Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Arizona Professor Emeritus Dr Guy McPherson thinks the world could end in the next eight years because climate change.
BEGINNING OF THE END: Natural disasters to spike because of climate change, says scientist
A SPIKE in devastating natural disasters is on the way as the planet has exceeded a “tipping point” for climate change, a leading scientist has claimed.
By SEAN MARTIN
PUBLISHED: 16:55, Mon, Jan 8, 2018
The east coast of the US continues to be ravaged by a freezing cold snap while the other side of the country has been hit by wildfires.
These are a signs of the times according to one professor, who says that the situation will only worsen in the next few years.
…
Dr McPherson said: “The latest unprecedented hurricanes, earthquakes and wildfires that we have seen in 2017 are examples of profound changes in our climate system.
“These global disasters threaten energy systems, infrastructure and food supply.
“We have entered an era of exponential climate upheaval with tipping points and feedback loops pushing us over the edge whilst, all the while, governments and climate research bodies refuse to accept the gravity of our situation.
“Within the next eight years, Earth’s temperature will approach or exceed its highest temperature in the last two billion years.
“The rate of change will continue to outstrip the ability of humans and other life to adapt.”
Guy McPherson’s public views are so extreme they attract criticism from other climate alarmists. But McPherson is not alone in making extreme predictions; James Hansen, former director of NASA GISS, also predicts the world will soon become uninhabitable due to runaway global warming.
If climate models predict runaway global warming, when will this predicted runaway warming actually occur?
The answer is never, at least not for the next billion years or so. The Earth’s geological history is strong evidence that model based predictions of runaway global warming are nonsense.
During the Earth’s history, CO2 levels have exceeded 7000ppm, 17x higher than today’s CO2 levels. Many of these periods of elevated CO2 were actually quite cool (see the top of the page).
The Cretaceous, the age of the dinosaurs, experienced CO2 levels 4x higher than today – but the global temperature was only 4C warmer than today. No runaway warming occurred, despite dramatically higher natural CO2 levels and global temperatures.
If the model projections of runaway warming implausibly contradict geological history, clearly the models are wrong. There must be climate forcings at work which have been omitted or incorrectly handled by climate modellers.
The most likely candidate in my opinion for why model projections have an implausible tendency to run away from reality is the poor handling by climate models of clouds and tropical storms.
Clouds reflect sunlight back into space, but storms go a step further – they actively pump accumulated heat from the surface back into space.
Willis has produced many excellent posts about storms as heat pumps, such as How Thunderstorms Beat The Heat. Willis’ posts include data analysis which clearly demonstrate how tropical storms cap the Earth’s surface temperature, regardless of any additional greenhouse forcing.
When Dr. McPherson and James Hansen provide apocalyptic warnings about the consequences of global warming, in my opinion they are just being honest about the projections of their most extreme climate models.
It is the model predictions themselves which are wrong, because the climate model predictions on which those warnings are based are inconsistent with the Earth’s geological history.
Update (EW): fixed a typo (h/t Jim Masterson).
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8-years from now? Bad choice! Should have been 2099! No one alive now will be alive in 2099! Ergo no law suits!
Bad.
Hahahahahahah
Bite your tongue. My 18 month old grandson will be 83 years old in January 2099. I would pick an out date of 2040.
Dr McPherson what should we do:
Genocide?
Mass suicide?
Nuke the Chinese and Indians?
Sentence all coalmine directors and shareholders to death?
Sorry what was that . . .
– increase subsidies for solar and wind
– give more taxpayer money to climate researchers
Ok doc we’ll get straight onto it . . .
““The latest unprecedented hurricanes, earthquakes and wildfires”
Are NOT unprecedented.
LIES from the very first !!
It doesn’t matter. Apparently ecosystems are already collapsing
https://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2018-01-08/ecosystems-are-collapsing-and-food-bowls-are-next
They even tout tgat old chesnut that:
completely ignoring the fact that this is based on an increase in actual food because of increased CO2.
Anyway, we’re all gonna die!
I think that Bloomberg article is a typo — should be “Wacosystems are collapsing and (climate science) begging bowls are next.”
Where is the science?
LOL, reminds me of the crazed religious folks, bless their hearts who are so scared they will miss the Messiah that they end up taking their own lives. Zealots for sure but damned deceived for sure. Our planet has the ability to heal itself.
Carbonphobes are religious folks. They are following their own peculiar form of pantheistic gnosticism.
Trouble is they arent really unpredecented are they. This numpty should have learned to push his predictions of doom out a bit further from his alarminista buddies. 8 years will go by quickly and he will look as silly as Gore, Flannery, Mann et al do with their predictions of doom.
“In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.” – Warhol
What an idiot.
Every time I raise the CO2 was higher in the past I get but the sun was weaker then.
My answer has always been “but I thought the sun had nothing to do with it”.
I am open to additional responses to this one. thanks in advance
That old CO2 was natural. Nature is Good. This is Capitalist CO2. It is Bad.
See the difference?
I know it’s not polite, but all I can do is point and laugh.
He breezed through NZ a couple of years ago.
Looks like we Kiwis are the last to be exterminated.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/environment/86998427/kiwis-will-be-the-last-humans-on-earth-guy-mcpherson-predicts
I might try running a B&B for all you Rich Northern Hemisphere folk.
Send $$$$$$$ now and I’ll keep a room free for you.
Might take you up on that, Maggy. I’d like to see Mt. Cook near sunset with clouds floating through the valleys between Cook and the other mountains. Makes it look like you can see into forever from that spot.
Eric, OT but following up on your recent Elon Musk, here’s the latest:
“On Sunday night [January 7] at 8:00 p.m. EST, Elon Musk’s SpaceX launched the secretive Zuma satellite into space aboard its Falcon Heavy rocket from Cape Canaveral. However, less than a day later, the WSJ reports that the secretive spacecraft built by Northrop Grumman for the U.S. government military industrial complex, and worth billions “is presumed to be a total loss after it failed to reach orbit.”
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-01-08/highly-classified-spy-satellite-total-loss-after-spacex-mission-fails
If people just stop paying attention to Musk, he will fade away. Ditto the rest of these crackpots getting attention in the media.
This guy’s climate science is quite similar in many respects to this kind of “science.”
http://i66.tinypic.com/2ywbqbo.jpg
Both are religious beliefs and unfalsifiable.
I’d like to affirm that there will be a spike in devastating natural disasters in the coming eight years. Just like the eight years gone, and the eight years before that, and the eight years before that…and all the eight-year periods of time past. (I could have referred to “decades”…but “eight years” makes me sound more precise and sciency, just like an Arizona professor.)
Think it’s been tough? Try running a complex civilisation outside a cosy little interglacial like ours. No-one’s tried that yet.
This is so bizarre – topped off by his linking of climate change to earthquakes – that one wonders if this Arizona prof might be stressed, or maybe distracted.
This happened a month ago:
“Washington, D.C. – Late last week Arizona Superior Court Justice James Marner granted the Energy & Environment Legal Institute’s (E&E Legal’s) motion requesting release of ‘Climategate’ related emails withheld for years by the University of Arizona (UofA).”
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2017/12/07/arizona-supreme-court-orders-release-of-climategate-related-emails/
His predictions are sensationally alarming. If he is wrong throw him in jail for public mischief because uneducated people, and some more educated as well, believe what he says and may take silly action for no reason at all.
Good news! We can ;now cut all funding for climate science. It is too late to make a difference. PARTY!
Maxing out the credit cards and reverse mortgaging right now and I have lots of bridges up for sale online going for a song. They’d want to cut the funding for climate science pronto because what dopes would be paying taxes with thermageddon nigh?
One thing’s for sure. When you’ve been tipped off as often as I have like this I’m not tipping anymore.
Ah the seventies and deja vu. If you could remember it well you weren’t there-
http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/south-australia/adelaide-remember-when-clairvoyant-john-nash-predicted-earthquake-and-tidal-wave-would-obliterate-adelaide-in-january-1976/news-story/e11935a6d44b5281a47bbfdd65b2dc2d
Suck on the picture of Chris Overall Dr Mcpherson because that’s the young bloke I knew and being a real man of science and not into clairvoyants and smoking things he shouldn’t by now this is him nowadays by all accounts-
http://www.dentistry.ubc.ca/faculty-profiles/k-o/christopher-overall/
Dontcha just love those blow up vinyl ‘floaties’ he’s wearing on his arms? That’s what the WWII generation of mums and dads used to put on us as tackers to go swimming and compare that with the bedwetters and nanny-staters of today and their machinations.
He seems to be a real life version of the Nutty Professor.
Now I don’t know the Prof but when is his retirement? 8 yrs from now?
I’m old enough to remember the World’s Entering New Ice Age scare(s) of the 1970s. They were real. Whole learned articles appeared in Scientific American, New York Times, in atmospheric and climate journals. Encyclopedia Britannia, Comptons, other majors had both main-book articles and their “Science Year” summaries proclaimed near-near future famines, doom. Ice ages.
I’m also old enough to remember all sorts of other bûllsnot: the aluminum pan scare – it’ll give you Alzheimers (it doesn’t); the cranberry scare – they’ll give you hepatitus or something (it doesn’t); or in 2008 the Great KillerTomato scare. No one would serve ’em. Turned out to be green peppers. Oops. 2006 Organic Spinach scare. 2001 West Nile Fever scare. $200,000,000 spent. No one got the fever. Killer Bees. Radon Gas. SARS. Seat Belt Conspiracy.
It never stops: The Media knows in its gut that fear fear! sells eyeballs. Sells talking points. Things for people “in the know” to talk about FIRST, that everyone following slavishly hops on board. Remember Y2K crisis? Wait… what crisis? Remember post 9–11 across the land for months, the posted Army troops leading to major bridges? Or for months the Air Force escorts (2 of them!) for every incoming international airline flight?
I’m not saying that “we should do nothing” when bonafide problems, issues, “scares” turn up. Who knows – since we read history, it is certain that the 1917 influenza pandemic with a massive killer. Some QUITE real. 1969 Hong Kong influenza… greater than 1,000,000 worldwide perished. 1957 Asian Flu … over 2,000,000 worldwide. The millions killed in the 9 Cholera pandemics. Plagues, measles, smallpox.
Sure BIG SCARES are seriously to be alert to. But… some are just silly. The present day “tipping point crisis” is just one such. There is almost no evidence that the world “tips”. Or… if it does (and it certainly did when it came out of the last Freez-o-cene), or the Little Ice Age … when it does decide to flip – mankind, no matter how much we tend to fret, seems to NEVER have been the root of any of it. Pandemics, yes.
GoatGuy
“I’m old enough to remember the World’s Entering New Ice Age scare(s) of the 1970s. They were real. Whole learned articles appeared in Scientific American, New York Times, in atmospheric and climate journals. Encyclopedia Britannia, Comptons, other majors had both main-book articles and their “Science Year” summaries proclaimed near-near future famines, doom. Ice ages.”
May have been real but outnumbered by studies predicting warming.
So the media found them nice and sensational.
“Ice Age cometh” will do that.
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/2008BAMS2370.1
“May have been real but outnumbered by studies predicting warming.”
Only according to Wikipedia vandal “Stoat” Connelly.
Those of us who were around at the time and had access to the scientific literature know different.
You left out the Zika virus. Now it’s found to have potential benefits for eliminating cancerous cells in brain tissues.
I am curious to the absence of their forecast. They see, in 8 more years, the beginning of the end, yet they could not see, 2017-2018; fires and floods in California, while at the same time, historical cold and snow on the East Coast.
The Prof has clearly been reading the Guardian too often (once is too often!). You may know that the Guardian is in financial difficulties and that its print run is the lowest since the pre-Cambrian. Most of these are bought by the BBC as a sort of not-very-well-hidden state subsidy. How one of these valuable copies got to Arizona is a mystery, and probably a cause of climate change. By coincidence I recently read that at the present rate of losses, the Guardian will run out of money in exactly 8 years time. So we will have something to celebrate in thermagedon. Get the champagne in.
It would be interesting to get this Guy McPherson that predicts a thermageddon pronto, and Valentina Zharkova that predicts a mini-ice age any time now, in the same TV show. The audience would be thrilled. Great popcorn time.