Eric Worrall writes about “The Conversation” Austalia’s favorite hangout of climate doomers:
As the great unwinding of the more extreme climate alarmist positions gathers momentum, “The Conversation” provides us with a hilarious new excuse for some of the wild claims made by climate scientists over the years. Apparently they weren’t lying or exaggerating, they were “oversimplifying”.
According to The Conversation;
“To exaggerate is human, and scientists are human. Exaggeration and the complementary art of simplification are the basic rhetorical tools of human intercourse. So yes, scientists do exaggerate. … In general, limiting or extreme results come about because a simplified analysis is missing an important feedback or because an intricate model is being “exercised” by simulating an extreme scenario.”
![dog-homework[1]](https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/dog-homework1.jpg?quality=83)
So you see, its not the fault of advocate scientist that anyone took their claims of imminent arctic melting, approaching climatic catastrophe, and irreversible tipping points literally. Its our fault, because our feeble intellects were simply incapable of comprehending that they were just talking about worst case scenarios, which they didn’t expect would actually occur.
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Key points for policy makers:
1) You can’t know the future with certainty.
2) Some funding choices will prove good, others bad.
3) Try to fund things which don’t take a long time to be proven wrong-headed.
4) A dreadful mistake is one that lingers on for decades.
The entire crumbling edifice is built on the unverifiable and unfalsifiable conjecture that “… most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations …”.
The rest is puffery exploiting the boredom of the First World.
As in Cavafy’s poem Waiting for the Barbarians …
… some people have come in from the frontier
and say that there aren’t any more barbarians.
What are we going to do now without the barbarians?
In a way, those people were a solution.
So they’re off the hook, then. Along with Adolf and Hermann and Josef, who also “exaggerated.” It’s the human thing to do.
I like that: “doomers”. Isn’t that a balanced retort to “deniers”? I think we come out ahead on that.
So they want us to extend the credibility we give to politicians to climate scientists as well.
Okay.
The whole basis for carbon taxes, bird munchers, hideously expensive geo-engineering, abandonment of fossil fuels etc is all based on the chain of exaggeration. “Oh this is terrible” then leads to the “need” to labour the point, so more exaggeration. “Oh, this is terrible” more exaggeration and so on. Eventually, the exaggerations are a shell surrounding an original half-truth, which in this case is shrinking with time as the models and reality diverge. The article pretty well admits that the whole cAGW scene is based on exaggeration. Anyone with half a brain would then realize that all the radical calls for action are simply not warranted. The “just in case” excuse with its radical calls for action mean humanity will suffer the “losses” incurred by the action(eg money wasted which could have been used for things like alleviating world hunger or fresh drinking water in the third world.)
On 13th January 2014 ,IPCC chief, Christiana Figueres stated in the Guardian that Democracy is a poor political system for fighting global warming. Chinese Communism is the best model. Just think, if she had her way, the world would be under the iron fist of world totalitarianism To think this would have been totally unnecessary in terms of climate effect but with the total loss of freedom as a side-effect. Not a good idea at all.
Liars readily admit to Exaggeration and Simplification. Why not?
Thieves only borrow, Liars only exaggerate.
The following is an interesting look at the situation.
http://www.biocab.org/carbon_dioxide_geological_timescale.html
—–
I have maintained for decades that humans had precious little impact on the total climate and that the whole climate engine was far bigger than mankind. CO2 is, at best, a bit player of marginal import.
We can not even discount the possibility that the earth has had large impacts in the past that may have done tremendous damage and caused gigantic changes in the climate. Some even reckon that something may have ripped part of the earth’s and all of the moon’s atmosphere away in a large impact or near encounter in the past. Do I believe that? I do believe it is possible that the uniformitarianism view is fatally flawed.
One thing I know for darn sure: the present knowledge of our climate history and its causes matches a puppies understanding of nuclear physics. (and that is no insult to puppies)
Mods. Can you tell me what word in my last post got it stuck in moderation? For the life of me I can’t see it. The worst I said was “darn”.
Testing: “transgression”
Nope–that word wasn’t moderated.
It could have been the all caps words.
Australian Warmists are in acute distress at the moment for a number of reasons amongst which are no major droughts, floods, fires or cyclones for them to attribute. And of course the Abbot Government which is stripping funding away from them.
Amongst ordinary people the CAGW panic is fading fast.
It’s morning in Australia!
… as well as the approval of coal by our Prime Minister Abbott ! 😉
I disagree. There are some really odd people here in Aus supporting the CAGW scare. While we have seen many stories claiming companies etc are divesting from fossil fuel industries, we have a bunch of people closing their bank accounts becuase the bank loaned money to businesses involved in the fossil fuel industry. Seriously, the climate change brain rot is well and truely set in here in Aus.
These nitwits are putting their deposits in to Bendigo Bank, which funds building mosques in new areas to spread Islamic influence. These morons will be surplus to requirements when crunch time comes. Unfortunately these nitwits will take the rest of us down with them.
Bendigo bank came about because ANZ pulled out of rural areas in the late 90’s.
From Prof MacKenzie’s second last paragraph (my emphasis):
Seeing that around 95% of model projections have been demonstrated to be hopelessly wrong maybe it’s this treating model projections as “evidence” that has caused UK politicians to get energy policy so hopelessly wrong? I would have thought also that for scientists to continue to accept such model projections as “evidence” long after they have been found to have little or no useful predictive skill, ceases to be science and is in fact nothing more than blatant ideological advocacy.
“Seeing that around 95% of model projections have been demonstrated to be hopelessly wrong”
That paints an overly optimistic picture – because you don’t know WHICH 95% are hopelessly wrong beforehand. Which means that 100% of them are useless.
I often wonder of the fiduciary duty (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiduciary) of the climate scientists (TM) to the general public.
It’s about time some tort lawyers get to work.
the backpedaling gathers pace . the next year or so should be interesting ,looking at the increasing volume of papers deviating from the meme.
There needs to be some numerical way for capturing this backpedaling that is bound to come.
I am starting to get a little annoyed that Aussie PM Abbott hasn’t moved faster to lance the boil on the body politic known as the Australian Broadcasting Commission.
Perhaps Richard Windsor / Lisa Jackson only exaggerated a little. Was there no harm done? Was it just a tiny insignificant fib?
Or could it be one worthy of incarceration?
Liars always regard their monster whopper lies as just little white lies.
One not write one’s homework assignment on a strip of beef jerky.
I think when you call someone a liar, you better be really sure.
“Exaggeration and the complementary art of simplification are the basic rhetorical tools of human intercourse. So yes, scientists do exaggerate.”
I know, I know, I know. And that makes an interesting study in whether human scientists can eventually actually slip lower than dogs, who at least feel guilty! 🙂
Guilty Dog Is So Guilty
Three comments,
1 : Backpedaling by the current and most vocal “warmists”, They are not worried at all they’ve made their $$ of our backs (tax $$),
2 : Most of you Guys and Ladies on this site are well rounded intelligent people and scientists and leave me with great insight that have helped me a lot and understand about not only climate but also how to communicate (thanks AW).
3 : The sad thing is that most of us seem to be of an age where education was still part of our upbringing and there are few or any on this ( and other similar sites) site that are young and still engaged with today’s problems they seem more interested in the next version of a video game.
I hope that will change when the blinders come off.
David
October 18, 2014 at 10:05 am
And now for something completely different. “This parrot isn’t dead, it’s … resting.”
==============================
“It’s pining for the fjords”
Sorry, I just couldn’t resist.
(sheepish/)
Ee’s a Norwegian Blue, Beautiful ee is.
Maybe it is not the scientists fault. Maybe they should blame it on the climate activist groups who shouted down any critical questions. Or the alarmist bloggers, who resorted to name-calling.
@manicbeancounter I think the scientists don’t get off that easily. They still have questions to be answered:
Where were they when they saw their work being misrepresented by sensational journalism and activists? Were they shouting and screaming and asking for corrections? Why not?
“To exaggerate is human, and scientists are human.”
Well it’s nice to see they’re making some progress. Now if they would realize that there are scientists that are good at what they do and ones that are bad at what they do. The ones that exaggerate and sensationalize, take a guess as to which category they fall into.