From the you’ve got to be effing kidding me department come this dead serious essay from “The Conversation”, that hotbed of climate alarmism in Australia which somehow got past bullshit detectors at phys.org.
The money quote sort of tries to talk down the headline, but they leave it wide open as a possibility.
David Waltham writes:
So why don’t we see advanced civilisations swarming across the universe? One problem may be climate change. It is not that advanced civilisations always destroy themselves by over-heating their biospheres (although that is a possibility). Instead, because stars become brighter as they age, most planets with an initially life-friendly climate will become uninhabitably hot long before intelligent life emerges.
The Earth has had 4 billion years of good weather despite our sun burning a lot more fuel than when Earth was formed. We can estimate the amount of warming this should have produced thanks to the scientific effort to predict the consequences of man-made greenhouse-gas emissions.
These models predict that our planet should warm by a few degrees centigrade for each percentage increase in heating at Earth’s surface. This is roughly the increased heating produced by carbon dioxide at the levels expected for the end of the 21st century. (Incidentally, that is where the IPCC prediction of global warming of around 3°C centigrade comes from.)
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-06-climate-contact-alien-civilisations.html#jCp
Is there anything climate change can’t do? I predict effects on black holes next.
On the plus side, Michael Mann must be relieved that the Green Lizards aren’t coming after him.
h/t to Marc Morano and Leif Svalgaard
…I thought it was because we’re too stupid
Are you kidding me? CAGW devotees ARE aliens!
It sounds like they are admitting that solar activity is the true culprit everywhere
Since the election of the Abbot government, who’s very first act was to abolish the Climate Commission, the climate establishment here in Aus has been under blitzkrieg type assault…they may well be suffering from shell-shock!
ROFLMAO! Really? I don’t really know what to say at this point.
Back in the ’60’s I had a pimple on my nose. Was the climate changing that long ago?
Can I sue somebody?
I dunno. 3,2,1 go.
Co2 is a magical gas.
I didn’t know we were trying. I really need to get my head out of the sand.
Wait…
Does that mean climate change will stave off the alien invasion caused by climate change?
I wish they’d make up their minds.
Add it to the list-
http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/globalwarming2.html
Wasn’t there a story a couple of years back that suggested aliens might not bother to contact us because they can somehow detect, from many, many light years away, that we’re contributing too much CO2 to our atmosphere?
Is it any kookier than claiming that a few degrees of heating would turn Earth into a Venusian inferno?
Once again, WUWT helps expose the lunatics who believe we are all going to melt into a pile of burning, stinking flesh if we don’t stop driving our cars, powering our homes, industry and world. Ludicrous nonsense.
Bollocks. Why look at 4 billion years of ‘weather’ when you really should be saying climate? Weather is not climate.
Why not look at the last 2 million years? In the last few million years the normal state of the Earth is ice ages (good ‘weather’?). Most of the recent interglacials have been HOTTER than the Holocene. Should aliens conclude that we humans are cooling the Earth during interglacials??? The Holocene is STILL on a cooling trend. It’s worse than we thought!
Nothing to see here, move along folks.
These models predict that our planet should warm by a few degrees centigrade for each percentage increase in heating … ???
If you can bring yourself to believe that the output of unverified computer models is evidence, the sky is not the limit. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/04/10/why-a-compelling-theory-is-not-enough/
Thank God… So all this time letting my truck idle in the driveway overnight has protected us from the Brain Sucking Aliens. I suddenly feel even better than I felt before, which was already pretty good!
Would that be a retroactive prediction? LOL.
Global warming is like tulip mania. It will soon fizzle out as people slowly come to their senses. As the Earth slowly defies their garbage and does NOT WARM. Shame on Hansen and his ship of fools.
But…..aren’t they already here???
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOAvL1O3DyM
Oh, I dunno– seems to me we’ve been here awhile, climate change hasn’t stopped us yet.
mjmsprt40, undocumented space alien.
I am now thinking that the human civilization should probably disappear from the Universe before we embarrass ourselves even more. If other intelligent life forms elsewhere get wind of the nonsense that our alleged intelligent leaders and scientists are telling us, they will surely laugh themselves to death.
The climate has been achanging and no aliens. QED
Same as garlic prevents vampires. I eat garlic and have had really minimal vampire problems.
@ Jimbo, June 10, 2014 at 4:43 pm
Ah, but that’s how we stop the anti-AGW invasion.We use climate change to shut down the interstellar worm holes.
Keep it coming. This is how the GOP destroyed itself with the help of the media. Again the media is helping but I don’t think they realize who/what side. AGW proponents don’t even realize this is the caricature they have become.
“Remarkably, biological and geological evolution have generally produced cooling and this has compensated for the warming effect of our ageing sun. There have been times when compensation was too slow or too fast, and the Earth warmed or cooled, but not once since life first emerged has liquid water completely disappeared from the surface.”
Wait…what? Earth’s compensation has at TIMES (plural) been “too slow or to fast, and the Earth warmed or cooled…” On it’s OWN??? No way….”too fast” is unprecedented. Ask Mann.
“The Convseration” vs “The Conversation”- dyslexics untie!
The original “When the Earth Stood Still” was a masterpiece! (and not just because the female lead was played by Patricia Neal, who I am a great fan of). It was about how aliens could come in peace. Their message was simple. Blow the damn place up if you want, but do not export your violence to the rest of the universe.
The remake was a cluster flop! They bastardized the message. It was “you are destroying your planet so we will destroy you before you can succeed”. And the way we were destroying it was of course global warming.
So I think these clowns in Australia need to get together with the producers of the film and figure out exactly what the aliens want! If they are going to stop us, they will have to come here and do it.
WOW, climate change can do ANYTHING, except match their flawed computer modems!! ;-)!
The “pro-science” brigade believes in aliens. How quaint.
Incidentally, that is where the IPCC prediction of global warming of around 3°C centigrade comes from.
The 3°C centigrade (sic) number was plucked from thin air, but I suppose it could have easily been plucked from outer space.
Aliens have already been and gone, fellas. That’s where the missing warming went (I guess they read the AGW screeds, and decided we had plenty to spare…)…
They are experts on all stars and extra-solar planets now, I knew this day would happen.
Wait, I was certain the earth is surrounded by a million spacecraft from as many space age species sent here because of really bad television programming…. But no. They are here to intervene because we have caused CO2 to spike a bit in the troposphere, Golly. I think I am suffering pre-post traumatic stress syndrome now. I hate that when that happens.
“We can estimate the amount of warming this should have produced thanks to the scientific effort to predict the consequences of man-made greenhouse-gas emissions”
Bullshit.
“These models predict that our planet should warm by a few degrees centigrade for each percentage increase in heating at Earth’s surface.”
Bullshit squared.
This article is garbage. Aliens have long regarded this entire planet as “flyover country”. Aliens don’t come here unless they have a warp drive breakdown or are graduate students at some third rate multiversity condemned to study primitive species because nobody trusts them to do real research. They mostly stay in their alien base camps getting high (ozone is a favorite) and waiting for warp drive breakdowns to relieve the boredom. They make occasional forays “on planet” to probe a sampling of earth inhabitants, followed by writing turgid papers on our continued lack of development and grubbing for more grants to continue the dreary cycle (which is still preferable to getting a real job).
Show these morons the Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram…
All of you are wrong!
You see, the guy who only comes once a year via the wormhole in the Arctic has twelve rain deer, you see? And he knows if we are naughty or nice.
And if you are like us here, NAUGHTY, you get some COAL! Not made in China toys. 🙂
emsnews says:
June 10, 2014 at 6:02 pm
I’ve always wondered how Santa delivers presents to children on distant worlds on Christmas night.
emsnews says:
June 10, 2014 at 6:02 pm
All of you are wrong!
You see, the guy who only comes once a year via the wormhole in the Arctic has twelve rain deer, you see? And he knows if we are naughty or nice.
And if you are like us here, NAUGHTY, you get some COAL! Not made in China toys. 🙂
—————————————————————
Uh— Not exactly. Actually, he comes in a rusty Chevrolet. I happen to have that on the very best authority. You’re right about the coal though. He seems to find it funny that, with all this talk of CAGW, he can leave one of the dirtiest fuels on the planet in stockings, with a fair amount of that coal being burned in the colder regions for heat.
Just a few years ago, a report said that the aliens might come and wipe us out to protect the rest of the planet from our GHG emissions.
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2011/aug/18/aliens-destroy-humanity-protect-civilisations
One of several scenarios proposed.
The Fermi Paradox? Who said that intelligent life has to master interstellar space travel to be intelligent? That would mean humans aren’t intelligent (yet). And that was the opening sentence. That and the fact that Howard Stern was beamed to Earth to test the intelligence of Earthlings and shortly after bought his own satellite just to send a message back to his home planet – “get me the hell out of here!”
It’s all true.
dccowboy says:
June 10, 2014 at 4:21 pm
“ROFLMAO! Really? I don’t really know what to say at this point.”
______________________
try:
Klaatu barada nikto
It’s quite obvious that, at least in the US, the entire Climate Change Movement will come to a screeching halt under the doctrine of separation of Church and State.
When scientists sound like cheap TV preachers, eventually the real TV preachers will sue.
David Waltham primarily writes about the changing climate of planets due to increased radiation from stars that are blowing up and become red giants. That would narrow the period of it’s potentially inhabitable planet of beeing in the zone between too cold like Mars and too hot like Venus to few 100 million years. In the case of earth this would have been to short for development of self-replicating molecules into organisms that are able to discover outer space, leave it’s atmosphere and ultimately colonize the galaxy.
He claims that earth was just lucky and life on other planets would be extinct because of the changing climate there (!!!) before they reach the era of spaceflight.
He doesn’t say that our atmospheres’ content of CO2 will influence other civilizations or our search for them. The reference to IPCC and it’s propaganda seems just to be there for comparison. The ‘climate change’ he talks about is supposed to occur on other civilizations’ planets and could have plenty of reason’s, mainly the increase of their star’s radiation.
REPLY: Yes perhaps, but it is still a stupid headline – A
On the positive side he is saying it’s the sun — does that mean we can forget CO2?
Just askin’
philjourdan says:
June 10, 2014 at 5:29 pm
Movie trivia–great! The Day the Earth Stood Still is excellent 50’s science fiction. The galactic police force shows up on Earth and threatens to destroy the planet unless earthlings abjure destructive nuclear weapons. It had a hint of romance, a baaad robot, and a happy ending. It even sported a whimsical scientist inspired by Einstein, lost in his studies. As a little bonus the visiting alien shows “Einstein” how to put the finishing touches on his unified theory of the cosmos.
But more interesting and perhaps more on topic is a supplemental discussion by the film makers. They saw their film as their own warning to earthlings to put aside petty disputes and turn to a new super-authority, the UN, to resolve all their conflicts. The film makers were lovable old communists who thought that nothing but good could come from an international authoritarian body. They would have adored the IPCC.
It’s interesting to contrast this with Independence Day, which features aliens who are neither supervisory nor benign. For those who haven’t seen it, it’s a remake of the old Orson Welles’ presentation of The War of the Worlds. Those badass aliens might embody your worst nightmare of what the UN could become. But, to end with another bit of trivia: early in Independence Day there is a brief flash of a TV set showing a rerun of The Day the Earth Stood Still. Many gullible earthlings apparently still thought that the Galactic Bureaucracy would bring us nothing but good.
@James Strom – excellent analysis! (mine was short to stick to the point). It was the heady days after WWII and the UN still had some integrity left. So yes, that is the message of the 50s. So what is the excuse of the remake? I guess they gave up on the UN. 😉
Ad Hom time!!!!
Damn it Jim!
Being a suspected alien myself (as my wife and kids insist), I can say we only want to build a highway through here but Earth is in the way.
“So why don’t we see advanced civilisations swarming across the universe?”
—
If these idiots would only study the “historical documents,” they would realize that aliens either use cloaking devices to avoid detection, or they hide themselves to honor the prime directive. Of course you don’t see them swarming across the universe!
Whatever the reason why aliens are avoiding us, it’s a good thing for me. I’ve misplaced my copy of Slim Whitman’s “Indian Love Call.” I realize it’s only been tested successfully against Martians, but that’s a pretty good start.
Any sign of life on Uranus?
Earth-like is not Earth. How many planets have a 22-1/2 degree tilted axis, were struck by a rogue planet creating a large single satellite orbiting at just the right distance and have a start like the Sun? And even with all that, the biosphere appears to have been a bit of a fluke. We may be alone or nearly so.
start -> star (danged fat fingers … )
‘Michael Mann must be relieved that the Green Lizards aren’t coming after him.’
Too many cock tales?
Aliens are watching us right now, tuning in to all the BBC, ABC broadcasts. This CO2 malarkey is the funniest show in the galaxy!
/sarc (just in case)
“It is not that advanced civilisations always destroy themselves by over-heating their biospheres (although that is a possibility).
It is also possible that they always destroy themselves because they cant tell when they are exaggerating.
“So why don’t we see advanced civilisations swarming across the universe?”
Because we are not looking hard enough. NASA is not searching. SETI is privately underfunded. They rely on dole outs from individuals. They don’t even have their own dedicated radio telescopes. They share telescopes with other institutions. Given this pathetic situation, I estimate the odds of finding ET is one in three million. In other words, at the rate we’re searching we expect to find ET after 3 million years. Assuming there are at least 10,000 alien civilizations in our galaxy. It’s also possible there is none or they are not interested in communicating with us (not sending signals)
Climate, huh. That’s what they want us to believe.
Roswell Station Data
If it gets warmer, the earth will become the holiday resort of choice for Proxima Centaurians ;>)
Intelligent life has not emerged in Australia yet.
Fire up… “They” are not friendly!
Were we not told, just a few years back, that climate change would bring alien intervention?
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2011/aug/18/aliens-destroy-humanity-protect-civilisations
I don’t tink we need to be worried about aliens.
If intelligent life is common on planets that can have life and such planets are common then there would be millions or billions of planets with intelligent life forms.
If it is possible to colonize other planets it would not take a long time for an advanced civilization to colonize the entire galaxy.
It may actually be too hard or too dangerous to do so and thas why it hasn’t happened. There is a limit how far technology can take us and we do not know the limit yet.
Assume the following:
– Start with 1 planet with intelligent life.
– It takes 10 000 years for an advenced civilization to get enough people to create 2 new colonization ships.
– Each colonized planet will only send 2 new colonization ships and do so 10 000 years after it is colonized.
So if we assume a civilization at our level and it takes 10 000 years for it to send the first 2 ships we get the following numbers:
It will take 360 000 years to colonize 137 Billion planets. 360 000 years may seem a long time but it is a very short time for a solar system or our galaxy.
Imagine how many planets a civilization on a solar system like ours that was formed just 1 million years before us could have visited.
There would be traces of aliens everywhere on planets all over the universe, but there aren’t, at least not in our solar system. Our Planet would most likeley have been colonized millions of years before humans appeared if it would be possible, but it hasn’t.
So in my opionion there are just a few reason for this.
– We are one of the first intelligent lifeforms. It may be very rare that an intelligent liform appears on a planet.
– It is techinacally too hard/impossible and dangerous to send colonization ships to other planets many lightyears away.
Aliens are not staying away from earth due to climate change. Even with the moste scary CAGW scenarios earth would still look like a great planet to live on for aliens.
From the amazon page about his book Lucky Planet, which is based on the “4 billion years of good weather” lunacy –
“About the Author
David Waltham is an astrobiologist, geophysicist and head of the department of Earth Sciences at Royal Holloway College, the University of London.”
“This solution to the Fermi Paradox might be considered depressing, but it should increase our caution – “We may just find out the hard way that planets with nasty climates are quite easy to produce.””
“good weather” vs. “nasty climate”. A typical British scare salesman like Maltus, Lovelock, Ravetz on a book promotion tour.
Climate change will end the Universe. Following the Big Bang, gravitational attraction should’ve been sufficient to slow down and reverse the expanding Universe, once again leading to a singularity and another Big Bang, thus repeating the cycle for infinity. But just like it causes the expansion of the seas, and Mann’s ego (I had to throw in a little comic relief for this sober assessment), Climate Change will cause the Universe to expand.
Forever.
I can just imagine a retired couple of aliens planning their vacation:
“You don’t want to visit Earth. The A/C doesn’t work.”
Unless they are from Hoth. They would love the warm weather.
@Kenny – Or the Husnock – they were Eradicated by Kevin Uxbridge. 😉
“Instead, because stars become brighter as they age, most planets with an initially life-friendly climate will become uninhabitably hot long before intelligent life emerges.”
The single measurement that refutes this hypothesis is “Earth”.
“We can estimate the amount of warming this should have produced thanks to the scientific effort to predict the consequences of man-made greenhouse-gas emissions.”
Original estimates based on a large body of engineering data on aerodynamics ‘predicted’ that bumblebees cannot fly. Other estimates based on early computer models of the electronic structures of simple molecules ‘predicted’ that lithium hydride was too unstable to exist. Estimates in nascent scientific investigations are primarily useful for grantsmanship.
It is probably impossible for spacecraft to travel faster than 10% of the speed of light. That means we are all stuck in our own little solar systems and EM spectrum communication at the speed of light is all that is possible.
The period of time that advanced civilizations are broadcasting EM to reach into deep space might only last a few hundred years. Earth will go dark in this type of communication in the next 50 years in terms of everyday communication that will be strong enough to reach beyond the nearest stars. Deliberate attempts at communication across the stars might be all that we can hear. Maybe this is eventually deemed to be dangerous to do and alien civilizations only do it for a few decades before someone says stop doing that. I think, we have already reached this conclusion.
So, they are not here and we cannot hear them either. In 50 years, no one will hear us either.
Dammit, now the aliens won’t come to visit us because too many idiots are flapping their meat at each other. This classic humor story by Terry Bisson will explain all:
http://www.terrybisson.com/page6/page6.html
This whole thing is based on the idea that the earth’s climate is a delicately balanced system that, purely by luck, has remained relatively stable for the last billion years. They believe that the increase in solar energy over that time should have coused up to 100C in warming but it’s been almost precisely countered by the cooling forcings produced by the biosphere (like decreasing CO2). They can’t even conceive that the climate might be able to regulate itself.
I swear I’ve seen studies referenced on this site that claim the opposite — unnatural climate change will alert aliens to our presence and prompt an alien invasion because
1) The aliens want to harvest the natural resources contained in our precious bodily fluids.
-OR-
2) The aliens want to destroy us before we destroy the environment.
Or possibly I saw this on The Simpson’s.
Final word on global warming and its power over the natural world.
CO2 with the help of GLOBAL WARMING caused the Big Bang and subsequent super-luminal expansion of the early Universe.
So there! (sticks out toungue)
“tongue” . Sorry!
With our nearest stars between 5 and 15 light years away…I’m not going to worry too much about intergalactic invasions.
“Alan Robertson says:
June 10, 2014 at 6:38 pm
Klaatu barada nikto”
This is what happens when you get it wrong;
Exactly!
Were interstellar space-faring intelligence common (even as ‘common’ as one per galaxy per million years), Earth would have been colonized by another race long ago.
The similarity of human DNA to that of every other Earth creature rules out the possibility that humans were planted here as a colony.
If faster than light travel is possible, the limit on expansion is population growth, and any race with a rate of population doubling close to that of humans could populate the galaxy in mere thousands of years. If not, it’s absurd to think that aliens would spend decades in travel just to visit the Earth.
We have not been visited.
I can think of a few reasons we haven’t been visited.
For one, just as in every human society, there are laws. Maybe in a larger society, one of the laws is to leave young civilizations alone. Or there may be other, unkown frontiers that are much more interesting and/or imperative, and which do not require interstellar expansion. Or, solipsism: I might be the only entity in existence, and everything else is a figment of my imagination… OK, that one isn’t as likely. But it is more likely than climate change.
The fact is that we haven’t been contacted. That is the only verifiable fact. So that leaves a lot of possibilities open. Except for climate change. We have to draw the line somewhere.
I live in Las Vegas and I can definitively say the odds are 50/50 — either we find ET or we don’t.
=========================================================================
They’re hiding behind the missing heat?
Or maybe they only hang around planets that don’t rotate and don’t revolve around a sun? Such a planet would liking have a climate that didn’t change much.
more soylent green! says:
June 11, 2014 at 12:07 pm
“I live in Las Vegas and I can definitively say the odds are 50/50 — either we find ET or we don’t.”
With what I have seen in Vegas my bet is that they are already here. But as we all know, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas so the rest of us will never find out.
=======================================================================
“It’s a cookbook!”
Maybe they’re just waiting until we preheat ourselves?
The “cold sun paradox” is important, and is strong evidence in favor of theories of broad climate stability like Willis’ thermostat hypothesis and Claes Johnson’s calculations for how a slower hydrological cycle would increase the lapse rate (concentrating warmth closer to the surface). Trying to tie it to anthropogenic or alienogenic climate change is of course absurd. Super slow changes are being lumped with changes that sentient agents make quickly and can react to quickly? The slow solar change and how pre-technological life was able to survive it is a real conundrum, but of all the ways technological life could kill itself off, climate change seems way down on the list.
The real reason we haven’t seen any space aliens.
Hmmph. Obviously they haven’t watched The Arrival: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Arrival_%28film%29. It’s global warming that brings the aliens.
The errors, illogicalities, unsustainable chains of inference, one dimensional thinking and over-arching utter intellectual deficiency are quite simply breathtaking.
One reason may be that they are observing climate changers lying to everyone to further their agendas and the aliens think: “What a bunch of dicks. Why do they lie and manipulate each other to make money?”
“Who wants to hang around with assholes like them?”
“Let’s check that planet out, over there. I hear they actually allow their people to grow organic without trampling their property.”
Great! One less threat to worry about. I never did like the idea of becoming a “food source”. I assume the food chain does not stop with the earth. LOL
“I live in Las Vegas and I can definitively say the odds are 50/50 — either we find ET or we don’t.”
Now I know why Las Vegas is the gambling capital of US and casinos are making a killing.
The physorg title completely misrepresents the article. The title assigned by an editor at The Conversation–“Why haven’t we encountered aliens yet? The answer could be climate change”–is at least a reasonable summary of the argument.
Waltham doesn’t seem to realize that without apocalyptic “climate change” guaranteed by predictable stellar evolution to motivate a seriously intelligent species to leave home, there would be no Fermi Paradox. So it is not the “solution” he seems to think it is, but part of the “paradox” package.
These models predict that our planet should warm by a few degrees centigrade for each percentage increase in heating at Earth’s surface.
Isn’t it marvelous how these climate modelers can bend the laws of physics to their wishes? It’s as if they have rescinded the Stefan-Boltzmann law, which ordains that a 1% increase of surface heating would produce global warming at the surface of about 0.7°C on current temperatures, not “a few degrees centigrade” as claimed.
I guess they must hail from a different universe to ours which operates by different physical laws. Hence their confusion.