With apologies to Morris Albert.
Joe Duggan. A “science communicator”, writes on his blog:
What follows are the words of real scientists. Researchers that understand climate change.
Kevin Walsh
Associate Professor and Reader, School of Earth Sciences
University of Melbourne 
I wish that climate change were not real.
This seems like a strange thing for a climate scientist to say, but it’s true.
If climate change were not real, we would not have to be concerned about it. We wouldn’t have to worry about the future of our water resources, already strained by over population. We wouldn’t have to worry about sea level rise increasing the flooding of our coastal cities and of low–lying, densely–populated areas of poor countries. Above all, we wouldn’t have to worry about climate change being yet another source of conflict in an already tense world.
Life would be so much simpler if climate change didn’t exist. But as scientists, we don’t have the luxury of pretending.
Kevin Walsh
Associate Professor and Reader
School of Earth Sciences
University of Melbourne
Anthony Richardson
Climate Change Ecologist
The University of Queensland
How climate change makes me feel.
I feel a maelstrom of emotions
I am exasperated. Exasperated no one is listening.
I am frustrated. Frustrated we are not solving the problem.
I am anxious. Anxious that we start acting now.
I am perplexed. Perplexed that the urgency is not appreciated.
I am dumbfounded. Dumbfounded by our inaction.
I am distressed. Distressed we are changing our planet.
I am upset. Upset for what our inaction will mean for all life.
I am annoyed. Annoyed with the media’s portrayal of the science.
I am angry. Angry that vested interests bias the debate.
I am infuriated. Infuriated we are destroying our planet.
But most of all I am apprehensive. Apprehensive about our children’s future.
Associate Professor
Anthony J. Richardson
Climate Change Ecologist
Dr Ailie Gallant
School of Earth, Atmosphere and Environment
Monash University
Dear Joe,
I feel nervous. I get worried and anxious, but also a little curious. The curiosity is a strange, paradoxical feeling that I sometimes feel guilty about. After all, this is the future of the people I love.
I get frustrated a lot; by the knowns, the unknowns, and the lack of action. I get angry at the invalid opinions that are all-pervasive in this age of indiscriminant information, where evidence seems to play second fiddle to whomever can shout the loudest. I often feel like shouting…
But would that really help? I feel like they don’t listen anyway. After all, we’ve been shouting for years.
I hate feeling helpless. I’m ashamed to say that, sometimes, my frustration leads to apathy. I hate feeling apathetic.
But sometimes I read things, or see things, from individuals, from communities like ‘1 million solar panels installed in Australian homes”, and optimism tickles.
I will keep doing my work. I will keep shouting in my own little way. I will be optimistic that we will do something about this, collectively. I live in hope that the climate changes on the graphs that I stare into every day wont be as bad as my data tells me, because we worked together to find a solution. All I can hope is that people share my optimism and convert it into Action.
Kind Regards,
Dr Ailie Gallant
School of Earth, Atmosphere and Environment
Monash University.
Professor Andrew Pitman
Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science
Dear Jo,
You ask me how climate change makes me feel.
I do not have a single answer.
In equal measure, climate change makes me feel frustrates that my community cannot overcome ignorance and apathy. I feel scared that I cannot trigger action. I feel scared about what the future brings. But most of all, to be honest, I feel challenged by the science, I feel invigorated by how bright my group is and I feel very lucky that each day brings new challenges to confront and sometimes to overcome.
A.J. Pitman
Professor, Climate Science at UNSW.
Dr Sarah Perkins
Climate Scientist, Extreme Events Specialist
University of New South Wales.
My Dear Friend,
For sometime now I’ve been terribly worried. I wish I didn’t have to acknowledge it, but everything I have feared is happening. I used to think I was paranoid, but it’s true. She’s slipping away from us. She’s been showing signs of acute illness for quite a while, but no one has really done anything. Her increased erratic behaviour is something I’ve especially noticed. Certain behaviours that were only rare occurrences are starting to occur more often, and with heightened anger. I’ve tried to highlight these changes time and time again, as well as their speed of increase, but no one has paid attention.
It almost seems everyone has been ignoring me completely, and I’m not sure why. Is it easier to pretend there’s no illness, hoping it will go away? Or because they’ve never had to live without her, so the thought of death is impossible? perhaps they cannot see they’ve done this to her. We all have.
To me this is all false logic. How can you ignore the severe sickness of someone you are so intricately connected to and dependent upon. How can you let your selfishness and greed take control, and not protect and nurture those who need it most? How can anyone not feel an overwhelming sense of care and responsibility when those so dear to us are so desperately ill? How can you push all this to the back of your mind? This is something I will never understand. Perhaps I’m the odd one out, the anomaly of the human race. The one who cares enough, who has the compassion, to want to help make her better.
The thing is we can make her better!! If we work together, we can cure this terrible illness and restore her to her old self before we exploited her. But we must act quickly, we must act together. Time is ticking, and we need to act now.
Yours faithfully,
Dr Sarah Perkins
Climate Scientist, Extreme Events Specialist.
The University of New South Wales.
Emeritus Professor Tony McMichael
National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health
Australian National University, College of Medicine, Biology and Environment
Dear Joe
It’s hard to imagine that people are doing so much damage to the natural world. It’s sad when a society like ours can’t see further than its bank balance and stumbles blindly into a future when children won’t be able to enjoy the flowing rivers, mountain snow, coloured birds and bush animals. Don’t we have any responsibility for other creatures, forests and rivers? I’m rather ashamed of our behaviour.
It seems so silly to go on behaving like this – though, from hearing our politicians speak, it seems that making and consuming more and more is the point of life. Surely the dreadful heat we have suffered from in recent heatwaves, and the awful bushfires that have terrified rural communities in the past couple of years are telling us that something is going very wrong.
Scientist friends say it’s probably because we’re making the world hotter by adding ‘greenhouse gases’ into the air. So we are seriously harming the world around us and yet we understand how!
It’s really sad that some of our local children seem quite puzzled and worried by what they see on TV bout this and hearing what adults say. I hope my family and our community can try and help solve these frightening problems.
Sincerely,
Tony McMichael
Emeritus Professor, Australian National University
Climate Change Research Centre, University of New South Wales
Knowing how much is at stake, knowing that I am one of the few people who understand the magnitude of the consequences and then realizing that most of the people around me are oblivious. Some of the people are not only oblivious, they also do not want to understand. They have made up their mind, maybe based on the opinion of someone they trust, someone in their family, or a friend, maybe based on a political conviction, but certainly not based on facts.
It makes me feel sick. Looking at my children and realizing that they won’t have the same quality of life we had. Far from it. That they will live in a world facing severe water and food shortages, a world marked by wars caused by the consequences of climate change.
It makes me feel sad. And it scares me. It scares me more than anything else. I see a group of people sitting in a boat, happily waving, taking pictures on the way, not knowing that this boat is floating right into a powerful and deadly waterfall. It is still time to pull out of the stream. We might lose some boat equipment but we might be able to save the people in the boat. But no one acts.
Time is running out.
Associate Professor Katrin Meissner
ARC Future Fellow
Professor Lesley Hughes
Department of Biological Sciences, Macquarie University
Founding Member of the Australian Climate Council
I became a professional biologist because I just loved animals – watching them, catching them, studying them. I was the kid whose bedroom was full of jars and boxes of things that crawled and slithered and hopped. The notion that I could actually be paid for doing this, as an adult, was truly wonderful.
But where to for our species in the future? Our biodiversity is our life support system, each species a precious support system, each species a precious, irreplaceable heritage item. We have harvested and cleared and plundered and spoiled. Every year our natural capital declines a bit more as we squander our heritage and rob our descendants.
And now we have this new threat, likely to be the biggest one of all.
Climate change is likely to become the biggest species killer ever, impoverishing our planet and our race.
We have so much to lose.
Prof. Lesley Hughes
Dr Alex Sen Gupta
Climate Change Research Centre, University of New South Wales
How does it make me feel?
I feel frustrated. The scientific evidence is overwhelming. We know what’s going on, we know why it’s happening, we know how serious things are going to get and still after so many years, we are still doing practically nothing to stop it.I feel betrayed by our leaders who show no leadership and who place ideology above evidence, willing to say anything to peddle their agendas – leaders who are at best negligent and at worst complicit in allowing this to happen with full knowledge of likely consequences. I feel bemused. That scientists who have spent years or decades dedicated to understanding how it all works are given the same credibility as poleticians, [sic] media commentators and industry spokes people with obvious vested interests and whose only credential is their ability to read discredited blogs.I feel concerned that unmitigated our inaction will cause terrible suffering to those least able to cope with change and that within my lifetime many of the places that make this planet so special – the snows on Kilimanjaro, the Great Barrier Reef, even the ice covered Arctic will be degraded beyond recognition – our legacy to the next generation.I also feel a glimmer of hope. China and the USA are starting to move in the right direction and beginning to show some global leadership on this issue, even if Australia is backtracking again to a position of laggard and obstructionist.
Alex Sen Gupta
Senior Lecturer (Oceanography)
Climate Change Research Centre
University of New South Wales
Professor Brendan Mackey
Director Of Griffith Climate Change Response Program
I was unable to receive a hand written letter from Professor Mackey, but he kindly contributed the typed copy above.
Dear Earth,
Just a quick note to say thanks so much for the last 4 billion years or so. It’s been great! The planetary life support systems worked really well, the whole biological evolution thing was a nice surprise and meant that humans got to come into being and I got to exist!
I’m really sorry about the last couple of 100 years – we’ve really stuffed things up haven’t we! I though we climate scientist might be able to save the day but alas no one really took as seriously. Everyone wants to keep opening new coal mines and for some reason that escapes me are happy to ignore the fact that natural gas is a fossil fuel. Well, no one can say we didn’t try!
You’re probably quietly happy that “peak human” time has come and gone and it’s kind of all downhill got us now, though I guess you’re more than a bit miffed at what we’ve done to your lovely ecosystem (the forests and corals were a really nice touch by the way) and sorry again for the tigers, sharks etc.
In case you were wondering, our modeling suggests that your global biogeochemical cycles (especially the carbon one) should reach a new dynamic equilibrium in about 100,000 years or so. I guess it will be a bit of a rocky road until then but, oh well, no one said the universe was meant to be stable!
All the best and do try and maintain that “can do” attitude we love so much.
Prof Brendan G. Mackey, PhD
30 July 2014
===============================================================
Two things:
1. Logic (Science) and emotion (feelings) are polar opposites. Mixing the two is a sure recipe for logical disaster. Ref: fMRI reveals reciprocal inhibition between social and physical cognitive domains. NeuroImage, 2012; DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2012.10.061
2. I feel like I want to hurl.
(h/t to Maurizio Morabito)
-Anthony
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
I believe there are medications for this type of problem.
Ben Hewitt recently addressed this topic. Please read his musings about how much he and his children think about global concerns.
http://benhewitt.net/2014/08/21/our-obligations/
Pathological. This is why the CAGW crowd will literally fight to their death for the cause, because the truth literally means the end of their relevance, lifestyle, hopes, dreams, etc. They seem like eloquent meth heads. Pretty freaking scary if you ask me.
Next they will run around hitting themselves with a whip as an act of atonement. Sick puppies.
Sigh! As an Australian finishing up a PhD in modelling, I find this utterly embarrassing. I can’t believe these people are allowed to call themselves scientists. Thankfully, these types don’t infect the Engineering, Maths and Physics department at my particular Uni. However, they do make up the majority in the Arts and Biological Sciences side of things.
Looking at the CO2 page in the WUWT Reference folders I estimate that the CO2 concentration has been rising linearly since 1995 at a rate of 1-7 – 2.1 ppm/year. Yet , as even politicians and extreme warmists admit, the global temperatures appear to have stabilised for the last 14 or 17 years.
What is missing from the reference pages is the cumulative sum of money poured into AGW projects , including funding these weepy Australian profs in their cushy chairs, enriching numerous politicians and depriving many people of their jobs , and even their food , given the change to biofuels . Some in these blogs have suggested an amount of money of the order of at least a trillion USD has been withdrawn from the world’s economy in the past 20 years – but it has not made any difference to the very linear increase in CO2 concentration.
If the latter is a measure of the success of these academic’s achievements , how much more money are they demanding must be removed from the global economy just to make a small kink in the rate of increase of CO2 ? Thousands of trillions USD? What kind of conflict is that likely to create ?
If these academics had any sense , or any conscience, they would point to the stabilised temperature and claim that , thanks to their hard and unstinting research . the threat of catastrophic warming has been averted and we can now relax – job done. Just keep renewables at the present level , stop converting virgin rain forest into biofuels, stop throwing blue – collar workers out of their jobs and stop throwing money at certain politicians who already have more than they can ever spend.
Meanwhile politicians could return to thinking about the war , rape and murder in the Middle East , pandemics such as bird flu and Ebola , Putin’s aggression towards East Europe and China’s plans to take over most of the China Sea- none of these having anything to do with climate change.
Hand written notes? Only one was dated but it was 2014. I’m sorry, but exactly who actually writes one pages essays any more by hand? Children just learning to write perhaps? These are supposedly scientists who spend the vast majority of their lives working with computers.
Either this is a staged publicity stunt with the letters hand written for extra effect, or… Well I don’t have an “or”. But just because I can’t think of one doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
These letters remind me of a bunch of kids sitting around a camp fire telling ghost stories – then end up scaring themselves silly.
The most economical explanation of these documents is that these people actually do understand the situation better than the folks commenting here do, and that this causes them to be deeply worried about the future. But that evidently cannot be even entertained.
The comments here are a case study in epistemological closure.
You’re kidding. Right?
These amateur compositions sound like a seventh grade English exam. These people are living high on the taxpayer hog, and they are clearly fanning the flames of climate alarmism.
If anyone is sociopaths, it is these rent-seekers.
Dr Mackey: “spew” , not “spue”.
The Aztecs also felt anxious about the climate.
These climate scientists are not the first people to be worried about a changing climate, such worries go back since we could walk upright. In the Little Ice Age it led to extensive witch hunts, much like today.
Lewandowsky should read these – it may make a much more useful study source.
But actually, I’m rather shocked that post-graduate University degrees for climate, seem to be able to be earned without any course reference to earth history. There seems to be no recognition of either the recent nor distant past earth cycles. Can they really have been that isolated that they know nothing of what hot and cold cycles the planet has been through?? Its a serious condemnation of those universities and those faculties.
palindrom says:
August 21, 2014 at 9:54 am
“The most economical explanation of these documents is that these people actually do understand the situation better than the folks commenting here do, and that this causes them to be deeply worried about the future. But that evidently cannot be even entertained.”
Please cite the evidence for your assertion. Thanks.
(Fortunately, those of us who inhabit the real world can rightly ignore these “academics” who have obviously lost their grip on reality…)
Climate Scientist knows best
It’s not the first time the use this angle and even the same people, e.g, Ailie Gallant at 1:05
With friends like these……
Ten letters from Australian ‘real’*** scientists using emotion as if emotion has any relevant value in rational cognition involved in science; as if it has any relevant value in achieving the applied reasoning which is science’s process and product. Emotion is not a logical factor of applied reasoning.
There are philosophies in the history of philosophy that try to elevate emotion to valid cognitive status which they maintain support rational cognition. Those philosophies are consequently involved with irrational cognitive modes.
*** ‘real’ scientists according to Joe Duggan evaluation of what is ‘real’ and what is ‘science’. Given that he is doing favorable PR for the 10 scientists whose letters are emulating emotion as cognitively relevant in science, then his concepts of ‘real’ and ‘science’ are likely subjectivist derived from post-modern philosophy.
John
Chuck L says:
Have any of the supposed writers confirmed their authorship? I find it hard not believe this is NOT a bunch of students who were given a writing exercise along with an identity under which to write it.
We would be happy to entertain this parsimonious, if unsubstantiated, explanation—if these people could provide even a shred of empirical evidence for their fears.
Absent such testimony, I’m afraid these pathetic missives are at best entertaining us.
/Mr Lynn
Oops, previous should read “I find it hard to believe this is NOT a bunch…”
Palindrom says
How many trillions in an “economical explanation”?
I feel:
1.That the whole Chimera is about to fall.
2. The whole effort of spending billions for nothing
will besmirch science for generations .
3.Seeing the death of millions of migratory birds is not green nor clean.
4. the freezing and starving of elderly and poor is not clean either.
5. That the whole AGW grant gravy train is about to jump the tracks..
6. The greater war on terror will come- and we will discover that AGW
hardly the bigger threat…
7. Fracking will loosen-and has- the grip of OPEC on the west.
-let them eat sand…
Bob Boder says:
August 21, 2014 at 10:43 am
Bob – you have to understand. Folks like “Palindrome” inhabit a fantasy world that is supported by their parents and their government. They tell you that your carbon footprint is too big while they warm themselves in their schools and offices using energy from powerplants run on fossil fuels. They fly to vacations and conferences on large commercial aircraft. They drive a Prius not realizing that they need electricity from…you guessed it. They decry “corporate influence” while texting on Apple (corporation) cellphones, tweeting and facebooking using Twitter/Facebook (corporation) technology, and drinking coffee from Starbucks (corporation). They think every weather event is caused by human-influenced climate change and has never been seen before because they are too lazy (or stupid) to research the past. They don’t care about taxes, over-regulation or the myriad of other ills in this world (disease, poverty, etc.) because the world revolves around them, and in case the government and/or Mom and Dad will make things all better. You can’t reason with people like this.
“[…] I will keep shouting in my own little way. […]”
Dr Ailie Gallant
School of Earth, Atmosphere and Environment
Monash University.
“[…]She’s slipping away[…] She’s been showing signs of acute illness […] Her increased erratic behaviour […] Certain behaviours […] heightened anger. […] It almost seems everyone has been ignoring me […] they’ve done this to her […] Perhaps I’m the odd one out, the anomaly of the human race. The one who cares enough, […]”
Yours faithfully,
Dr Sarah Perkins
Climate Scientist, Extreme Events Specialist.
The University of New South Wales.
“[…] a future when children won’t be able to enjoy the flowing rivers, mountain snow, coloured birds and bush animals. […] It’s really sad that some of our local children seem quite puzzled and worried by what they see on TV bout this and hearing what adults say. […] frightening problems.”
Sincerely,
Tony McMichael
Emeritus Professor, Australian National University
“[…] I am one of the few people who understand the magnitude of the consequences […] Time is running out.”
Associate Professor Katrin Meissner
ARC Future Fellow
“Dear Earth,
[… Never mind].”
Prof Brendan G. Mackey, PhD
I am sure something dreadful will happen, just beyond the verifiable horizon. It always does.
Frank K says
That was summed up very well. Thanks
Methinks there will shortly be a much needed and misunderstood group hug amonst these “gentlemen”. Then again, maybe they could lay off the Estrogen pills before that happens?