Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Stephen Hawking thinks President Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris Agreement and the British Brexit decision might trigger a chain of events which leads to the destruction of the world. My question – where is the evidence?
Hawking says Trump’s climate stance could damage Earth
By Pallab Ghosh
Science correspondent, BBC News
2 July 2017
Stephen Hawking says that US President Donald Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris climate agreement could lead to irreversible climate change.\
Prof Hawking said the action could put Earth onto a path that turns it into a hothouse planet like Venus.
He also feared aggression was “inbuilt” in humans and that our best hope of survival was to live on other planets.
…
In its Fifth Assessment Report, the IPCC authors wrote: “The precise levels of climate change sufficient to trigger tipping points (thresholds for abrupt and irreversible change) remain uncertain, but the risk associated with crossing multiple tipping points in the Earth system or in interlinked human and natural systems increases with rising temperature.”
…
“We are close to the tipping point where global warming becomes irreversible. Trump’s action could push the Earth over the brink, to become like Venus, with a temperature of two hundred and fifty degrees, and raining sulphuric acid,” he told BBC News.
“Climate change is one of the great dangers we face, and it’s one we can prevent if we act now. By denying the evidence for climate change, and pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement, Donald Trump will cause avoidable environmental damage to our beautiful planet, endangering the natural world, for us and our children.”
…
And on Brexit, he feared UK research would be irreparably damaged.
“Science is a cooperative effort, so the impact will be wholly bad, and will leave British science isolated and inward looking”.
…
Read more: http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-40461726
There is so much wrong with Stephen Hawking’s statement, its difficult to know where to begin.
For starters, the US “commitment” to the Paris Agreement was never going to significantly reduce global CO2 emissions. China, whose emissions already dwarf the USA, demonstrated how they think the Paris Agreement is a joke, when they announced a colossal 20% increase in coal capacity in the next 3 years November last year. Green efforts to cast China as an environmental champion just add to the humour.
In addition to China’s heroic effort to emit plant fertiliser, as WUWT recently reported, 1600 new coal plants are currently under construction around the world..
Hawking’s suggestion that the USA could somehow lead others into economic hardship by destroying the domestic US economy is and always was a liberal fantasy.
As for Hawking’s claim we could end up like Venus, a statement without evidence, even from someone with Stephen Hawking’s reputation or from the IPCC, is no more valid than a prognostication provided by a psychic gazing into a crystal ball.
The Earth has experienced far higher CO2 levels than the present day. CO2 levels in the Cretaceous, the age of the Dinosaurs, were 1700ppm – more than 4x today’s level. The Earth has experienced extreme warming and extreme cooling, but has never experienced a runaway greenhouse effect which made it totally uninhabitable like Venus.
Gigantic CO2 belching volcanic eruptions which lasted for 1000s, maybe millions of years, huge meteor strikes, the advance and retreat of giant ice sheets – for billions of years since life began, nothing in our violent geological history has managed to shift temperatures outside a range where life is possible somewhere on our planet.
Nothing we have done or are likely to do to our planet can come close to what nature has already done – to what our planet has already endured.
In a few centuries fossil fuel resources will likely be exhausted. At most we shall add a few hundred more PPM CO2 to our atmosphere. Suggesting that our mild contribution to global greening is somehow worse than all the awful geological events of our planet’s history is pure and simple fiction.
Unfortunately, it appears as if even very bright people can become useful idiots for a political cause. Very sad, indeed.
It is the Dunning-Kruger Effect in action. Look it up.
Try looking through the correct end of the telescope.
It has more to do with the desire, or in some cases, career need to be accepted at the cocktail party, office or on tv than the degree of mental capacity involved. Though some of the Venus comments do make one wonder.
Try removing the telescope from your nether regions.
Well done Stephen, if and when the weather changes back to a 1960s-1970s cooler regime your judgement will be questioned, and as these things tend to go the judgement of your particular scientific specialty may be looked at with more critical eyes.
By spouting crap like that he has ruined his reputation and shows he is just another clown.
+1000
Not only reputation but also credibility.
Ruined with one statement.
About as quantitatively challenged as Lord Nincompoop of whimsy …
“What do I say? I simply try to explain to people that here are the facts upon which this is based. Here is a community, surely you can’t believe that you have got 10,000 or more people signed up to some secret pledge to misrepresent the evidence? And that essentially 99 per cent of the people who work in the subject recognise uncertainties about time scales and other details but have unanimity in that putting a million years’ worth of fossil fuel carbon back into the atmosphere each year is thickening the greenhouse gas blanket and is going to make a difference. You should listen to them.”
“I would have the hubris to say that I believe common sense, helpfully illustrated by toy models, can point you in the direction that many others are pointing in. They can point you in ways which will not prevent bad things happening but will make them less likely.”
Someone hand the fool a soaking wet duvet, enough with the radiative myopia and childish blanket sucking.
I believe another famous physicist and a quote applicable to Hawking’s screed:
“That is not only not right; it is not even wrong,”
Extra points if you can name the source (no googling)
That’s attributed to Wolfgang Pauli – German theoretical physicist.
The problem is that the quote does not apply to Hawkins. Hawkins is actually fundamentally wrong. Period.
There were many, eminently qualified, who questioned his appointment to Newton’s chair in 1979.
Newton’s revolutionary theories have served as the basis for an ever more sophisticated understanding of how the universe and its various components interact.
So far, Hawkins has added little of any consequence to the fundamentals. Instead, he has lent his name to various causes that belong in the modern sphere of what 17th century Newton’s would have understood as alchemy..
Yeah, the worthiness of his supposed statement for consideration as right or wrong is not in question. The statement is coherent and focused on already established ideas. But the statement is combining these already established ideas wrongly. Consequently, we are able to judge its wrongness — it is WRONG.
If he had said, “White unicorns are sweating poisonous fumes into the biosphere,” then I would say that THIS is “not even wrong”, because the existence of unicorns is unfounded, let alone their ability to sweat poisonous fumes. In other words, it would be nonsense, therefore, unworthy of a judgement of EITHER “right” or “wrong”.
For broad-based intellect and critical thinking, I’ll take Richard Feynman, rest his soul, over Hawking any day.
The other day Hawking was quoted as saying the human race has no more than 100 years to find another planet.
If this is not proof that either his intellect has turned to soft mush, or some nincompoop is inputting words into his voice-box, what could be?
He ought to know better than anyone that there is no possibility of a human being making a journey to another star system, unless we invent some sort of warp drive.
Considering it took tens of thousands of years of using fire and tools to figure out how to make the stuff we have today, it seems likely that if we discover how to fold space in the next few thousand years, maybe a few tens of millennia after that we will turn that into a practical starship.
Imagine a vessel that could take a group of people on a journey that would take tens of times longer than recorded history…all self sustained and no catastrophic failures over a longer period than humans have had a civilization.
Yeah…a hundred years oughta do it.
And that is if we somehow knew where to go with it.
I would be surprised if humans have even begun to explore any of the barren rocks in our own solar system by them.
100 years goes by fast…fifty years ago we were about to go to the moon.
Today we have no ability to send a person into low Earth orbit without hitching a ride from the Russians.
And every launch that does not blow up on the pad is a minor miracle.
Sending a few hundred pound robot to Mars takes decades of effort and many of them crash or just disappear.
Space is a huge disappointment…it is very inhospitable off the Earth, machines that can do those tasks are complicated and temperamental, and it will remain a risky waste of money for a very long time.
I hate to say it, but it is true.
I thought i was going to go to space when i was a kid…but then the world moved on and we all grew up.
“The other day Hawking was quoted as saying the human race has no more than 100 years to find another planet.”
Building a starship isn’t a question of physics any more; we KNOW how. All that remains is engineering. An Orion Nuclear Pulse Drive would take a breeding stock of humans to another star system – IF we knew where to go. If you’re going to tell me that us now knowing how to build an Orion starship would be like Robert Goddard saying that he knew how to build a moon rocket – yes, that’s exactly where we are. We’ve got decades of ENGINEERING work to do to get there. Along the way, we’re likely to make lots of new discoveries. But Hawking’s PHYSICS knowledge is just about irrelevant to the ENGINEERING work that will take us to the stars.
Ken, you think that someone is going to another star once we get a few decades of engineering out of the way?
By using a nuclear pulse drive?
Over a distance of light years?
Dream on.
We can barely be sure of getting a rocket into orbit without it blowing up.
It is likely cosmic rays will kill anyone outside of the Earths magnetic field within a few years if not a few months. And outside the heliopause?
But the main point is the time.
Time means mass, for everything anyone will possibly need. Which means a really big ship…which means a really large number of nukes…
How are we going to get all that mass into space?
Can’t build a space elevator…the terrorists will knock it down like cat knocking over legos.
You think we will build a machine that will function and keep people alive in interstellar space for thousands of years?
If we did, it will never get there?
Why
Because… The first (or the second or the fifth) generation of kids will turn that thing around the day they get the controls!
Why would they want to spend their lives going someplace they will never see, or their kids…or even their great to the 20th kids…but if everything goes right someone might get somewhere and it might be a place that can be lived on…or ..oopsie, maybe not!
It is a useless bet, but I will bet you that no one in the world will be spending tens of trillions of dollars so a few people can go on the most expensive suicide mission in history.
Not in a hundred years.
Maybe in ten thousand.
But not likely.
Honestly, I doubt even a dead person will make it to Mars in a hundred years.
And if they get there, they are not getting back.
Anyone who thinks so just is not paying attention.
Or is just kidding themselves.
Chemical rockets are not adequate for real space travel.
Nuclear fission as proposed for the Orion project is not adequate for inter stellar travel.
To reach distant stars in a human life time you need matter annihilation:
https://diggingintheclay.wordpress.com/2013/06/17/bussard-revisited/
I appreciate optimism as much as anyone…really I do.
Since I was a young kid I have been reading everything there is to read in the sci fi universe.
But those are stories.
The reality is we have almost no ability to get mass into space or to work up there…or to build flawless machines that will keep working without a team of engineers and a huge budget…and that is on the ground.
The distance, the cost, the time it will take…all are deal breakers.
But that hardly matters…we have the scientists of the world insisting we deindustrialize because of a myth!
We have a slow motion invasion going on that wants to take the whole world back to the dark ages.
When we elect someone who wants to clean up the crony system that is looting our country blind, a third of the population goes absolutely insane!
Let’s face it…no interstellar mission is happening.
Not with entire generations being miseducated and taught to be more concerned with safe spaces than actual knowledge.
I think we probably need to bypass normal space to have any chance of going very far into the universe on a short timescale. Space has a lot of particles floating around in it which can be very destructive if you collide with them while traveling at very high speeds. The faster you go, the more danger they pose.
If we don’t develop a fast method of interstellar travel, humans will move from one solar system to the next by using the planetary bodies that surround the stars as steppingstones between them. Of course, that will be a slow process.
But the human race has nothing but time. 🙂
I think our best chance is to be taken pity on by one of the spacefaring civilizations that already exists.
Because the “Where are they all” question is a real one.
If no one is already there, it seems doubtful it is possible.
Billions of years lead time on us, and all those planets as possible sources for others?
How could it be there is no one up there already?
Just too far between stars?
Or maybe the space wasps are well aware of us and have us on the menu for June 18th, 2054?
Is it possible to know if he’s really making these claims anymore? Or just his handlers?
With no Paris agreement, will death rates increase?
From an Issue paper by Juanita Constible, Natural Resources Defense Council:
KILLER SUMMER HEAT:
PARIS AGREEMENT COMPLIANCE COULD AVERT HUNDREDS
OF THOUSANDS OF NEEDLESS DEATHS IN AMERICA’S CITIES.
Is this claim true?
I am a climate realist, that means I look at the totality of what is happening to the climate with increasing CO2 levels, and what it means for our future.
https://lenbilen.com/2017/07/02/with-no-paris-agreement-will-death-rates-increase/
This guy is well past his use by date
Geniality borders pretty close to insanity…
I certainly hope Stephen the best. His situation is tragic and it causes me to wish him well even though I’ve never met him.
I don’t consider his judgement sound. That shouldn’t be a difficulty for most folks. Stephen isn’t like other people and isn’t able to think rationally. If I were in his situation I wouldn’t be able to either. He deserves our pity and support. He isn’t capable of providing leadership.
he deserves Our pity? Our support? do you hear yourself? you’re not conscripting me into your liberal victimhood.uber.alles racket.
i owe him no pity.
on the other hand, it would be an act moral embezzlement to withhold the recognition of his complete idiocy.
that’s what he has earned from me – that’s what he deserves.
stupidity is not a virtue to be rewarded with other people’s pity. nature provides for it at the Darwin Awards.
He had my pity until he started in on the end of the world muckraking and panic mongering.
Support?
Nah…why? He makes more money than I ever will.
But now?
I will go back to pitying him when he decides to apologize and tell the truth and then STFU.
The interview was broadcast on SBS in Australia as well.
The US is actually reducing its CO2 footprint.
The big emitters are not.
So what is scary about Trump?
That is one of the stranger aspects of this particular side branch of Trump Derangement Syndrome.
who typed Stephen Hawking’s statement into the computer? when I saw Hawking on an NPR special it was “aides” typing stuff into the computer and Hawking would sometimes pencil hit enter, sometimes the “aides” would do it.. very sad
Hansen was the originator of this Earth-to-Venus prophecy, wasn’t he? Possibly that where Hawking got the idea. But even Hansen is now soft-pedaling this prospect, isn’t he?
Hansen also turned the air conditioning off and kept conference room windows shut when making his presentation in 1988.
Those who are criticising Donald Trump, the US President for withdrawing from Paris agreement should first understand the differences between climate change and global warming. Climate change was there in the past, is there at present and will be there in future. In the case of global warming, so far there is no clear cut quantified climate sensitivity factor. Scientists coming up with positive results on using CO2. If this is achieved, the process of global warming [if any] could be reversible in near future.
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
Besides for that, we have the geologic record, which is quite clear that we are in a very cold period of the Earth’s history…one of the coldest.
And when it was far warmer on average, the world was not just livable but lushly verdant from pole to pole.
The idea we are at some tipping point, or that warmer temps are to be feared, is utter lunacy.
It is made up hogwash, with no facts to back it up.
There are no tipping points…billions of years of history proves it.
The Earth and the biosphere take what comes.
“There are no tipping points”
No, not in the entire history of Earth. Which at times, had much more CO2 in the atmosphere than now, yet no tipping points. There is no evidence for tipping points. CAGW promoters should be required to provide some evidence of their claims of tipping points.
Really, the ice cores and the lag of CO2 behind temperature that they show speaks to this very forcefully… high and rising concentration of CO2 does not push warming to ever more extreme levels, and low and decreasing levels of CO2 do not lead to perpetual ice.
At the core of this nitwit notion of CO2 as being the thermostat of the planet, is a refusal to acknowledge a single pebble of the mountain of proof that it is not.
There is far more than the ice cores to prove it, but it hardly matters…the notion is falsified.
Before anyone even needs to get to any of the many other independent lines of evidence that on their own disprove it.
I think we need to come up with a phrase to refer to “CO2 is the temperature control knob of the atmosphere”.
Something that that sums it up, is obvious, and casts it in the appropriate light.
Of course there have been tipping points in Earth’s history. Both entering and exiting ice ages. During an earlier ice age the entire earth was covered in ice. So tipping points into or out of catastrophic conditions are clearly in the geologic record.
Having said that, I agree with the consensus here, that Hawking’s statements are ludicrous.
The tipping points in question have to do with runaway warming being triggered by a tiny increase in temperature caused by a trace gas increasing slightly…and still no where near levels that it had been over most of Earth history…with no such runaway heating.
The full glacial/interglacial transitions are not exactly a tipping point in the sense that they are referring to…more like two modes that are alternating.
The big question (regarding ice ages) is…why are we in an ice age at all?
The last one before this was hundreds of millions of years ago, and the Sun was not as strong then, or so we are told.
Rather than runaway warming, there is a well defined cap in temps that it has never gone above except briefly…but has frequently stayed very near to that upper bound:
http://www.vonborks.org/Pages/Walt/1.jpg
Prof. Hawkings appears to have forsaken the central principle of the scientific method. It is the falslfiability of the claims that are made by the model that is the product of a scientific study. The claims that are made by modern global warming models are not falsifiable thus they are not scientific.
What evidence is Hawking using to reach his conclusions?
I wonder if he has a line of reasoning, or if he is just relying on the conclusions of others.
There is no evidence or reason for such pronouncements…it is scaremongering of the most completely reckless and unfounded sort.
He takes the worst of the exaggerations and doubles down on them and then takes out the qualifiers and weasel words, leaving it stated as if a fact.
Then calls out our President by name as responsible for it all even though the US is now the only country cutting emissions.
“Then calls out our President by name as responsible for it all even though the US is now the only country cutting emissions.”
Isn’t that ironic. It’s just delusional. And the US will probably continue to reduce its CO2 output while all the others are either not reducing, but increasing their output, or are struggling to meet their CO2 goals.
The US did better than other nations on emissions during the Kyoto treaty era, too, even though the US refused to abide by the Kyoto treaty. The same thing is happening again with CO2.
William Thompson (aka Lord Kelvin) was a prominent scientist in his day yet he made some absurd statements such as these:
“There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.”
“Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.”
“Radio has no future.” “X-rays are clearly a hoax”. “The aeroplane is scientifically impossible.”
I think this is Hawking’s “Kelvin Moment”.
Hawkins has clearly lost the grip on reality.
maybe,
but you are in no
way qualified to judge
a mind like hawkings’
I know that the citations are out of grip with reality and that they are detached from a scientific argument.
Science or Fiction is very much qualified to judge reality. it’s your judgement that’s faulty.
you are not the only one who may judge hawking’s mind. it’s the right of every man who possesses the faculty of judgement and who wants to bother.
that’s what judgement is for.
I feel quite certain that i am in every way qualified to judge his words and by extension his grasp of facts, his grasp on reality, and his motivations and intentions.
Taken as a whole, his statements, both here and in weeks past on the prospects for the Earth as a home planet for the human race and the whole of the biosphere, demonstrate derangement, delusion, a shockingly unscientific demeanor, and no grasp of even the basics of several branches of natural science, including chemistry and physics and astronomy.
Coupled with an alarmist mentality, and a sickeningly patronizing tone while being so utterly brazen in his panic mongering, it amounts to him being afflicted with the very worst case of warmista jackassery I have ever witnessed.
Plus he is stupid and crazy.
And if I could, I would tell him all of that to his face, then ask him why he wants to scare children who have no way of knowing he is making it all up?
Nor, apparently, do quite a few adults…as you have made us aware.
Do you understand that what he is saying is that everyone must knuckle under to the fascist takeover of our economy?
That we must all consign ourselves to living a life of energy poverty?
That the poor nations of the Earth must remain so…tens of millions consigned to eternal poverty and misery?
I would have more respect for a fire and brimstone preacher than for a fire and brimstone fake scientist.
cracker demonstrates the fallacy of appeal to authority.
In it’s mind, Hawkins can’t be wrong because he’s a genius.
Hawking who still believes in Einstein’s ‘relativity of simultaneity’.
Dear Stephen,
What does the ‘relativity of simultaneity’ offer the value of observations made by observers in relative motion above those by equivalent observers stationary in the simultaneous event’s reference frame?
I thought as much . . . and you’re even less qualified to pontificate on climate matters of which you know nothing of importance.
Venus has no free water, instead it has sulfuric acid. Far higher boiling point and much lower vapor pressure. No wonder it is hot.
No magnetosphere either. And with the dense atmosphere, carbon dioxide exists in supercritical state at the surface. This isn’t going to happen with a few ppm more of carbon dioxide.
No. And I suspect orbital mechanics plays a part as well.
Some theories claim that Venus’ heat is independent of the compostion of its atmosphere, and its temperature is determined by the density of the atmosphere and amount of solar energy received at its location in space.
Perhaps someone should look into those theories in a little more detail and discuss them on a Climate Change blog.
Or do some experiments.
Or write a scientific paper.
Your Holiness,
Surely you can’t be serious?
Our grant applications have been repeatedly rejected, our labs been shut down due to running out of funding, pending the next check from Exxon Mobile and the Koch brothers of course…and you do not want to get me started on the pal review kerfuffle that ensues every time a skeptic submits a paper.
And stop calling me Shirley.
Here is a link. Read all about it.
I find it very interesting that this theory seems to apply to all the planets in our solar system with atmospheres, for which we have sufficient temperature information.
As we gain information on other planets in our solar system, and their atmospheres, this theory can also be applied to them to see if they too behave the same way.
https://www.omicsonline.org/open-access/new-insights-on-the-physical-nature-of-the-atmospheric-greenhouse-effect-deduced-from-an-empirical-planetary-temperature-model.php?aid=88574
Hmmm. We’ve burned through roughly 1/3rd of known fossil fuel reserves and emitted roughly 750 billion tons of carbon as CO2, which has added perhaps 0.3C of CO2 induced global warming recovery, which has been beneficial.
In addition, the added CO2 has increased crop yields by roughly 25% from CO2 fertilization and has increased plant drought resistance…
Because CO2 forcing is logarithmic, if we burn ALL fossil fuels (an economic impossibility because of supply/demand/price dynamics) we’ll perhaps contribute another 0.5C of CO2 induced warming…
How Hawking comes up with 250C, is anyone’s guess, but it certainly isn’t based on physics and empirical evidence.
I wonder if Hawking will be held accountable for making such an absurd claim based on absolutely no evidence or physics, when this absurd CAGW sc@m is officially deemed disconfirmed in about 5 years?
The Left has lost its collective mind… it’s sad and embarrassing to witness someone like Hawking make such a fool of himself.
It would be sad and embarrassing if he did it in a scientific way.
He did this in a political way, naming our President as responsible for his imaginary horror story.
That takes it out of the realm of the sad and into the realm of abstruse political muckraking.
That’s OK. His ‘brief history of time’ was undoubtedly the least [actually] read best seller in history not written by a Clinton.
Nor did it turn out to be correct.
His belief that the Earth can somehow exude 90 times the atmospheric pressure with a gas that is desperately sought be all plant life is interesting, However it is impossible.
Missing the spot light.
His computer was hacked.