recorded, temperatures – allowing for the natural seasonal effect – showed distinct signs of changing abruptly from one “regime” to another. After about 20 years of examining climate data of many types this step effect seems to me to be virtually ubiquitous, but tends to have been neglected by the climate establishment up to quite recently.
So, I have come to believe that most climate (temperature) changes tend to occur very rapidly from one relatively stable state to another, with no prior indication that a change is imminent. For this reason I fear that predicting climate is a doomed enterprise until a fundamental understanding of the apparently chaotic state of affairs is chanced upon. The odds of being able to apportion blame for these climate changes still seem to be very low to vanishing, and they are self-evidently not caused by CO2 in the atmosphere, which has been increasing very steadily for many years.
Due to the self-preservation instinct of politicians I fear that there will be no “revelation” experience in our governing classes. Things are likely to change gradually, with much effort being expended on blaming others for distorting the realities, such as amending climate data retrospectively, hiding important information and collusion amongst their currently trusted climate advisers. I should state here that in about 1991 I was greatly helped by (the then Dr) Phil Jones, who provided me with about 15 climate time series on a floppy disc, that he had personally extracted from an expensive (£700, I believe) CD that CRU were publishing. These series convinced me the step changes were widespread. Thank you, Professor Jones.
Actually, CAGW is still in the throes of the metaphorical menopause/male midlife crisis. I think we all know that both males and females often go off on a last intense search to consummate their rapidly ticking fertility clock. In CAGW terms, this equates to a yet more aggressive, yet more strident set of articles, propaganda pieces and new distortions which have to be dissected and unpicked by the rationalists. I don’t see the fanatics backing off until at least 2015.
What will happen then??
Well, I think that what we are seeing in the UK (and maybe too in the US also) is a radical change in the public perception of officials, authority and the Establishment. People have lost faith in their trustworthiness, their honesty, their loyalty and, quite simply their actual representation of those they purport to represent. I think there will come a radical demand for a small number of things to be done properly by society, since those few small things, done well, make the difference between stable societies and unstable ones.
1. People want homes to be designed properly, to be affordable and to be well suited to bringing up children in. They don’t need King’s palaces, but they do need buildings which are designed with living in mind, not with a builder’s profit in mind. A happy family home is still the bulwark of stable and prosperous societies.
2. People want energy to be affordable, they want it to be accessible and they want it at the times of day and times of the year when they need it. There is going to be one monumental conflagration when the people realise quite how shafted they’ve been by politicians since 1995. Also, people are going to demand that minerals are extracted for the benefit of the people, not for the benefit of modern shareholders. It’s possible for massive energy production in a country not to benefit the majority, since it is sold to rich foreigners by a foreign owned company whose taxation arrangements mean that the Exchequer gets almost nothing in corporation tax. People won’t wear that any more.
3. People want healthy food and a healthy lifestyle. They are becoming more and more demanding in terms of how their food is produced, how it is distributed and who benefits. There is going to be a demand for less profit for supermarkets and more profit for farmers. Growing the food is more important than the packaging and branding. I’m sorry, but it is. People are sick of a bunch of retailers impoverishing everyone, including the people who keep us alive by growing food for god’s sake. There’s going to be increasing demand to disintermediate, to grow locally and to grow all year round under glass.
4. The effect of all that knowledge will be, in my opinion, a greater ability to discern the truth about climate. Climate affects how farmers grow food, it affects how many people die in the winter and the summer due to excessive cold or heat.
It’s a similar evolution to that of how to deal with aggressive feminism. Most folks I know, me included, of my generation were brought up seeing girls offered the same opportunities as boys. Our parents were the pioneers in breaking the taboos and we grew up wondering what all this nonsense was about. I’ve never seen a workplace discriminate against women in 25 years, but all we hear about is wimmin this, wimmin that, wimmin the other. It’s all propaganda in the middle classes in the UK. Girls now outnumber boys at University, schooling has been feminised and boys education is in crisis. The female journalists will lose their jobs when they are rumbled which is why they can’t back down. Anyone who tries to challenge them in UK blogs is censored in a way which is far, far worse than in climatology. At least there you just get Australian twat scientists telling me that ‘because you’re not a climate scientists, what could you possibly contribute to the debate?’ With the feminists, it’s akin to being gay in the 1950s.
There is going to be a hard fight between evidence based evaluation and propaganda-based religion. By religion I mean assertions without evidence, not God, Jesus and Mohammed etc etc.
The crux will come in whether people really want a politician who tells them the truth and when they come to realise that they do. Until they do, CAGW will hang on, because the politicians will pander for votes rather than lead by example. The communities of activists will lead the agenda but won’t be in power. WUWT now leads the world in driving the climatology agenda – trust me, it’s light years ahead of every single UK daily newspaper. It’s readership is global, it’s contributors increasingly so. It puts Nature and Science magazines to shame but has none of the supposed reputation of those tarnished brands.
It’s a fine judgement as to when each country will take the plunge to vote for such leadership. It’s dependent on the nature of the media ownership, the nature of education, the role of science in the economy and the history of science and scientific thought in that nation. It’s also dependent on the size of the country because big countries are like oil tankers – very difficult to change direction quickly. The UK will likely acquire such leadership before the USA, but may lag behind other small enlightened nations. The UK has a reactionary, oligarchic media, mostly foreign owned and a highly undemocratic electoral system which institutionalise unrepresentative duopolies. It’s population has been brainwashed for years and it is only really since 2008 that lost of trust has become irreversible. That makes climate skepticism increasingly possible, since no-one trusts anything that authority tells them now without examining it. Too many scandals, too much abuse, too much corruption, too much financial larceny: trust is gone. God is still around for an evangelical minority, however.
In addition, this will be impacted by how rapidly the global non-governmental agencies enter the crisis of credibility deficit. There is a lot of cynicism about the IMF, the World Bank, the UN, the IPCC, the WHO and OPEC out there. Reforming such organisations is fraught with difficulty for activists, since they are funded by national governments and answer to them, not the people. Learning how to engineer change in such an environment is a key determinant in how CAGW attitudes will evolve.
My judgement is that the current hysteria will wane by 2020 and then, it all depends on what happens up to 2050. My judgement is that 30 years of halt/cooler temperatures will provide the impetus for climate measurement to become central to global humanity. Ensuring that the organisations tasked with such crucial work are honest, dispassionate and funded by the entire world is critical. A 21st century CERN for climate data acquisition, a global database repository, the basis for worldwide data analysis insights is the most healthy course for the world to take, in my judgement.
What happens in the nearer term, most relevant to us over the age of 45, is more unclear.
But the momentum currently is for skeptical debate and rational, reasoned science.
I for one hope that that momentum is not stalled.
It is really not that hard, all you have to do is predict the evolution of conditions, as shown in this water vapor loop (refresh as needed).
http://www.weather.unisys.com/satellite/sat_wv_hem_loop-12.gif
It won’t lock-up your computer, it loads fast.
Yes, it is weather, and well named.
Has it changed ?
In the early ’80s, I heard the Warmista arguments for the first time, but was always puzzled by the historical record – Vikings farming in Greenland … ice fairs on the Thames in London. I was perturbed by the fact that CO2 levels were rising.
But, then it became clear that temperature, climate and CO2 records had large errors bars.
Clinching it, the Warmistas have never demonstrated the null hypothesis, that the current changes are not natural.
Thank you so much to everyone that has taken the time to post a reply. For the first time ever I have read every word of every comment on a WUWT thread.
I’m elated but not surprised by the number of fellow engineers here. After all, engineering is just applied science. If we make mistakes ‘Nature cannot be fooled’. Scientists have the luxury of error but it is rarely accorded to engineers, and the good ones tend to develop highly attuned sniff tests as a result. I have had my share of screw ups but also have designed equipment routinely flying on commercial airliners and a current space program, and have lost a lot of sleep in the process.
Especial thanks to dbstealy for refuting Jai Mitchell in the kind of detail I would find it hard to bother with. On a final note, Mr Mosher seems not to have noticed that firstly my essay makes no claim to be an actual scientific paper, and secondly I touch often on the principles of the Scientific Method, but as I didn’t mention it directly perhaps he didn’t notice. He is most welcome to sit down with me at any time, share a bottle of wine, and decide for himself whether my story is accurate as described.
Mr. Robin Edwards, what an inspiration you are.
The Great Depression came……….and went — and little Robin whistled as he skipped down the cobblestones to school.
Hitler and the horrors of WWII came…………….. and went — and a serious, bright, young man persevered, got a fine education, and began his career.
Stalin and Kruschev et. al. shook their fists at the free world and said, “We will bury you!”……. and, they too……………..went — and a hardworking, honest, father did his best to take care of his family.
The Envirostalinists and neo-Marxists came along and spit on decency and truth and then, most of them grew up…………… — meanwhile, Mr. Robin Edwards quietly continued to do his careful, precise, work and, then, retired.
The CAGW (the hippies that never grew up) gang bellowed and snarled and, now, they, too………………. are nearly done —- and here you are, today! Still typing away, optimistic that, “this, too, shall pass.”
Your optimism is evidence that deserves great weight.
Thank you for speaking up!
****************************************
Power Grab (at 3:56PM) — your points were excellent and NOT laughable at all. Mr. Mosher was wrong to criticize above based on lack of science content; this thread is simply about how people came to disbelieve the Cult of Climatology. There are no wrong answers (so long as one is telling the truth).
So you need not feel alone in asserting your faith as one of your reasons, I’ll join you and cite the part Genesis that most reassures me:
“For as long as the earth endures,
seedtime and harvest,
cold and heat,
summer and winter,
day and night
will never cease.”
Genesis 8:22.
Jonathan Abbott says:
“Especial thanks to dbstealy for refuting Jai Mitchell…”
It was easy-peasy. ☺
I don’t think the author’s goal here was to retry the case in yet another thread when there are so many all over the climatescape already. Your expectations for his account of his personal journey are what is actually mistaken, not his personal beliefs.
You disagree with his “assessment”, I think he understated it. There are clear cut conspiracies to thwart skeptical papers, you should know since you say you have read the emails. Even as we speak there is more outright insane alarmism occurring daily than anytime since the dark ages, and even though Steve Goddard routinely turns up example after example of historical examples of published alarmism, even you would have to admit that this current crop of psychos have exceeded anything yet seen. They have blasted right past the previous standard-bearer Paul Ehrlich, making him look like a tame, quiet conservative by comparison. Goddard has also demonstrated the corruption of the past temperature record to make the present warmer. I would like to know why it wasn’t you who came up with that blink graph showing this fraud.
It is a real shame that you are one of the blessed few with the password for ClimateGate III ( I believe you just admitted to it ). One can only hope that FOIA reconsiders and lets the password out into the open because it is senseless to leave it in the hands of self-described “lukewarmers” and AGW true-believers who cannot see the alarmism right in front of their faces each and every day.
Steve, have you looked at the vast amount of MIME encoded attachments in ALL.7z? There is likely quite a bit of data in that stash. I don’t have the password but can easily deduce that since the largest 392 files range from 100,089 bytes (100 KB) all the way to the 2,854,527 bytes (2.85 MB) for a total of 128.57 MB just for those alone, there are likely spreadsheets and tables of ASCII data that need to be compared to commonly available data to see what other fraudulent adjustments they have perpetrated. Are you doing this? Somebody out to be.
For me, it was because the “hippies” were so sure about CAGW it was reflexive to doubt. Then Lenin’s birthday became Earth Day, no more doubt.
My own journey started around 2003 when I got tired of reading all the accusatory rhetoric about AGW, and decided to read the primary literature to find out for myself, what’s going on. The definitive moment for me was reading the 2001 paper by Willie Soon, Sallie Baliunas, Sherwood Idso, Kirill Kondratyev, abd Eric Posmentier, Modeling climatic effects of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions: unknowns and uncertainties Climate Research 18(3) 259-275; abstract here
Soon, et al., showed that climate models (GCMs) made huge errors in the way they partitioned the available energy among the various climate modes. The errors were orders of magnitude larger than any energy introduced or transduced by greenhouse gases. When I read that, it was immediately obvious that the effects of GHGs could not be resolved, and were in fact totally unknown and presently unknowable.
It was a small step from there to realizing that the physical scientists who were so assiduously touting the AGW alarm were either incompetent or dishonest. Nothing I’ve read or experienced ever since has supported modifying that view.