Yes, we’ve heard this before, again, and again, and again. Further, I’m not sure this fellow qualifies as a “Top Climate Scientist”.
From some website called GritPost:
Top Climate Scientist: Humans Will Go Extinct if We Don’t Fix Climate Change by 2023
A top climate scientist is warning that climate change will wipe out all of humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years.
In a recent speech at the University of Chicago, James Anderson — a professor of atmospheric chemistry at Harvard University — warned that climate change is drastically pushing Earth back to the Eocene Epoch from 33 million BCE, when there was no ice on either pole. Anderson says current pollution levels have already catastrophically depleted atmospheric ozone levels, which absorb 98 percent of ultraviolet rays, to levels not seen in 12 million years.
Anderson’s assessment of humanity’s timeline for action is likely accurate, given that his diagnosis and discovery of Antarctica’s ozone holes led to the Montreal Protocol of 1987. Anderson’s research was recognized by the United Nations in September of 1997. He subsequently received the United Nations Vienna Convention Award for Protection of the Ozone Layer in 2005, and has been recognized by numerous universities and academic bodies for his research.
While some governments have made commitments to reduce carbon emissions (Germany has pledged to cut 95 percent of carbon emissions by 2050), Anderson warned that those measures were insufficient to stop the extinction of humanity by way of a rapidly changing climate. Instead, Anderson is calling for a Marshall Plan-style endeavor in which all of the world takes extreme measures to transition off of fossil fuels completely within the next five years.
Recovery is all but impossible, he argued, without a World War II-style transformation of industry—an acceleration of the effort to halt carbon pollution and remove it from the atmosphere, and a new effort to reflect sunlight away from the earth’s poles.
This has do[sic] be done, Anderson added, within the next five years.
“The chance that there will be any permanent ice left in the Arctic after 2022 is essentially zero,” Anderson said, with 75 to 80 percent of permanent ice having melted already in the last 35 years.
Anderson’s prediction of Arctic sea ice disappearing by 2022 may be closer to reality than a lot of us would hope. In 2016, University of Reading professor Ed Hawkins compiled global temperature data dating back to 1850, prior to the Industrial Revolution of the early 20th century and the oil boom, and turning the data into a time-lapse GIF. The most alarming part of the data showed that temperatures began rising exponentially faster at the start of the 21st century and show no signs of slowing down:
Spiralling global temperatures from 1850-2016 (full animation) https://t.co/YETC5HkmTr pic.twitter.com/Ypci717AHq
— Ed Hawkins (@ed_hawkins) May 9, 2016
Yawn…
Full story here if you want to bother with it.
He is kind of right. About 150,000 humans go extinct every day, so in 2023 it is expected that around 55 million humans will go extinct.
The truth is that nobody gets out alive.
Wow…… how underwhelming
I would bet the farm that Professor Anderson is wrong. 🙂
The more the alarmists wail into the wind – the better it is.
Overall ozone has not depleted to any great extent. Sure it has seasonal variations since the start of the satellite era. Seasonal Ozone dilution is a key metric in measuring the transition from cool into warm periods and vice versa.
Last year on this site I forecast after extensive research and throwing the CFC out the window (forecast – not guessed, and I cant find that forecast, still looking) that 2017 would be very similar to 2012, it was just below and the second lowest on record. The first and only prediction since the so called ozone hole was identified, and it was correct. My forecast for global ACE was also close to the mark.
Lets have some fun. This year if El Nino conditions stay away and similar conditions prevail, the ozone hole will be in the same vicinity as last year. Lets say some where around 2012 to 2017.
Global ACE will be about the historical mean with an East Pacific bias rather than Atlantic.
Normally the forecast would be made in the first week of July, and I reserve the right to fine tune at that point. By all means make your own forecast.
With regards
PS, I will make the Arctic sea ice extent forecast in the first week of July.
They are all connected.
Regards
“James Anderson — a professor of atmospheric chemistry at Harvard University”
Can anybody explain to me what the difference is between Atmospheric Physics and Atmospheric Chemistry ? It seems that Anderson has swallowed some hallucinogenic drug that he concocted in his lab. He should stick to Atmospheric Physics. Atmospheric Chemistry is too dangerous for him.
Not seen in 12 million years? What was the proxy? What were the error bars? Twice the size of the plot? Did they hide the incline?
This section was enough for me as I was LAUGHING hard!
“In a recent speech at the University of Chicago, James Anderson — a professor of atmospheric chemistry at Harvard University — warned that climate change is drastically pushing Earth back to the Eocene Epoch from 33 million BCE, when there was no ice on either pole.”
Polar ice began growing 34 million years ago…….
Formation Of Ice Sheets 34 Million Years Ago Changed Ocean Acidity
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080428130641.htm
Hmmm…. Anderson’s “Arctic sea ice disappearing by 2022″… I’ll take that bet.
Then there’s Anderson’s “Climate change will wipe out all of humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years.” Guess we’re doomed, as — unless our alien overlords assume planetary control over Earth — there’s no way on God’s green Earth that fossil fuel use is going to stop, or even reduce from current levels, within five years… or fifty years… or perhaps 150 years.
Zero fossil fuel use by 2023?… I’ll take that bet, too.
Cue trolls to once again proclaim that nobody is predicting catastrophe.
“at the University of Chicago, James Anderson — a professor of atmospheric chemistry at Harvard University — warned that climate change is drastically pushing Earth back to the Eocene Epoch”
Yeah, lets not just ignore this.
One man’s opinion, with a big helping of gloom and doom thrown in, just like the tipping point zealots. Ignore it.
The ignoramus doesn’t even know when the Eocene was.
Why not ignore it? There isn’t a shred of evidence to support the notion that CO2 is even a problem, much less one that is going to kill all of us.
Ignore it? I’m laughing my fracking ass off at it!
We aren’t even pushing Earth back to the Pliocene Epoch…
What Anderson means by a WWII-type Marshall plan is that the USA must cough up a whole lot of money. If the ozone levels are depleted to the what he claims wouldn’t life on earth already be dying at unimaginable rates?
James was born in 1944, same as me.
James was from Spokane WA. I now live in WA State.
James and I have both made stupid statements in our lives.
I quit that when I turned 14.
If he’s so concerned, why isn’t he (I assume) advocating nuclear power?
How many idiots will be incited to violence by this nonsense?
Yawn………..
This story reminds me of one of my earlier verses:
Coming Out on Climate
Authority figures, foretelling
Hot doom (and our “myths” dispelling),
Cast great dispersions
On skeptical versions
(Which keep carbon credits from selling)!
Now, shriller and louder they’re yelling,
To drown out the doubters’ rebelling!
New taxes are “just”
When you’ve gained public trust,
So “the questioners” (quickly) they’re quelling.
I’ve arrived at this realization;
Our industrial civilization
Can only be sin
If the ‘green’ Marxists win-
On their platform of demonization!
Pop Piasa : RE LINE 3 :
Cast great dispersions
would read better as “Cast great aspersions”
to my mind ! Regards , Trevor.
Thanks Trevor! I must have had an eggcorn brainfart again. (at least I didn’t say “cornegg” this time)
This is a wonderful learning place indeed for old dogs to learn new tricks.
Okay, line three is now
“Cast foul aspersions”
(with credit to Trevor) Good editors are rare these days.
James Anderson is in his mid-70’s. Me thinks he’s just looking for “one last hurrah”.
Or some sizable supplemental income…
Plus, he’s old enough he won’t be around to face ridicule when proven wrong.
It’s amazing to me that this is coming to the fore on a day when the inestimable father of climate alarmism James Hansen actually said in a Boston Globe OpEd that: “The notion that renewable energies and batteries alone will provide all needed energy is fantastical. It is also a grotesque idea, because of the staggering environmental pollution from mining and material disposal, if all energy was derived from renewables and batteries. Worse, tricking the public to accept the fantasy of 100 percent renewables means that, in reality, fossil fuels reign and climate change grows.” Shocking I know but true!
So this guy discovered a lack of ozone in the stratosphere above the Antarctic, hasn’t predicted anything accurately in his life but that somehow means his “assessment of humanity’s timeline for action is likely accurate”.
We have a natural experiment here, and it will be instructive to observe the results. What Anderson is reported as saying is that
If you take this seriously, this means among other things China going from 10 billion plus tons a year, and more than half the world’s coal, to zero, and no coal. Or only coal if the CO2 is captured. By 2023.
Obviously this is not going to happen. But the interesting natural experiment is whether any of the activists who pick up this story stay with the ‘all of the world’ element. Will they advocate China going from 10 billion to zero by 2023?
My prediction is that the story will be picked up, and that local activists will use it only to justify unilateral action by their own countries, US, the UK and Australia.
China and the developing world will vanish from view. Anyone suggesting that the diagnosis requires China to go to zero will be met with a chorus of abuse and denial.
And so a prediction that if the world does not go to zero emissions by 2023 humanity will go extinct will metamorphose into a demand by US activists that the US unilaterally go to zero emissions by that date, that is, eliminating its 5 billion tons a year, while the rest of the world carries on emitting and growing their 32 billion tons.
Watch for it, because it will happen, as it has in the past. This is part of the recent history of climate activism. The advocacy of local expensive measures which fail to address an allegedly global problem, and the refusal to advocate the global measures which are required by what the activists claim to believe.
And then ask why, if they were really concerned about global climate, and believed Anderson’s predictions, anyone would behave like this. Hint: maybe its not global emissions they are trying to change.
I started to read the IPCC Climate Change Synthesis Report of 2015. They have a diagram pg. 48 of Contributions to observed surface temperature changes over period 1951 to 2010. The observed warming according to the IPCC has been 0.64 C or about 1.1 C per century . In the graph they give range estimates of all the different factors that could have caused this based on degrees C. Of the non human causes they give two. 1) Natural forcings and 2) Natural internal variability However they give each one of those two factors exactly the same range of -0.1 to +0.1 C. This shows me that they did not do any science What they did was calculate the pause rate of warming from 1998 to 2012 as 0.15C and prorated the pause length of 15 years to the total period of 60 years and observed that without the natural causes of pause the rate of warming would have been 0 .15C. Since it showed 0.05 C according to their combined sea and temperature data; so that the difference is 0.1 which is what they say the natural forcing is. They don’t even bother to combine the two natural causes into 1 temperature range unlike what they did for the different AGW forcings.
https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/syr/SYR_AR5_FINAL_full_wcover.pdf
Another gem in the report is on age 73. I quote
“Warming will continue beyond 2100 under all RCP scenarios
except RCP2.6. Surface temperatures will remain approximately constant
at elevated levels for many centuries after a complete cessation
of net anthropogenic CO2 emissions (see Section 2.2.5 for the relationship
between CO2 emissions and global temperature change.). A large
fraction of anthropogenic climate change resulting from CO2 emissions
is irreversible on a multi-century to millennial timescale,….”
Did they have a time machine to find this out? Oh I forgot the computer model says so. The IPCC is a junk body practicing junk science with junk scientists.
“Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.” — George Orwell
Harvard students brainwashed/educated by delusional intellectuals. Heaven help them!
Since Feynman died in February 1988, the world has been at the mercy of junk scientists like this guy. Witness the 2 big scams of the UN 1) Ozone hole scam 2) Global warming scam. I listed them in chronological order.
“Anderson’s assessment of humanity’s timeline for action is likely accurate, given that his diagnosis and discovery of Antarctica’s ozone holes ”
Hahahahahahahaha! How ridiculous! Just because he discovered a hole in the ozone layer doesn’t mean he can predict the inability of man to adapt to a degree or two of warming, especially given the fact man inhabits environments encompassing +50C to -50C.
Well if humans are going to be going extinct by 2023, I fail to see why anybody should bother giving Proffessor Anderson any more funding, particularly if his proposals for further funding extend beyond say 2020.
The waste of money and wealth in providing any further finance to Anderson seems completely unjustified if we will all be extinct by 2023.
So save the bother and the money by defunding him as he himself is claiming , he along with the rest of us won’t be around at all after 2023 to take advantage of any future funding .
Of course his findings are also irrelevant as there won’t be anybody around to read and study them. Although why anybody would bother to even give a quick glance at his claim is open to question.