Bloomberg news: People Don’t Fear Climate Change Enough
With respect to the science of climate change, many experts regard the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as the world’s authoritative institution. A draft summary of its forthcoming report was leaked last week. It describes the panel’s growing confidence that climate change is real, that it is a result of human action, and that if the world continues on its current course, it will face exceedingly serious losses and threats (including a significant rise in sea levels by century’s end).
…
Climate change lacks other characteristics that spur public concern about risks. It is gradual rather than sudden. The idea of warmer climates doesn’t produce anger, revulsion or disgust. Depletion of the ozone layer was probably the most closely analogous environmental concern; public attention to that problem was easier to mobilize because of fears of a huge rise in skin cancer.
In this light, it should not be surprising if people don’t get much exercised by the IPCC’s forthcoming report. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-27/people-don-t-fear-climate-change-enough.html (h/t to milodonharlani)
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WUWT reader Jimbo says:
Richard Tol is onto John Cook.He has written to the University of Queensland demanding all the data from Cook in an open letter.
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I found that the consensus rate in the data differs from that reported in the paper. Further research showed that, contrary to what is said in the paper, the main validity test in fact invalidates the data. And the sample of papers does not represent the literature. That is, the main finding of the paper is incorrect, invalid and unrepresentative.Furthermore, the data showed patterns that cannot be explained by either the data gathering process as described in the paper or by chance. This is documented. I asked Mr Cook again for the data so as to find a coherent explanation of what is wrong with the paper. As that was unsuccessful, also after a plea to Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, the director of Mr Cook’s work place,…
http://joannenova.com.au/2013/08/richard-tol-half-cooks-data-still-hidden-rest-shows-result-is-incorrect-invalid-unrepresentative/
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WUWT reader Gareth Phillips says:
How environmental news works.
A) http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/jul/19/puffin-numbers-recovery-farne-islands Headline, Puffin numbers show good recovery 19 July 2013
B) http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/aug/23/fears-seabirds-global-warming-affects-coastline Puffin number in serious decline. 23 August 2013
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The drifting “North pole” cam is back to its frozen state, not a hint of water:
http://psc.apl.washington.edu/northpole/NPEO2013/WEBCAM1/ARCHIVE/npeo_cam1_20130416145048.jpg
Meanwhile, after the coldest summer on record for the DMI dataset, 80N and above temperatures are below the freezing point of seawater and headed down at a normal pace now.
![meanT_2013[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/meant_201311.png?quality=75)
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Time for the BBC to ban the ‘D’ word?
It was at it again this morning on one of its regular Scientists: Aren’t They Marvellous?!!! programmes, this one presented by a particularly fulsome and slobbering Jim Al Khallili. [The audio is here but for God’s sake keep a towel handy to wipe off all the drool. Oh, and a sick bag too.] Khallili was giving the O Mighty Genius, How Shall We Praise Thee? treatment to a dreary-sounding woman named Joanna Haigh who is apparently head of physics at Imperial College London. Presumably Freeman Dyson and Richard Lindzen weren’t available.
Anyway, when she’s not swanning around her department radiating goodness, light, truth and beauty (so various recorded tributes told us), Haigh is a fervent believer in the IPCC, in man-made global warming, sections on “climate change” in Geography GCSEs and so on. She also has no time for climate sceptics who, she said, she prefers to call “deniers”.
Once might have been forgivable. But Al Khallili used in his intro too, for all the world as if the very nature of climate scepticism is so outre and unacceptable that it is perfectly acceptable to dismiss such miscreants with whatever insults one will.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100232735/time-for-the-bbc-to-ban-the-d-word/
meanwhile….
At Bishop Hill in comments, apparently a number of people complained, and one of them got some results from Joanna Haigh.
I fired off an email before the programme ended. After a courteous discussion (confined to the use of the word “denier”) Prof Haigh has agreed to avoid the term in future.
Skeptical Chymist
Bloomberg, of course.
Fearing Climate Change.
The Bloomberg article includes this second observation: ……. people tend to be especially focused on risks or hazards that have an identifiable perpetrator, and for that reason produce outrage. Warmer temperatures are a product not of any particular human being or group, but the interaction between nature and countless decisions by countless people. There are no obvious devils or demons — no individuals who intend to create the harms associated with climate change. For terrorism, a “we-they” narrative fits the facts; in the context of climate change, those who are the solution might well also be, or seem to be, the problem. In these circumstances, public outrage is much harder to fuel.
In fact there is a lot of talk about engendering disgust, indeed another sentence quotes The idea of warmer climates doesn’t produce anger, revulsion or disgust.
Why is fomenting this relevant? Doesn’t Prof Cass R. Sunstein not understand the manipulative and motivated reasoning and how transparent the corruption of this thinking?
milodonharlani
Every Washington Post article about climate is an opportunity to educate readers of the Post to the actual science.
Seems to me that Sunstein made a pretty good case that there is little or no reason to fear climate change.
However, if Sunstein wants to take the matter more seriously, I have a suggestion. Please explain what reason there is to believe in climate change aside from the propaganda agency known as the IPCC and a bunch of so-called climate scientists whose models were always toys and who have admittedly not solved the “forcings and feedbacks” riddle that must be solved if we are to know how much warming CO2 can cause.
The only reasons to believe in CAGW are the propagandistic output of the IPCC, the worthless models, and the failed attempt to attach an empirical meaning to the “forcings and feedbacks” claimed for CO2. There is no evidence available to the ordinary citizen or the ordinary Phd. There is no mass movement of people calling for relief.
I think it is worth pointing out that there is some clever wording in the AR5 claim for ‘certainty’.
Look carefully: AR4 said that there was a certain level of confidence (90%?) that “mankind was largely responsible for the temperature rise over the last 50 years”.
AR5 doesn’t say that. It doesn’t extend that claim. The new version says they are “95% confident that mankind is responsible for at least half of that warming. That is a heck of a climb-down.
But note how the spin is being placed on the message. It is being advertised as increased confidence instead of being a little more sure that about half the warming is anthropogenic. I am not sure they are weasel words because it is plainly stated: humans have apparently caused a lot less warming than was hitherto claimed, so says the IPCC.
They could be even more certain if the AG contribution was reduced. Maybe 98% sure it is AGW if it is only 20% of warming. If they could get to 1% of warming I’ll bet 100% agreement is possible.
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Sharp.
I know I’m 100% sure I’m more than skeptical of anything they say.
The IPCC’s ever increasing confidence reminds me of my Budget Officer experiences at a US Air Force base in England at the tail end of the Vietnam War. Funding was tight, but at the end of each fiscal year we would get additional funds (called “fall-out”) as excesses in better funded programs were identified and reprogrammed to short-funded bases. In 1970 we got a large measure of fall-out money in the last month of the fiscal year after being told all year that we wouldn’t. At the beginning of fiscal year 1971 we were told that this year we really would not get any fall-out money; we got more than in 1970. In 1972 we were told we really, really would not get any fall-out money; we got twice as much as in 1971. You guessed it. In 1973 we were told we really, really, really would not get any fall-out money; in the last month of the fiscal year we made out like Saudi potentates. The IPCC engages in the same rhetoric; they are really, really, really, really confident now. Why? Because they have left themselves nowhere to go. Once you are really confident about something, the only thing you can be is even more confident. Any less sows doubt amongst the masses, who only believe what they are told with conviction and passion. As with Ponzi schemes, the IPCC has to keep doubling down on future catastrophic scenarios to distract attention from the reality that the IPCC are natural climate change deniers. Climate change has always been, is now, and ever more will be. But the IPCC says this time it’s different and for proof offer half of half a century of modest warming, which follows two centuries of the warming rebound from the Little Ice Age. And follows four warmer periods in the past 10,000 years. “There are none so blind as those who will not see”; for the IPCC and its acolytes, belief has clouded vision.
Sunstein’s life’s work has always seemed to me to involve the manipulation of idiots, such as his efforts to get people elected whose own life’s work has in turn involved becoming adulated by idiots. But what blooming idiot wants to do either?
milodonharlani says: “Notice also the WaPo editorial, a position unlikely to be revised under new owner Bezos.”
“Careful not step on WaPoo.”
there is a Wapoo road in Charleston SC
The puffin comparison it truly interesting, because there was another story on NPR about a week ago, about puffins, no less, in North America, and how they were suffering because the primary food of the chicks was being driven north. The replacement fish, butterfish, is supposedly too large for the chicks to eat.
I did a quick search on puffins and climate change, and it appears that they are the poster-animal this summer for climate change. Articles all over the media, in the UK and the US, about puffins and how their chicks are all dying because their preferred food is too big to swallow The arguments all sound similar, like someone wrote one heart-rending press release, with local options to use the preferred fish in North America or in the UK, depending on the target market for the article.
I wonder if Fenton Communication has had a hand in this…
Only now do I realize that the Bloomberg article is from the inventor of the government sockpuppet, husband of current UN ambassador for the US, and newly appointed member of the NSA oversight comittee, Cass “Comrade” Sunstein.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-27/people-don-t-fear-climate-change-enough.html
This would have deversed an extra exclaimer. As his pontifications are not from some random Fellow of Climate Communications like the esteemed Comrade John Cook – Comrade Cass is smack bang up there in the centre of the politbüro elite!
@geran says:
August 27, 2013 at 3:07 pm
The insects are “attuned”? And here I thought they were going about their daily business. Lots of bees going after the flowers, mosquitoes biting and ants crawling. Even the birds (ours haven’t left the planet yet) are around. Thankfully the majority of people are ignoring the fear-mongering. Now – to get that majority to stir up enough to kick out the money-wasting politicians and “scientists”. It seems that they are busy doing other stuff – like living and trying to earn a living.
DirkH says:
August 28, 2013 at 1:50 am
Frightening, isn’t it? Yes, he has acquired an amazing amount of power. And he is just another professor. Not many years ago, the ascension of someone with his “professional experience” and intellectual bent would have brought forth powerful criticism.
Seems the BBC getting it wrong again.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23849332
Melting ice reveals clothing and tools. I.E. it was warmer then!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!