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.
It was Al Gore’s movie that first made me sceptical, surely it isn’t all that bad I thought.
Then on subsequent research I stumbled upon ” Real Climate” a site by real climate scientists. After enthusiastically thinking this is just what I need, all it took was 20 minutes to relalise they had no idea about uncertainty like a good scientist and were obviously an activist site. After leaving in disgust it was another 12 months before our partisan national broadcaster let slip there was a luke warm website called “Climate Debate Daily”. This was the portal I needed to discover the amazing diversity of climate bloggs. Now I relish that my sceptical concerns are held by a growing number of scientists and citizens.
jai mitchell says:
July 25, 2013 at 3:14 pm The Greenland temperatures are currently 3 degrees C higher than the end of the GISP2 series, much higher than the medieval warming period…
That seems unlikely Jai.
In excavations on Greenland, archaeologists have found ample evidence of banquets where beef and mutton were consumed. ….. and remains of stables that housed up to 100 cattle each.
In 2008, Greenland recorded a population of 49 cattle, up from 5 in the year 2000.
Nowadays they rely on seasonally replanted ryegrass pastures, and the growing season is still too short for the ryegrass to seed. Ie – the spring replanting is essential to provide feed.
Something the Vikings could not do.
Jonathan Abbott
Enjoyed reading it.
Thank you
My introduction to the CAGW arguments came several years ago when while channel surfing, I watched a program on CSPAN. It was a Congressional hearing about global warming. Involved were an obnoxious prick, and a couple of fuddy-duddy guys with beards. I learned that the prick was Michael Mann, and the dull, bearded guys were Steve McIntyre and Wegman ( I think).
It was the total lack of respect and manners of Michael Mann that lead me to research the CAGW subject. It appears that Mann runs from the facts. What a clown!
Great story, Mr Abbott.
My story is very short: I’m a geologist–a real geologist, not one of those Mann-made types, thank God (literally).
I will admit I’ve always been pretty skeptical of most everything. Back around 2005, when the stories started ramping up about CAGW, I decided to look for some sources on the Internet. One of the first I looked at was realclimate.org. There was an article attacking someone (probably Roger Pielke) for a paper on adjusting satellite temperate readings due to orbital decay. Fortunately they quoted from the paper, so I could form my own judgement when they declaimed, “Is this how a scientist operates?”. In fact, it seemed to me that the science exhibited in the quotes from the paper was pretty reasonable, while their ad hominem attack on the author was quite the opposite.
As I compared the articles on realclimate.org to other websites, like climateaudit.org, I saw that one was purveying snippy, condescending vituperation, while the other was engaged in thoughtful, detailed analysis of data and processes. No points for identifying which was which.
The kicker was the climategate files, particularly the HARRY_READ_ME file, which was the step by step recording of the ordeal of trying to make sense of (as I recall) the CRUTEM2 world temperature model and turn it into CRUTEM3. This was something I fully understood, having a degree in computer science and (at that time) 37 years experience in the IT field. I agonized along with the author as he tried to make sense of undocumented data files, subroutines with no error handling, index pointers with no limit checking, and endless atrocious coding. And this was the model on which much of the doomsaying was based. It was far worse than the first program I wrote, which was one to find prime numbers. As the Director of the Computing Centre remarked, looking at my printed output, “I don’t think 355 is a prime number”. And after reading that file, I don’t give any credence to anything that involves a computer done by these “scientists”.
A timely and well done post.
Same for me, mostly ignored it until Al Gore tried to erase history with that blatant propaganda movie, sought better evidence for and against until Climategate 1.
Now regard CAGW as an intelligence test, and most of the authoritarians in my government have failed that test.
Am deeply enraged and troubled by the dishonesty and incompetence this “cause” has revealed.
I suspect academia and bureaucracy have fallen so far, that the best fix for their decline is to grab a shovel.Certainly no longer willing to fund these fakes.
jai mitchell says:
July 25, 2013 at 12:02 pm
The Global Warming Swindle of 2007 is so full of lies and disinformation that even now it is being distanced by the skeptic community because it is so completely unscientific. For example, they provide the Greenland temperature data to show that the medieval warm period was much warmer than today, which is a common myth promoted by anti-global warming propagandists who pretend that Greenland is the entire world and that Greenland ice cores are the only way to derive temperature from the paleo record.
Greenland data proves past Greenland conditions. Bur regarding the Roman and Medieval optimums, data is also supported with proxies in Europe and historical records. And that makes a good portion of the northern hemisphere. Please prove: 1) how is it possible that Greenland being 1C or more hotter than now, none of the promised catastrophic scenarios related to warming took place. Please prove how is it compatible that Greenland and most of Europe being more than 1C hotter than now, the arctic would still have more ice than now and therefore the current lack of arctic ice is unprecedented. And, more importantly, please explain what caused that, and how it ended. I think you didn’t even bother to ask the questions.
Another example is that they failed to show how the IPCC had determined it was a combination of volcanic and man made aerosols that caused the post WWII cooling and that the “recession” of the 1970s had nothing to do with the resurgence of warming but rather it was the response to acid rain (removing sulfate emission in U.S. and Europe) that caused the resurgence of warming. These subtle efforts to hide truth show that this movie was simply a form of propaganda.
That’s nothing but theory and models. We don’t have measurements of the aerosol contents at that time, only estimations. And people will estimate whatever fits their theory. Maybe it is true, or maybe there are oceanic cicles like ENSO, PDO and such, accelerating and slowing down the warming. Again, what caused MWP? What caused LIA? We don’t know, and because we don’t know, we cannot claim a thing about what part of the current climate change is natural. The thing is that climate has been warming since the LIA, which is much earlier than we started to massively put CO2 into the atmosphere.
It turns out that, when looking at reliable historic temperatures we are already above the global level of both the medieval warming and the roman warming period and are basically tied with the Holocene Optimum. For the most reliable temperature record for the earlier interglacial (the Eemian) the Antarctic ice core data shows we are within 1C of the peak temperature found during the Eemian optimum. After that point we will reach an average temperature level that hasn’t been seen on planet earth for the last 1.5 million years and (likely) will reach a point not seen on this planet for nearly 50 million years. –all within the next 100-200 years.
Oh really? We will reach? And what is the climate waiting for? And where is the evidence that the +1C warmer climate in the Eemian was actually worse for life on Earth? I’m still waiting for ANY evidence that shows that a warmer climate is a bad thing.
The characterization of the “climategate” emails was a complete fabrication by the websites you listed. Comprehensive analysis of the emails showed that there was no impropriety involved.
Oh my, you definitely need a big blind faith to conclude that. I’m not going to enter there.
It is inherently clear in all sociological studies of global warming perceptions that the overwhelming majority of “skeptics” are white males over the age of 35 with above average incomes who come from a politically right ideology.
Actually, bloggers in general are mostly white males over the age of 35, and if you ckeck which of them promote CAGW, you will find that they come from a certain political ideology as well. Why don’t you use the same statistics to mischaracterize both?
Are you sure that your scientific understanding isn’t actually derived from your ideological opposition to collective responses to AGW and/or fear of the potential regulatory framework that will be implemented (i.e. government restrictions on personal freedoms)?
It is very possible that, in many cases, having different political views caused our original skepticism and made as want to know more. That was definitely my case. But that was at the beginning. After investigating, we know that you have no case, that CAGW is bollocks. We are more skeptics AFTER we have seen the data, that we could have been before. Because in addition to the data that we have been shown again and again by the mainstream, we have seen other data that contradicts the theoty. And it is data that the mainstream has been conveniently hiding from us. The approach has never been that of a scientific discussion. In fact, they have repeatedly told us that there is nothing to discuss. And we know it is a lie. We know that the sensitivity is uncertain, future warming is uncertain, the increase of climatic extremes is blatantly false, not happening, the Earth is greening, and polar bears love to have less ice in the north pole because it brings them more food.
As I began to review the documentation, actual peer reviewed articles and then book after book, I began to find out things that were in direct opposition to what I had previously known to be true, like the fact that 2007 arctic melt was a significant outlier to all modeled arctic ice responses, that the uncertainty of modeling projections for global temperatures indicated that it was likely that the projections for warming over the next 75 years would be double what we were being told. I also found that there was also significant uncertainties on the feedback mechanisms regarding boreal forest, Amazon basin forests and arctic methane feedbacks indicating that the models were inherently conservative in their estimations by leaving out these potentially catastrophic factors.
Have you had a look at the increase rates of atmospheric methane? Anything unusual there? Have you indeed calculated the effect of the increase in methane? Because despite the higher greenhouse effect of a methane molecule compared to a CO2 one, the increase is so little that ALL of the methane increase since the fifties create the same level of warming as the CO2 we emit in half a year. It’s quite hard to believe that methane is going to have any protagonism in this story, even if the methane scares became true. Do the numbers!
Also, if in the MWP most of the northern hemisphere was around 1C hotter, why didn’t we have a runaway methane catastrophe then? And why didn’t all the methane that could potentially escape, already escape at that time? Did we perhaps have warming without permafrost melting? How is that possible?
Then I found that the paleoclimate analyses for climate sensitivity to CO2 were based on studies of the glacial phases in the climate record not the interglacials, like we are in today. I then found out that climate sensitivities determined during historic interglacials indicated a MUCH higher climate sensitivity but were thrown out of the calculation because runaway climate change didn’t happen. But that they didn’t consider that the only other time that we had a non-Milankovich driven interglacial (one driven by CO2) actually DID produce runaway warming (the PETM).
Bollocks. Temperature went up, and CO2 went up, during PETM. We don’t know in which order. We do know that, when temperatures go up, CO2 will closely follow due to oceanic outgassing.
Then I found out that our current CO2 emissions path is actually higher than the worst case scenario, that wasn’t actually considered as likely at the time (A1Fl) and that the rapid collapse of arctic ice was going to radically shift the northern hemisphere weather patterns before any other processes were going to take place.
Our emissions are worse than the worst case scenarios, yet the temperature increase since those scenarios were proomulgated, is lower than the best case scenarios (actually, it is inexistent). Shouldn’t that ring siome kind of alarm bell in your head, regarding the inconsistency of your irrational beliefs?
Then, most recently I found out that the weather pattern shift predicted after the ice melt of 2012 was actually happening and then, in the beginning of this summer, a split in the northern hemisphere polar jet stream began producing long-lived cut off lows in the midlattitude regions and now, for the last 2 months there has been an ever-present cut-off low in the north pacific (and sometimes two or three!) that are persisting much longer than the 4-6 days that they usually live) and the wrong-way low that started in July 10th and moved into texas, has only now moved back to the east coast after 2 weeks in an unprecedented shift in northern hemisphere weather.
Bollocks. All weather specialists have concluded that the persistent highs of 2012 have happened before, will continue to happen in the future, there’s no indication that it has been happening more often lately, and are unrelated to global warming. This has been repeatedly shown even in the most leftist media. And to be able to connect it to the 2012 ice melt you would need to explain why we didn’t have those blocking highs in 2007. The two things are unrelated. Perhaps you could also explain why the 2012 blocking high happened BEFORE the 2012 unusual melt.
The effects of AGW have now shown themselves in extremely unstable weather events. We will see what kind of a wild ride we are in for now. One can only hope that the current predictions are not true, but one thing is absolutely true, and without a doubt, AGW is real, the scientists were not part of some grand socialist conspiracy and we are now in the fight for the lives of our future generations.
AGW is real. CAGW is not, and current climate scares are a farce.
Our greatest Historical climatologist was Hubert Lamb, founder and First Director of CRU. This was one of the last things he wrote as a preface to his updated book ‘climate history and the modern world.’
“The idea of climate change has at last taken on with the public after generations which assumed that climate could be taken as constant. But it is easy to notice the common assumption that mans science and modern industry and technology are now so powerful that any change of climate or the environment must be due to us. It is good for us to be more alert and responsible in our treatment of the environment, but not to have a distorted view of our own importance. Above all, we need more knowledge, education and understanding in these matters.”
Hubert Lamb December 1994
Tonyb
My scepticism of man made global warming is based on a single graph of the global mean temperature data that shows the multi-decadal oscillation shown below:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/detrend:0.8
Thank you Jonathan Abbott for your reflective inspiration and all the many other stories accumulated here of CAGW skepticism discovery. Trying to think of my own, but can’t. The coming ice age came and went rather quickly while being challenged by family recollections of related experiences, a college seminar confidence warning by nuclear fusion researcher/developer Robert Gottlieb, suspicions of lack of CAGW data support. etc.
Thus tempered and suspicious of the crowd-mentality of CAGW believers I never accepted the CAGW mindset. I also recall the first public challenge to CAGW I heard that impressed me when I happened to hear Rush Limbaugh discuss some of his climate mentor Roy Spencer’s discussions on CAGW and ethanol some years ago. My interest piqued, along with my need to keep my now gainfully employed engineering physics/software developer sons and extended family informed I am now a bit of a climate-watch devotee.
Ethanol is still, insanely, being taxpayer subsidized. Coal, nuke, oil and gas energy generation is increasingly being mega-regulated by the powers that be in efforts to raise energy prices high enough to make wind, solar and other unreliable, insufficient, less efficient energy sources prices “competitive” in the market. As political ideologists destabilize the world economies and infrastructures numerous real possibly fatal threats continually seem to attempt to remind us of our overall tenuousness, such as when relative “near” misses by previously unknown (and known) errant planetary bodies that could wreak havoc on/to Earth (I am leaving our religious, cultural and maniacal threats).
Another Golden Age of U.S. energy self-sufficiency and inventive momentum is being greatly squandered just when the world needs strong, good spirited advances preparing against as many of the ill-winds that may possibly blow our way. Many thanks for Fracking in forestalling an U.S. economic collapse!
The misuse of Big Data by the same and more ideologues through over-surveillance, combined with EPA and DOE over-regulation are real threats to the “free” world continuing to realize inventive and creative potentials by maximizing being free. I have always felt that the best defense against domestic attack is having a healthy, vibrant, aware society, especially not one harassed, unwillingly exploited and/or paranoid. We will increasingly need the maximum number of perspectives in all fields in order to even preserve our species, let alone advance it through our solar system allowing it to survive through a widening and far-reaching dispersal.
Through whatever nation(s) the future presents incredible challenges, but at least we don’t have to invent creating and controlling fire! Many great contributions must be made by many great, “normal” and “AB-normal” people so, may we all keep busy and do our “things” in the name of expanding our knowledge of all things (mostly helpful and superfluous) granting us the most options.
As always, a fond, respectful pat on the back (here, at WUWT) for Anthony, the Mods and most post contributors and commenters.
Patriotically, may God have mercy on our Founder’s country, and inclusively on all freedom loving peoples.
It was December of 2006,
I have to admit that it was Al Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, a Christmas gift from my mother (thanks Mom!), and that film scared the bejeezus out of me! Hook, line and sinker. They had me, I was truly freaked out. Everything made sense and I was a believer.
The biggest affect that film had on me was that it made me hypersensitive to warming. Every time there was a warm breeze I could literally feel the ice sheets melting and the coastal waters rising. Choked for breath as C02 was robbing my body of the much needed oxygen, we have to do something.
I always enjoyed reading and tried to read often and it was in the summer of ’07 that a friend of mine let me read the book he just finished. After listening to me talk….no preach about the doom and gloom of ‘Global Warming’, he tossed me the book and half jokingly said “here you go….the truth”. It was Michael Crichton’s ‘State Of Fear’. I was thrown for a loop.
It was this moment of confusion that started me researching and researching, reading and reading, learning and learning….forming what you might call the skeptic view. You might as well brand me with the official label……’Denier’, What ever that means!
I should have realized early on….. science is not about alarmism, propaganda, sensationalism, censorship or consensus. Shame on me!
Thanks to Anthony and the rest of the operators of the other mentioned sites, keep up the fabulous work. It is very much appreciated!
In 2008 someone said to me “Global warming. I don’t believe a word of it”. I looked back at them and thought to myself “you’re crazy”.
So back in 2008, please don’t laugh, but it had never occurred to me that the BBC might be biased. I had assumed that everything the BBC produced was the gold standard of broadcasting and journalism. Of course I thought my friend was crazy, he was saying the opposite of what we were informed by the BBC on a daily basis on numerous programs and channels.
Anyhow I was so shocked by my friends “crazy” rejection of global warming I went to check it out for myself. I landed here at Watts Up, have been an avid reader ever since and I’m now a paid up sceptic.
(I am leaving OUT our(<not) religious, cultural and maniacal threats). – sorry!
Psychologist with a b/s detector inbuilt. It smacked of Agamemnon’s slaughter of his daughter to placate the weather goddess to me, right from when some of my leftist colleagues started lecturing me about it.
At 11:43 PM on 25 July, Angela had written of the AGW fraud:
Didn’t quite make the connection with Greek mythology, but I suppose it was sometime around the middle or late ’80s that I recall getting the first “consider-the-source” twitch in the nostrils.
I became aware that people of odiously statist inclinations had become uniformly making noises about how this awful-horrible-bad-nasty “We’re All Gonna Die!” imminent catastrophe more than sufficiently necessitated vastly expanded normatively suppressive government regulation of all economic activities in the Western (“developed”) countries, with all that metastatic malignancy to be put under the command of wise, altruistic, socially-conscious, dedicated “Liberal” politicians and their squittering weenie functionaries.
However, there could never be discussed or allowed any efforts at mitigation of increased atmospheric CO2 (I remember the first “Geritol Solution” experiments with oceanic iron oxide seeding to increase biomass uptake in the form of plankton blooms), and nuclear fission powerplants – which emit no CO2 whatsoever in the process of providing ginormous amounts of highly reliable baseload electric power – still constituted nothing more than a great sin against Mother Gaea.
So why were we only hearing this “settled science” yammer from the same leftie-luzers who’d been demonstrating no ability to grasp the much simpler premises of sound political economic theory and practice?
When one feels one’s leg being warmly spattered upon by a contemptible weasel sneaking his hand into one’s pocket, there’s nothing of “conspiracy theory” in the assumption that it ain’t raining no matter how that thieving bastich claims it is.
Hi,
My personal story is this:
Man I was deeply in – including planting perhaps 20,000 greenhouse trees in mitigation – right up until the Climategate emails. Trenberth’s, “its a travesty”, quote was probably the start. This seemed to beg a closer look, and one of the first documents I came across was D’Aleo and Watts:
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/surface_temp.pdf
I was interested but skeptical of the document until I read “Case Study 12: NASA: Hide this after Jim Checks it”
I was totally gobsmacked that anyone could be so cavalier with data – If they could just do that manipulation without documentation, then you just couldn’t trust any of their data – and that forced me to go right back to first principles and start checking through everything.
Reasons among others:
John Daly
CAGW was dominated by radicals and supported by leftist
All the solutions end up with bringing back the Western world as it was before Ronald and Margaret
And the aim to establish undemocratic global government that will be based on taking away democracy and political power from local and national levels.
Etc…
Reading agenda driven half truths by people like jai mitchell has convinced me there is no threat of CAGW.
Any science performed with a political slant is suspect from the start, surely.
Skepticism and science SO go together.
Incidentally,
Hi Girma at 11:09
I still update the graph from your 1010 paper every month. – Still looking pretty sound
I see Akasofu has updated his graph too at:
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com.au/2013/07/new-paper-finds-global-warming-since.html
Cheers
Like many here, at first I just believed what I was being told. I thought we were headed for doom because of CAGW. Then I remember hearing somewhere vaguely that there were some scientists who said the contention was all bulldust. Then Climategate! What really roused my suspicions was an article that purported to rebut Climategate in the Age newspaper (Melbourne, Australia). When I read it I found the argument had a shrill, protesteth-too-much quality about it. So I started doing my own research. The rest is history.
After a period of honest inquiry, several things pushed me into the skeptics camp, among which are:
1. The insufferably cult-like, “Pharisaic” demeanor of the warmists. Thoughtful, honest, self-aware, intelligent people do not act that way; True Believers who are in mortal fear of a loss of faith and/or cult standing do. As do charlatans and narcissists.
2. The implausibility of the positive feedback mechanism necessary for high sensitivity.
3. The warmists’ portrayal of anthropogenic CO2 as a magical compound, uniquely able to initiate runaway warming.
4. The intelligence, wit, and open-mindedness generally apparent on the skeptic side. (Exhibit A: rgb@duke)
5. The incessant pathetic fallacious argument from consensus on the part of the warmists. Have they nothing better to present? (“Call that a knife, mate?”)
I have concluded that most CAGW believers (Jai) are psychologically codependent with the CAGW meme as a vital element of a comic book mythos of good and evil, they being green heroes fighting greedy capitalist nature-hating bigoted lying denier-villains. “Super Mandia” is not as tongue-in-cheek as we might think! And what else would explain Gleik’s bizarre behavior vis a vis Heartland?
Yes and one more thing, 12 years ago, about, I downloaded a study that claimed that 25 people died in Oslo every year due to cancer, caused by emissions of tar from cars.
The truth was that somewhere during winter some people in Oslo could reach levels for a week or two that if you where exposed to this level constantly for 70 years you could get 5 cancer sick out of every 100.000 in Oslo. That’s why the number 25 came about since Oslo has 500.000 citizens.
The study was far fetched and creative in claiming that if some in Oslo was exposed with a Health risk all in Oslo was exposed for the same. And if the exposure was a week or two during winter it meant 52 weeks a year for 70 years. That would give 25 cancerwictims every 70 year, not 25 each year as the study claimed. Tried to talk to him but he was the expert and I was just an idiot that could not believe that every year Oslo had 500.000 citizens that had been exposed for 70 years.
In addition I found that 80% of tar came from burning of wood in fireplaces to keep the houses warm in cold winters, inversion that leads to cold weather and air pollution problems. So since we only do this in winter I recon that more than 90 % of the tar came from burning of wood when tar reached health levels a week or two.
I tried to talk with his senior boss, did not work.
Finally I sent an email to the highest level in the public health organization he was working in and 2 hours later the study was drawn back.
After that I never trust any study about environment and climate. I don’t trust the press/media, because they could only print the propaganda lies about it and definitely not the truth. And on newsgroup at that time I was also considered an idiot by some for critiquing the study. And when I was proven right it was like “don’t mention the war”.
Global Cooling stories by the ’90s had morphed into Nuclear Winter stories, and I remember seeing them both running in the media at the same time. I knew something was wrong. When I saw that “Global Warming” was being pushed by left wing politics, I figured it out.
I realised I was being lied to by scientists… lots of them…. that was enough for me to smell smoked haddock in my bouillbaise !