Guest Post by Bob Tisdale
The overselling of calamities in environmental sciences has reached unseemly proportions…so much so in one field that in 2014 a team of marine researchers exposed the problems in a journal article. The paper is Duarte et al. (2014) Reconsidering Ocean Calamities. The abstract reads (my boldface):
The proliferation of a number of pressures affecting the ocean is leading to a growing concern that the state of the ocean is compromised, which is driving society into pessimism. Ocean calamities are disruptive changes to ocean ecosystems that have profound impacts and that are widespread or global in scope. However, scrutiny of ocean calamities to ensure that they can be confidently attributed to human drivers, operate at widespread or global scales, and cause severe disruptions of marine social-ecosystems shows that some of the problems fail to meet these requirements or that the evidence is equivocal. A number of biases internal and external to the scientific community contribute to perpetuating the perception of ocean calamities in the absence of robust evidence. An organized auditing of ocean calamities may deliver a more precise diagnosis of the status of the oceans, which may help to identify the most pressing problems that need be addressed to conserve a healthy ocean.
Also see the Nature editorial Ocean ‘calamities’ oversold, say researchers about Duarte et al. It begins:
The state of the world’s seas is often painted as verging on catastrophe. But although some challenges are very real, others have been vastly overstated, researchers claim in a review paper. The team writes that scientists, journals and the media have fallen into a mode of groupthink that can damage the credibility of the ocean sciences. The controversial study exposes fault lines in the marine-science community.
Carlos Duarte, a marine biologist at the University of Western Australia in Perth, and his colleagues say that gloomy media reports about ocean issues such as invasive species and coral die-offs are not always based on actual observations. It is not just journalists who are to blame, they maintain: the marine research community “may not have remained sufficiently sceptical” on the topic.
These problems run rampant in climate science.
NYTimes Headline
A brand new example of attempted overselling of calamities is the article in The New York Times Ocean Life Faces Mass Extinction, Broad Study Says. The article is based on the McCauley et al (2015) paper Marine defaunation: Animal loss in the global ocean.
[Thanks to Ruth Dixon for introducing us to Duarte et al. (2014) in a comment here at WUWT.]
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So we see a full court press going on right now with obvious collusion between the progressive press, the government, and some “scientists” to get around the fact there has been no appreciable temperature trend in the last 18+ years and nothing they have said would happen has.
And it all comes just before the President gives his State of the Union address. Cover for the new EPA regs that will directly effect a lot of the population? Attempt to put the Republican congress on the defensive over Keystone and possibly de-funding the green energy scam? Prep for Paris next fall? I suspect that there is something else coming. Something we don’t know about yet. Perhaps another unconstitutional move by the president having to do with environmental policy?
Anyway it goes only the disengaged, dishonest, pneumocephalic or those gullible enough to buy bridges off street venders can possibly NOT SEE the obvious over the top PR campaign on climate/environmental issues that going on right now.
“If you cranked up the aquarium heater and dumped some acid in the water, your fish would not be very happy,” Dr. Pinsky said. “In effect, that’s what we’re doing to the oceans.”
This kind of statement always annoys me. Please tell me Dr. Pinsky: how many gallons are in the earth’s aquarium and how many gallons of acid would it take to make a -measurable- difference in PH? Now, tell me how many gallons of acid can mankind produce in a year? Now go away.
You’re right, calamities, Apocalipse and extrmely bad news sell better than good or neutral news. I strongly recommend to those reporters first to read something more about the oceans and about their important role in the climatic changes, and then to start writing. Here’s a good example of well documented information: http://www.2030climate.com/a2005/04_12-Dateien/04_12.html
Strange. The title of the article says “calamities oversold”. Not having time or stomach to read all of the comments, I did a word search of the page on the keyword “solar”, and failed to get a single hit.
Yesterday, I watched a program on the Love Nature channel (the channel previously known as “OASIS”), which pretended to clarify the dangers posed by solar storms. Instead, it totally trivialized them as follows:
1. the Carrington Event was never discussed, or even mentioned that I could detect.
2. the most serious solar disruption described was the Quebec power outage of 1989, which was described as having caused grid power loss for 9 hours.
3. the possibility of the entire North American grid being put out of commission for months, years, or forever, by a CME was never mentioned
4. the possibility that all unshielded electronic devices would be destroyed was never mentioned
On the contrary,
A. the “documentary” assured the viewers that humanity is “prepared as never before” , as opposed to more vulnerable (and steadily getting more so with globalization and “just in time production”)
B. it lauded the newly acquired ability to protect satellites by warning operators to speed up their orbiting velocity in anticipation of a coming solar event (implying this is the worst case scenario humanity could face). and
C.it gave serious voice to the view that we are entering a lengthy period of minimal solar activity (no indication of the time of creation of this documentary was provided, despite repeated use of the expression “in the next two years”)
So I would say that the article published above is seriously misleading. The arguably most serious threat to human civilization is being consistently trivialized in the popular media, usually after a tantalizing scary lead in and subject title.
After a fairly difficult search for the origins of the solar storm documentary I mentioned above, I found it to be a BBC Horizon program published in February of 2012, and discovered that it did mention that we are more vulnerable before adding, [but] better prepared.
Going back over the past 40 days of this blog, which I had sadly been forced to neglect by pressing circumstances, I also discovered the announcement with comments here of the new Dscovr satellite, set to be launched yesterday as an adjunct to the aging (and, according the BBC program, seriously damaged in 2003) ACE satellite described as the greatest tool we .
Most interesting was the (to me at least) revelation that close orbit satellites could benefit from the 45 minute advance warnings of incoming flares transmitted to their operators by ACE and DSCOVR only to shut down vulnerable circuits and turn their shielded side toward the sun. I had wondered how satellites could carry enough fuel to accelerate within their orbit to counteract the increased atmospheric density created by solar flares (as the documentary described).
So there you have it, our civilization is better prepared for total destruction by the provision of a 45 minute advance warning to satellite operators’ on-duty staff. Let there be dancing in the streets.
The name of the program is “Solar Storm: the threat to planet Earth”, I managed to find it and skim through the whole episode once, but can’t find it again. It seems to be blocked on most sites, at least for Canada.
http://www.ironammonite.com/2012/03/end-is-nigh-solar-storms-threat-to_06.html