Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Tuvalu Prime Minister Enele Sosene Sopoaga has criticised demands for evidence that his country is suffering harm caused by anthropogenic climate change.
According to the Australian ABC;
Paris climate talks: Tuvalu PM Enele Sosene Sopoaga criticises demand for evidence of claims
Tuvalu’s prime minister says his country is being expected to provide unreasonably robust scientific evidence to prove it is a victim of climate change to qualify for international support.
Enele Sosene Sopoaga issued another stark warning to fellow negotiators at the Paris climate talks that without a binding deal to limit global warming, his tiny Pacific island nation could be wiped out.
He said the required evidence was hard to come by in a nation of only 12,000.
…
After a meeting with the president of the climate talks French foreign minister Laurent Fabius, Mr Sopoaga said climate change was a challenge for the whole world.
“I think there’s a moral challenge to people of the world,” he said.
“Are we going to allow this to happen to some of our fellow nations?
“If we can reach the planets and … the Moon, and we cannot save our own kinds, this is a shameful world.”
Mr Sopoaga said that the deck had been stacked against small countries, like his, which do not have enough delegates to attend the vast numbers of working groups happening at the conference.
Read more: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-12-05/tuvalu-pm-criticises-demand-for-evidence-of-climate-change-claim/7004090
While we obviously sympathise with Mr. Sapoaga’s inability to finance flights to Paris for the entire population of Tuvalu, this isn’t the first small time small island nations in the Pacific have faced difficult questions about climate change.
When failed Kiribati climate refugee Ioane Teitiota was finally deported back to to Kiribati, the reporter who did the followup discovered the surprising fact that New Zealand is struggling to fill places in a citizenship lottery offered to residents of Kiribati. Upon being asked about this oddity, President Anote Tong of Kiribati explained that is because things aren’t desperate enough yet.
Having visited New Zealand, I can assure readers that life in New Zealand is probably quite enjoyable. The weather is a little cold for my taste, but the water of Lake Taupo, a vast inland lake which sits in the caldera of one of the world’s most active super volcanoes, was pleasantly warm when I went for a swim.
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….a New Zealand Super-volcano that, no doubt, will super-volcano again. Makes Tuvalu’s quiet Guyot seem rather bucolic.
I believe that Tuvalese farts cause my head-aches.
I demand $ Lots n lots [my lawyers will decide the quantum of zeros – likely seven or eight].
I hate being expected to provide unreasonably robust scientific evidence to prove I am a victim of Tuvalese faring.
Accordingly – Triple damages, please, judge.
Auto.
PS mods – and the passing reader with no Irony-gene – this is Mega-Sarc.
/Sarc to the fourteenth degree.
And any money received from Tuvalu will be re- purposed well.
And I am sure he is making everything to make his people desperate, cause that’s what a politician should do.
How much is he asking for (cash, that is)?
Tell him he’s dreaming.
🙂 😉 + 1000 😉
had to wipe the screen
I believe somewhere around $100 billion
That piddling amount? Or is that weekly?
He can always ask Roger Harrabin at the Biased Broadcasting Corporation for some free propaganda:
http://new.spectator.co.uk/2015/12/quentin-lettss-diary-an-apology-to-the-bbc-journos-who-thanks-to-me-are-being-sent-away-for-re-education/
Did anyone see Harribin’s BBC Report earlier this year where he was standing up to his waist in shallow warm seawater off a NE Australia bed showing gas bubbles spiralling up to the surface from the sea bed in discrete columns. His report was on CO2 induced ocean acidification. He mentioned the gas bubbles but didn’t specifically define the gas but then showed bare coral reefs, apparently dead, and talked of the decline in fish and crustaceans. Implicit in what he was reporting was that the gas was CO2. What he didn’t say was the gas was venting up from undersea volcanoes and contained CO, H2S and a variety of other poisonous gases. There is no other explanation for such discrete spirals of gas and no known mechanism for atmospheric CO2 somehow re-appearing as spiralling columns of CO2 bubbles emerging from the sea bed. Typical blatantly biased and disreputable reporting from the BBC!
“He said the required evidence was hard to come by in a nation of only 12,000.”
If it was really happening the evidence would be out there in spades and the alarmists would be shouting it to the rafters but it is hard to fake.
Even for experts.
The ABC interviewed the president of Kiribati recently who went on in a similar tone and it also was an evidence-free discussion.
Someone needs to tell them their problem is deck-space not freeboard.
If there really were evidence – skeptics would be shouting about it.
Difficult to prove a negative, isn’t it?
Why should they produce evidence, it is up to the rest of world to prove that they have NOT been affected by climate change. This is just Trenberth’s reversal of the null hypothesis. Simple “new science” logic.
My home was destroyed by climate change, and I lost my job. I demand the developed countries give me loads of money is due reparations. Unfortunately I do not have any money to fly to all these conferences and attend working groups, so why should I have to prove my claim?! Just give me the money.
Heck, next time I have a car accident someone is going start asking me to prove the damage to the vehicle before they pay for the repairs. Outrageous.
Spangled
BBC Online 5.11.15.
An article about The man rejected as a Climate Refugee… What they (The Court) didn’t accept was that the dangers were imminent, or that they were due to “reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion,” as the refugee convention requires.
…But there hasn’t been a dramatic exodus just yet. The New Zealand immigration department sets aside 75 places a year in a lottery for migrants from Kiribati, and at the moment it can’t fill them!!!
President Anote Tong suggests that is because things aren’t desperate enough yet.
“It’s not a critical issue yet. I think if there are people who migrate now, I hope they would do it out of choice. But as to the question, is it so critical that people would be regarded as refugees? My answer would be no, not at this point in time.”
And yet, the annihilation of his country is something he discusses more than any other head of government…
And at Government funded sites here in Australia they keep banging on about the current dangerous occuring threat ignoring Kench 2010 and and 2014 and the sea level rise data (Simon Donner Canadian climatologist, ‘So far, most atolls winning the sea level rise battle’ Pacific Institute of Public Policy 11.05.15.
This Kench and Donner material and The NOAA sea level rise data gets up the nose of the alarmaramas as they have nothing other than their emotive ‘we are so moral and halo deserving’ fantasy.
Cheers from The Land of The Drongo and proud to so say.
I hear Germany is seeking some new peoples.
Look, in a sane world every would just point out the obvious history of the Earth, and how these atolls do not just happen by random coincidence to be situated close to sea level. They stay near sea level as a consequence of the physical geography of such tropical corals atoll islands. Always have, very likely always will. And there is plenty of dry land to move to in case they do not.
The climate jackasses would have people believe that our nincompoop politicians can control sea level, but if only a sufficient level of will power can be mustered, widespread consensus achieved, abject subjugation of our economic freedom can be imposed, and delegation of power/money to the UN can be finagled.
These bungholio liars must be shouted down and discredited once and for all, if for no other reason than they are getting the weak-minded and gullible all up in a tizzy.
And as to our inability to control the sea level of a planet, even while we know how to send a rocket to space…this is the sort of false paradox which people should not cloud their mind with. I could as easily say that since we can build a tractor, we should be able to make it rain where and when we want. But saying it does not mean it makes any sense at all.
Bullsh!t profundity is not an avenue to solutions to impossible abilities.
It is simply bullsh!t.
Menicholas comments on the fatuity of the King Canute premise (“The climate jackasses would have people believe that our nincompoop politicians can control sea level”), then goes on to observe:
As I age ever more experienced with these “bungholio liars” and as a result ever more bellicose, I become convinced that the only proper rejoinder to be made when they noise-off is the sound of a 12-gauge shell being racked into a pump-gun’s firing chamber.
Tuvalu is a Greenpeace operation: http://www.worldwatch.org/node/6360
Interview with Ian Fry, Tuvalu negotiator
Q. How did you, an Australian native, become Tuvalu’s lead climate negotiator?
A. I’ve been on the job for 11 years. I was working for Earth Negotiations Bulletin and Greenpeace before that. I met the prime minister of Tuvalu at a meeting and provided him with a briefing on climate change. He then invited me to come onto their delegation at [the 1997 climate negotiations in Kyoto, Japan]. It evolved from there. I now work full time for the Tuvalu government as an international environment advisor.
From where has his salary come for the past 11 years? How much is his salary? Now multiply that by all the other people around the world engaged in such fruitless activities!
The GDP of Tuvalu in 2013 was a little over 38 million USD. Mr Fry may perhaps be taking starvation wages out of his love for the people of Tuvalu, but said love would make him use telecommunication rather than jets.
Much cheaper to give each of the 12,000 Kiribatese a free condo, on the French Riviera, than to worry about what happens to the atoll they leave behind.
Then I would have a nice tropical fishing spot to visit now and then.
g
You’re attacking one the UN’s primary agendas in achieving its totalitarian fascist kleptocracy – pitting developed nations against developing nations and fostering the greed and dishonesty of their leaders.
Enele is right.
Just send the cash.
How much cash do we send?
Don’t you worry about that.
Enele will tell you when you have sent enough cash.
Tidal Gauges at Tuvalu since 1977…
http://www.john-daly.com/press/tuvalu.gif
See – this was predicted by the theory of climate change.
Some things will go up and some things will go down and other things will stay the same.
This tidal gauge chart is a clear demonstration of global saming – where a weird and unprecedented absence of trend is caused by climate change.
In the past zero trends such as this were almost completely unknown.
It might look like nothing is happening, but it’s a mistake to think that.
There is a worrying lack of a worrying trend.
Something is clearly amiss!!! 🙂
I think it is more properly classified as ‘extreme saming’ so it can be used as yet another example of ‘climate extremes’ caused by AGW.
“The more things stay the same, the more they change.” – double speak?
It’s an unprecedented absence of an average anomaly.
Clearly there is no increase in the rate of change of the sea level, in fact that shows there is no increase in the sea level, let alone a change in the rate of change. It makes you wonder what evidence they use to reach their conclusions. This documentary demonstrates how nonsensical the “science” is behind man made climate change.
https://youtu.be/QowL2BiGK7o
I guess all the H2O from the melting ice is escaping from the atmosphere into space instead of flooding our oceans.
Noaaprogrammer,
shhhhhh skeptics are siphoning it into our new swimming pools, which are really just sink holes created by us siphoning water out of the ground to drink. Big oil is financing the whole thing ! *sarc*
Hey, that tide guage record is very interesting. There are dips that correspond quite well with El Chichon and Mt Pinatubo eruptions and another matching 1998 El Nino.
The the latter is a hot event the drop may correspond to the drop in west Pacific sea level as warm waters flow eastwards out of the west Pacific warm pool.
Yep. Unprecedented Catastrophic Swamping Event. The White Guilt industry will be all over this. 🙂 (for a fee of course)
This data has not been homogenised.
When the data has been homogenised, it will be obvious that sea level is going up like a rocket.
Sea levels have been recovering from the large El Nino decrease in 1997/8, but the recovery is hyped as “rising sea levels”. Long term, there is even a decreasing trend. The usual dishonesty.
Looks like a permanent el nino should give them what they want.
The way I see it, a long long time ago, some people got stranded on a spit of land in the middle of an ocean. They have been stuck there for so long they forgot they are stranded in a place that no one should want to spend more than a week or two on. They should all move somewhere else…somewhere that is not a glorified sand bar in the middle of nowhere.
12,000 of them would fit on three boats. No big deal.
What happened to the last 14 – 15 years?
Anent “Tidal Gauges at Tuvalu since 1977,” Nudge asks:
Oh, you can’t see those yet. They’re out being “adjusted.”
Available here:
http://www.psmsl.org/data/obtaining/rlr.monthly.plots/1839_high.png
not very frightening really….
This is before the right adjustments were performed on the dataset
I am sure this will be most inconvenient of these island nations to prove their problems are climate related. It is easy to blame Climate Change instead of acknowledging detrimental land use policies and having populations that over extending existing resources. Isn’t Kiribati the nation building a new, international class airport a meter above sea level in the interest of tourism? What about your people?
Kiribati has 2 international airports. One is 3 metres above sea level, the other is 1.5 metres above. Both provided courtesy USA in 1944 about. Google the airports and try to find the habitations. One on Tarawa is well away from the town, but like Wellington Airport if a plane runs off the end of the runway it falls into the sea. The other, on Christmas Island, is in the jungle. Christmas Island appears to have two ‘cities’, London and Paris, separated by a channel. Did close up on Paris and could not find any houses. There is another town – total population of Christmas Island about 5500.
Interesting fact from Wikipaedia:
“At Western discovery, Kiritimati was uninhabited. As on other Line Islands there might have been a small or temporary native population, most probably Polynesian traders and settlers, who would have found the island a useful replenishing station on the long voyages from the Society Islands to Hawaiʻi, perhaps as early as AD 400. This trade route was apparently used with some regularity by about AD 1000. From 1200 onwards Polynesian long-distance voyages became less frequent, and had there been human settlement on Kiritimati, it would have been abandoned in the early-mid second millennium AD. ” This appears similar to the depopulation of Greenland – same reson perhaps? Christmas Island was also abandoned in 1905! Severe drought.
“early-mid second millennium AD”?
“early-mid second millennium AD”
Is that the same as late-early second millennium AD?
No, it is pre-late-early second millennium.
“As on other Line Islands there might have been a small or temporary native population, most probably Polynesian traders and settlers, who would have found the island a useful replenishing station on the long voyages from the Society Islands to Hawaiʻi, perhaps as early as AD 400.”
Granted I am no mariner, but I am having a hard time understanding why someone travelling from the Society Islands to Hawaii would find it convenient to go a few thousand miles in the wrong direction while on the way there.
The Marshall Islands and Kiribati appear to be no closer to Hawaii than the Society Islands, and also appear to be (mostly) downwind and (mostly) down current.
According to the WHO we need to “face the facts”.
Unless something is done about the problems faced by the people of Tuvalu, then soon their entire nation may sink beneath the waves.
This is because of rising OBESITY.
65% of males and 71% of females are overweight, according to WHO figures.
Are we entirely sure that they need more money?
More money for what? Cake?
http://www.who.int/chp/chronic_disease_report/tuvalu.pdf
LOL…
Its genetic, and likely widespread because of a previous population restriction. Related to highnprevelance of T2 diabetes. A subject of active medical research.
Have heart. Name three nations which don’t need money. And be grateful for a small size of Tuvalu population; imagine China asking as much money per person.
If they all moved to one side of the island, would it tip over?
wow… u ppl… have you been to Tuvalu?
[have you? show us your travel pictures -mod]
Reparations, hand outs, gimme, gimme, more, more, more………
“Why the hell should I show you why, or what for?”
Such is the work ethic and morality of the Third World’s kleptocrats and ineptocrats.
It is comforting to know the only places they can find to justify their claims is in the highly manipulated computer model projections and land based temperature data. As for Mother Nature, it still refuses to co-operate by giving us a demonstration of supposed global warming. Not surprisingly, the Chinese, Indian and Russian leaders howl with laughter at their western counterparts for their stupidity and willingness to sacrifice their economies in a futile attempt to solve a non-problem.
Well, no other country has any evidence.
It’s hardly fair to demand tiny Tuvalu to become world leaders in the science.
“World leaders in the science”?!?! Yeah, wha-huh?
They are being asked to show anything, something…..a flooded house, an empty net, a dead bird, a sea fish upland, ANYTHING. The clowns at the Cop21 only want a scrap, so they can crow and holler over it. They aren’t asking him out of spite, they are begging him for their sound bite.
Don’t be so daft. No one needs science when you have proof.
gaelansclark,
You may want to practice the art of recognizing sarcasm, which is clearly evident in MCourtney’s remark.
ease up, dude!
B. S.
I read Gaelan’s comment as sarcastic as well.
Get 12000 folks from US to swap fully with their citizens. Call the bluff.
“Money for old rope”
Of course all these islands and small 3rd world countries are rubbing their hands at free money, who wouldn’t. Since they can blame everything on “climate change”, why not blame their own mistakes on it. After all Tuvalu’s land mismanagement can be covered up and free money to help out would be gratefully received.
Who needs evidence it hasn’t helped climate “scientists” as they just ignore it anyway.
Let the money floodgates open!
Um, hey…let’s not, instead.
It was downright foolish to extend full nationhood to all those hundreds of coral islands scattered all over the Pacific Ocean – as if they were ordinary countries with an ordinary geography, with sufficient resources of water and hortiocultural soil; and with room for expansion. They should have been declared special United Nations protectorates so that their population could have been monitored. Their problem is not sea level rise (coral islands go up with sea levels) their problem is overpopulation. But, yes, they certainly need help to remedy that problem. But let us tell them they are not climate refugees – ’cause they aren’t.
Maybe we should downgrade them to dwarf nations.
Not even nations. Nationtesimals, maybe. Pluto is not anymore a planet for the same reason.
It’s absurd even calling them nations – they are unable to develop a modern civilisation in a place like that. They simply haven’t got the resources. They will never manage without continued economic support.from outside.
I think that is what originally was the case. Nauru for example, I believe used to be under some sort of New Zealand protectorate status.
NZ provides school teachers and medical services to places like Raratonga, and the Cook Islands.
Then busybody Bobby Kennedy, the US attorney General got on his anti ” colonial ” high horse, to force independence on these unsustainable nano-countries.
Along the way, part of New Guinea suddenly became part of Indonesia; with absolutely no ethnic population connection whatsoever.
Papuans are as akin to Indonesians, as Swedes are to Australian Aborigines.
So the UN has a self made mess that it helped create; so let it fix it from Brussels.
g
And NZ is starting to show some signs of good sense over sea level rise. A recent report by our Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment acknowledged that RCP8.5 was a “very high” emissions scenario (our legislation requires resource managers to take account of the “likely effects of climate change” so projection based on RCP8.5 now look shaky), and that any assessment done as an input into coastal management needs to give a best estimate of the uncertainty, and not add a little bit for safety at every turn.
Hopefully people will now start to get this into perspective. Despite all the rhetoric about the risks from sea level rise in NZ, in reality it is a slowly evolving change.
The volcanoes, earthquakes and Tsunamis are much greater risks.
The greatest risks are pompous fools.
Tuvalu is still above water?
LOL
floating atolls always are.
Phishing is a national pastime in Tuvalu.
Actually, Tuvalu is moderately important in the world of the internet. Each country was assigned a two letter code as its top level domain. The United States has .us, the United Kingdom has .uk. Tuvalu has .tv, which has been quite popular. They did the sensible thing and contracted the operation out to a big player (Verisign).
All of you who call yourselves skeptics might like to read an article in the December issue of Scientific American written by, in my estimation, the king of skeptics. His name is Michael Shermer and he is the publisher of Skeptic Magazine (www.skeptic.com). The name of the article is; “Consilience and Consensus: Or why climate skeptics are wrong”. It can be found on page 81. I don’t expect that the article will change anyone’s mind on this site, but it might show another way to think about things, that one might find interesting.
I used to be a regular at skeptics meetings. My team regularly won the annual trivia contest. My contribution was answering the really odd questions, like what was the gender of the first computer.
Still haven’t really forgiven the “skeptics” for how they jumped on James Randi, when he expressed a little climate scepticism.
http://archive.randi.org/site/index.php/swift-blog/806-i-am-not-qdenyingq-anything.html
Eric,
Interesting. I am wondering what the gender was.
Quiz time:
Do you know the origin of the term “bug” to refer to a problem with computer hardware or software?
( i know this may be an easy one)
I don’t know the answer to that, but I am aware of a real life ‘bug’ story.
Years ago, at Tektronix; at their Cedar Hills Engineering plant, one of the engineers received a number of engineering samples of a Phillips very high gm dual triode vacuum tube (something similar to ECC81 or somesuch) similar to a super 12AT7.
While pretesting these samples in a Tektronix tube curve tracer, the engineer was surprised to find a strong blue glow from one of the samples, yet it clearly had no cracks or anything wrong with the envelope.
So he took a look at it under an assembly type binocular microscope, and was surprised to find the dessicated remains of an ordinary house fly inside the envelope.
So he sent it back to the Phillips lab people and said that this sample did not seem to function according to his expectations.
He got it back from Phillips with a terse note that said.
Well of course not; can’t you see that the driver is dead ??
The blue glow was of course the ionized gaseous emanations from the fly.
g
george e. smith tells of the Tektronix engineer who sent a “buggy” component back to Phillips quality control complaining “that this sample did not seem to function according to his expectations,” to get back a note reading:
Okay, Mr. smith. That one’s a keeper.
At 12:50 AM on 5 December, we have bobthebear ardently recommending “an article in the December issue of Scientific American written by, in my estimation, the king of skeptics. His name is Michael Shermer and he is the publisher of Skeptic Magazine (www.skeptic.com).
But, of course, no link. Let’s rectify this ommission: “Consilience and Consensus: Or why climate skeptics are wrong” for all to see that the extent of this “king of sceptics” examination of climate skepticism has the depth, extent, concerted integrity, and intellectual value of a desktop coffee-cup slopover.
Not to get all ad hominem, but guess the principal source upon whom this “king of skeptics” preponderantly relies. You betcha!
Now, those “of you who call yourselves skeptics” (uncrowned) who frequent WUWT are aware – as bobthebear may not be – of the methodological qualities of the endlessly-regurgitated “about 97 percent” toxic waste emitted by Cook et alia in pushing “consensus science” on the issue of allegedly anthropogenic global climate change, but would anybody else reading here care to assist this – er, discussant – to a better appreciation of how and why Mr. Shermer had been insufficiently skeptical (if, indeed, “skeptical” is a valid term of use) in sourcing the information upon which his opinion piece had been predicated?
As Mr. Monckton might put it: Ex nihilo, nihil fit.
Tucci78, thanks for your comment. As I said, I didn’t expect to change anyone’s mind. I thought it might be interesting to some of you. You never know when you might learn something of value. Remember that open minds are as hard to find as hens teeth.
Over on CE, there is a long anguished 2015 post by Planning Engineer. He used to be a full blown member of Shermer’s skeptics. Hosted meetings, knew Randi personally… But somehow that gang decided climate skepticism was in the same debunkable category as psychics, telepathy, and bent spoons. That whole group has scientifically inverted itself. Shermer in SciAm merely puts this perverse inversion on indelible public display.
Some of us true skeptics will have great fun with him in upcoming years. He is a big fat target, who did not study the climate science up close and personal as his creed requires. That makes him a cargo cult shaman.
Obama raised the 97% to 99.5% last week. Climate Science is now purer than Ivory Soap, which is only 99.44% pure.
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/barbara-hollingsworth/obama-ups-climate-change-consensus-paris-995-scientists
When keeping an open mind, one must guard against keeping it so open that one’s brain falls out.
So, then that might imply that the average climate scientist is about as virtuous as the Ivory Soap Girl herself, Marilyn Chambers?
Yep – skepticdotcom is a disinfo site.
Shermer is a pompous ass. There, I said it.
The man thinks his own sensibilities are the last word in objective evaluation.
Have you read his magazine or his blogs? Please don’t be so quick to judge. Thank you for your comment.
In response to the assertion that “Shermer is a pompous ass,” we have bobthebear conciliating:
bobthebear, why don’t you write a post describing in detail why you think we are wrong, and submit it to Anthony as a new story?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/submit-a-story/
Providing your post is well written, and contains plenty of links to evidence to support your points, I think it is likely Anthony will accept your post.
You’ll find we’re very open minded compared to a lot of skeptic blogs. We tolerate, we encourage open discussion. You’ll find a diversity of opinions on this blog, amongst opinions, amongst published articles, about the causes of global warming – as opposed to the straightjacket monoculture of intolerant dogma which in my opinion tends to prevail on alarmist websites.
You might receive a lot of comments from people who disagree with you – but I’ve published plenty of posts on this site which didn’t win “universal” support, sometimes because I was wrong about something, sometimes because everyone else is wrong ;-).
All research papers are a study or claim Michael.
Being published in a peer reviewed journal does not make a scientific paper irrefutable fact, especially some of the more absurd climate related papers.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/09/06/claim-climate-change-increases-risk-of-legionnaires-disease/
Care to back that claim with evidence Michael, or is your word evidence enough?
Bobthebear,
I have been reading SciAm since I was a young teen, when I found a stack of them from the 1950’s-’60’s in a closet. I was fascinated and drawn further into the world of scientific research, with articles on cosmology, particle physics, astronomy, and biology especially interesting. Back in those days, important things were being discovered and elucidated, and there were few sources of such technical information back then.
Of course, back then, and for many years after, it was a real scientific publication, with much of the magazine pages of text only. No color photographs, no pretty illustrations, not written at a sixth grade level.
Starting in the 1980’s I noticed it becoming more of a commercial publication, and the articles written or edited to be more colorful and more accessible to laypersons and casual readers.
So, yes, I have/had read nearly every article Shermer wrote for that periodical, until relatively recently.
I even used to visit his website regularly, and have seen him on various television programs over the years, including some recent ones.
I still have a subscription, but only because i have not gotten around to cancelling it. The magazine is now a rag. I am not sure if his given opinions on such matters as climate change/CAGW are even his, given that if he was a skeptic he would no longer be welcome on the staff…of that I am quite certain.
So I think my opinion is grounded in an assessment of his writing, yes.
He writes opinions, and some I agree with, and some I do not.
What I find little of in his writings and opinions is just what I said above…he writes as though his opinions carry the weight of facts, as if his reasoning and interpretations are somehow unassailable, watertight, and bulletproof.
(Although, I did read a recent piece of his in which he recounted a rather personal experience with some sort of occult overtones, in which some old radio or something turned itself on after twenty years in a closet or some such thing…a radio that was a memento of a relative who had recently died, and the occurrence was at some particularly unlikely moment in time. I do not recall the finer details, and recount this to demonstrate that yes, I do indeed read what he has written. I read a lot, from many sources. Always have.)
PS, I finally had it with SciAm when they began to delete any and all skeptical comments as soon as they were posted. i found this shocking and completely unacceptable…they have a unity of opinion on their website because they permit no discussion at all, at least none that might draw any attention to their hive-minded devotion to liberal causes and CAGW in particular.
Link, please.
To what ??
I expect that many people who post here were formerly quite well aligned with the views of the Michael Shermer. I, for one, consider myself to be a well informed and scientifically literate skeptic.
But, I’m here because I’ve encountered a lot of bullcrap and a lot of very crappy voodoo/cargo-cult/pseudo science which masquerades as “climate science” and related environmental studies/sociology/psychology etc.
If pressed I have never attempted to refute or dispute the basic theory – burning fossil fuels is raising atmospheric GHCs which should, all else equal, produce some warming.
I’m not here because I need to reject the central hypothesis. I’m here because I find it reassuring to discover that there are still people who can make some basic enquiries, learn some basic facts and ask some awkward questions. In an age when most people appear to be screaming “faster faster” as the bus hurtles over a cliff.
This article may interest you:
http://judithcurry.com/2015/06/03/why-skeptics-hate-climate-skeptics/
Apologies – GHGs, not GHCs whatever they might be!!
GHC = Green House Cabal
+10. See my comment just upthread. You went and got the link that I should have. PE is even more hurt by Shermer and his ilk than his post let on. We have done some joint guest posts on renewables over there, also. In real life, he is THE senior transmission system planning engineer for one of the country’s largest electric utilities.
Count me in the same camp as I. Frog and R. Istvan.
Here’s Michael Shermer’s AmSci column at his blog site, where interested folk can read it for free.
In that column, Mr. Shermer says that theories are accepted because of a “consilience of inductions,” which he also calls a “convergence of evidence.” So, human-caused global warming is proved because of (his words), “pollen, tree rings, ice cores, corals, glacial and polar ice-cap melt, sea-level rise, ecological shifts, carbon dioxide increases, the unprecedented rate of temperature increase — that all converge to a singular conclusion.”
But notice what’s really going on here. There is a large number of possibilities that could cause this same set of observables (perhaps apart from carbon dioxide increases). The terrestrial climate is known to be highly variable. See also here.
Climate theory is far from adequate to choose among possible causalities, or even to delineate the range of possible causal agents.
Mr. Shermer has merely made an ad hoc decision to pick one favored cause from the set of possibilities. That, when climate science is incapable of determining whether his choice of cause — GHG emissions — is even capable of being causal. He has assigned causality, rather than deduced it from a falsifiable theory.
The whole column merely shows that Mr. Shermer does not know how to think as a scientist. In his defense, the AGW controversy itself has demonstrated that a large number of scientists, and — by my experience, all climate modelers — do not know how to think as scientists, either.
Given that Mr. Shermer is not a trained physical scientist, we can forgive him for following the false lead of people who are trained physical scientists. Apart from climate modelers, who give no evidence of being scientists.
Mr. Shermer is not really equipped to realize that the scientists among those he follows are leading through incompetence rather than acuity, and that the others he follows are not scientists at all. That latter diagnosis includes most of those involved in proxy climatology as well.
Shermer really disappoints. To the best of my knowledge, he had first used “consilience of inductions” and “convergence of evidence” in a respectable and well-researched book he had co-authored with (real!) historian, Dr. Alex Grobman in 2002: Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened & Why Do They Say It?.
That book, however, pertained to an in-depth, well-documented examination of the “works” of self-appointed “revisionist scholars”, such as Ernst Zundel, David Irving and their disreputable ilk.
Yet Shermer has chosen (or perhaps been persuaded?!) to mindlessly re-purpose these two concepts in conjunction with relying on third-rate dreck produced by the likes of Cook et al.
Perhaps Shermer – who calls himself inter alia a “scientist”, but whose academic background is in psychology, would have been wise to enlist Grobman’s assistance prior to issuing his superficial declamations pertaining to “climate science”. Views to which, according to Wikipedia, he appears to have been “converted” circa June 2006. If Wikipedia is to be believed, this does not appear to be the first of such “conversions” for Shermer; nor was it his last!
Bob dear, I no longer subscribe to Scientific American. They published a whole issue demolishing Bjorn Lomborg’s book, and only allowed one page for his reply. He refused, and argued on his website. Then the dear SciAm sued him for a copyright infringement.
Just to be contrarian and open minded, all chicks have an egg tooth to bust out of the shell.
https://thechickenstreet.wordpress.com/2012/08/27/whats-an-egg-tooth/
Not only is this the case but they also carry the genetic information to make an adaptable tooth.
http://knowledgenuts.com/2013/12/18/chickens-still-have-genes-for-growing-teeth/
This site is populated by scientists, it is not interested in internet chatter.
If you want a debate just publish.
I just did and I bet you this comment will make the cut.
Another way to think about things? I could not find ANY train of thought in the article, other than, “We must believe in the consensus, because, well, it’s a consensus, isn’t it?” Mr. Shermer’s assertion that skeptics must come up with an alternate theory that explains ALL the data, is simply laughable. It’s smarter to say you DON’T KNOW, when you’re working on a problem as big as the Earth, a non-linear chaotic system with many variables and processes, some still unknown or poorly understood.
I guess you just need to find a geologically stable coastline somewhere, outside the influence of posts-glacial rebound etc, and check to see what’s going on.
http://donaitkin.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/image011.jpg
So that’s that.
Sydney is actually sinking at a faster rate than the tide gauge sea level rising. That would indicate sea level is actually falling.
http://www.sonel.org/spip.php?page=gps&idStation=2405
Wouldn’t surprise. It’s certainly been a very sluggish rise since the late 1700s. Not much of a warming compared to the days when you could sail a boat into Ephesus or Ostia. Hope we’re not going into a chilly period. That LIA was a bit nasty, and you don’t get indefinite Holocene. Alas.
I sincerely doubt Kiribati is experiencing post-glacial rebound. The center of the Pacific plate may be one of the most geologically stable portions of the earth’s crust.
And I seriously doubt that sea levels are rising selectively. Never said or implied that Kiribati is influenced by post-glacial rebound. If sea levels in Stockholm or Juneau are “dropping” while they are “rising” elsewhere and pretty “stable” around much or the Australian coast, I’m thinking we need to look for conservation and engineering solutions to the vagaries of climate and geology. And we need to remember that there has been a dribble of actual sea level rise since the end of the 1700s, which is bound to have an effect. When you consider that it was possible to walk from Victoria to Tasmania less than nine thousand years ago, and that the Claudian invasion of Britain in 43AD came ashore where you would now need to walk miles from the coast…well, I guess it’s fair to say that there are going to be these ups and downs.
The Maldives were holding underwater cabinet meetings before tens of billions came in for airstrips, hotels and super-luxury resorts – which quite changed the subject! Let’s hope a few of those billions go towards sane conservation measures.
My point was that islands such as coral atolls built on the backs of long extinct volcanoes, and residing in the middle of the pacific plate, may in fact be the best place to determine what sea level is really doing.
I is apparent by looking at tide gage data from many places and over many years that, in the short term, the monthly and annual variability is far greater than any overall long term trend. So one must look at quite a few years to have any assurance that what is being seen is not variations in ocean currents, large scale wind patterns, etc.
As pointed out, land subsidence due to isostatic rebound, ground water draw down, and other factors such as overall tectonic movements or magma intrusions can mask the true trends.
And these are outside of all the possible ways that the ocean might actually be rising, from sedimentation, to changes in gravitational and possibly even magnetic anomalies of the Earth, to thermal expansion, draining of inland seas and groundwaters, glacial melt, etc.
And Tony Heller seems to have uncovered evidence that even the tide gage data itself is being adjusted and may be unreliable, as trends and levels being reported now differ significantly from what was reported a few decades ago.
United Nations has created a complete mess.
How on earth did they think they could be able to distinguish between climate change and bad weather events? Did they think every possible record has already been set and recorded at every location in the world – and that all new records or all new bad weather events would have to be caused by humanity? Everything is allowed by their theory: More rain and less rain, more wind and less wind, more drought and less drought, higher temperatures and lower temperatures, more ice and less ice and the sea level is rising anyhow.How naive can one possibly get? Who voted for these idiocrats?
Who votes for fascists?
The same naïve fools who gullibly buy their propaganda.
And many of ones who did not appoint themselves are simply whoring themselves out for the fat stacks being larded around.
The whole thing smacks of a fish suddenly becoming aware of the water in which it’s swimming. Oh golly gee, the climate CHANGES? Holy shite, why-why-why that could, like AFFECT us, no? What can we DO about it? No one wants to hear “nothing,” which is the truth, because their egos can’t admit they’re not the Masters of the Universe. Whole thing’s like an adolescent “having a problem” with the facts of life!
The CAGW crowd is not interested in solving problems. If they were they would be looking into cheaper ways to build sea walls. They want to seize power over the entire population of Earth, and tell them how to live. Their aim is purely political, their method is to panic everyone into giving them power.
Read the history of the UN environment program at appinsysdotcom; UNFCCC head Maurice Strong – “how can we get $60 billion/yr?”
It’s never been about AGW; CO2 was a convenient excuse.
Evidence? I don’t gotta to show you no stinkin evidence!
Was my first thought upon reading the headline, Mark.
Cat owners are very familiar with willful obstinacy, eh?
When I think of willful obstinacy, I think of obama.
My Cats display enlightened self-interest 🙂
I stands corrected.
I don’t understand the prime ministers bitch of having to supply “evidence” when it’s already been done for him or doesn’t he agree with it?
“New Zealand coastal geomorphologist Paul Kench, of the University of Auckland’s School of Environment, and colleagues in Australia and Fiji, who have been studying how reef islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans respond to rising sea levels… Their analysis, which now extends to more than 600 coral reef islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, indicates that about 80 percent of the islands have remained stable or increased in size (roughly 40 percent in each category)… Tuvalu’s main atoll, Funafuti—33 islands distributed around the rim of a large lagoon—has gained 75 acres (32 hectares) of land during the past 115 years.”
Then to compound those facts, you have the United Nations summary in responce to their very own latest report SR5, in the section dedicated to the Pacific Islands.
Is he’s island really threatened by global warming or is it simply over population that is depleting finite natural resources?
“In summary, confidence in large scale changes in the intensity of extreme extratropical cyclones since 1900 is low… Over periods of a century or more, evidence suggests slight decreases in the frequency of tropical cyclones making landfall in the North Atlantic and the South Pacific”
Many of these islands are too close to the Equator to ever have any chance of being hit by a tropical cyclone, or any other sort of cyclone.
There is not enough Coriolis force at those low latitudes.
What Coriolis ‘force’ would that be then?
Yes, everyone familiar with the subject should also be aware that Coriolis is not a true force, but instead is a manifestation of inertia on a spherical surface.
But the point remains…cyclones do not/can not form or persist at the Equator, and are quite rare at any latitude lower than about 10 degrees. The ones that do manage to spin up below 10 degrees are almost always very weak.
You can see maybe one that has managed hurricane status at the 10 degree margin since WWII
Rotating spherical surface, that is.
I only meant to point out that there are places and Islands which have little to nothing to fear from cyclone activity.
Kiribati is one such place, laying largely within about 10 degrees of the Equator, and mostly within about 5.
So they can cross this off the list of concerns.
BTW, click to embiggen.
I think Willis Eschenbach has explained that on this website several times.
…and I think he’s a witch…
Has anyone weighed him against a duck to check ?
“Tuvalu Prime Minister Enele Sosene Sopoaga has criticized demands for evidence that his country is suffering harm caused by anthropogenic climate change.”
I would like to point out that Tuvalu has been “harmed” but it is lexicons from Ireland that did it. Ireland should pay the damages!
And please don’t ask me for evidence, as modern “science” does not do evidence any more.
I don’t usually report people to the Grammar Police, but your comment
“. . .but it is lexicons from Ireland that did it. . .”
tempts me. Before I submit the report, does this comment mean:
1. Someone shipped too many dictionaries to the island, causing it to sink beneath the waves?
2. A rogue auto spellcheck has been unleashed?
3. Leprechauns have been co-opted by Greenpeace? Why not, they are both green.
It was probably mostly number 2, but I think that number 3 may also have been involved.
On the other hand, it may well be that I typed “Leprechauns” and they changed the word to “lexicons”. They have always messed with me and my family. Darn them!
I took it for a speech to text error and moved on, although I was briefly tempted to comment.
Of course Tuvalu PM Enele Sosene Sopoaga is critical of the demand for evidence of claims….they were promised a windfall for going along with the farce from the get go…..this raising of the bar was not a part of the original promise..not fair!
Be fair, he has put a lot of work into decided what color he wants his Lear jet to be. And all that is holding it up now is the money.