Guest Post by Bob Tisdale
The title question is rarely, if ever, asked of people who are skeptical of human-induced global warming and climate change…for obvious reasons. If persons are skeptical of a future filled with climate catastrophes, regardless of whether they are caused by nature or by emissions of manmade greenhouse gases, then there should be few reasons for them to be fearful of future climate.
For example: some persons may most fear the future possible rise in sea levels, understanding that surface temperatures are above the threshold at which the seasonal mass losses from glaciers and ice shelves exceed those of seasonal mass gains and that those temperatures have been above that threshold since the end of the last ice age; but they temper that concern with an understanding that even the UN’s political report-writing entity, the IPCC, acknowledges the oceans will continue their inland march regardless of whether or not we limit the emissions of manmade greenhouse gases…that it’s just a matter of time. (See Figure 13.27 on page 68 of 80 of Chapter 13 of the IPCC’s 5th Assessment Report. The blue curve is for the “optimistic” RCP2.6 emissions scenario and the red curve is for the worst-case RCP8.5 scenario.)
What scares me?
My fears are that:
- activist climate scientists and agenda-driven politicians who fund climate science have tainted all related fields with unjustifiable certainty of a future filled with pain and suffering,
- to manufacture those predictions of gloom and doom, the sole focus of climate science has been and continues to be on human-induced, not naturally occurring, global warming and climate change,
- the climate science community will come no closer to understanding the natural contributions to global warming and climate change until there is a total change of mindset, and
- it will take decades of that completely new mindset to overcome the present groupthink.
With that said, what are your fears about global warming and climate change?
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That’s it’s a smokescreen for a global cool down. Because cold is really bad.
Global warming?
We could use a good bit more. I’m all for it. Canada could be the new Florida. What’s not to like? (Besides, it’s not like global warming will cripple the Kansas downhill ski industry, so there’s no monetary loss there.)
Climate change?
I don’t think humankind has much say in the matter, but if we ever come to that point, I think we should be backing global warming technology. Given the past 2.5 million years, trying to cool off the earth at ~12,000 years into an interglacial strikes me as a dumb idea.
Cliff Mass at his weather blog already complained about skeptics hijacking the lack of snow – 6 inches instead of the 3 feet predicted for NYC. But in his analysis, he notes there were TWO models, the European and the US service, and the US service is usually less accurate but was correct this time.
Here is the key to the hypocrisy. While he is correct in noting that NYC was unnecessarily alarmed, and they could have called off the emergency early, there seems to be no willingness to do so with “Global Warming”, yet the draconian policies – which are not dissimilar to the emergency measures imposed by the Government in NYC and the area around it – are also based on “the worst possible model”.
I’m sure that some readers here could come up with a model which is MORE accurate than those with a “hockey stick”, but assume that one model shows warming that isn’t really significant, say 0.2 degrees C by 2100. But the other side will point to models saying 3-5 degrees C in the same timespan.
Just like NYC that had several models, and ONE which the people (with reason) considered was most accurate said it would be a really severe blizzard so everything needed to close down. Do we always take the “worst case” or the one that is becoming the most accurate?
For the “alarmists”, it is the idea that if even one model says severe blizzard with over 3′ of snow, we must do what is appropriate for that condition, but that mentality applied to the world over the many years. We must shut down the western world because one model says if we don’t there may be problems.
I fear the wrong choices affecting mankind will be made for political reasons.
My fear is that the warmists will succeed in imposing some drastic mitigation regime and will thereafter point to the subsequent lack of change in the climate as evidence that they were correct.
I fear that the huge amount of money invested in this mitigation industry will make it impossible to get rid of and the progress of western civilisation will be set back a hundred years or more.
I fear that while we wrestle with the distraction of AGW serious issues are going unaddressed.
The weakening of the US economy in the face of the unfettered 30 year growth of the economy of the PRC.
Thanks Mr. President.
We are already doomed to a greatly reduced future, even if we could put an immediate and instantaneous end to all this carbon demonization nonsense, due to the inexorable compounding of a fundamental property of economic science i.e. Opportunity Costs. For those who are not familiar, which is shamefully more common than should ever be in a society which hopes to have an improving future, opportunity costs are the costs of all things you cannot do now and into the future because you have ratholed your precious financial resources on things which are completely unproductive. A story I have quoted in the past because it so beautifully illustrates the principle is that of Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway. This is from the Berkshire Hathaway entry at Wikipedia
“In 1962, Warren Buffett began buying stock in Berkshire Hathaway after noticing a pattern in the price direction of its stock whenever the company closed a mill. Eventually, Buffett acknowledged that the textile business was waning and the company’s financial situation was not going to improve. In 1964, Stanton made an oral tender offer of $111⁄2 per share for the company to buy back Buffett’s shares. Buffett agreed to the deal. A few weeks later, Warren Buffett received the tender offer in writing, but the tender offer was for only $113⁄8. Buffett later admitted that this lower, undercutting offer made him angry.[7] Instead of selling at the slightly lower price, Buffett decided to buy more of the stock to take control of the company and fire Stanton (which he did). However, this put Buffett in a situation where he was now majority owner of a textile business that was failing.
…In 2010, Buffett claimed that purchasing Berkshire Hathaway was the biggest investment mistake he had ever made, and claimed that it had denied him compounded investment returns of about $200 billion over the subsequent 45 years”
Buffett maintains that a misinvestment of perhaps $20 million over 45 years cost him $200 Billion.
Now it is hard to approximate the total misallocation of resources on the warmunists children’s crusade so far, but I would suggest that $1Trillion worldwide is probably quite conservative since the formation of the IPCC. If you apply just a fraction of Mr. Buffett’s loss ratio, but allow for the fact that the duration to the turn of the next century is nearly double his window, when 2100 comes around, every man, woman and child on the planet will be poorer by about a quarter of a million in constant dollars, just because we haven’t been able to derail the railroad engineer from his phony scam. Given that nothing that has been attempted or even suggested to remedy our “catastrophic” future has the least chance of producing a measurable effect on the climate of the next century I suspect our future descendants would have rather faced the vagaries of the weather with an extra hundred Quadrillion or three in world wealth than with hundreds of thousands of crumbling wind turbine foundations and seething cesspools of chemical soup from old PV panel plants.
Bob, you said it all!. But truth will triumph!
Carbon-based, cashless rationing and caste system;
implanted RFID chips required to buy or sell;
a single city which is the center of all economic activity on earth, opulent and luxurious and corrupt beyond all cities before;
all leaders betray their own countries for the sake of the wealth and spiritual/occult allure of this city;
a charismatic world leader who will fool people with lies.
———
Two Christians were holding signs on the sidewalk which said, “The end is near. Turn around before it’s too late.”
A driver rolled down the window and yelled, “Leave us alone, you religious nuts!” Next there was a screeching of tires and a splash.
One said to the other, “Do you think we should just get a sign that says, ‘Bridge out ahead’?”
My fear was that measures would be taken to fight AGW and then, when it slowed down or stopped (warming , that is) it would be declared a triumph and held as evidence that more regulations and green energy are needed.
I have a moral issue with using the world’s poorest peoples’ food for biodiesel and telling them we priced them out of the basics deliberately to save their (now dead) children from a 0.1% greater chance of being killed by a typhoon if some computer model developed by a guy funded to find alarming AGW scenarios is right.
I have a moral issue with the World Bank forcing Africans to buy solar panels instead of coal for 20x the price.
I have a moral problem with Scottish pensioners dying of pneumonia in their thousands.
I have a moral problem with a Pope siding with atheist abortionist anti Semite Greens.
I have a moral problem with steel workers losing their jobs and homes for nothing, as a mill opens in China.
See, that’s the thing. I’m so rich that carbon taxes really can’t hurt me at $1000 a year. It’s basically a little less income tax the bankrupt govt will need to levy on me. Net, I don’t care.
Slower growth due to economic dead weight can’t hurt materially either. (And I can arrange my affairs to be divested of coal and invested in tax eaters like wind – as it is I hold almost none of either.)
I have nothing to fear from either AGW or anti-AGW. I fear for those who don’t have my luxury.
I have a moral problem with educated adults rejecting the conclusions of ALL the Worlds Institutions of Science that Man’s burning of fossil fuels is warming the planet, without end, and proudly ignoring the consequences for our Grandchildren and theirs.
That isn’t what we are doing, and if you would pay attention you would know that isn’t what we are doing. I have problem with you claiming over and over again that we are doing something when we have shown you over and over again that isn’t what we are doing.
1) “I have a moral issue with using the world’s poorest peoples’ food for biodiesel”
I’ve read that biodiesel doesn’t command the price for the crop that food use does. Do you have evidence that the world’s poorest are being hurt today by biodiesel policy, rather than their own country’s corrupt governance? If you do, I join you in your outrage.
2) “I have a moral issue with the World Bank forcing Africans to buy solar panels instead of coal for 20x the price. ” If true, I agree with you.
3) “I have a moral problem with Scottish pensioners dying of pneumonia in their thousands”. I’m not Scottish, and not familiar with the issue. What happened?
4) “I have a moral problem with a Pope siding with atheist abortionist anti Semite Greens.” I think I agree. But on what issue did the Pope side with which Greens? Which Greens are anti-semites?
5) “I have a moral problem with steel workers losing their jobs and homes for nothing, as a mill opens in China.” Disagree and Agree. I’d have a moral problem if the National Government didn’t allow its citizens free access to cheaper steel, or any cheaper products. But if steel mill workers lose their jobs as a result, national policy to provide a safety net is in order.
6) “I’m so rich that carbon taxes really can’t hurt me at $1000 a year.” A properly implemented revenue-neutral carbon tax won’t hurt anyone: https://citizensclimatelobby.org/carbon-fee-and-dividend/ And will mitigate a much higher cost of adaption and disruption.
Won’t hurt anyone?? Great – let’s make it ONE MILLION DOLLARS a ton. Each person in AUS or USA accounts for say 20t pa, so that’s $20m pa of free annuity income. No one gets hurt – the planet is saved and free money from the govt!
You should be truly ashamed to have linked to that tripe.
Alright, after reading the skeptic’s fears, and the few Climate Activists retorts, I want to throw down a challenge at EVERYONE. Because it’s one thing to say we fear something from the warm comforts of first world nations with Western lifestyles, as recipients of cheap and abundant energy, who’ve never actually had to taste poverty. As some of you who’ve read my posts know now, I spent a lot of time riding a bicycle, alone, through 3rd world nations for years. I’ve seen a lot of crap. I want to shock everyone here out of that first world complacency and get a sense of the audience here.
Say something if you:
1.) Witnessed or been in a food riot.
2.) Saw a person stoned to death because they chose to defy a blockade ( or executed for being in a protest)
3.) Volunteered to help the poor in a third world nation
4.) Went for at least 3 days without a bath or access to clean water (I’ve done 5).
5.) Treated your water with iodine (or had to boil and crudely filter) from a source that you saw animals defecate in
6.) Ate food that made you sick for at least a week in a third world nation
7.) Went without electricity for days at a time
8.) Went without any kind of energy for days at a time in freezing cold weather in a third world nation
9.) As a volunteer, had to make the difficult counsel to someone who had to choose between the environment and feeding his family
10.) Saw food prices skyrocket, and knew what that would do to the people and society in that third world nation
11.) If you were a climate activist before hand, how did you come away from the experience?
12.) If you were a climate skeptic before hand, how did you come away from the experience?
I’m really curious, because experience combined with empathy creates compassion But it also creates grief. And anger. And I’d like for any Climate Activists to respond as well. Yes, I do consider Climate Activists as my dire enemies. I’ve seen way too much suffering first hand from the IPCC Biofuel policy recommendation to consider them a friend, or even an ally. I hold them responsible for that. But at the same time, I have a slim hope that some Climate Activists aren’t Ivory tower elitists with zero concept of what poor people have to deal with.
It’s one thing reading posts and debates from first worlders engaging in what I consider to be scientific and policy smack talk.
It’s a whole other thing watching the real world effects of Climate policies that starve, impoverish, economically destroy, and kill people in foreign countries with your own eyes, especially to people that you personally know.
I’ve been to Africa and experienced some of what you say. It does seem apparent to me that the likes of David Socrates and Warren haven’t and sit in comfortable homes, with plenty of power, technology and food.
What does your post have to do with the validity of the science of AGW? Policies, rightly or wrongly conceived, may flow from many sources, including Science. Do you think it’s logical to conclude AGW is invalid because you see bad results from a policy, whether its based on the science, or not?
99% of peer reviewed papers conclude AGW. All the worlds major research Universities conclude AGW. Do you blame the poverty in Africa on these Scientists for publishing their research?
warrenlb
You ask
Nobody does. We “blame” the ‘Team’ for publishing half-truths and falsehoods in the guise of “science” as support for their “cause”: poverty results from policies based on that “cause”.
Please read the ‘climategate’ emails before posting your offensive and accusatory questions.
Richard
Wrong: 97% Consensus Survey Breakdown Reveals only 1-3% Explicit Agreement. Note “explicit”.
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2014/02/prweb11550514.htm
I was government employee (Geological Survey) in Nigeria during the mid-60s and experienced over a year of civil war, “ethnic cleansing” in Northern Nigeria with people with machetes running through our neighborhood, bodies on the streets and one being put into a tar boiler on a road repair job. This was about two years after independence. Strangely, it sounded like a circus in town or a big celebration at the railway station with the last train going south and too few cars to take many away. I gave my landrover (actually a cursed Austin Gypsy) up to geologists and mining engineers fleeing to the airport for the last plane for senior civil servants (Ibo [apparently now known as Igbo], Yoruba and Calibari). My secretary typist was a Calibari man and my messenger (no telephones) was a Hausa from Niger with a bicycle. I also saw cardboard drums of rice with a label “A gift to the people of Nigeria from Oxfam” which I had to pay about sixpence for a cupful and twice what the locals were being charged. I lost a friend who worked for Oxfam who wouldnt believe that story. I was back in ~2000 and in neighboring Benin and Togo and found not much positive change that I see, given the trillions spent by NGO’s GO’s UN. It makes me think there is an agreement to keep people in poverty, and hey, Nigeria is one of the most advanced (next door in Benin and Togo, it looked like Nigeria in the 60s…The only thing that was boringly the same was the 87F temperature in Lagos, 4 degrees N of the equator.
SABicyclist. Never been in a true 3rd world country, but close enough contact with tritium, monomers, various known cytotoxic substances, Chernobyl radiation rain, Toulouse AZF accident smoke and IRA South Quay bomb explosion perhaps count for something.
And yet, having also experienced few days without electricity and running water in freezing conditions, my biggest fear by far is those who want to increase energy costs with the aim to return my country of origin back to the end of 19th century conditions.
The fact that the same well-intending, but misguided fools bastardize scientific method, compromise public trust in necessary civil service institutions, oppose to financially sustainable technological progress, undermine democracy, civil rights and even mankind scores also high.
This is my fear;
“Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.”
Albert Einstein
Indeed. Somewhere, there’s a Dumbsday Clock ticking away towards the day we humans reach catastrophic dumbness. The whole CAGW sky-is-falling scare has pushed that clock ever-closer, to roughly 3 minutes before midnight.
Bruce, the best comment of the day!! I love it. It will be good to refer to the other clock being run by morons in these terms.
Yes indeed. Experience does colour ones thinking. I have working for twenty years in the deserts of the middle east and South West Africa. That made me a sceptic from day one. If anyone can explain how CO2 absorbs emissions from the surface and then radiates a portion back to the surface making it warmer will make me rethink all I have learned. I am confident nobody can.
I have come to regard what is happening as an evolutionary process for mankind. Population pressure is forcing the pace. I am informed rats bred in captivity become agitated and start attacking each other if the population exceeds some level. Seems to be the same for mankind. Just look at all the mini-wars and riots occurring all around the globe.
There’s the biblical account of Cain killing Able when the earth’s population was supposedly just four people. I don’t disagree that people tend to get testy when crowded together, but there is still plenty of room left on this earth for people to spread out and still plenty of room for more people. If you look into the mini-wars and riots now or at any time in the past, you’ll most likely find a power hungry sociopath at the root of the problem.
Every single living person on this rock can stand, I repeat *stand* as in “footprint”, on the area I know to be the Isle of Wight off the south coast of England. Google it! It’s not a large island!
The problem is ‘suitable food growing land’. We are running out of it. Current world population is 7.3 billion and expected to hit 8 billion by 2020. At a 40 year doubling this means some 16 billion people by 2060. Long before the world becomes dangerously warm from supposed AGW. People say population will stabilise at 9 billion. Really? Somebody going to shoot the excess? Easier to starve them when access to energy and technology is removed. It is one hell of a problem which ever way you look at it.
Richard111
You assert saying in total
You could not be more wrong.
The supposed “problem” of ‘suitable food growing land’ keeps being raised by Malthusians who have always been wrong and will continue to be wrong.
In the 1970s the Club of Rome predicted that human population would have collapsed from starvation by now. But human population has continued to rise and there are fewer starving people now than in the 1970s; n.b. there are less starving people in total and not merely fewer in in percentage.
The ingenuity which increases availability of all resources (including food) also provides additional usefulness to the resources. For example, abundant energy supply and technologies to use it have freed people from the constraints of ‘renewable’ energy and the need for the power of muscles provided by slaves and animals. Malthusians are blind to the obvious truth that human ingenuity has freed humans from the need for slaves to operate treadmills, the oars of galleys, etc..
And these benefits also act to prevent overpopulation because population growth declines with affluence.
There are several reasons for this. Of most importance is that poor people need large families as ‘insurance’ to care for them at times of illness and old age. Affluent people can pay for that ‘insurance’ so do not need the costs of large families.
The result is that the indigenous populations of rich countries decline. But rich countries need to sustain population growth for economic growth so they need to import – and are importing – people from poor countries. Increased affluence in poor countries can be expected to reduce their population growth with resulting lack of people for import by rich countries.
Hence, the real foreseeable problem is population decrease; n.b. not population increase.
All projections and predictions indicate that human population will peak around the middle of this century and decline after that. So, we are confronted by the probability of a problem of ‘peak population’ resulting from growth of affluence around the world.
Richard
richardscourtney
I sincerely hope you are right. A growing population needs a reliable energy supply. That is not happening.
“If anyone can explain how CO2 absorbs emissions from the surface and then radiates a portion back to the surface making it warmer will make me rethink all I have learned. I am confident nobody can”
Actually, Science has explained it since 1824. Here you go: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect
warrenlb
Thanks for the link. Seen it before. There is NO SCIENCE in that link period. They simply state it happens. Absolutely no explanation as to how it happens.
Nothing at all. With Bob Tisdale in the ranks:
Skys, come falling.
Hans.
I no longer have any fears about climate change/global warming. The public mind is steadily swinging back from hyped-up alarmism to the common sense middle-of-the-road opinion – nobody knows!
I remember a few years back i was covering a story at Reading University about ……. . It was being funded by …….. I asked the scientist about funding , he said it is the holy grail. He went on to tell me the lengths scientists would go to get those grants and funding- smearing, backstabbing……
Sorry if I have offended any scientists who read this, just a personal experience that opened my eyes.
I guess when the coffers open, well it’s only human isn’t it.
My fear is that AGW theory will suddenly fall into overwhelming, public disrepute and millions of participants in the climate wars will be forced to develop a new obsession. Downside possibilities boggle the mind. What if, for example, instead of being bent over our computer keyboards 24/7 we were all out driving the streets? Traffic Armageddon!
“With that said, what are your fears about global warming and climate change?” ans…NOTHING!
From my reading to date, a sudden onset ice age is a much greater threat than global warming, and it’s something humanity, or at least the nations of the temperate zones, could and should be preparing to deal with. The chief danger of global warming is that it will destroy our ability to deal with global freezing by dismantling the technologies and skills required.
That said, both of these climate change possibilities pale in comparison to the threat of an extreme solar EMP, which would happen suddenly, and could conceivably destroy our entire global communications, transport, and food distribution systems in a matter of hours (if the world’s electrical power grids were knocked out for weeks or months), causing dozens or even hundreds of millions of people to die of starvation within months, if not weeks, and leaving nuclear reactors without any means of shutting down safely.
The fact that no governments have shown any signs of preparing for this threat is an ominous sign. It suggests to me that their preparations are only sufficient to protect a tiny elite of survivors, and that they have no hope of saving the majority of their people, a situation they would obviously not want their subjects to become aware of…
My fears are:
1. The people with real political power in each and every country on earth do not carry out rigorous stress tests for their societies on climate change, particularly outside the tropics on the effects of greater cold, not warmth.
2. ‘Climate Change’ becomes a religion every bit as pernicious as early christianity in terms of tithes/taxes, strident conformism demanded and no questioning allowed of the Climate Gospels (which have yet to be written by the four chosen men/wimmin).
3. The over-riding question of energy security (which should be a top focus for every Parliament in every society in every generation ad infinitum, up to including the era when space technology must be developed to allow life on earth to be transported to a new planet, either in adult form, in the form of stored seeds/samples of unicellular organisms etc or in forms not yet conceived by anyone on earth to date) becomes derailed by carbon emissions and ‘renewable mantras’ rather than being tackled in terms of the most appropriate energy sources in an evolving world (which will obviously see oil tailing off in the next 200 years and forms of ‘renewable’ energy emerging in importance over a similiar timescale).
4. Obsessions over carbon dioxide prevent appropriate focus on matters of human priority, namely the improvement in housing design at each and every latitude and longitude, allowing as many houses as possible to be affordable, energy neutral and conducive to human health, happiness and familial harmony.
5. Green zealots wish to return human kind to time periods where travel was the sole preserve of small elites, at just a point when travelling the world is the easiest way to make the world’s people unwilling to kill each others for their rich masters’ benefits.
I guess there might be a few others, but that pretty much covers it……..
4.
@RIchard111: I didn’t say it was a link to a scientific explanation of AGW. It’s a link that describes the state of Scientific Consensus.
The state of Scientific Consensus? What “consensus” might that be?
You’re funny. Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier buried the concept of The Scientific Consensus with phlogiston in the 1780s.
Near term: Nothing during my life time or the next hundreds of years.
Long term: The advent of the next ice age glacial period. That glaciation may be hastened by successful efforts to reduce near term temperatures. Glaciation may be “Overwhelmingly Catastrophic” to virtually all life.
I fear NOTHING, but won’t accept slavery. I’m grateful for the moment I have, and will do my best, within my limited power, to help those I love, first; the wonderful thing that’s humanity, second; and the lovely things around me, last. However, I know I’m going to die, and be no more, and I also know it doesn’t matter!
My favorite song, ‘Britannia Rules the Waves’, I think has lyrics including ‘Britons never ever will be slaves.” It’s inspiring, even to a jaded American.
I fear that the AGW scientists will be proven correct and we’ll lose the entertainment value of this site.
They had best get a MovOn, because as of right now, there is NO proof of AGW.