Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to the Sydney Morning Herald, telling the truth about climate doesn’t work. Hyping extreme climate scenarios is sometimes the only way to motivate climate action.
How Y2K offers a lesson for fighting climate change
Earlier this month, New York magazine published a riveting and frightening look at the future of the planet we call home.
Now that global warming is well underway, we are in for an apocalyptic awakening, and “parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century,” the writer, David Wallace-Wells, argues.
The article captured the public’s attention, quickly becoming the most-read piece in the magazine’s history. But many critics, including several climate scientists, argued that it was flawed because Wallace-Wells focused on the worst-case scenario, a pessimist’s take.
Why feed the public a too-bleak picture of the future? Why frighten people into action, rather than inspire them?
Because sometimes, the worst case is the only thing that prompts us to get anything done.
…
One popular misconception about Y2K is that it was a wasted effort. After all, when the clocks turned over on January 1, 2000, there were scattered problems, but the world didn’t end. And there is some evidence that money was misspent.
But several of the government and outside analysts who have studied the response – including the Senate task force – concluded that on the whole, the effort was justified, given what we knew about the bug beforehand, and especially considering the United States’ particular vulnerability to tech problems.
…
People are not fools. It is one thing to argue a position, an entirely different thing to deliberately distort the truth.
The Y2K bug – as a software expert I was involved in fixing the problems. I was a Y2K alarmist – there just seemed to be far too many decrepit, decades old COBOL systems running core business processes, all hopelessly riddled with Y2K defects, written by people who had long since retired or died of old age. To my surprise the world didn’t end January 2000.
But it never occurred to me to deliberately exaggerate the problems I thought I saw, to try to panic people into acting.
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Y2K was a solvable problem. Companies recognized the problem and fixed it. I remember meeting quite a few people working on the problem, and it was real.
What the media didn’t understand though was the motivation of companies to deal with it.
I remember a conversation with a fellow from Kraft Foods who was working on the problem.
He said they went through every computer system and every machine in every factory in order find and solve problems that might be encountered on Y2K.
They fixed it, on time, and protected their company.
But no one should equate Y2k with climate change. Apples and oranges.
(…sonofabitch!)
The media here are simply admitting their culture, mindset and modus operandi.
“It’s OK for us in the media to lie brazenly since
(a) it makes people watch our shyte
(b) it controls people according to the agenda of our elite gods and masters
(c) it expresses our utter contempt for most people.
(d) please remind us why it matters anyway whether what you say is true or false – all sounds a tad judeo-christian and hillbilly to me
some body should tell the guy in the march photo to stop smoking
That Feyman clip is interesting because so few people go past the first bit of this lecture. 5 minutes in he explains how it is easy to create loose pseudo science hypothesese you can’t prove right ir wrong, which is climate “science”. Statistical model forecasting not ever proveable as deterministic science by the people who propose it, or anyone else. NO control planet, etc.. This is why a winnable challenge to renewables on energy science fact is diverted to unprovable beliefs of climate “science”.
This is also how religion works. And Communism and fsascism, social pressure is promoted by the powerful to follow unprovable ideology and its dogma.You tell people something is a fact w/o proof, pay your priests (climate pseudo scientists you pay well to spread the deceit), to proclaim the beief is a fact, label anyone who denies the belief using scientific method on the facts a heretic (Science Denier) and create an inquisition to hunt down anyone asking rational questions of the ideology. Job done.
I have one strong suggestion. Follow the money. If you stick to challenging renewable energy as a fraud on the science facts, that must make net CO2 emissions expensively and inadeqauately worse, unsustainbly w/o fossil fuel to justify their presence, for the majority of people on the grid, then that argument cannot be lost on the science facts. They don’t like that sort of talk.
So I prefer to stick to that and not even argue climate change from CO2, or anything else. Without the easy money snake oil solution to the the ideology, promoting CO2 as a cause of climate change rather than a consequence will go away.
This will be good because these flawed “scientists” might then start “adjusting” their model’s bias to look for the real cause (My bet is magma heating the ocean from the 75,000 volcanoes over 1km high and the million smaller volcanoes under our oceans – continually being reheated and recycled by the radioactive furnace just under our feet. So far I can account for 4×10^11 tonnes pa. That’s about 4×10^20 Joules @ur momisugly 10^9 Joules per tonne for 1,000 degree delta.
PS There is no real risk from CO2 of course. Plants ate all the CO2, down from 95% to just the minimum to support plant and animal life, under 0.2% for at least 1 Billion years of extreme change and (real) mass extinctions.
Seems climate modellers don’t know how the atmosphere was formed and how the varying amounts of CO2 and oxygen are controlled by plants, because its not in the their interest to do that in their models, of course. Plants multiply when CO 2 increases, because their is more food to support more plants, CO2 increases because the oceans warm, and because we add to it. And they are. Plants can’t tell the difference.