Holy crap on a cracker! This Q&A with Michael Mann at some blog nobody has ever heard of called “Down with Tyranny” leaves me wondering, what is he smoking? I think the self imposed “climate interpreter” title needs some work.
-by Gaius Publius
One of my hats is as a climate interpreter to the interested lay person. I have something of a science background and can read the papers “in the original.” Another hat is as an occasional interviewer for Virtually Speaking. This month the two hats merged on the same head, and I got to interview the “Hockey Stick graph” climate scientist, Dr. Michael Mann. – See more at: http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2014/10/michael-mann-on-climate-theres-very.html#sthash.y25kBteI.dpuf
[QUESTION] What level of CO2 is reasonable?
[ANSWER] Most still think that 350 ppm (parts per million) CO2 is what’s needed to keep us at the upper end of Holocene (era of civilized human culture) temperatures. For contrast, the ice ages averaged about 180 ppm CO2 at the bottom, and pre-industrial (pre-1750) concentrations were about 280 ppm CO2. Pre-industrial temperatures were at the bottom of the Holocene (post–ice age) temperature range, so there’s some headroom above that 280 ppm number. How much exactly? No one knows.
It looks like we’re headed for a IPCC-“safe” 450 ppm CO2 unless we stop. Not safe, IMO; nor in Dr. Mann’s. For starters, this “450 ppm” measures CO2 only, not other GHGs like methane and nitrous oxide. The effective ppm in “CO2 equivalent” with those other added GHGs is higher if only CO2 is at 450.
It’s roughly thought that the original ice sheet formations of 35 million years ago, which gave us modern Antarctic, Greenland and Arctic ice, occurred in a cooling environment that crossed below CO2 concentrations in the range of 550-400 ppm or so.
First, that’s a wide range. Second, that’s no indication of what will happen going the other direction, where the warming tipping points are. Hansen writes, correctly IMO, that real climate sensitivity depends on (a) the starting point (i.e., how near we are to tipping points), and (b) the direction (effect of warming of X amount is not necessarily correlated to the effect of cooling of that same amount).
Nevertheless, the massive uncertainty, plus the world-historical consequences, gives most of us pause. Me, I think 450 ppm CO2 is ultimately a death sentence for civilized humans. Back to life as hunter-gatherers for our third- or fourth-generation descendants. And if worldwide social chaos takes over before we stop, the process could run to conclusion, which, the old IPCC A1FI scenario says, tops out at +7°C warming.
On Mann:
“First, he’s actually good on the politics, better than most. But second, I wanted to get his thoughts regarding next steps. For me the key, core messages are — Stop Now… Zero Carbon “Budget” … Free Market Solutions Won’t Work. He surprised me in agreeing with the third point, and I hope he carries that message to the public going forward. He was already mainly on board on the first two, but I wanted to hear him say so for the record, since I hadn’t encountered his public comment on this. “
Source: http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2014/10/michael-mann-on-climate-theres-very.html
H/t to Steve Mosher
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Free Market Solutions Won’t Work
Right, we must send in the storm troopers and send the deniers out to the CO2 ovens. I’m sorry, you polluted my day with this one Anthony.
For one, you are barking up the wrong tree.
For two, nobody forced this upon you.
Hey Michael Mann, I see that crude oil prices are down to $78.25 per barrel today! If we vote in enough cheap energy advocates, maybe we can afford to hit the road again if gas prices go down (and energy in general gets cheaper), and maybe US industries and businesses can start thriving again, bringing back some real jobs for our out-of-work workers. CO2 is a boon to agriculture and Flora in general – get over it!
Bring on 450.org…
All very good points.
The only problem is that it leaves the politicians out of the equation.
They feel left out, unneeded, over paid, loss of ability to raise funds for re-election, …
The media (mainstream) is gonna have to reevaluate after the crushing defeat that is coming.
Then, when it’s all said and done, we get more of the same from the actors.
Ah, I see:
the quote is from a “climate interpreter”.
I was confusing that with “climate data manipulator”.
My bad.
In the 70’s college critical thinking courses I believe an interview such as this one would have been labeled “pseudo-scientific jargon”
Wait, my Sagan Baloney Detector Just went critical…
Today we just call it pseudo-scientific propaganda. Or crap for short.
The most (in)famous person called Gaius doesn’t exactly have a good reputation.
Searched for “450.org” and got into “Information Superhighway Hell”…
If Mann feels so strongly that carbon emissions must be stopped immediately, do you suppose he would support ceasing ALL funding directed toward climate research and spend it instead on engineering studies of how to capture and bury CO2? Would he put his funding where his mouth is?
&
First Mann claims falsely to own a Nobel Prize, now one of his fan club members claims “He [Mann] responds to climate change deniers on his [Mann’s] RealClimate blog “
LOLROTF
John
&
Corroborated to not be owned by Mann:
– Noble Prize
– RealClimate blog
– exonerations wrt CG1/ CG2 / aspects of the Hockey Stick Papers
– good scriptwriter for his self-serving heroic mythology of himself
Partly corroborated to be owned by Mann:
– litigations supported by legal defense fund money through efforts by UCS
John
http://www.smartvoter.org/2010/06/08/ca/vn/vote/atkins_d/
If my Internet Archeologist (my newest hat) skills are as honed as Gaseous Publicarse’s are, then I think I found him.
He’s got a zillion blogs and twitter accounts, and holy wow…that Virtual blog radio thing has 136 followers! But he’s no scientist. He has a B.A. in Greek and Latin.
Now that you mention it….Cool…
You need to be more specific about what you find “cool”.
Sorry, thought you’d catch my sarcasm.
Sitting around the campfire (burning old dead grass for a few seconds at a time since all the wood was gone), after being skunked for the 30th day in-a-row in hunting with everyone so hungry that they are even the grass …
… now you are a great grandpa telling your great grandchildren about these great things from the distant past called coal and oil that …
… kept us warm, kept a refrigerator box fully stored with 10 days of food all the time for just 8 hours of mild work, entertained with movies every day, let us buy warm coats for 8 hours of work and let us travel in creature comfort at 60 mpg down smooth roads, …
… the frozen starving grandchildren would be very happy with grandpa abandoning those comforts just because some great chief named Mann told him to do so. They would think grandpa was the dumbest person ever to be alive …
… and the great chief Mann was even dumber that that, dumber than the grass.
… after all, it was so cold outside where they lived, that they could not have been this global warming thing in the first place.
There are twelve men/women, good and true, waiting for his message in the District of Columbia.
Going forward, that is.
Contrari,
Sorry to disagree with you, but Hanson is only worth two stars…
Mike
The most clear observation possible from the above is that Dr. Mann is not well regarded, and that this treatment is well earned by him.
Let’s see, what would the approximate added global temperature be from increasing CO2 from 400ppm to 450ppm?: ((5.35 x ln(450/280)) – ((5.35 x ln(400/280))= 0.63 watts/M^2 x 0.32 (Stefan Bolzmann constant) x .4 (negative feedbacks according to Dr. Lindzen’s ECS estimates)= 0.08C…
So, what da Mann is sayin’ is that an increase of approximately 0.08C of global warming is sufficient to completely destroy modern civilization and basically put us back into the Stone Age….
Yeah, right, Mann… sure it will…
Mann is barking mad… For 500+ million of years (Cambrian to Cretaceous), land and sea life THRIVED at CO2 levels ranging from 1000~7000ppm, and somehow the laws of physics, logic and reason suddenly cease to exist, because….. what, warmunists need more CAGW grant funding and governments lust for more power?
Once the CAGW hypothesis crashes and burns, historians will NOT treat this generation well….
The stupid , it burns.
Hunter gatherers?
You mean the sort who form packs to drive politicians over a fiscally responsible cliff and plunder the corpse of the public purse for the vast bounty of ‘research’ funding and speculative technology subsidies and tax boondoggles then dance around campfires fuelled by economic wreckage while spaced out of their hillbilly brains on the scientific theory equivalent of hallucinogens.
Had M. Mann and his co-conspirators NOT manipulated their data, politicized climate research, and completely jumped the shark by calling others “Anti-Science,” and “Deniers,” things may have turned out differently in the “debate.”
But, the debate has been tainted, the science is certainly not “settled,” and the hysteria has proven to be unsupported by reality.
That may happen for large swaths of humanity, if we are forced to subsist on “green” energy.
Those might not be Mann’s words. As it says in the paragraph before the Q&A section that you quoted: –
“2. Virtually Speaking is broadcast with a studio audience in Second Life. A number of questions came in during the broadcast, some of which are worth repeating. All answers are mine. I hope you find these helpful. Again, I just want to put the basics in your brain — no reason to learn more than needed.”
All answers are mine. “mine” refers to Gaius Publius, although the text is a bit messy so I can’t tell for sure. However, certainly not Mann’s words in that paragraph, unless you can find them in the audio interview? If so, best to state that. From the text of the blog post, you are basically stating that these are Mann’s words. And they may well not be.
“Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place.”
Still in stiches over that one, and that was way before the idyllic hollowscene. The hollowscene really has little to recommend it except that is an INTERrglacial. Early Hominins probably descended from the trees just about 3.5 mya when it began to seriously chill out and CO2 may have been at roughly current levels.
It should be remembered that the initial Antarctic glaciation about 30mya was a temporary affair with CO2 levels very high and janky, maybe over 550 ppm.
This may actually be a new climate “forcing” that mikee has discovered and and if 450 (a mere 52 away/) forces a hunter gathering lifestyle, perhaps 550 will force us back up the trees?
FTA: “It’s roughly thought that the original ice sheet formations of 35 million years ago, which gave us modern Antarctic, Greenland and Arctic ice, occurred in a cooling environment that crossed below CO2 concentrations in the range of 550-400 ppm or so.”
Higher CO2, colder than today. It’s as if Mann stuck a chicken bone in his goatee, and announced, “I shall go mad”.
I for one am taking out the fake stone logs and gas burner in my home’s fireplace and turning it back into a wood burning fireplace it was meant to be. I’ll be bringing a truckload of mesquite firewood home in December from my ranch in Texas to burn in said fireplace. Can hardly wait for the crackle of a real mesquite wood fire in my fireplace this winter.
I have always been a big fan of Larry Niven, the science fiction writer. In 1991, he released a fun little novel co-written with Jerry Pournelle and Michael Flynn called ‘Fallen Angel’. It takes place in the not to distant future when radical Greens have taken over the governments and triggered the next ice age with their draconian policies. As a new climate crisis skeptic myself, I eagerly read and enjoyed the book, although I thought the ‘bad guys’ were a little to hard to believe.
Not any more.
Reality has become stranger than fiction. Michael Mann and his ilk, are actually more twisted and delusional than the bad guys in that 23 year old novel.
The ironic thing is that the UN and their ultra green human hating cronies want us to abandon technology and return to being hunter-gatherers(being vegans, they will not want to hunt.) Of course, plants just love the higher CO2. What the Green Nazis want is a return to the Stone Age. However, they do not want us to know that the planet only supported around 7 million humans 10,000 years ago. Oh dear, 99.9% of us will be surplus to requirements. I wonder why they never mention the “cost” of abandoning technology.
Folks, that Mann is a bungler. He’s in an absolute no-win-situation. If he admits that he propped up(to say the least) his tree ring saga, they’d kick him out of academia, thus losing his neat sinecure. So he has to carry on with odd stories and warm-mongering of all sort. He hasn’t the guts to admit his manipulations. He is the living example of the old proverb „If you lie, stick to it, come hell or high water.“ Unfortunately, floods are getting fewer, but the alternative seems to be worth talking about.
The Left will turn humans into hunter gatherers just ask the Russians……..or the Chinese.