Guest Post by Bob Tisdale
It’s been months since I’ve wandered over to the ClimateProgress wing of the political blog ThinkProgress. The title of the November 4, 2014 blog post by alarmist Joe Romm is truly remarkable. Please sit. Put down your coffee, unless you want to spritz your keyboard. (I have a standby keyboard from my old computer just in case I run into something like this.) Here it comes, ready or not.
The title is IPCC Scientists Emphasize Immorality Of Inaction By Focusing On ‘Irreversible Impacts’.
Told ya’. It’s a doozy.
Odd thing, I don’t recall the IPCC being tasked with preparing reports about the ethics of hypothetical human-induced global warming and climate change. Do you? Referring to the IPCC History webpage, the IPCC I know was tasked with preparing reports that (my bold):
…assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant to understanding the scientific basis of risk of human-induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation. IPCC reports should be neutral with respect to policy, although they may need to deal objectively with scientific, technical and socio-economic factors relevant to the application of particular policies.
If the IPCC is policy neutral, one might suspect it is also ethics neutral. In other words, it is not for the IPCC to decide what is moral or immoral.
Recall, the IPCC is only a report-writing arm of a political organization. They are not a scientific body. The reports are written for a political body—by like-minded scientists, granted—but they are prepared only to support that political body’s agendas.
On that IPCC History webpage, they also note:
The scientific evidence brought up by the first IPCC Assessment Report of 1990 underlined the importance of climate change as a challenge requiring international cooperation to tackle its consequences. It therefore played a decisive role in leading to the creation of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the key international treaty to reduce global warming and cope with the consequences of climate change.
That’s also odd. The first IPCC assessment report wasn’t very conclusive. In fact, the IPCC admitted, at that time, they could not detect the impacts of manmade greenhouse gases on global mean surface temperatures. Yet somehow, the UNFCCC was created based on those inconclusive findings in the first IPCC report.
This has led many persons to conclude the UN was going to proceed with their agenda of stabilizing “greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system” by creating regulations intended to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases…regardless of the findings of that first IPCC report. In other words, there was never any real need for the IPCC, never any real need for governments around the globe, since the founding of the purposeless IPCC in 1988, to continue to waste billions of dollars annually on climate studies. All of that time and money has been wasted. The politicians had already decided what they were going to do.
But I’ve gone off on a tangent. Back to Joe Romm’s IPCC Scientists Emphasize Immorality Of Inaction By Focusing On ‘Irreversible Impacts’.
The title of that post did its magic. I clicked on it.
It turns out that Romm performed an in-depth study on the use of the word “irreversible”, finding that it was used “only 4 times” in the IPCC’s full 4th synthesis report but used “31 times” in the IPCC’s new full 2014 synthesis report. To Joe Romm, the almost 8-fold increase in the use of one word in 100+ page documents was a clear message that “world’s leading scientists” were emphasizing the “immorality of inaction”.
Or it could indicate the politicians for whom the report is written have grown increasingly more frustrated with their own failures and have directed the report writers to ramp up the rhetoric.
Joe Romm then quoted portions of, possibly, a past synthesis report, and a 5-year-old NOAA study, and, assumedly, the recently released IPCC 2014 Synthesis Report, though I haven’t bothered to confirm the quotes or their sources. Then Romm proceeded to translate those quotes, all according to the Romm beliefs in the immoralities of failing to act on the computer-model projected impacts of hypothetical human-induced global warming, while failing to consider that those climate models cannot be falsified, because the models, purposely, are not representative of Earth’s climate.
I have no further comment about Romm’s post, but I’ll be happy to read yours.
Related:
Pierre Gosselin of NoTrickZone reports on “contradictions, falsehoods and distortions“ in the new IPCC Synthesis Report, which were discovered and documented by the Germany-based European Institute for Climate and Energy (EIKE). See Pierre’s post EIKE: IPCC Synthesis Report “In Crass Contradiction To Almost Every Measurement And Trend In Nature”.
Additionally, maybe you recall the blog post or news story from recent days. It was by a science reporter who had documented that many portions of the IPCC’s new synthesis report weren’t supported by their year-old 5th Assessment Report (AR5). If you have a link to the original article, please leave it for me in comments. I’d like to discuss it (introduce it) in this post as part of an update.
Thanks.
It seems:
You take the cold hard science and add a pinch fear and assertions of certainty to arrive at AR5.
Then you take AR5 and add a dose if alarm to get to the synthesis report.
Then you give this to ‘communicators’ who spin it, adding threats.
By the time it gets to the press and the politicians the only message that comes across is “WE ARE ALL GOING TO FRY BY 2100”
No, you take a cold hard fear and assertions and add a pinch of science. Then throw away the science part.
Lying liars continually perpetrating their fraud….
Hey Mark! “Lying liars continually perpetrating their fraud….”
It is said that to a man with a hammer, every problem is a nail. A corollary of that, is that to a man with a sociopathic talent for lying, every problem is an opportunity for remorseless fraud.
Are we still talking about Romm here?
Thanks Bob, I think we all know that the IPCC is a corrupt organization backed by corrupt politicians intent on trying to steamroller a world government. Thankfully America has come to its senses and voted the GOP back. Sen. Inhofe is rubbibg his hands in glee. UK/Europe may follow the US trend but I am not holding my breath.
Nah, the EU only follows its own delirious ideation.
You’re probably right!
The “almost 8 fold” increase of a term says more about the lack of science of the report than of anything else. Hysteria is not science, but that is what the alarmist crowd has been reduced to. No facts, no data, just hysteria.
Prozac futures are soaring in Geneva.
Alarmist rhetoric has shifted from “the next 5, 10, 15 years” to “the end of the century”, where it is safely out of reach of embarrassing present-day evidence. No more “snows are a thing of the past” or “here comes the rain/drought stuff, just “trust us — the end of the century is going to be bad”. Isn’t this in itself a retreat?
It is a retreat from the science, but not from anything else sadly. As long as there is good money to be made climate change will always be at the edge of irreversibility.
Good bounce Ball. I never thought of that.
This follows a well trodden path of ramping up the hype while the science stays stagnant. Over 50 excuses for the temp standstill and counting.
http://www.energyadvocate.com/gc1.jpg
I had some interaction with Joe on his site but he wholesale censorship of responses makes any conversation impossible. He is a true believer, a true Climate Jihadist.
This is more of the same from him. He is utterly irrelevant, like a chicken that runs around the farmyard for epeeiod unaware its head has been removed from its body.
He probably is not, he just plays the role and gets paid for it. The lies he tells and the total absence of any logic in his reasonings make me think that it is all just faked.
Nylo, I think you are correct. If he were a true believer, convinced that his arguments were irrefutable and overwhelmingly true, he would not censor and delete sceptical counterpoints.
I’ve watched him in action on vid, and I’m sure he’s totally sincere. He probably has sane opinions on other subjects, like sports. But I wouldn’t bring up ice hockey, if I were talking to him.
The more time passes, the more climate models will diverge from reality and the more strained will be their attempts to hold onto their discredited theory. According to Kuhn, there should occur a sudden and dramatic paradigm shift. Nobody can say when that will occur, but I hope I’m still around to witness it.
In actual fact, the deep oceans will continue to absorb the heat. So the oceans should be “on the boil” in about 10 years time – which will not be much fun for surfers.
Its already started
http://ow.ly/i/7tB6N/original
SoWrongMate:
Too bad the deep oceans have been cooling for the last 2 decades:
According to the IPCC Technical Summary TS 6.1 Key Uncertainties WG1:
• Different global estimates of sub-surface ocean temperatures have
variations at different times and for different periods, suggesting
that sub-decadal variability in the temperature and upper heat
content (0 to to 700 m) is still poorly characterized in the historical
record. {3.2}
• Below ocean depths of 700 m the sampling in space and time is
too sparse to produce annual global ocean temperature and heat
content estimates prior to 2005. {3.2.4}
• Observational coverage of the ocean deeper than 2000 m is still
limited and hampers more robust estimates of changes in global
ocean heat content and carbon content. This also limits the quantification
of the contribution of deep ocean warming to sea level rise.
______________
The ARGO system was not complete until 2007. So ocean temperature data was very sparse prior 2005 as noted above. 20th Century ocean heat content data is simply not robust.
? Theory
“Too bad the deep oceans have been cooling for the last 2 decades”
So that would rule out submarine volcanoes being responsible for the warming oceans hey!
“The average September temperature for the global oceans was record high for the month, at 0.66°C (1.19°F) above the 20th century average, the highest on record for September. This also marked the highest departure from average for any month since records began in 1880, breaking the previous record of 0.65°C (1.17°F) set just one month earlier in August. This is the third time in 2014 this all-time monthly high temperature record has been broken. Record warmth was observed in parts of every major ocean basin, particularly notable in the northeastern and equatorial Pacific Ocean.”
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/2014/9
Global ocean records since 1880? Does NOAA think we can’t read?
From the ARGO website:
It’s amazing…just amazing, that he still has a platform from which to spew.
But then again, so do most of the religious figureheads…which is basically the same thing.
“Or it could indicate the politicians for whom the report is written have grown increasingly more frustrated with their own failures and have directed the report writers to ramp up the rhetoric.”
There is one English word that captures both the AR5 SPM and the recent 2014 synthesis report: sophistry
Climate hysteria doesn’t even rise to the level of good sophistry. I’m surprised this word isn’t used more tho. It seems to have dropped from our dumbed-down vocabulary.
Most people who think they are sophisticated (endowed with sophistry), usually are.
” A sophistical rhetorician, excuberated by his own verbacity”.
Benjamin Disreali.
Oops “verbosity”
I’d like to see the electorate vote on Joe Romm’s statements and conclusions. I bet the results would be the same rejection we saw of this administration’s policies last Tuesday.
Some things are so transparently false.
They just did, on Tuesday.
“To even start reversing the irreversible, we have to go far below zero net emissions to actually sucking …”
I stopped it about there 🙂
Sorry – misformatted:
Except that is the opposite of what the SPM says.
The latest science says that the “pause” is caused by heat entering the deep ocean. The feedbacks require heat to be in the atmosphere, doing something.
A correct quote would be “…we have unleashed no change for over a decade and thus presumably myriad nullifying feedbacks that make the job of getting to even zero net emissions doubly pointless”.
M Courtney says:
“The latest science says that the pause is caused by the heat entering the deep ocean”
No need to wonder any longer about where this fellow has his head.
Courtney, your comrades have posited, in the literature, fifty some odd reasons for the so-called pause. You are far behind ward in the matter.
Well even so. Regardless of which guess you pick for where the heat went (if it exists at all)…
If it isn’t in the atmosphere (GASTA) then the hypothesised feedbacks that the models predicted no longer apply.
And so the catastrophic feedbacks can’t occur.
The BBC mentioned the “31 uses of the word irreversible” in a news report. It was our wonderful Science and Environment reporter, Matt McGrath (he of the thousand photos of silhouetted cooling towers belching black ‘smoke’). So he either read Joe Romm, or sat there counting the “irreversible”s for Joe to pick up on. Maybe they follow eachother on Twitter, brothers in arms, fighting the good fight.
I think it was Lao Tzu who said:
“To know that you do not know is the best.
To think you know when you do not is a disease.
Recognizing this disease as a disease is to be free of it.”
It offers some profound wisdom for the true believers in this eternal debate!
There are a zillion translations of Lao Tse. Most of them give no hope of a cure for that particular disease.
“It offers some profound wisdom for the true believers in this eternal debate!”
.. .or it will leave them scratching their empty heads about what on earth Lao Tzu was trying to say, thereby keeping them preoccupied and out of our faces for awhile.
Thanks Bob.
Just wondering what happened to”dealing with the consequences of climate change”. Conveniently forgotten probably because it is a lot harder to make money from building dikes and keeping runoff channels clean. Beside, it may actually save a few lives.
Just in case you’re wondering how I’m pumping out a blog post per day. I may not be able to keep up this pace, but the answer is:
http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2014/11/07/yippee-a-two-month-vacation/
Yes I wondered on another thread how you do what you do. And now you’re pumping it up?
Whole departments do not generate the deliverables you produce.
There should be a government grant on auto pay for you.
Bob, Brandon Shollenberger commented on undisclosed changes in the final report.
http://hiizuru.wordpress.com/2014/10/17/undisclosed-changes-in-the-ipcc-ar5-report/
Thanks, Ron C. Maybe that was what I ran across this week.
But I recall something else. It was an article about the differences between the 2013 Assessment Report and the 2014 Synthesis Report…so that the Assessment Report didn’t support the Synthesis Report. The reporter who published it was being scolded and threatened on Twitter by the authors of the Synthesis Report.
Bob, perhaps this from Marcel Crok
http://www.staatvanhetklimaat.nl/2014/11/04/ipcc-bias-in-action/
More probably another post at NTZ:
By Axel Bojanowski
http://notrickszone.com/2014/11/04/spiegel-slams-at-ipcc-alarmism-comes-before-accuracy-ipcc-gross-problems-suppresses-important-findings/#comment-989916
oh for goodness sake, I’ve spritzed my keyboard.
Donna Laframboise did the analysis of grey literature cited in the earlier report – I did one chapter. / mark fraser
The very name of the IPCC, Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change, embeds the conclusion that climate change is happening.
For example, it isn’t called the ‘Inter-Governmental Panel on Nothing Much Happening’ or the Inter-Governmental Panel on the Plateaupause. The bias is inbuilt so don’t hold breath waiting for their next ‘scientific’ report.
If indeed the effects are irreversible then good! – we can all relax because there is nothing we can do it about it.
Actually, there is no pause; climate continues to change just as it has always done, albeit at times imperceptibly to short-lived humans.
If the IPCC were ever to have a shred of legitimacy—which of course it couldn’t by the fact that it is “inter-governmental” (don’t you love that term and all it implies?)—it should direct its energy towards solving problems engendered by the normal and natural shifts in climate and weather. Think of all the millions flushed down the loo that instead could have gone towards maintaining the decaying infrastructure in this country and abroad. How many tragedies could be averted by shoring up dams, levees, bridges and the like?
Everytime the “Think Progress” or “Climate Progress” blogs are mentioned, it needs to be pointed out how intensely political these groups are through and through – they are paid arms of the Democratic National Committee – and that is no exaggeration, it is easily proved.
“Climate Progress” and “Think Progress” are the online outlets of the “Center for American Progress”. John Podesta is the former President, and now the Chair and Counselor for the Center for American Progress. John Podesta hired Joe Romm, and John Podesta is now also the personal Counselor to President Barak Obama.
Again, that is ultra-important and opens up the can of worms here for all to see – Joe Romm’s boss is President Obama’s personal counselor. It’s not much of a stretch to say that *Everything* published by Joe Romm is coordinated with the official Messaging strategy of the White House.
When we say that “Climate Change” is now completely a political issue, THAT is what we are talking about.
(Luckily their strategy is going down in flames on that front!)
With less of a “6 degrees of separation”, we already know that MSNBC and CNN clear their content with the white house. So the progress sites are just easier as they do not clear anything – they get their orders from there.
As an addition, John Podesta’s daughter is a lawyer–owns a lobby firm named after her in DC–her company is there to “help” corporate CEO’s to meet the right people to get “things” done in DC. An incestuous lot, I might say.
Based on the results of last Tuesday’s election. Next year I think there is going to be a big change in the funding of climate change research in the U.S.
In Google translator, they should have an English–>Alarmism function. Although the reverse of that might cause your CPU to explode.
First, you have to understand that the IPCC was created to further the purposes of the United Nations, not to actually create anything useful. That is, the United Nations, fur years, has acted as if it should be a “government of governments,” much as the United States is a government of states. And like that last comparison, the United Nations wants to have dictatorial powers, as the federal government has over the individual states.
To further the comparison, you have to have external threats to hammer the constituent parts into total submission. With the United States, it is the now eternal “war on terror” as it used to be the Cold War, and with this, the laws passed have changed the relationships between government and governed.
With the United Nations, the external threats have to be “world wide” as they aren’t likely to be extraterrestrial., not that they actually could do anything if they WERE extraterrestrial in nature. So they have contrived “global warming,” and have backed it up with the threat of infectious disease. With this two prong approach, they will attempt to hammer the individual nations into submission “for the benefit of humanity.”
It is all about creating themselves as the unelected and all enforcing world government, and that is all. The European Union was, to me, the trial balloon as to see if you can take individual nations and generate true subservience to an appointed “super government,” and it appears to have been successful, at least up until recently. The UN merely wants to take that concept to a world level instead of just a continental level. They want every nation to give up sovereignty, as the EU has done in Europe, thus they, and ONLY they, can determine the best use for land, water, or population.
“You say that farm has been in your family for generations? Too bad. We have determined that its best use to humanity is to lie fallow. Go somewhere else. Compensation? Sorry, we don’t give compensation when it is “for the good of humanity.” “
It should be pointed out that, under the Constitution of the United States, the federal government is explicitly denied “dictatorial powers” over the individual states. It has been through a perversion of constitution prerogatives (especially the Commerce Clause) and the vast proliferation and expansion of federal bureaucratic agencies with quasi-legislative and enforcement powers, that the federal government has been able to insinuate itself into every aspect of American life.
This process is not inevitable, and, though the odds may be against it, can still be reversed. Read Mark Levin’s The Liberty Amendments, and take hope—or better yet, take action.
/Mr Lynn
‘…under the Constitution of the United States, the federal government is explicitly denied “dictatorial powers” over the individual states’
Yes, but federal agencies such as the EPA are easily able to circumvent the Constitution. Acting under Presidential edict they have ways of disguising dictatorial power;
‘…With the EPA, there’s regulations. They are not actually laws. They never go through Congress and are never voted on by our representatives. That creates soft tyranny because we have no choice in the matter.” (Gary Howell – R- W.V)
Soft Tyranny indeed.
Very good summation, Tom. Too bad it would be banned from most student textbooks…
“If the IPCC is policy neutral, one might suspect it is also ethics neutral. In other words, it is not for the IPCC to decide what is moral or immoral.”
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No. Indeed. However, it is Mr. Romm’s job – and he has, of course, history – to lecture us all about right and wrong. Me, I’d prefer it if he kept schtumm, but there ya go.