Guest Post by Barry Woods
I was invited several months ago, to contribute to a collection of essays and narratives about what sort of story is climate change. The book – Culture and Climate Change: Narratives – edited by Joe Smith, Renata Tyszczuk and Robert Butler, it was launched on the 24th June 2014. I originally submitted a rather long essay, and with some careful editing reduced it to the ~ 800 word limit (a big thank you to Hannah/Casper for their patience and help) .
Please take a look at all the contributions, some here might consider mine a rather lone voice, but I am glad to be included, and it is probably all the better for being tightly edited. Looking back now, I may have been experiencing mild ‘Climate Burnout’ when I wrote it. An extended revised version of my original submission is below, I called it:
The Science Was Settled Enough
I arrived very late to the man-made Global Warming debate; I was for want of a better phrase, totally ‘climate oblivious’ for years. If I had been surveyed say 5 years ago I would probably be considered as concerned about climate change and thought something should be done. That said I was largely oblivious to the issues of the debate, the ‘science’, the ‘policies’, The Inconvenient Truth, the Big Ask campaign, the UK Climate Change Act 2008, the IPCC, Rio, Kyoto had meant absolutely nothing to me. I was graduating, post graduate, then too busy with a career, getting married, day to day life and then three children. Which does seem to me to demonstrate the pointlessness of those surveys, presumably conjured up to persuade politicians that the weakly green public, largely totally oblivious to the issues of the debate, want politicians to take radical ‘action’.
I only became interested in climate change a few weeks before the Copenhagen conference following a blog post on a News and Politics forum I’d been a member of for a decade. The forum discussion it went on for tens and tens of pages and I finally took a look at the blog it referred to – WattsUpWithThat – (I’d never heard of it before) and I downloaded the climategate leaked material for myself. What struck me was FOI requests for data, that should have been freely given, apparent utter incompetence in the handling of data, and most striking to me (and for me the major ‘truth’ of the emails) was the apparent subtle pressure on scientists to provide a ‘nice tidy story’ for the politicians. Something I have since seen for myself in the twittersphere / blogs /media with warnings from climate concerned activists (and some scientists) to other scientists when they were trying to be accurate about the science, that ‘they are giving ammunition to sceptics. An awful situation for Science, if trying to scientifically accurate is to be thought of as spreading doubt?
Then came the Copenhagen conference, the media/political hype of ‘Saving the Planet’, the COP15 opening conference video being the worst offender, a child running from the rising ocean, leaping into a tree screaming for her life, which gave my daughter nightmares for months after, metres of sea level rise, cracked earth, tipping points, climate doom and catastrophes and climate denier rhetoric in the media. I asked an old friend of mine (a UK climate scientist) for the official sea level projections, and I was told the actual and most current IPCC figures(AR4) and that the high end figures were thought very unlikely and I thought why is this video being shown without any criticism or analysis from the media. Around the same time, one day my 5 year old daughter came home from infants school and started turning off all the lights in the house (great-it saves electricity and we are always telling our children to do this), but then she cried when we asked why she was, because all the polar bears are dying because of humans.
So I started getting involved, reading and commenting on newspaper articles, on blogs, discovering the below the line comments in the mainstream media were utterly fruitless and a time suck (despite many climate concerned people thinking they were plagued by astro-turfing climate denial paid trolls), and submitted a guest post or two at ‘sceptical’ websites and was quickly labelled as a ‘sceptic’ or even a ‘climate denier’ and pushed to one side (or out of) of a very polarised debate. I was motivated (in part) by ‘The Science’ being misused to push policy, the rhetoric used, with policy being thought of as science, and to ask questions was to reject or be anti-science.
There are people (some activists, politicians and scientists – a few) convinced that a climate catastrophe is coming, tipping points, a future climate disaster en par with multiple holocausts, and the public (and even climate science) is in denial of this. With this worldview, all to easy to rationalise anybody that questions policies to be dismissed as deniers, cranks, flat-earther (and that was just my Prime Minister’s words at Copenhagen) with motivations questioned and people as bad, mad, sad, or conspiracy theorists, or in the pay of an organised fossil fuel denial industry. It was also disconcerting to find many people I have met, correspond with, or read, to be named and shamed in Deniers – Halls of Shame – Denier Disinformation databases, tagged and labelled disinformers, deniers, denial machine.
Why could these people not all merely be just said to be wrong?
But which ‘public’ is in denial or in ‘climate silence’? The very small subset that are actively aware of the debate, or the billions just getting on with their day to day lives (like myself previously), where climate change issues, and media reporting of, is just so much background noise or not even noticed at all. If the disinterested Western public (and what of Africa, China, India, and billions more) have not taken to the streets and lobbied for action by now (after decades) despite hearing that the ‘science is settled’, ‘97% of scientists say’ or ‘300,000 people are dying every year of climate change’ (Global Humanitarian Forum -2009). Science sounding soundbites used as an authority, moral pressure on the public and politician’s to conform to this consensus, no more questions, Act!
The ‘300,000 people dying’ given media headlines, Guardian, 10:10, quoted at UN conferences and on the lips of journalist and politician, motivating Greenpeace activists into shutting down power stations, clambering on the roofs of the Houses of Commons, and a soundbite to assert moral authority for action to shutdown any questions in a debate.
All feeding into an environmental vision (utopian?) of changing society away from industrial, capitalistic and economic growth. Limiting any possibilities of a technological climate change solution, embracing nuclear technology, a ‘Manhattan Style’ quest for fusion, of exploring conventional and new energy technologies, including shale gas.
and now?
In 2014, we find the psychological and social sciences seeking to find out why the general public and climate change sceptics are sceptical, is it motivated reasoning, ideology, worldview, their cultural values, or are they just mad, bad, cranks and conspiracy theorists, and just in the pay of somebody (much of this frequently stated in academic papers without much questioning or thought).
But all those soundbites, surveys and psychological research are just seemingly produced to be used to persuade a weakly green but disinterested public to allow politicians to take action, yet survey after survey shows the public put climate change repeatedly at the bottom of lists of issues that concern them. Are they just ‘climate oblivious’ like I used to be, not in denial of anything or has ‘climate fatigue’ set in and it becomes just background noise, much like the latest repeated medicine ‘science says’ scares in the media.
The science was settled enough for some policy action and has been for decades.
A range of temperature projections and possible consequence was, decades ago and still is sufficient to take some policy action. But politicians could not encompass radical demands of total decarbonisation and an added factor was, emissions were a consequence of industrialism and economic growth and horror of horrors, capitalism. A compromise had to be sort between the demands for rapid decarbonisation, and the growth of the developing countries who would not contend emission reductions, thinking the West historically caused the problem. So a compromise was set, the richest nations would seek to reduce emissions whilst the developing world would have no such constraints, thus the seed for the failure of the Copenhagen conference was set decades ago, years prior to the Kyoto agreement.
So what should happen in the future?
I think that the future narrative of the 21st century will be, that the developing world brought its citizens out of poverty, and if this is also allows these citizens to grow resilience from potential risks of man-made climate change (let alone from the ‘normal’ ravages of nature) escape from disease, so much the better. If, as I think there is no chance politically (East, West, developing, developed) of ever being any meaningful global agreement in the reduction in world emissions, then we should build resilience and adapt to the possible peril of dangerous climate change or very unlikely risk of catastrophic climate change. Then even IF this does not occur, we will have saved millions of people’s lives every year into the future. By allowing their economies and wealth to grow and by wealth I mean, clean water, access to regular electricity supply, refrigeration, cheap energy, infrastructure. Everything we in the developed world forget is a ‘luxury’ to many millions of people that simply aspire to what we have and take for granted.
I am not sceptical of climate science as a field, more the futile symbolic gesture climate policies and politics which the authority of ‘The Science’ is used to push for. So perhaps if all the people that have been labelled ‘climate sceptics’ took a long holiday and stayed ‘climate silent’, would the climate campaigners be forced to deal with the pragmatic hard realities that policymakers face, energy policies, jobs, economic growth, technological realties, the publics aspirations for their families in the developed world and more importantly the public in the developing world.
“….A second obstacle to action is the pathological obsession of many environmental campaigners with the climate sceptics. By concluding that the sceptics are the main obstacle to action, campaigners are not only demonstrating a spectacularly circular logic, but they are also devoting their energies to a fruitless fight. Make no mistake, fighting sceptics has its benefits – it reinforces a simplistic good versus evil view of the world, it gives a sense of doing something, and privileges scientific expertise in policy debates. However, one thing that it does not do is contribute towards effective action on climate change.
The battle over public opinion on climate change has long been won, and not by the sceptics. But simply by virtue of their continued existence, the climate sceptics may have the last laugh, because many climate campaigners seem to be able to see nothing else in the debate. Climate sceptics are not all powerful and may not even be very relevant to efforts to decarbonise the global economy. They have, however, cast a spell upon their opponents…..” – Dr Roger Pielke Jnr – Guardian
I think however, that the spell is of the campaigners own making, creating by their rhetoric, sceptics at every turn and then the campaigners needing, some group, some focus, some reason, to blame for all the political failure, even though the reasons for the failure of COP15 (and subsequent meetings) are very clear. If there were no sceptics to blame for political failure, would then the calls for, Radical Plans, for degrowth, or almost total decarbonisation in a short term, be looked at critically, determined as unworkable and the policymakers could move on and actually achieve something merely good.
If there were no sceptics (all finally convinced now by ‘97% of scientist say’) would the climate change campaigners then realise that the failures of policymakers were because of the hard realities of developing world’s fossil fuel economies which will bring many millions more of the world’s poorest out of poverty, and even if the World’s leaders agreed about climate change, compromises, health, wealth creation and economic development would remain the primary goal of the now mostly highly emitting developing world. (China now having caught up with the EU average per capita emissions, in less than a decade and growing still)
What has motivated me? Well principle of science being accurately presented in the media, that we should focus on the poor NOW, not the future poor, which is a total poverty of the imagination; by 2050 ‘we’ should be ashamed if there are any future ‘poor’. Over 6 million children die of disease, malnutrition, lack of sanitation and many other factors all related to poverty every single year,(an annual catastrophe) all causes all but eliminated in the relatively wealthy developed world. But perhaps at a very personal level, motivated by a future where even my 5 year old daughter was not (very) concerned enough to ask her father (she was), ‘please don’t tell anybody, what you think about polar bears’.
I hope the political rhetoric and intolerance of sceptical voices soon burns out and politicians can constructively deal with hard policy choices and achieve something, the science is settled enough to be pragmatic (especially no regrets policies, achieving a merely good outcome is always better at failing to achieve perfect), yet I heard whilst writing this:
“Will the Prime Minister clarify his position? Is he happy to have climate change deniers in his Government? – Ed Milliband – Leader of the Labour Party – 26th Feb 2014
I think I will be increasingly ‘Climate Indifferent’ the only label I really want to be associated with or will accept in the future is, Member of the Public.
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The complete book is available as a free PDF here,
Yes.. it should be 1.25 + or – 0.5C
and I’m leaning towards the lower end of that, now
there us no actual field of ‘climate science’ massively multi discipline, some gpod, some bad, some average.
I am hugely sceptical of model projections ( my background includes modelling)
Hi Barry! I tend to read – try to read – anything I see with your name on. I am a great admirer of someone prepared, like Anthony and Andrew (the Bishop), to stick their head above the parapet; so it seems frivolous to have a go at the style of your writing. There is, though a constructive point to such critique.
I know of two authors I admire who were famous for their long sentences: Dickens and (Bernard) Levin. The latter, who wrote so beautifully for the Times of London in the ’70s, once famously wrote a piece where most paragraphs had but one full stop. You are of that ilk. Unfortunately, you do not have access to Levin’s editorial assistance. That is a shame. You have much to say and it is worth reading, at times: in this instance your editors let you down.
Please don’t come piling back in at me with a question about what I have done (very probably not a tenth of what you have done, but I do spread the word and argue the toss with alarmists, and have done for very many years. As it happens, I also spent many years as a technical author.). All I wanted to do was give you credit for sharing your thoughts and ideas and giving you the humble advice that you get a better editor – and don’t give up: KBO ( as Churchill said).
Barry Woods says:
June 27, 2014 at 1:03 pm
John the cube..
I think you miss my point. May I ask what you have actually done and achieved.
What i’ve done or not done is entirely irrelevant. You are correct, I missed your point. Snce the point of essay reading is to impart a point, rather than being defensive and immediately questioning my credentials you should rather be examining your work and trying to understand why it is that you were unable to achieve your goal with me, an arbitrary reader.
Nice essay Barry.
The reason for the disconnect from reality you describe, for the lack of progress and the constant obsession with skeptics, is that the agenda belongs to the CAGW narrative itself (NOT sentient, NOT agential), not to any of the population that hosts it. The discipline of cultural evolution has long known of this effect, and the supporting mechanisms are the same as those in religions. Secular social entities of this kind follow similar developmental trajectories, e.g. for ‘deniers’ think heretics or blasphemers. Climate worries triggered the process, but with such high uncertainty it was easy for the narrative to distance itself from any science. It’s only ‘purpose’, (one falls easily to agential terms – same as in biology, e.g. diseases, but an agential nature is not implied) is to sustain itself, which it is doing very well. As memeticist Susan Blackmore points out regarding religious entities, the agenda of these things has no alignment to our own agendas, or necessarily our benefit either.
Harry
may i suggest you re read the intro.. and the final version in the book
this is the longer original version.. the actual contribution in the book, had the input of the editorial team. And is tighter
I published the longer version, purely as some bits I thought important had to be cut purely due to word count
Barry: My mistake was assuming your props to your editing team at the beginning of the post meant that this was an edited version.
***
In 2014, we find the psychological and social sciences seeking to find out why the general public and climate change sceptics are sceptical, is it motivated reasoning, ideology, worldview, their cultural values, or are they just mad, bad, cranks and conspiracy theorists, and just in the pay of somebody (much of this frequently stated in academic papers without much questioning or thought).
***
FAR more sinister than that. As you experienced, the psychological, social sciences and educational system are (and have been) actively involved in putting down skepticism, enforcing conformity and even brain-washing/scaring defenseless little children.
Christopher Hanley says:”Show me the evidence of a climate crisis.”
Your participation, my participation and the existence of this website for starters. Anything that costs $20 billion every year must be some sort of crisis. Perhaps I should call this a meta-crisis.
Perhaps you mean “looking out the window and seeing it” evidence. This is a website. Even if I had such evidence, how would I give it to you? I cannot. So what is evident is that many people are deeply and emotionally committed to a crisis that seems not to exist. That creates a meta-crisis right now, a political crisis for many politicians.
photos of a uk climate psychologist below (painted blue on a Climate march and at Copenhagen waving a banner):
(he also writes for the Guardian, and promoted the Lewandowsky, sceptics are conspiracy theorists, paper)
https://www.flickr.com/photos/cardiff_friends_of_the_earth/4190476939/
http://realclimategate.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/fairness-missing-from-copenhagen-accord-green-wales-sping-2010.png?w=823
http://www.foecardiff.co.uk/content/cardiff-campaigners-demand-climate-action-record-breaking-protest
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/blog/2012/jul/27/climate-sceptics-conspiracy-theorists
I asked him once about his own motivated reasoning and ideology, and he started claiming I was smearing him with ‘my’ photos, both photos, from articles he had written, in publicity material for the Green Party and FOE
http://www.foecardiff.co.uk/content/cardiff-campaigners-demand-climate-action-record-breaking-protest
John The Cube says: “you should rather be examining your work and trying to understand why it is that you were unable to achieve your goal with me, an arbitrary reader.”
Mr. Woods wrote it for me. I seem to understand it, a sentence repeated twice is the clue: “The Science Was Settled Enough.”
Enough for what? Social policy. That’s what it’s all about. Science serves policy, not the other way round. A “bubble” has been created where too many people think it is about “science” and Mr. Woods brings it back down to the ground, it is about *people*.
Michael 2 says: June 28, 2014 at 8:27 am
“So what is evident is that many people are deeply and emotionally committed to a crisis that seems not to exist. That creates a meta-crisis right now, a political crisis for many politicians.”
Yes. Per my 4.29 am above, self-sustaining narratives work by engaging emotion and engendering a sense of crisis: we must atone for sins, or save the planet, or those guys are subhuman, or whatever. In practice, the social phenomenon has long proceeded independently of any actual physical climate realities, and so whether these are good, bad, or indifferent for us. Hence it’s still possible that there is something bad to discover one day, when sense and science regain control. But it does indeed seem on such real data as slowly trickles out so far, very unlikley that any real climate ‘crisis’ worth this word, actually exists. Emotive narratives can be surprisingly powerful, penetrating the psyche to produce effects like noble cause corruption, confirmation bias, motivated reasoning etc, which tend to obscure reality and maintain the uncertainties that allowed the narratives to arise in the first place. Likely, this is a big contributor to the very poor progress on climate sensitivity over the last few decades.
“I think that the future narrative of the 21st century will be, that the developing world brought its citizens out of poverty,…”
———————————————————
I don’t know if you’re dreaming or just ignoring the obvious.
The primary problem for the poor of Africa is leadership.
During the last 5000 years as we grew, innovated and developed our modern world with plenty of food and energy to go around the third world was prevented from joining.
Corrupt despots and dictators supported by hatred and tribalism have prevented the third world from fully taking part in the civilized world.
Until the liars in government and the media admit that better and worse societies,cultures and governments really do exist, the third world will wallow in poverty, disease and ignorance.
Just like the Cancer Society needs cancer the UN wants, needs and takes action that ensures poverty and conflict in the third world.
This is substantiated by the UN support of islam and it’s third world tenets against infidels including women, homosexuals and anyone who has other religious beliefs.
Life is short, brutal and cheap in the third world.
The UN’s work continues.
cn
Barry Woods says: June 28, 2014 at 8:35 am
“I asked him once about his own motivated reasoning and ideology…”
Very good questions to aske a psychologist! It has always seemed to me an ultimate irony that the type of phenomena of which CAGW is an example, has been fully described by the overlapping discliplines of psychology, cultural evolution, neuroscience, anthropology, memetics, and others. None of the characteristics have anything to do with climate either. These disciplines have even given out very sound warnings about falling to the influence of such phenomena. Yet they seem either to be in blissful ignorance of CAGW as being a subject related to their field of work, or, as is the case with pyschology, actively attempt to use the tools of their trade to (usually via incredibly shallow arguments that typically clash with all their main findings) diss skeptics. It’s an unfortunate fact that influence by aggressive cultural entities is very highly domain orientated. We can all have reason as sound as a bell in one domain, and yet be highly influenced and so unreasonable in another, to the extent that knowledge of such entities is itself not protection against becoming prey to the influence of one.
Hi Chuck
I’m not going to disagree with you about Africa, though even there, there are success stories.
China will, and India might..
Michael 2 at June 27, 2014 at 3:47 pm includes a statement that puts the issue in better focus.
“Landing a man on the moon was primarily emotional. Science did not lead to this outcome; the outcome was declared and then science used to achieve it. Science does not lead policy, policy pays for and thus leads science”. This explains why pointing out the fallacies of CAGW on the science side will never work. The policy is set, the science never mattered except as a tool to convince the masses that draconian action, wealth redistribution, and control of energy by the central government is required. Proving that the the alarmists are wrong about the science will not stop them.
In the US, we are starting on the path to shutting down our coal fired power plants, as many as 400 of them by some estimates, which will create power shortages and higher power costs for everyone. One can’t help but wonder if this stupidity is due to warped logic or evil intentions on the part of the leaders we elected to improve our lives and keep us safe. Oddly, the general population by a wide margin appears to have some idea that the dangers are exaggerated, but the politicians intend to go forward anyway.
Barry, I figured from your early discussion that this must not have been the version that received critical editing. So I wasn’t as worried about that as some, though I did find it a somewhat difficult read.
I get where you are coming from. And I would agree with others that you do seem to be suffering from climate fatigue. I do too, as many of us probably do.
I came at the thing from a whole different perspective. Before the last oil “bust” in the mid 1980’s, I had made it to R&D Director for a multinational oil company. Climate change was old-hat to petroleum geologists even back in the 80’s. Here’s a taste from a thorough workup of the Powder River Basin I did in ’86:
“The Pennsylvanian and Permian periods were characterized by large scale eustatic sea level changes that Heckel (1980) attributes to extensive glaciation in the south polar regions. Heckel (1980) has documented as many as 25 transgressive events associated with Upper Pennsylvanian sediments (approximately 10 million years) throughout the mid-continent and western United States. These transgressive-regressive events are well represented in the middle and upper Minnelusa rocks as sabkha cycles consisting of shales, evaporites and eolian sandstones. Therefore numerous unconformities exist within the three units of the Minnelusa, with the most economically important being the contact between the upper Minnelusa and the overlying Opeche shale member of the Goose Egg Formation.”
from deeper in the paper:
“Trotter (1984) reminds us of a 350 foot sea level change during the Wisconsin stage of the Pleistocene in the Persian Gulf region. With a surface gradient of 6 inches per mile, fluctuations of 100 feet could conceivably have affected 200 miles of Trotter’s (1984) Late Paleozoic seaway.”
So climate change was not a debate for me when it became a debate for everyone else. Climate change was, and is used today, as sequence stratigraphy. You see, it isn’t that climate doesn’t change, it’s that it does. That, and everything that that entails, has long been put to fruitful use in O&G exploration.
So I was not surprised to watch the evolution and perfection of the electric ice coring drills by the early 1990’s, nor was I surprised to learn that at the end of the most recent interglacial, the Eemian, was a climatic “Madhouse”, with 2 or 3 strong thermal excursions right at its typical half precession cycle end. I had long since ceased exploiting what that meant economically (by mapping and drilling the favorable horizons that resulted), but what I hadn’t expected to encounter was the inanity that was global warming alarmism!
It’s difficult for me to remember why I was so struck by the AGW meme back in the day because I am now all too familiar with the wealth of research which has eventuated since that time. The best way I can describe this mindset is to relate how scared and horrified I was to learn that “we” could cause a worst-case and whopping absolute climate change measure of +0.59 meters above mean sea level (amsl) by 2099 in IPCC’s 2007 Assessment Report 4 if we took the upper error bar of the do nothing scenario.
Why was I so scared and horrified? Well, by 2007 we knew that the lowest estimate for the last (2nd or 3rd) end-Eemian thermal excursion had resulted in somewhere between +6.0 to +52.0 meters amsl sea level rise. Without much of any anthropogenic input.
At least MIS-5 (the Eemian), MIS-11 (the Holsteinian) and MIS-19 each had at least 3 strong thermal pulses right at their very ends, the last one always being the stronger.
Take, for instance, Desprat et al. (2005) on MIS-11:
“The Marine Isotope Stage 11 interglacial, centered at ~400 ka, appears to be the best candidate for understanding climatic changes in the context of low insolation forcing such as that of our present interglacial. Direct correlation between terrestrial (pollen) and marine climatic indicators and ice volume proxy from deep-sea core MD01-2447 (off northwestern Iberia) shows for the first time the phase relationship between southwestern European vegetation, sea surface temperatures in the northeastern Atlantic midlatitudes and ice volume during MIS 11. A warmest 32,000 years-long period and three following warm/cold cycles occurred synchronously on land and ocean. THE END OF THE WARMEST PERIOD SEES THE GLACIAL INCEPTION which coincides with the replacement of warm deciduous forest by conifer (pine-fir) expansion in northwestern Iberia and, consequently, with the southward migration of the tree line in high latitudes in response to declining summer insolation. As weak insolation changes alone cannot account for ice growth, the associated vegetation changes must now be considered as a potential major feedback mechanism for glaciation initiation during MIS 11.” [emphasis mine]
http://www.researchgate.net/publication/229415952_Is_vegetation_responsible_for_glacial_inception_during_periods_of_muted_insolation_changes/file/9c96051e55e2f0f6b2.pdf
The same was true with MIS-19.
“During the glacial inception from MIS 19 to MIS 18, the low resolution EPICA Dome C water stable isotope record (Jouzel et al., 2007) has revealed millennial variability principally marked by the occurrence of three consecutive warm events (hereafter called Antarctic Isotope Maxima – AIM, following EPICA-community-members, 2006, and noted A, B, C on Fig. 2).”
http://lgge.osug.fr/IMG/fparrenin/articles/pol-EPSL2010.pdf
People identify, or are identified, as “skeptics” for a plethora of reasons. I arrived here by reason alone. My reservations, as regard the Anthropogenic Global Warming hypothesis, may be distilled down to some pointed questions:
1) “The End of the Present Interglacial: How and When” Wallace S. Broecker, 1998 http://www.personal.kent.edu/~jortiz/paleoceanography/broecker.pdf
2) How do you propose to recognize, much less measure, the first-ever anthropogenic sea level rise, which hasn’t occurred yet, from normal natural end interglacial climate noise that comes in between 1 and 2 orders of magnitude higher in relative sea level (the absolute measure), not just once, but as many as 3 times, rapidly, during glacial inception?
3) What if Ruddiman’s 2003 “Early Anthropogenic Hypothesis” is correct? Could it possibly be that:
“The possible explanation as to why we are still in an interglacial relates to the early anthropogenic hypothesis of Ruddiman (2003, 2005). According to that hypothesis, the anomalous increase of CO2 and CH4 concentrations in the atmosphere as observed in mid- to late Holocene ice-cores results from anthropogenic deforestation and rice irrigation, which started in the early Neolithic at 8000 and 5000 yr BP, respectively. Ruddiman proposes that these early human greenhouse gas emissions prevented the inception of an overdue glacial that otherwise would have already started.”
conclude Muller and Pross (2007) http://folk.uib.no/abo007/share/papers/eemian_and_lgi/mueller_pross07.qsr.pdf
If so, then Houston, we have a problem. We can’t say that we have delayed glacial inception for quite some time now with GHGs so that is why we demand that they be removed quicksmart, now can we?
“Do you realize what this means?” spouts Doc’ Brown in “Back to the Future”. “It means that this damned thing doesn’t work at all!”
You can’t have AGW both ways. GHGs are either capable of the climate feat of obviating glacial inception, and indeed may already have if Ruddiman 2003 is correct (and presumably could continue to do so if we don’t do anything about them) or they can’t.
4) Increasingly, I have come of the opinion that none of it really matters. Your concept of going back to being a Member Of The Public may have more merit than some give you credit for. Here’s my take, which bolsters yours, but from way in left field. Go ahead. Remove anything not late Holocene hominid atmosphere approved. It is conceded that this will indeed quell that ominous IPCC AR4 upper error bar worst-case “business as usual” +0.59 m amsl sea-level rise by 2099. Fantastic! Then, like MIS-19, MIS-11, and MIS 5e before it, sea level goes up anyway, which in MIS-11 resulted in a +21.3 M amsl highstand, and anywhere from +6.0 to +52.0 m amsl during the last and strongest thermal excursion right at the end-Eemian. And not just once, but perhaps 3 times, again, before dropping off into the next ~80-90kyr ice age.
Yes, there is a question in here, in fact two. What is it climate alarmists actually hope to accomplish, again? If all “we” are going to do is futz about with +0.59 m, what does your climate health plan provide in terms of protection against a +6.0, +21.3, and +52 m amsl sea level rises which might just happen anyway? And maybe 3 times at a half-precession old interglacial, like it has done 3 times before? OK, that was 3 questions.
5) We are often told there is a silver-lining in every cloud. We had been on the interglacial stage, as our stone age selves, for as long during the Eemian as our civilizations have been during this interglacial, the Holocene. So, we have actually been through the climatic “Madhouse” known as glacial inception before. We actually made it through a triple-header and the Wisconsin glacial arriving here, today. What you may not realize is just how dependent the genus Homo is on climate change:
“An examination of the fossil record indicates that the key junctures in hominin evolution reported nowadays at 2.6, 1.8 and 1 Ma coincide with 400 kyr eccentricity maxima, which suggests that periods with enhanced speciation and extinction events coincided with periods of maximum climate variability on high moisture levels.”
state Trauth, et al (2009) in Quaternary Science Reviews http://www.manfredmudelsee.com/publ/pdf/Trends-rhythms-and-events-in-Plio-Pleistocene-African-climate.pdf
Which is where the rub is. We are at an eccentricity minima, not a maxima. We aren’t actually due for our next potential “hardware upgrade” for another 200kyrs when we can look forward to “periods of maximum climate variability on high moisture levels.” Feel better yet? No, that wasn’t the question. But we are either overdue, due, or maybe not due for the next glacial inception. Back at the end of MIS-5e, the Eemian, we made it through the climatic “Madhouse” of glacial inception. Famous astronomer Fred Hoyle stated this question best back in 1999:
“This is why the past million years has been essentially a continuing ice-age, broken occasionally by short-lived interglacials. It is also why those who have engaged in lurid talk over an enhanced greenhouse effect raising the Earth’s temperature by a degree or two should be seen as both demented and dangerous. The problem for the present swollen human species is of a drift back into an ice-age, not away from an ice-age.”
6) Would not the worst case be that CO2/GHGs aren’t the heathen devil gases they are made out to be?
7) Has there ever been a more “damned if we do and damned if we don’t” conundrum in hominid history?
It is here, after asking such awkward questions of the sciences, I also find myself “A Member of The Public”. The only really relevant climate question was that which Broecker asked way back in 1998 “The End of the Present Interglacial: How and When?”
If we can prevent it, I would be for doing so. We may only have “to do so” for a paltry ~4,000 years or so, if Sirockos and Seelos (2005) are correct:
“Investigating the processes that led to the end of the last interglacial period is relevant for understanding how our ongoing interglacial will end, which has been a matter of much debate…..”
“The onset of the LEAP occurred within less than two decades, demonstrating the existence of a sharp threshold, which must be near 416 Wm2, which is the 65oN July insolation for 118 kyr BP (ref. 9). This value is only slightly below today’s value of 428 Wm2. Insolation will remain at this level slightly above the [glacial] inception for the next 4,000 years before it then increases again.”
http://www.particle-analysis.info/LEAP_Nature__Sirocko+Seelos.pdf
we may need only prop-up Gaia’s climate for that long. If we fail to do so, for any reason, then, well, you know, it might be glacial inception all over again.
GHGs either can or cannot mitigate glacial inception. It is no more complicated or simple than that. Period.
Which lends itself readily to the final questions of the whole climate change non-debate:
a) If GHGs can get us over the next ~4,000 years of glacial inception risk, then why are we having this discussion at all?
b) If GHGs can’t vault us across the next ~4,000 years of glacial inception risk, then why are we having this discussion at all?
I rest my “Member Of The Public” case.
Barry, the fact that you don’t get immediately the outrageous contrast between the 300,000 undocumented (and almost certainly imaginary) climate deaths and the 10s of millions of real deaths from biofuel initiatives and misguided de-development economics that have already happened consigns your treatise and opinions to the dustbin. Discuss with Willis. I dare you.