By Larry Kummer. From the Fabius Maximus website.
Summary: The news has become stranger since the climate policy debate has decoupled from the IPCC. Ludicrous claims of certain doom and nightmarish futures splash across the headlines, seldom with rebuttals (climate scientists are complicit in their silence). This one-sided flow of “news” will shape public opinion slowly but surely, creating support for bold measures by President Clinton. Activists are panicking the public for political gain.
“I think looking at grief is quite appropriate, as I believe we are facing human extinction”
— Comment by a reader on the FM website.
“The more immediate danger is runaway climate change. A rise in ocean temperatures will melt the ice caps and cause the release of large amounts of carbon dioxide from the ocean floor. Both effects could make our climate like that of Venus, with a temperature of 250 degrees.”
— Nobel laureate physicist Stephen Hawking on “Good morning Britain on NBC News’ U.K. news partner, ITV News in May 2016.
This was reported as “Earth DOOMED by climate change which could burn us alive, warns Stephen Hawking” by Sean Martin in The Daily Express, 31 May 2016.
We have heard this before. The BBC hinted at it last year; Hawking has said it before. There is no support for this in the IPCC’s reports and little (perhaps none) in the peer-reviewed literature. There are papers clearly saying the opposite, such as “Low simulated radiation limit for runaway greenhouse climates” by Colin Goldblatt el al, Nature Geoscience, August 2013 — Gated. See the press release here. Excerpt…
“The so-called `hothouse’ climate of the Eocene is the most useful constraint for anthropogenic change. With the solar constant 1% less than today and a few thousand ppmv CO2, the mean temperature was 10 K warmer than today. With CO2 and temperature both higher then than we expect in the foreseeable future, this implies that an anthropogenic runaway greenhouse is unlikely.
“…As the solar constant increases with time, Earth’s future is analogous to Venus’s past. We expect a runaway greenhouse on Earth 1.5 billion years hence if water is the only greenhouse gas, or sooner if there are others.”
While peer-reviewed analysis is good, it is obvious that Earth cannot become Venus in any policy-relevant time. See the NASA fact sheets for Venus and for Earth. They explain that…
- Venus is closer to the Sun. Venus is aprox. 0.72 AU distant from the sun (72% of Earth’s), with a total solar irradiance (TSI) almost 2x that of Earth.
- Venus has a denser atmosphere. The pressure on Venus is 93x that of Earth, the equivalent of almost 1 kilometer under the ocean. This is probably the largest factor causing its high temperature.
- The clouds of Venus are mostly sulphuric acid (not water vapor) — a powerful greenhouse agent.
- The atmosphere of Venus has nearly 3000x more CO2 than Earth’s atmosphere. Venus is 96.5% CO2 by volume vs. 380 per million for Earth (0.038%). Goldblatt el al say that with CO2 at 30,000 ppm Earth would have “no stable temperate climate.” That would require burning 10x more than Earth’s estimated fossil fuel resources.
A bizarre, even fun example of our mad news media
“Humans? In 2300? At the rate we’re going odds are there WON’T be many of them and the ones that are there will be far too busy trying to survive to bother over history, other than to curse us.”
— Comment by Bruce J. at the website of Brad DeLong (Prof Economics, Berkeley).
Take a look at “When Did the End Begin?” by Robert Sullivan in New York Magazine — “A scientific debate that’s oddly amusing to entertain: At what point, exactly, did mankind irrevocably put the Earth on the road to ruin?” The title is irrelevant to the article, which discusses dating the point at which the “Anthropocene Era” began, if the designation is approved. That is, when human impacts are the predominate force shaping Earth. It does not imply the beginning of the End Times.
Sullivan gives us the real-world version of an incident in Berkeley Breathed’s great “Bloom County” comic strip. It is not funny when played out in real life.
Bedfellow: “Hello, Bloom Beacon! This is Senator Bedfellow! What’s with this headline? … There’s no story, just a headline!”
Milo: “Which headline?”
Bedfellow: “The big headline on the front page!” ‘BEDFELLOW: THE SECRET LIFE OF A WIFE-SWAPPING ATHEIST’”
Mile: “Oh, that’s just a typo.”
Conclusion
“There will be no successor civilization. … Our planet had ONE shot at building a sustainable industrial civilization, and we humans f***ed it up, big time.”
— Comment by Redwood Rhiadra at website of Brad DeLong (Prof Economics, Berkeley).
A battle consists of phases. Both sides muster their forces, seize advantageous positions. Victory comes to the side that breaks through their foe’s lines. Then begins the pursuit phase, as the losers are chased away or destroyed.
Climate alarmists have followed this formula in the climate public policy debate. They built commanding positions in academia, the news media, ngo’s (such as foundations and the major science professional associations), and the relevant government agencies. With the funding and power so gained, they attack — abandoning the scientists of the IPCC (once called the “gold standard of climate science). Their articles are cheered and echoed by scores of organizations. Dozens of glitzy (well-funded) websites staffed by professionals propagate their messages, as do a flood of books and films.
Now they use their commanding position to say almost anything, however bogus, which pushes their message of climate doom. This campaign will reshape public opinion. For more information see Why skeptics will lose the US climate policy debate.
NPR story I heard yesterday afternoon went on an on about how it’s the hottest this and hottest that on record and everything is only going to get worse and hotter. No other opinion representated – just DOOOOOOMMMM.
..Trump will cut off the Tax Payers money supply to this House of Cards and it will crumble into oblivion….
Having worked in the media for 60 years, I can only observe “what’s new?” Nothing. The media loves the sky is falling. The media honors government and Ph.D.’s. So gloom and doom will be headlined whenever the government or a Ph.D. gives the nod.
There is a market for doom. The only way that doom-mongers ever lose influence is by mockery and contempt. If the greens were treated like Evangelical millenarians, much of their influence would go away.
It looks to me like they threw the sex scandal thing at the IPCC chair to get rid of him, and used that to shut it down. Hence, the media is off ranting on its own. The raging doom headlines are not shaping public opinion, they are totally ignored. People are getting an increasing amount of content from social media, which is overall causing the old media stories to become inflamed for attention, which funny enough, leads to their being discredited and ignored. A key component of current alarm is to try to maintain a science budget in the face of really boring climate with nothing much to say. You could see the panic coming when they started saying they could process sample noise to see trends. Sort of like saying there are patterns in random numbers. An uptick in noise is no longer, uh, noise. It is now an alarming increase.
They have condition our mind to accept AGW for the last 25 years. It will take the next 50 years to correct. They will claim victory just like in the Ozone scare.
Profits and Prophecy.
Unfortunately, scientific mysticism is not limited to prophecies of catastrophic warming. It has been equally effective to normalize the agenda of population control schemers. Whereas China had a one-child policy, liberal societies have a selective-child policy. Where the former is evidence of a minority psychopathy, the latter is evidence of consensus psychopathy. The same mystics that normalized selective-child and other selective policies are behind the CAGW/CACC prophecy and its related schemes.
There is plenty of rebuttal to these climate fright spasms. We see the rebuttals daily. Just how, pray, are they to appear on these check-out-line “news forums”? Kill the gatekeepers? Or at the least, tell respected scientists like Hawking to check their facts before they mouth off? If they rebut, do you suppose they will get news space? Dream on.
All of it is a runaway. manic popular delusion unmatched by anything the middle ages dished up. For all of our progress, ignorance and superstition are as controlling as ever.
We’re doomed anyway ….. during the sun’s expansion (into a White Dwarf, is it?) in the next — what? — 3 bn. years. If that doesn’t get us, some lunatic despot, or a big meteor, or other natural disaster will.
However, by far the greatest and most immediate threat is from the Alarmists themselves who would have us revert to the Dark Ages. Our life-spans will be halved, infant & birthing mortality will sky-rocket, public health-care will vanish, social welfare & community services will collapse, wars over resources will explode, famine will follow a disintegration of efficient farming and plagues will overrun us.
I just try to avoid politics and tell people the basic data. Temps are up 0.6 deg in the fossil fuel era. We can only sense a 2 deg difference and can only measure within perhaps 0.2 deg. Some, perhaps most, due to humans. Humans have caused perhaps two inches of sea level rise. It would be extremely hard to argue more than 4″ and one could easily argue 0. Forecast models have been consistently, and dramatically too high. The changes have been slowing, not accelerating. Many peer reviewed astronomers warn of solar cooling.
The issue is complex and we are clueless in many ways. But the climate is actually very stable. Relax. Move on.
Most reasonable people actually ‘get’ this which is why climate change is low on priority lists in opinion polls.
Also, it’s important to explain that “better safe than sorry” is a bad idea. Spending billions on climate change mitigation is ineffective and takes precious resources from more important environmental challenges.
Watts Up With the new prime minister taking action on the Climate bs operation in the British govt.
see a post on legal insurrection blog
a buddy called me on phone on this
my try on the web site
http://www.legalinsurrection.com/
I now it doesnt go down well but Hawking is part hack. Much of his claims re astrophysics was bollocks.
The more sensational, alarming, gruesome or disturbing a statement is, the more attention it gets from the press – on the assumption that it will sell more papers / attract more viewers / draw more votes.
“If it bleeds, it leads.”
It is not about truth or correct information, and hasn’t been for centuries.
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” – H. L. Mencken
I’m not worried. The days have gone when the people automatically kowtowed to their elites. Said elites have undermined their authority by years of obfuscation, half truths and outright lying on many subjects. People no longer believe them. And most people are not stupid, there comes a time when they realise they have been sold a pup and that time is very close in the realm of climate science. Very, very close.
After 3 sweltering days (uncomfortable) in Cheltenham I thought how nice it would be to return to the cold refreshing June days; when I was told by the IPCC’s hockey stick department via the BBC that June had been the hottest on record.
(1) The Eocene is an inappropriate comparison. Climate is affected by continental positions and ocean currents. Antarctica did not begin to glaciate until about 35 millions years ago as it approached its present position. Present Paleocene ice age did not begin until the Panama Isthmus closed about 2.2 million years ago. Eemian highstand shows there are no SLR tipping points, at least not for another 3000 years if we do reach +2C; Eemian rise from present SLR to its highstand about 6.6m higher is a rate of 2.2mm/year, just what dGPS tide gauges. Are showing now. Greening shows more CO2 is beneficial up to levels that we cannot reach given likely price/abailability of fossil fuels– RPC8.5 is a joke.
(2) I do not share your apparent despair, for 3 reasons: a. Mother Nature is not cooperating with the warmunists, and there have been enough alarming ‘projections’ already falsified that people are beginning to take notice. Neither snow nor Arctic ice have disappeared. b. The intermittency failure of renewables is becoming evident with penetration even in wacko places like California, UK, Germany, and South Australia. I suspect even harder object lessons are coming soon in the form of killing intermittency caused blackouts, as has happened already in SA, and will likely happen this winter in UK. Relying on shut and mothballed obsolete coal/gas generation for all your inadequate reserve safety margin is UK energy suicide. c. Despite growing warmunist shrillness and its continued amplification in MSM, the public isn’t buying. That simple fact explains the shrillness. China, India, and now Phillipines won’t play. UK just eliminated DECC by folding into new BEIS; the emphasis will now be on business, energy, and industrial strategy, not climate change. Wailing and nashing of Greenpeace won’t change that until at least the next election in 2020. May has made this clear. Obama’s CPP was already stayed by SCOTUS because likely unconstitional. Hillary cannot change that. Obama failed with carbon taxes even when Dems held both branches of Congress 2008-2010 at the peak of the AR4 hype before Climategate. Hillary will have no shot either unless Trump proves an utter disaster down ticket as well as up ticket. We shall see.
I do not think skeptics will lose the climate debate. In my opinion the climate debate will become irrelevant for policies when more urgent and serious problems take our attention out of it. Once everybody gets over the debate, science will start to work on sorting it out.
Constant bad, doom and gloom messages and reports can have a negative psychological effect, especially amongst children.
Actually if people are that easily taken by bogus,lying scaremongering claims,then they are plain gullible and stupid. But a few smarter people are WILLFULLY ignoring the evidence that the warming trend since the late 1600’s is not unusual.
What has happened in the press and government organizations, is that in choosing people to deal with environmental issues, they mistakenly hired activists because they were “experienced” in environmental issues. Unfortunately they were experienced because they were zealots…all the more rational ones having long since retired from those causes because the developed world had already dealt with its environmental issues reasonably well.
We have effectively hired members of a nature cult that believes capitalism and industry are the horsemen of the apocalypse …so of course they spew nothing but news of the coming apocalypse.
I am not sure why environmentalists want us to go back to the stone age. Wherever man went, mega fauna died. It happened every time man moved. In Australia, man migrated there around 50,000 years ago. within a few thousand years, all large mammals were gone. Giant Kangaroos, marsupial saber tooth cats, giant sloths, gone. Same with NA 15000 years ago. So, what man is doing now to the environment is peanuts to what happened in the past. We are probably the most gentle species around compared to what we were in the stone age.
Largest misconception of climate change is the co2 factor. That will cause problems in 100 to 120 years. The real factor is us turning on a dryer to dry our clothes or driving our cars that give off over a 195 to 220 f. and now think how many are in use right now. Other causes cell phones, lights, air conditioning, laptops, and anything that we use that creates heat that’s released into our atmosphere. We’re all to blame, even me. I’m at fault as well. I do everything as much as the next person. We need to fix this. I think we have alot less time then what their projecting. I give it 20 maybe 40 years for our own extinction. It was 85 degrees in the Arctic Circle at Dead Horse. We’re in trouble. We can’t keep on acting like nothings wrong. When this happens there’s no planet to move to, no quick fix, and no place to run to. Our children or grand children will die. We need to wake up the world. Now! Please share this post. We need to be self aware!
But note, it’s been quite a while since the cable news shows, including CNN and MSNBC, have been pushing it. They’ll have an hour long special on it twice a year or so but it’s not the daily drumbeat it used to be.
It’s more the international globalists who are pushing it hard.