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
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From the infamous music video:
There you have it. An admission climate science is faith-based.
I wonder if the letters are just a ploy to draw “harassing” emails from heretics.
I am worried about the future too. If these brainwashed academics are teaching our children, the next generation of researchers, technicians, engineers, and scientists, we have a real problem.
What I find interesting is the number of times the assertion that the skeptical message dominates their poor underfunded efforts at spreading climate truth appears in these delusional rants. Not long ago the BBC enacted a total ban of people of a climate skeptical bent from their airways. They were far from the first to do this. The default position for “97%” of major and minor media sources is full on, drank the Kool-Aid alarmism. Every TV show, movie, advert, newspaper, magazine feels compelled to include comments, plot elements, and often almost subliminal affirmations of the evils of Carbon. Anti-Carbon ideology is wired into the PR DNA of virtually every corporation, large or small, in the country and in most of the rest of the world and that includes Big Oil and Big Energy The CAGW position has been the beneficiary of at least a half a $Trillion of free word of mouth propagandizing every year.
Arrayed against that and supposedly unfairly dominating all these oh so caring scientists is a motley collection of websites, a few organizations like Heartland, Cato, the NIPCC, etc., and a set scientists and reseachers struggling mightily for scraps of funding and access to publication. Ask yourselves this, in your daily life outside of the Web environs, what is the ratio of the number of times you’re importuned by some Hollywood celebutard to embrace the latest green absurdity versus the opportunities you have to be exposed to real climate information. I would suggest the ratio is approaching asymptotically to infinity, especially since on the rare occasions when any of the above do manage to bang their gong loud enough to attract any coverage in the MSM, their message will be countermanded by quotes from the usual suspects declaring it all a bunch of flat-eartherism.
What is truly amazing about all this is that they are actually at least partially correct in saying they are dominated by the skeptical message, but it has nothing to do with being outspent or outshouted. A Big Lie loudly and endlessly repeated can be very hard to defeat, but a small truth calmly, quietly, and forcefully expressed is like an earworm burrowing away until the Big Lie disintegrates.
Climate alarmism is like Political Correctness and Moral Relativism. Almost everyone knows in their heart of hearts that it is BS but they have all seen how dangerous to one’s well-being it can be to try to challenge the orthodoxy. Most choose the path of least resistance at least superficially. The trouble for the dogmatists is that the true present moment costs are becoming increasingly and incredibly obvious and the distant future benefits are simultaneously becoming much more ephemeral.
If the latest EPA regs regarding coal-fired generation come into effect I’d be willing to wager that long before we see an ice free Arctic we will be seeing massive numbers of old people dying cold in the dark because our electrical grid is no longer is up to the task.
Dear Joe
You have no idea how sad this has made me feel.
I think the Lucky Country just ran out of luck.
Where do you start? Apparently another push by the sophomoric crowd to the emotional side, ” they just don’t understand” and ” we have to do something now “. Their lack of scientific understanding at being able to justify this AGW theory has fallen flat, 1) is contradiction in their arguments and 2) reality. Is that why nobody is listening?
I ‘feel’ just doesn’t cut it in science.
If only these poor folks would go out and get jobs, then
(1) they might find that sense of accomplishment they so desperately need, and
(2) they wouldn’t have so much idle time for useless worrying.
Sad.
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…”
BWAHAHAHA! Good one!
What is the Occam’s Razor type explanation (a line of reasoning that says the simplest explanation may have a reasonable basis for being correct) for the ten ‘what do I feel’ letters from Australian academics involved in the climate science discussion?
My thought is that the Occam’s Razor type explanation that fits the 10 letters is their science is often perceived in the broader general culture as biased activism so they are simply appealing to populist emotion instead.
NOTE: palindrom @August 21, 2014 at 9:54 am attempted what he called the most economical explanation, however, I find his implied explanation that their emotion is more important because they are smarter just begs the question of why they are doing these letters.
John
Just goes to indicate that education to the doctorate degree level does not validate an assumption that an individual is balanced, mature and has a superior intelligence. Idiot Savant comes to mind.
“Prof. Lesley Hughes – Climate change is likely to become the biggest species killer ever, impoverishing our planet and our race.”
I fear that that statement is correct but not the way intended. Another mini-ice-age and we are all in a world of trouble. Warmer doesn’t kill anywhere near what colder does.
Well – that tears it. After reading this I believe that a 97.3% concensus of climate scientists are clinically depressed and off their medications….
LogosWrench says:
August 21, 2014 at 8:00 am
“Mr. Gupta you feel betrayed by leaders who place ideology above evidence? The irony of that statement is staggering, breathtaking, and every other -ing I can think of. Good Night. What is wrong with these people?”
What is wrong with these people? …..a very good question.
What I believe has happened in the heads of these people is that, of course, they have gone on a We-Need-to-Save-the-Planet emotional and spiritual guilt trip. On the surface, there is of course nothing wrong with caring for the planet and wanting to be a steward of it. The problem here is what has happened in their heads as a result of it.
IMHO, what has gone tragically wrong in the heads of these people (and forgive me if this seems all too obvious) is that they have chosen to disconnect themselves from or disassociate themselves from honest, genuine science as a result of that guilt trip they are on. Facts from real world observations along with logic and reasoning are no longer good enough for them. The guilt trip, along with hatred of fossil fuels and the fossil fuels industry, has so overwhelmed them that something needs replace honest, genuine, real world science.
What replaces it is a pseudo-science that they can manipulate and engineer to service, support and reinforce the guilt trip and their emotions. The beauty of this junk science is that they can mold it any way they want. Hence, we see why climate models, faulty as they are, are given so much weight and real world observations mean nothing. Add in a healthy dose of corrupting politics and taxpayer dollars, and you are left with climate science (if I can still call it that) which is in what seems to be a hopeless state. Again, this is just my theory….I am not a psychologist, and not all climate alarmist scientists may fit into this theory.
Caring for the planet should not cause you to disconnect from or disassociate with genuine, real world science in your head. Why it is nonetheless happening can probably be better explained by psychologists than it can by me. That is my two cents worth.
Palindrom @Aug 21, 2014
No! The most economical explanation is the NULL. Until credible evidence is presented that shows a dangerous result from increased carbon dioxide, it must be concluded that these people are living in a separate reality of their own design with no connection with the true state of nature. They can go back to their rooms and play Bat Man and Robin on their own time. What they are doing is not science, it is theatrics, they would do well on the drama squad.
Is Kool-Aid a popular refreshment down under?
The authors of the ten letters appeal to emotion and they are inconvincible*** about the observations showing failure of the CAGW hypothesis.
Appeals to emotion and being inconvincible are non-rational attributes.
*** Inconvincible – is an adjective defined as incapable of being convinced
John
Given almost all funding for climate alarmism in Australia has been culled…they are out to save their jobs. Sad, really sad!
dear earth,
after assessing the changes in climate during the last 20 years , i am left feeling a bit
. . .
. . .
meh.
Makes me think they’re trying a new turn: “Don’t listen to our science. Listen to our tears.”
Earth
You are a great kid, NEVER CHANGE!
See ya after the summer hiatus!
So wait Austrailian climate scientists are not aware that our understanding of all major variables is in flux in the published work? interesting and kinda sad.
Also I would LOVE to see the lifestyle choices of these exact people. They claim to think the entire future is in jeopardy.
A scenario.
I go to my doctor. He tells me I have 6 months to live.
He tells me this because he is a vegetarian and I am an omnivore.
He said I have 6 months to live, not because of any test results but because some of the things I eat had faces. That makes him feel bad.
Time to find a new doctor.
To paraphrase from the movie “Blazing Saddles”, “now who can argue with that, authentic frontier gibberish“.
What feature is common to each of these climate “scientists”? Why they’re all products of Australia’s eco.. sorry, climate establishment. Here’s the cure for all of their ills (courtesy of Tim Blair)… Paging Dr Switzer:
1. It reminds me of that climate conference where diplomats got up and burst into tears because nobody’s taking climate change seriously – or has that become standard behaviour now?
2. It also reminds me of the seminar in the subsequent post; lots of people, supposedly erudite, making very definite statements about things that are far from definite, in extremely sententious voices.
These turkeys don’t strike me as scientists at all. Not even at three in the morning in the hotel bar.