Argh. You often wonder how weapons grade hubris can be come to be. For example, we shake our head at the hubris of people like Michael Mann and James Hansen, whom I’m convinced are simply victims of noble cause corruption in their quest to “save the planet”. Well it seems NPR reporter Adam Frank has topped everyone when it comes to talking about climate science and its importance in the scheme of things.
From the NPR story: The Climate Story Nobody Talks About (h/t to Marc Morano)
In service of answering this question and looking for perspectives on climate change beyond the usual focus on controversy, let’s begin by acknowledging a single fact that’s rarely discussed in the media: Climate science is a triumph of human civilization.
Landing on the moon. The development of relativity theory. The discovery of DNA. We rightfully hail these accomplishments as testaments to the creative power of the human imagination. We point to them as the highest achievements of our species, calling them milestones in our collective evolution.
But climate science is no different. It, too, belongs in that short list of epoch making human efforts.
Bold mine.
In short, climate science is supposedly one of the greatest achievements of mankind, after all, the IPCC awarded the Nobel Prize in 2007 to a couple of guys named Al Gore and Rajenda K. Pachauri, both of which have had sex scandals, and Pachauri had to step down as head of the IPCC. Gore seems to be politically self-neutered and few people except bots seem to care anymore about what he has to say.
In fact, the U.N. poll of over 7 million people says climate change is dead last in concern.
I found this but of chutzpah in the article quite amazing:
Just two centuries ago, humanity barely understood that a planet’s climate could change at all.
Tell it to the Vikings in Greenland, the people that went through the cold and crop failures of the dark ages period with black plague, and the people that lived through the Little Ice Age, and the Peruvians.
No, nobody ever figured out the climate could change before our current crop of saviors of humanity came along. Yeah, that’s the ticket.
Maybe nobody ever talks about The Climate Story Nobody Talks About simply because it’s ridiculous to claim it is of “humanity’s greatest achievements”, particularly since doomsayers like the disgraced identity thief and faked up documents purveyor Dr. Peter Gleick was telling us in 2010 that we are past the point of no return anyway? Oh wait, that was the last chance climate conference in 2009. Adam Frank is talking about the next last chance conference coming in Paris this fall.
Some achievement, King Canute would be proud.
Note: this story was updated shortly after publication to fix an error in the title and give a hat tip to the source for the NPR story
Thanks to the fossil-fueled industrial revolution we
a) live longer, so are more likely to notice a change in climate, and
b) have more opportunity to sit on our derrière and philosophize about climate.
I think climate change IS one of humanities greatest achievements, right up there with the other major world religions….
God grant that this false cult lacks the staying power of the major world religions.
Here’s a list of ten great scientific ideas.
Well, they were great until they were not great.
Unfortunately, in the future one of these silly ideas will have to be displaced from the top ten, in order to make room for the theory that a 0.1 degree change in average global temperatures can produce an observable increase in the frequency and severity extreme weather phenomena.
http://listverse.com/2009/01/19/10-debunked-scientific-beliefs-of-the-past/
I’m not sure that that list included my favourite bonkers theory. Female Hysteria.
In the 1890’s, 97% of papers that made reference to “female hysteria” as a search term agreed with the consensus view that female hysteria was related to the womb. (sarc)
“Some achievement, King Canute would be proud.”
Anthony, I think you malign King Canute.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Canute_and_the_waves
This got bizarre a long time ago. I can’t even think of a word to describe what’s going on now. Will there be anything left of legitimate science 20 years from now.
I wonder if the NPR wonk would like to list the ways climate science has made our lives better?
Or even changed things a bit.
They are right. It has to be the greatest human achievement ever to be able to con so many people of man made climate change based on an analysis of the normal climate that was dated two centuries before.
To add to this the ability to maintain the con faced with data “adjusted ” in exactly the opposite direction to the adjustments that comparison with the reference network and what in the engineering world would be therefore be the standard makes the con an even greater human achievement.
To then add the computer modelling con that is the equivalent of maintaining that painting ships with grey primer speeds them up so much that in a century ships will travel faster than sound based on purely average increases as ships changed from wooden sail to metal steam ones makes the achievement a truly outstanding achievement by any standard. The last one perhaps is a little less obvious but a little thought shows that since the metal grey primed ones go faster and as more become metal steam powered the average increases so clearly projecting the graph we prove that faster than sound ships are inevitable given time.
I clicked on the link to this “story” by Adam Frank and I wish I hadn’t bothered: it has more holes than a tea-strainer.
His website is titled as: “a commentary on science and society” and indeed it is, however, the opinions and the comments in his so-called “story” are poorly written, fanciful, clumsy and biased.
I dare say his GRANT MONEY application improved his bank balance, courtesy of the Great Global Warming Gravy Train.
I notice the collage of achievements at the top of the article includes the Pantheon dome. Excellent. What a wonderful building. A must see for any visitor to Rome, expecially on a snowy day, assuming we’ll still get snow….. 🙂
Sigh…the lack of historical references when we see garbage like the NPR story written by this guy who went to college and got a degree (communication degrees are a joke, of course)…is very annoying.
Way back when I went to college and first, due to winning a scholarship to study German in Germany by taking severe tests and coming out #1 when I was 16, I studied history with an exciting range of professors both in Europe and when I returned to the US.
We had intense sessions with the students, ourselves, bringing in documentation, books, science reports, etc. to debate all sorts of periods in earth’s history and human history, it was quite exciting and very challenging and we would go to various sites to dig up first hand information which meant all sorts of adventures, etc.
Then suddenly beginning in 1974, and then gathering steam very rapidly, all the major German departments of major and minor universities vanished like snow during ‘global warming.’
I was out of work! Even in NY state, all the schools eliminated all the major parts of foreign language departments! I couldn’t believe my eyes. And this has harmed scholarship greatly and spread to other fields, only some of the hard sciences have escaped this (guess where I went later: to RPI and hard stuff that remains stubbornly real!).
Emsnews,
Your time frame seems about right. The National Commission on Excellence in Education (Grace Commission) reported in 1983, under the title, A Nation At Risk, “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”
http://www2.ed.gov/pubs/NatAtRisk/risk.html
I’m sure this will come as a great shock to many, but in my exploration of the more recent version of the MyWorld stats (i.e. Sep. 10), I see that “Action taken on climate change” is still at rock bottom of the list, while the vote count is now over 8 million.
During my explorations yesterday, I had stumbled across a related subset of data called “Peoples’ Voices Challenge”.
Here comes the shocker, folks …It seems that the wizards operating in the bowels of the UN have found a way (via this subset) to bring “Action taken on climate change” to the very TOP of this (now very familiar) list! Amazing, eh?!
My evidence (and the rather winding path which eventually led me to it) can be viewed at:
Refugees rioting while UN playing and plying climate number games
One of the catastrophes of recent climate science has been trying to reinvent the wheel, but instead making it square. Including making a field that is shambolic when it comes to science and reinventing the scientific method. Apart from that and the appalling standards in recording surface data, it’s been a triumph of human civilization.
Matt G, one of the great achievements in human history was the triangular wheel, which replaced the square wheel, thus eliminating one bump.
We don’t feel much of the affects of weather change anymore. Why? We are no longer in the business of preparing for such change. Yet that preparation continues, just not as much in individual households. The only difference between folks shopping at a modern grocery store and ancient peoples is the fact that years of plenty were used to stockpile grain, and make dried meat, fruits and vegetables to last through years of drought all done right outside the tentflap.
Consider pemmican: It is an ancient recipe that serves the purpose of a modern grocery store. No difference there. We eat preserved food all the time. We just have to drive a ways to get it and when we get there it is all done for us.
http://paleofood.com/pemmican.htm#old
Consider ancient texts: Human-sin caused drought and floods are everywhere, along with the admonition to stock up. No difference there. We blame humans for climate change all the time.
http://www.openbible.info/topics/drought
http://www.openbible.info/topics/floods
So I disagree with the modern miracle. If anything, climate scientists are no further down the road than ancient preachers.
Nice list of verses. Just one more. Y’shua said, “But I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven; for He makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.”
So no throwing climate scientists down volcanoes, tempting though it may be.
correction: throwing climate scientists down volcanoes to stop climate change
It has been claimed that some aboriginal populations would sacrifice virgins by throwing them into a volcano, which was a waste of perfectly good virgins. I doubt that any climate scientist can be considered a virgin after $crewing the public out of tax money in the form of wasted research grants. Throwing climate scientists into a volcano would probably upset volcanologists and make the volcano gods angry. On the other hand, sending them do research into hand feeding polar bears would be an option.