Perhaps a eulogy will help Dana Nuccitelli and others come to terms with the death of the AGW hypothesis.
By Craig Lindberg
Perhaps Dana Nuccitelli and others can’t come to terms with the death of the AGW hypothesis because Climate Change hasn’t been properly eulogized. Maya Angelou once wrote; “I can accept the idea of my own demise, but I am unable to accept the death of anyone else. I find it impossible to let a friend or relative go into that country of no return. Disbelief becomes my close companion, and anger often follows in its wake.”
I fear Dana likewise is likewise suffering from the denial and anger that follows the loss of a loved one. To that end, I offer these words to try to bring some comfort and closure to him and his friends who are tormented by the loss of their dear friend and long-time companion.
I never had the opportunity to meet Climate Change personally;
however he had many friends, and they spoke of him frequently – so frequently that at times, I thought they wanted me to know him better than I know my own family. And while I never came to know and appreciate Climate Change the way they did, he did bring me many laughs over the years.
Climate change had a difficult childhood. His father was a relentlessly self-promoting civil servant from Iowa and his mother was an elderly French prostitute named Lia. She was not the perfect mother; she would drink. She would make outrageous claims like she invented the internet. Sometimes, she would accuse bushes of being corrupt. The sort of general mendacity that only the self-proclaimed genius possess and the skeptical lament. She spent all her time in pursuit of riches; never did she lift a finger to help Climate Change. His friends did their best to help him deal with the pain of his youth; so dedicated was one man, that he even tried to convince the world that Lia never even existed.
As a boy, Climate Change kept mostly to himself and was not the larger-than-life figure we have come to know in recent years. Certainly no one would have guessed that he would go on to found one of the largest religions of our time. You might say his childhood was typical: summers in Rangoon , luge lessons. In the spring, he made meat helmets, pretty standard, really.
He first gained notoriety when thrust unwillingly into the spotlight by those who would later become friends of his mother. They wanted everyone to believe that it was he who was cold and heartless; though now these proselytes deny any part in it. I can still remember seeing him as a young man on the cover of Time magazine; the “Big Freeze” they called him. A chilling life was not his destiny however, and soon his future was as bright as an active sun – so bright that even the Hollywood A-list would seek out his warmth. In time, he came to be known as Global Warming.
When someone you love passes away, there is a strong temptation to remember them perhaps a little too well. Misdeeds are forgotten; offenses are forgiven; and only the most shining characteristics of our loved ones make it into the version of them that we keep with us when they depart. Most people who knew Global Warming would be surprised to learn that he quietly struggled with depression. At times, he would preach among his followers, “If you don’t have the kind of life you might like, you can find happiness in the concerns of those around you.”
Though most people didn’t know this about him, they know the troubles it eventually caused him all too well. Many of his disciples took his words to mean that they should not only go out and create concerns in the people around them but also in all people around the world. And as time went by and the various fears that were attributed to Global Warming failed to materialize, the damage to his reputation became beyond repair. Many people stopped taking him seriously. When he went out in public, even the children would point at him and laugh. Ultimately this led his promoters to convince him to reinvent himself yet again, this time as the Climate Change we lay to rest here today.
Unlike his previous personas, Climate Change was difficult to understand. Perhaps this was by design; he didn’t want to relive the problems of his past, or perhaps it was his devoted friends who believed the best way to protect him was to keep the details of his life a secret. Whatever the reason, we never really had the opportunity to know who he was or wasn’t even though we heard about him every day. The paparazzi liked the new Climate Change more than ever – so much that they looked right past his ever increasing problems. I’m sure this made his passing all the more difficult for those who idolized him.
Despite a string of events that would have broken a lesser man, he continued to face the world with an unparalleled hope and optimism that nothing could stop him. Einstein once said “there are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” The latter certainly defined Climate Change. He believed nothing could prove him wrong, and he radiated a Machiavellian-like passion that inspired a wave of second-rate postdocs and government researchers to use the magic of politics, in a strange twist, to transform alchemy into a respected science that would let them to taste fame and fortune beyond their wildest expectations.
However, even with all his fame, Climate Change was never a rich man. He did not have money to give to the world’s poor and suffering, nor was he ever able to convince his mother to use her riches to help anyone other than herself. This particularly weighed on him given all the heat waves and snow storms, droughts and floods, and all manner of pestilence that had been falsely attributed to him now and into the future. Nonetheless, he had an uncanny way of inspiring a sort of assisted generosity in his fellow man. Countless billions of our hard earned dollars have been given in his name. For this more than anything else, I’m sure he will be missed by real friends.
His seemingly sudden death has come as a surprise to many, but Climate Change had been in poor health for some time. His close friends were in a deep denial, most of those in the media were too distraught to bring themselves to report it; and, despite his ever worsening condition, Climate Change never grumbled or complained about his sometimes obvious discomfort, a rare virtue in any man. Hopefully his friends can find it in them to be as strong. Let us honor Climate Change’s brave struggle by letting him go silently into the night. Rest in peace.
“Warning, Will Robinson!” Or maybe I should quote Mark Twain: “Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” All this gloating about the death of climate change assumes we know what the future holds in store. Isn’t that foolish thing for self-avowed skeptics to do?
Too many of us have been hoodwinked by the self-anointed “consensus” into believing that if AGW is “real,” then everything else they say follows as night the day. So it then seems we can’t reject their alarmism and statist “solutions” without denying a significant human contribution to global warming.
Please stop! You’re letting them set the terms of debate! Worse, you’re falling into the trap they have set for you. They want you to deny that greenhouse gases have a greenhouse effect, because rejecting a tautology does not reasonable, much less scientific. Worse still, if you follow their lead and make the tautology the main issue, you help them spread their false narrative that AGW = CAGW = moral imperative for centralized energy planning on a global scale.
Finally, let’s please remember that the world has been in an overall warming trend for about 150 years. The most cautious forecast is that this will continue. The 16-year warming pause is significant, but chiefly as evidence that IPCC climate models are not accurate enough to forecast climate change and very possibly overestimate climate sensitivity. But one swallow does not make a spring. Global temperatures have not dipped back to those of the 1950s, let alone those at the start of the instrumental record.
Those who gloat over the death of AGW today may wake up with lots of egg on their faces tomorrow.
Doug-
I think the leadership is there but it has now joined with a new vision of economics and that is doing the driving. Like the New Economics Institute in US (previously the Schumacher Society) and its affiliate new economics foundation in the UK and the Democracy Collaborative and the collaborative consumption movement that the EU added to its agenda back in September. You have Benjamin Barber pitching mayors as the new political heroes and cities as the base for sustainability efforts in his TED talk.
You had Gore at the citylab conference recently in NYC and sustainability efforts as the central focus at Atlanta’s recent (co)lab summit where climate change became part of the pitch for realizing King’s Beloved Community. Another summit in SF and then Cleveland yesterday. The targets and pitches are morphing into political authorities that have regulatory authority to bind without consent and increasingly that is regional planning authorities and education.
Cameron PMQs Vows To Roll Back Green Taxes On Energy
gopal panicker says:
October 25, 2013 at 8:35 am
He already has been re-incarnated…the very cute, warm and fuzzy baby is named Sustainable Development…
Exactly right.
Like many adventurers and explorers AGW succumbed to the vicious, vindictive Mother Nature.
Al Gore invented the internet, and, to promote its utilization, GGCAGW –Goofy Gore Calumnyistic AGW
Well my idea of climate change is, maybe about three and sixpence; but I can remember when that was real money. On Wednesdays, I often go to KFC for their chicken pot pie Wed. special, at $2.99 plus 10% sales tax (in CA)….When I was a kid, we used to buy those for lunch,at school; well not actually at school; but at the bakery. In those days, schools were for educational instruction; not restaurant catering. Well back then, those pies were called “thrupenny pies”, and they were real meat pies, usually steak and kidney, and they came with flakey pastry top and bottom, and all sides. The KFC CPPs come with Aluminium bottom and sides, and just the top is flakey pastry. The Aluminium doesn’t taste as good as the pastry. But the price is still the same; $3 US is still worth about thrupence. On my last visit to Auckland, I discovered you can still get those thrupenny pies, but now in a lot more filling flavors; and yes the do cost about the same; $3NZ.
So maybe climate change is only worth about two and sixpence !
Tim Maguire says:
October 25, 2013 at 4:12 am
“Catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, or CAGW for short. Not climate change.”
Could not agree more. Any planet with gaseous and liquid outer spheres that is not experiencing changes in its climate, be they large or small, fast or slow, is a dead or dying planet.
To write as the author of this piece has is to lend comfort to the corruption of our language by the proponents of CAGW.
The ultimate in /sarc! Bravo!
@Mary Childs –
Don’t forget that other socialist, Adolf Hitler, who, like Mao, learned his trade from Lenin and Stalin and one Anton Drexler, the founder of the Nazi Party six months before Hitler joined, who equated Germany’s Jews with the Marxist bourgeois class enemy.
“Climate Change” has quite a pedigree, doesn’t he?
“”””””…….Marlo Lewis says:
October 25, 2013 at 9:06 am
“Warning, Will Robinson!” Or maybe I should quote Mark Twain: “Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” All this gloating about the death of climate change assumes we know what the future holds in store. Isn’t that foolish thing for self-avowed skeptics to do?
Too many of us have been hoodwinked by the self-anointed “consensus” into believing that if AGW is “real,” then everything else they say follows as night the day. So it then seems we can’t reject their alarmism and statist “solutions” without denying a significant human contribution to global warming. …….”””””””
So this is supposed to be news ?? So the Temperature goes up, and the Temperature goes down; and life on earth goes on. Right now, the global CO2 is at an all time low; having in the past been 20 times what it is today. I don’t recall life coming to a screeching halt.
And if CO2 is the problem; well it is only logarithmically the problem, so you would have to cut CO2 by a factor of ten to get a noticeable difference in Temperature. When you are ready to call for cutting the world population (just of humans), by a factor of ten; then maybe it will be a serious problem.
And if, as you say, we know FOR SURE that man made CO2 is the problem; then let’s just cut through all the crap. Stop with ALL of the funding of research on climate change; since we have proved it’s the problem, and then we can hire ENGINEERS to fix the problem. We don’t need any more studies; just fixes, and that takes engineers; not political scientists.
Insert your favorite name, but it does bring to mind a little Shakespeare (modern language version):
HAMLET
Let me see. (he takes the skull) Oh, poor Yorick! I used to know him, Horatio—a very funny guy, and with an excellent imagination. He carried me on his back a thousand times, and now—how terrible—this is him. It makes my stomach turn. I don’t know how many times I kissed the lips that used to be right here. Where are your jokes now? Your pranks? Your songs?
Your flashes of wit that used to set the whole table laughing? You don’t make anybody smile now. Are you sad about that? You need to go to my lady’s room and tell her that no matter how much makeup she slathers on, she’ll end up just like you some day. That’ll make her laugh. Horatio, tell me something.
Pundits speculate endlessly why Climate Change had secretly kept his 1970s heavy fur coat. It had been delivered from storage, freshly cleaned and repaired just before his death and it was addressed to Big Freeze. Climate Change proved to be an enigma even to his closest friends. And, for such an apparently hysterical fellow, he was a clever practical joker. He capriciously sent one of his very closest, Travis T. Earthburn, off hunting for the hotspot which was supposedly pinballing randomly across the globe’s troposphere and deviously, from time to time, suddenly plunging down to the hidden depths of the ocean. The joke had already been pulled by C.C. when he sent Mikyamal Shamann off looking for lost tree rings blown away by volcanoes.
Point of order:
Paul Erlich was born in Philadelphia, not Iowa.
Carry on.
Dammit!! I should have known that Jimmy Hansen was born in Iowa…
“assisted generosity”
Heh. (:
and . . .
– – – – – – – –
george e. smith,
I think you are correct in your above comment to Marlo Lewis. Its nature is logarithmic.
Per your above comment addressed to Monckton on the other thread wrt Monckton’s CO2 plot. I think that the Mauna Loa data has a logarithm nature, not a linear nature as Monckton over-simplistically and unnecessarily plotted. His GASTA linear fit has significant assumption limits as well which he does not qualify.
Personal Note => As to Monckton, on that other thread, implying you are a troll . . . nuts to him. As much as I have enjoyed and often supported him here at WUWT, Monckton has an history of knee-jerk ‘troll’ name calling at critics or people with different thinking. It looks to me like an emotionally induced intermittent intellectual short circuit of sorts.
John
John Whitman says:
October 25, 2013 at 11:16 am
I think that the Mauna Loa data has a logarithm nature, not a linear nature as Monckton over-simplistically and unnecessarily plotted.
You think that?
I think that you should provide a link to the data that supports your thought.
Way I read it, the Mauna Loa data is a plot of the daily/monthly CO2 level readings showing that while they fluctuate somewhat rhythmically, it is rising rather steadily as the graph used by Monckton portrays.
Unfortunately the politicians who support CAGW/CC are the same ones who promise the voters something for nothing. It is a powerful combination that will not be defeated by mere logic. Perhaps logic with a bit of humor will help.
A Mann of Penn State Alma mater
Got funded to prove that it’s hotter
He cut down a tree
and exclaimed with great glee
that it’s temperature plot’s more crooked than me!
Ever since the picture of Nuccitelli on a scooter was published i’ve been haunted by a feeling that I’d seen him before. It took me ages to work it out. He’s Sally Bowles as played by Liza Minnelli in Cabaret.
JF
milodonharlani says:October 25, 2013 at 8:51 am
I prefer CACA, for Catastrophic Anthropogenic Climate Alarmism.
*********************
Sorrry, CACA is already taken by the Catastrophic Afordable Care Act.
Since CO2 is biochemically reduced to form life, it is the mother of ALL Life and those wanting to reduce its concentrations are fighting ALL life on Earth, cute endangered creatures and biodiversity included. They are only riding the “Enviornmentalism” wave to accomplish their real objective of harming and killing as many people as they can, and get away with it. They simply don’t care how much damage they do to the biosphere along the way.
If news journalists and the general public had any brains to amount to anything, they would have realized long ago that the alarmist claims simply could not be true. The persistence of life on this world for billions of years necessitates a far more stable climate than claimed.
I do not like to see skeptics exhibiting the same inability to think or investigate. Al Bore never said he invented the internet. He would have no reason to say something so stupid that everyone knew was false. He coined the term “information superhighway” in the 1990’s. He was already out to harm the economy and I already hated him for that and I hate this term because it WAS Al Gore who coined it.
“to terms with the death of the AGW hypothesis”
Who decides if the AGW hypothesis is dead? I thought that scientists usually make that decision. Like phrenology or other discredited theories scientists no longer do research trying to prove them.
John Whitman-
Great adaptive poetry!
Here’s my adaptation-
Ode to Climate Modelers
Yesterday, up in the air
I modeled heat that wasn’t there.
It wasn’t there again today,
I wish, I wish it came to stay…
When I logged in last night at three,
The GCM heat greeted me.
But when the measurements were called,
I couldn’t see it there at all!
Go away, measurements, no warming’s such a bore!
Go away, measurements, I trust my models more…
Last night I claimed up in the sky,
Great heat that none identified,
It wasn’t there again today
Oh, how I wish heat came my way…
Climate Change unfortunately spawned a number of illegitimate children (emission trading schemes ETS) tied by the umbilical cord to EU carbon markets. The ETS became imbedded in unwitting countries legislation. Climate Changes demise was foretold in April 2013 by the weakening of carbon markets and the inevitable effect on ETS.
NZ Net position April 2013 29.1 Million units
Carbon Price € 0.01 ($NZ 0.014)
Value of the Net Asset/(Liability) (NZ$m) ZERO
Unfortunately the irony of this situation was missed by the New Zealand press (are we surprised) Information from New Zealand Government website