Guest essay by Patrick Moore, PhD
Some time ago it struck me that the majority of alleged environmental catastrophes and threats are invisible or very remote, thus making it virtually impossible for the average person to validate them through observation. Observations, along with replications of those observations, are the very foundation of the scientific method. Seeing is believing, and seeing the same result again and again under similar circumstances reinforces the belief. Is it possible that activist groups and the media choose to cite supposed catastrophes and threats that are invisible, very remote or both because the majority of people cannot verify them in person and therefore must rely on the activists, the media, and other third parties to tell them the truth? At the conclusion of this essay, the reader may judge. Here’s a list of some of the alleged invisible catastrophes and threats of doom, beginning with one of the former.
Coral reefs around the world are dying
This is only one of the many supposed catastrophes blamed on invisible human CO2 emissions and human-caused climate change. In April 2016 most major media outlets ran a story implying that 93% of the Great Barrier Reef, the largest in the world, was “dead”, “nearly dead”, or “dying”.1 This was all based on a report that 93% of reefs in the northern section had “some bleaching”. “Some” could be only 1 percent. And bleaching is not death or even dying. It is a normal occurrence during periods of high heat and the coral usually recovers. Of course, as with all species, some are dying and others are being born at any given time.
It is well known that the world’s warmest oceans are in the region of Indonesia, the Philippines, and the Solomon Islands. This area is called the Coral Triangle and it harbors the world’s largest number of coral species and the largest number of reef fish and other reef dwellers.2 Surely this puts to rest the assertion that the world’s seas are “too hot” for coral reefs due to climate change.
recover once a hot spell ends.
How is the average person in Europe or North America supposed to “see for themselves” what is really occurring? Not only is the reef thousands of miles away from most people and far offshore, it is below the surface of the sea. Hundreds of millions of people were told the reef was doomed when we now know much of the bleached coral has already recovered. But that fact was barely reported in major media outlets. Fake news flies, the real story never gets off the ground.
Polar bears will become extinct
Again, climate change is the culprit. Melting Arctic ice, thinner ice, and not enough seals to eat are said to be a threat to the bear’s very existence.3 How many people can go to the Arctic and get a good look at the polar bear population? The truth is the polar bear population has increased from about 6,000 – 8,000 in the 1960s to 25,000 – 28,000 today.4 This is due mainly to a treaty signed by all the Arctic nations in 1973 that ended the unregulated hunting of polar bears.5 There is no real reason to fear for their demise. We know polar bears survived the last interglacial period, the Eocene Eemian, 120,000 years ago, which was warmer than the current Holocene interglacial period. But photos of old starving bears, bears supposedly “trapped” on ice floes, and bears that are thin after a long hibernation, are effectively employed to perpetuate the myth that they are threatened with extinction.
Climate catastrophe is inevitable due an increase in atmospheric CO2 if we don’t end the use of fossil fuels
Not only is CO2 invisible, is also odorless and tasteless so cannot be sensed without sophisticated equipment. Yet we are told it is causing a catastrophe of global proportions. The facts that CO2 is lower in the atmosphere today than it has been through nearly all the history of life and that global temperature during the ongoing 2.5 million-year long Pleistocene Ice Age is colder than it has been for the past 250 million years are simply ignored.6 Never mind the fact that CO2 is the basis for all life on Earth. CO2 in the atmosphere and in the oceans is where the carbon in carbon-based life originates. At least some attention is now given to the fact that the increase in our CO2 emissions is causing a greening of the Earth and the spreading of trees to areas that were too dry for them under low-CO2 conditions. During the past 150 million years CO2 had steadily declined to such a low level that plants were seriously threatened with starvation during the peak of the last few glacial cycles. Thankfully, our CO2 emissions have inadvertently reversed that trend, bringing some balance back to the global carbon cycle. All of this can be verified yet the narrative of “climate catastrophe”, which has no basis in science, is hollered from rooftops around the world.
Pesticide residues in our food causes cancer, birth defects, autism, and brain damage
One “health food” website claims pesticide residues in food cause nine diseases. It’s unfortunate that we can’t see, smell, or taste these “residues”. They cannot be observed which makes it easy to invent stories about an “invisible poison”.
and vegetables that have been sprayed with lawfully
approved pesticides.
In 1997, the Cancer Research Institutes of the United States and Canada published a multi-year study of all scientific publications reporting on any connection between cancer in humans and pesticide residues in food. They did not find a single piece of credible evidence connecting the two. And yet they concluded that 30 percent of human cancers are caused by tobacco consumption, from a natural plant, and that 35% of cancers are caused by poor diet, mainly too much fat and cholesterol, also natural substances.8
“Africa’s Oldest Baobab Trees are Dying at an Unprecedented Rate, and Climate Change may be to Blame.”
This is the actual headline from a USA Today article on June 11, 2018. Nearly every major news outlet ran with the story as if it were a harbinger of global doom.9 Even the online version of Encyclopedia Britannica gave credence to the story. No dead trees were depicted in any of the many articles I searched on the Internet. My first rule of critical thinking is never to trust a report that begins with the words “may”, “might’ or “could”. It should read, “may or may not”, might or might not, etc.
Many readers may or may not have stopped to think that it is perfectly natural for the oldest individuals of any species to die before the younger ones eventually pass away as they too grow old. It might be worth worrying if the youngest baobab trees were dying at an unprecedented rate if such a rate could be established with credible data. On the other hand the natural survival rate of the young of many species is very low.
As for an “unprecedented rate” of older trees dying, the only data provided in the source paper is from a Romanian chemistry professor who claims, “Eight of the 13 oldest trees in Africa have died over the past decade.” 10
Baobabs have a wide distribution in Africa, across the sub-Saharan belt and down the east coast as far as South Africa. My research produced no estimate of the total number of Baobab trees in Africa but one could hazard a guess that there are tens if not hundreds of thousands. Without a doubt it would not be unprecedented for eight of the oldest trees to die in a ten-year period. This is less than one tree per year. This might or might not be the silliest story to be taken seriously by the worldwide media lately. Even Fox News covered it.
GMOs will harm us and damage the environment.
A cob of conventional corn looks identical to a cob of GM corn. The GM corn may actually look better because it was better protected from insect damage due to the modification of its genes.
GM zealots must resort to scary fake images to drive their campaigns.
The USFDA says they are “substantially equivalent”, in other words not different from each other in any meaningful way. Yet hundreds of activist groups insist there is something in the GM corn, obviously something invisible, that will do evil things to the planet and us.11
Monsanto, basically a seed and crop protection company, is vilified as if it were producing weapons of mass destruction and using them on civilians. Every credible food, health, and science organization says GM food is perfectly safe 12 But the propaganda about an invisible poison is effective, and because people can’t “see for themselves” they worry a lot about themselves and their children.
Farmed salmon are full of poisons and they are destroying the wild salmon.
Of course the “poisons” are invisible and the salmon are below the surface of the sea where only a diver could inspect them. The anti-salmon farm activists contend that farmed salmon are spreading disease and sea-lice to wild salmon stocks.13 In fact the farmed salmon are raised in land-based hatcheries and are disease-free and lice-free when they are placed into pens in the sea. It is the wild salmon that give diseases and lice to the farmed fish. But the activists get away with their “story” and the media goes along because it sells papers and their readers and viewers can’t go down in the ocean to check out the truth for themselves. Farming salmon and the many other species raised in aquaculture is a sustainable development. It takes fishing pressure off wild stocks, many of which are seriously depleted. It produces one of the healthiest sources of protein and contains beneficial omega-3 oils. And aquaculture provides employment for tens of millions of people worldwide, often in remote coastal and inland communities.14
Nuclear energy is too dangerous and radiation will kill you15
Have you ever seen any nuclear radiation? No, because it is invisible – you need a Geiger counter to detect it, which most homes are not equipped with. The fact is in terms of fatalities per unit of energy produced; nuclear is the safest technology of them all. There has been only one nuclear accident that caused death to civilians, Chernobyl, and according to the World Health Organization it was responsible for 56 deaths.16 More than that were killed in a single hydroelectric dam accident in Russia in 2009. 17 In the Fukushima incident in 2011 no one died from radiation and according the Radiation Effects Research Foundation in Hiroshima, there will be no discernable health effects in the future.18 Yet activist groups have so scared the public with this invisible “threat” that Germany has decided to shut all its nuclear plants and many countries have decided not to build any more. Meanwhile China, India, and Russia have surpassed the West in nuclear technology and are building scores of new nuclear plants because they know it is the future of electricity production.
There is a “sea of plastic” the size of Texas in the North Pacific Gyre north of Hawaii
First question: have you ever seen an aerial or satellite photograph of the “sea of plastic”? Probably not, because it doesn’t really exist. But it makes a good word- picture and after all plastic is full of deadly poisons and is killing seabirds and marine mammals by the thousands.
This is also fake news and gives rise to calls for bans on plastic and other drastic measures. Silly people are banning plastic straws as if they were a dire threat to the environment. The fact is a piece of plastic floating in the ocean is no more toxic than a piece of wood. Wood has been entering the sea in vast quantities for millions of years. And in the same way that floating woody debris provides habitat for barnacles, seaweeds, crabs, and many other species of marine life, so does floating plastic. That’s why seabirds and fish eat the bits of plastic, to get the food that is growing on them. While it is true that some individual birds and animals are harmed by plastic debris, discarded fishnets in particular, this is far outweighed by the additional food supply it provides. Plastic is not poison or pollution, it is litter.
“There are a possible 3,000,000 undersea volcanoes doing something unobserved.”
This is a direct quote from a Science Daily article on February 15, 2015.19 The article refers to “a new study” attributed to the Earth Institute at Columbia University, which speculates that millions of undersea volcanoes are spewing millions of tons of CO2 into the ocean. No mention is made of the fact that the US Geological Service estimates that volcanic activity produces less than one percent of the CO2 emissions produced from human use of fossil fuels,20 or that there is really no direct evidence that CO2 causes global warming as claimed by so many activist scientists, media and politicians. The only proven effect of CO2 is to increase the growth of trees and food crops and to make plants more efficient with water. This has resulted in a “greening of the Earth” and the spread of trees into areas that were previously too dry for them. For a discussion on the important role of CO2 as the basis of all life on Earth you can download my paper on the subject here.21
Ocean “Acidification” will kill all the coral reefs and shellfish in the world
Once again, invisible CO2 will wreck havoc by so drastically lowering the pH of the oceans it will make it impossible for the out-of-sight corals and shellfish to produce their calcareous shells, thus undermining the entire food chain in the sea and destroying fisheries worldwide. This story was invented around 2004; co-incident with the beginning of the 20-year “pause” in global warming that began around 1998. The fact is coral reefs evolved when CO2 was at least 10 times higher than today and corals have survived and thrived for hundreds of millions of years since then. It is also a fact that the Humboldt Current off Peru, which has the highest CO2 and lowest pH in the world’s oceans, produces 20 percent of the world’s fish catch. In other words more CO2 is good for growth in the sea in the same way it is on land. It doesn’t take much research to conclude that ocean “acidification” is one big fabrication. For an in-depth discussion my paper on the subject can be downloaded here. 22
And finally,
“Climate Change is Killing the Cedars of Lebanon”
A July 18, 2018 article in The New York Times reports that rising temperatures are driving the Cedars of Lebanon to extinction.23 All the numerous photos in the article are of healthy living trees with the exception of one lonely sawed-off stump that is claimed to have died from an insect infestation. In flowery language the anguish of impending doom is expressed with appropriate references to Jesus and God. In fact the range of the Cedars of Lebanon has been drastically reduced over the centuries by cutting the trees for timber and converting the land to other uses – a classic case of deforestation as opposed to reforestation. Grazing land for goats, sheep and cattle have replaced the forests over wide areas and the grazers ensure that no new trees can establish themselves. Most of the remaining cedars are in protected reserves where there is no evidence of impending extinction or mass die-off. A careful reader will detect that all the dire predictions are just that; unsupported speculation into the future. Very few people have the ability to go to Lebanon and make a thorough investigation into the state of the cedar forests. No doubt if a knowledgeable person reported that the existing trees were in a state of good health the New York Times would not print it.
Conclusion
Is it just a coincidence that 12 of the most publicized alleged environmental catastrophes and threats of doom happen to be invisible or very remote, or both? Or is it just so much easier to create a fake “narrative” when the public can’t check it out for themselves? I will leave that judgement to the reader.
REFERENCES:
1 Chris D’Angelo, “93 Percent Of The Great Barrier Reef Is Practically Dead – Climate Change is Destroying Earth’s Largest https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/climate-change-destroying-great-barrier-reef_us_571918e6e4b0d912d5fde8d4
2 “Coral Triangle Facts”. World Wildlife Fund, http://wwf.panda.org/knowledge_hub/where_we_work/coraltriangle/coraltrianglefacts/
3 Stephen Leahy, “Polar Bears Really Are Starving Because of Global Warming, Study Shows” National Geographic, February 1, 2018. https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/02/polar-bears-starve-melting-sea-ice-global-warming- study-beaufort-sea-environment/
4 Susan Crockford, “Science, optimism, and the resilience of polar bears in an ever-changing Arctic”. January 15, 2018. https://polarbearscience.com/2018/01/15/science-optimism-and-the-resilience-of-polar-bears-in-an-ever-changing- arctic/
5 “Agreement on the Conservation of Polar Bears.” IUCN-SSG Polar Bear Specialist Group, Oslo, 15 November 1973. http://pbsg.npolar.no/en/agreements/agreement1973.html
6 “Carbon Dioxide through Geologic Time.” University of California San Diego. http://earthguide.ucsd.edu/virtualmuseum/climatechange2/07_1.shtml
7 Patrick Moore, “The Positive Impact of Human CO2 Emissions on the Survival of Life on Earth”. Frontier Centre For Public Policy, June 2016. https://www.dropbox.com/s/uhq557vrnww0ala/UpdatedCO2Paper.pdf?dl=0
8 Len Ritter et al, “Report of a Panel on the Relationship between Public Exposure to Pesticides and Cancer,” Cancer 80 (1997): 2019–33. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/(SICI)1097-0142(19971115)80:10%3C2019::AID- CNCR21%3E3.0.CO;2-Z
9 “Africa’s Oldest Baobab Trees are Dying at an Unprecedented Rate, and Climate Change may be to Blame.” USA Today, June 11, 2018. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/06/11/baobab-trees-dying-africa-climate- change/690946002/
10 Ibid.
11 Mike Adams, “The GMO debate is over; GM crops must be immediately outlawed; Monsanto halted from threatening humanity.” Natural News, September 21, 2012 https://www.naturalnews.com/037262_GMO_Monsanto_debate.html
12 David Tribe, “600+ Published Safety Assessments.” http://gmopundit.blogspot.ca/p/450-published-safety-assessments.html
13 “W5 investigates the battle over farmed Atlantic salmon on the B.C. coast.” CTV, October 14, 2017. https://sooke.pocketnews.ca/w5-investigates-the-battle-over-farmed-atlantic-salmon-on-the-b-c-coast/
14 “State of the World’s Fisheries and Aquaculture.” Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2016.
15 Caroline Lucas, “Why we must phase out nuclear power.” The Guardian, February 17, 2012. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/feb/17/phase-out-nuclear-power
16 “Health Effects of the Chernobyl Accident.” World Health Organization, Geneva, 2006. http://www.who.int/ionizing_radiation/chernobyl/who_chernobyl_report_2006.pdf
17 “2009 Sayano–Shushenskaya power station accident.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Sayano%E2%80%93Shushenskaya_power_station_accident
18 Richard Knox, “Why We May Not Learn Much New About Radiation Risks From Fukushima.” NPR, March 24, 2011. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2011/03/24/134833008/why-we-may-not-learn-much-new-about- radiation-risks-from-fukushima
19 “Seafloor volcano pulses may alter climate: Strikingly regular patterns, from weeks to eons.” Science Daily, Feb. 15, 2015. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/02/150205142921.htm
20 “Are Volcanoes or Humans Harder on the Atmosphere?” Scientific American,
(not dated) https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/earthtalks-volcanoes-or-humans/
21 Patrick Moore, “The Positive Impact of Human CO2 Emissions on the Survival of Life on Earth”. Frontier Centre For Public Policy, June 2016. https://www.dropbox.com/s/uhq557vrnww0ala/UpdatedCO2Paper.pdf?dl=0
22 Patrick Moore, “Ocean ‘Acidification’ Alarmism In Perspective.” Frontier Centre For Public Policy, November 2015. https://www.dropbox.com/s/50yr1b10fyj67t3/UpdatedOceanPaper.pdf?dl=0
23 “Climate Change is Killing the Cedars of Lebanon”. New York Times, July 18, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/07/18/climate/lebanon-climate-change-environment-cedars.html
A bit late to the party here but, for real reasons, I had to look up mercury poisoning from fish (my son is an avid camper and lake fisherman here). I didn’t spend a whole lot of time on it, but it kinda looked like the usual pile of crap at first blush. Can anyone enlighten me on whether or not this is real and also extend it to ocean tuna. Is this all made up too?
Mercury, in the right form and dosage, caused significant health problems in some large episodes. In one case, a huge amount of methyl mercury was dumped in a bay in Minamata, Japan, over a 36 year period, contaminating all the seafood. Other events took place in Japan, as well.
The questions are, what is the minimum dosage necessary to cause harm, and what form(s) must it be in. The speculation is that predator fish will essentially concentrate the mercury consumed in the smaller prey. Then there are confounding issues, e.g., are pregnant women, their fetuses, and children more susceptible.
I think we can assume all of the formal warnings err on the side of caution.
You might want to find out the mercury levels in the waters you fish. You should be able to find that info with a little research. If they are higher than average, or you are concerned, and particularly if anyone consumes a lot of fish, inexpensive mercury testing kits can be purchased online that will show if the mercury content in a piece of fish is very high. If little or none is detected, you will at least no longer worry about that specific catch.
If the fishing expeditions are few and far between, and the fish are an occasional treat, I wouldn’t worry too much.
Jtom,
A small correction: it was metallic mercury that was spilled from a local electrolysis plant making chlorine in Minimata bay of Japan. That mercury was transformed to methylmercury by bacteria and then entered the food chain, with humans at the top. As local fisher’s families did eat the highest quantities, they were the first to show the “Minimata desease”, mainly from nerves attacked by methyl mercury.
After the discovery of the role of methylmercury, the Japanese were the first to move to membrane electrolyses and many chlorine factories all over the world now use that method or have stringent cleaning methods for removing any mercury in waste waters.
Can you trust anyone ?
https://www.dropbox.com/s/zd68ltxej1ge7fu/Courier%20Mail%209%20January%202016.pdf?dl=0
This guy has been convicted .
https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/blogs/tim-blair/climate-fraud-goes-to-prison/news-story/7a35359b60a615c2b61d99e08204b263
Rosco
““On at least 25 occasions, he forged the signature of his supervisor.”
The signature is settled.”
HaHaHa……..Love it.
““What he bought was things that he did not need. It wasn’t an addiction such as gambling, or spending on his own lifestyle, it seemed to be bizarre things — I think you could say ridiculous things,” he said.
He’s a climate scientist. “Ridiculous things” are his speciality.”
ROTFLMAO…………. Seriously?!
The journalist Tim Blair of the The Daily Telegraph is our friend!!!!!
“Coral reefs around the world are dying”
the article you cite makes no such argument.
a. dont get your science from the msm.
b. when you ignore “a” try to avoid strawmanning them.
the msm is bad.
try not to be worse than they are.
thats a low bar to jump.
in the past wuwt could at least be less stupid than the msm.
now they race the msm to the depths of stupid
A lot of discussion on the very distant past in the replies. With all delving into the past is there info any where that would tell us whether the earth experienced any changes in its proximity to the Sun or Planets? Were there any additional planets during those ancient periods of time.
“Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it … ” Jonathan Swift, 1710
Fake environmentalist vs. Real environmentalist
Dear Patrick,
congratulations once again, great article! Just two observations.
About GMOs: it is so simple to scare folks with food because of evolution. For millennia we need to trust others which food is poisonous and which is not, particularly women need to know best. Those who didn’t simply died.
About public mistrust in GMOs: in modern times people DO NOT READ any longer information. We published a book (https://geanetic.com) first in Slovenian, than English, now Korean. Slovenian version was distributed for free to all Slovenian libraries. On the occasion of public debate about GMOs with some 200 present I asked attendants how many of them actual read it. One lifted hand and sad – I borrowed it but could not read more than 3 pages… People need confirmation of their existing believes not opposite information.
About invisible poisons. I think you missed diesel engine exhausts. Tiny particles and nitrous oxides are alleged cause of hundred thousands of premature deaths. I was trying to search Web of Science but as plant scientist could not get clear picture. In fact in medical literature I found very few articles. I believe this need attention. Smells to me as another invisible but non-existing scare.
Absolutely correct. We have all been breathing in this nitrous oxide to an increasing degree as massively increased numbers of diesel vehicles have been put on the roads since they were first introduced decades ago, yet, only now do we hear that it is dangerous to our health. At the same time, the government is saying that the health of the nation is such that we are all living longer and our future old age state pension costs will grow proportionately. Diesel health dangers are fake news, a ‘growing older’ population is fact.
George Lawson
From memory, some 40,000 premature deaths in the UK were attributed to diesel fumes by a number of doctors.
Upon investigation, I believe it was found these deaths were largely amongst the elderly and the premature period ranged from some hours to a few days.
I make no claim as to the truth of the criticism, but if it’s true, there are a number of doctors who need re training.
Patrick Moore said: “That’s why seabirds and fish eat the bits of plastic, to get the food that is growing on them.”
What is your evidence to support that claim?
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/284/1860/20171000
Chris
From the abstract:
“Despite its pervasiveness and severity, our mechanistic understanding of this maladaptive foraging behaviour is incomplete.”
In other words, ‘we don’t know’ but it’s ‘pervasive’ ‘severe’ and ‘maladaptive’.
“To our knowledge, this is the first experimental evidence that adult anchovy use odours to forage.”
In other words, ‘we’ll lay claim to a new phenomenon in the hope we make money from it by staking our claim based on anchovies, no other species mind you, just anchovies’
Nice try Chris but you would have been better spending your time trying to find the empirical evidence that CO2 causes global warming.
Or are you happier finding fishy research?
you couldn’t be more wrong and more evidence free than you are about pesticides. Get off the corporate fake-science cloud and out of the corporate controlled FDA bubble- chemicals that kill plants and bugs will slowly kill you too. No brainer. To believe anything else is madness. Especially when they destroy your gut micro biome like glyphosate does. it’s a registered antibiotic. start here gmwatch.org
We, in the West, are all eating tons of processed food, and tons of food grown with pesticides, and yet we are all living longer.
The fact that ever increasing consumption of these products accompanied by lengthening life expectancy would seem to contradict your assertion that these things are particularly bad. After washing and in the levels that we consume these things, they obviously can not be that bad for us, or we would all be dying earlier and earlier.
That is pure unadulterated BS. Monsanto registered it’s antimicrobial properties as a parasitic killer. It is not a registered antibiotic. The website you linked is a pure fact free scaremongering website.
Ever read this?
http://fafdl.org/blog/2017/04/13/glyphosate-vs-caffeine-acute-and-chronic-toxicity-assessments-explained/
All of these “invisible” environmental disasters are in one way or another an attack on modern civilization, especially capitalism. The general public’s reaction is more like the reaction in the little boy who cried wolf fable.
I dealt with both sides of an endangered species issue in Florida. While the rank and file members that belong to the “species club” believed the species was in the verge of extinction, the leaders of the club and the government technocrats knew better. When I was a middle level bureaucrat the club and species specific technocrats tried twice to recruit me to the cause. When I argued that we had more of the species than anytime in a century, because I was on the water almost daily and saw them, I expected them to say “no way.” Instead they said, “Oh, but we can use them to stop coastal development, therefore habitat destruction and end the boating industry in the state, so there will be less people fishing and crowding the waterways.” In other words it had nothing to do with saving the species. They were using a charismatic megafauna as a blunt instrument to attack business and coastal development. Now there are lots of reasons to carefully manage coastal development but the false use of the status of an endangered species had a near opposite effect. Meanwhile their strategy distracted from real well documented problems with known solutions. It also caused many in the public just to ignore any and all environmental concerns.
Edwin
A valuable, real life example.
And there was Limits to growth, und, und, und. . Find a problem no one can check, get academics funded to create a computer model to prove a chosen cause you can act against for some easy money and power is the problem, NOT what the complex causes might actually be, promote the belief to get funding using the pseudo science that cannot be proven, hnce not disproven, as with life after death you MUST believe and demands for proof make you a heretic, , then have laws passed to enforce subsidies that make a lot of profit from bogus remedies to non- problems that profit the remedial industries thus created, the makers of bogus snake oil cures for non problems, and the law makers who lounge after office in the subsidy trough they filled for their grateful industry lobbysists, that the well rewarded activisists created, e.g. Al Gore..
Same old legalised protection racket that was started by religion for control beyond the tribal level, exploiting unknowing and unsupported by fact fears created in an unknowing public by cynical extremists, with bot exploitative and bandwagon politicians working with the extremist and other lobbyists to defraud the public. All this is for short term personal profit that does nothing to solve any real long term environmental problem on the hard science facts no one seems to be interested in checking, by costing and publishing the actual effects of measures funded to remediate the claimed change on the ground, where we know them absolutely. The real inconvenient truth about Al Gore et al, it the hard physics expose the fraud of his solutions, even if his science is unprovable guesswork that doesn’t fit the facts either.
Not only are these supposed threats far removed from the supposedly threatened virtue signallers for profit, so impossible for most of the fearful flock to check, but they are also claimed to occur over generations so, like god, you must believe and not expect empirical evidence based proof from real data.
You must rather prefer to believe the distorted by grant specification computer models of the atmosphere designed to prove a single assumption as to cause to seeking out the complex natural evidence from empirical data evidence. data. Yet these models are overtly biased by specification and initial assumptions as to what is significant, and specified by IPCC grant funding to prove the cause of supposedly accelerating change is due to CO2 and other trace gas concentrations, not to determine causes within a holistic and cyclical global system, changing by far greater amounts, Feynman’s pseudo science of “experts on keyboards”..who “prove no laws”.
The final obscenity is that this causes rich nations to waste fortunes of OUR money, that they take from us by laws enacted on a fraudulent basis, on addressing global non problems no one can really measure over a human lifetime in preference to defending those actually threatened by much larger and real regional change, and building in vulnerable places, mostly through social problems of inappropriate building of human infrastructure in areas prone to flood, fire, etc, that also makes the risk worse and consequences larger, mplified by a snsationalist media, for whom tomorrow is a lifetime, with NO comprehension of the scale of change, the timescales it happens over, and the almost imerceptible effect ant people have on planetary scale change within a solar system.. (e.g. short term ignorant humans and short term greed dominate human transactions).
In summary the masses are exploited by the cynical rich and powerful using whatever eco crisis they can whip up legislation to make guaranteed money from by law. Unforgiveable, salaried hence vulnerable, so called scientists are paid to prove the claims, not independnently validate and challenge them, and seek other explanations. A disgrace to science. The people worst affected by the organised crime of an environmental protection racket are those most vulnerable, least able to pay the protection money of phoney energy subsidies and carbon taxes, or to secure the physical safety of themselves and their families from real problems, mostly created by over development and unsafe industrial practices where controls are not enforced, or simply ignored to make more money, or not even there to enforce (3rd World).
For me this is the real crime of so called modern environ-mentalists. The betrayal of the masses by the elites to enrich themselves in the name of environmentalism Al Gore and the others betray in so many easy to prove ways. Pseudo Science as a taxpayer funded University Industry, and the money its bad science (BS) creates, is the single driving force supporting the phoney money making eco religions, by whatever deceit it takes, including the fiscal corruption of academic institutions and democratically elected power, for the profit of insiders, at the actual fiscal and environmental expense of everyone else, through exploitation of a cynical and/or unknowing government and multi national bureaucracies using the BS. Once suckered in, the politicians become become a part of the legalised fraud, hence unable to change it for fear of the public response to the truth, as it dawns.
And why should they? They live so well in their elite palaces, well away from danger and daily reality, wallowing in the troughs of our money deceitfully taken from us by their laws to solve non-problems they invented and their paid academic enforcers produced a “consensus” to prove?
Most of these selfish, greedy sociopaths and ego maniacs will be dead before they are exposed for the simple con men they really are. Hardly a surprise that America is at the heart of all this. I expect Al Gore will be seen by history as the worst of these political con men. Piltdown Mann as the biggest betrayer of honest, open, independent, fact based science that we should expect from our public scientists for our money, instead of the unprovable pseudo science deceit to support the easy profit of the publisher and his sponsor that we get instead, that even seeks to keep the data that supposedly supports it from the scientific community that should be allowed to validate it, and fights that in the courts. Why?
I can only hope that the same fate will befall Piltdown Mann as befell Douglas Aadm’s fictional inventor of the Infinite Improbability Drive at the Galactic physics convention, where he was first recognised for his greatness, before being lybnched by a mob of his peers for being a smart arse.
So much death, misery and waste of literally Trillions on Dollars has already been caused by environmentalist’s irrational opposition to nuclear power, GM foods, that just work to improve life for all, denying plentiful cheap energy to the poor in developed colder countries and developing nations, and instead imposing weak intermittent “solutions” that just can’t and have no future as grid power, as well as denying them the genetically improved crops that can flourish in their environements, etc., All this out of an almost wholly bogus and easily disprovable obsession with how science actually works, how genomes change naturally, and how much CO2 emissions really affect climate stability, whereas the main effect of increased CO2 has been to improve our global environment for natural life with almost unmeasurable warming, that is within the noise of natural variation, before we descend, imperceptibly in human lifetimes as always, into the next ice age.
Question 1:
Is 0.8 degrees in 288 over 140 years, <0.3% a sensitive response to CO2, if CO2 was 100% causal and that increased by 40% over that time frame, as all agree, when the effect on greening is estimated at over 30%. One is senitive. The other isn't. Lovelock seems right, life/the biosphere does what it takes to keep the system in the optimum condition for life, given the planetary scale physics. The answer is so sensitivity is not proven.
Question2:
Why at the end of an interglacial 7Ka temperature rise, does it suddenly stop while the already lagging effect of desorbing CO2 from the warming oceans carries right on. Actual warming stops very suddenly, not sustained by the CO2 following along.. Check the Vostok and GISP data. Ipso fact CO2 did not initiate this warming, nor does it have any significance in maintaining warming once the much more powerful stabilising factors that end the interglacial warming take effect. Most likely the rising warming ocean levels with increasing cloud cover end the warming by reducing solar insolation, a massively more powerful effect, also confirmed by records showing increased precipitation at the end of interglacials.
CO2 is simply a passenger in this cycle. Not causal at any significant level. Discuss.
There is no hard evidence of CO2 ever causing anything other than changing plant growth from it's lagging response to ocean temperatures. a lagging effect that does not cause a thermal runaway when at its most extreme, because it is mainly a consequence. AS if to deny the hypothesis of GHE as advertised Tropospheric measuremts already show Maxwell was right and Kelvin wrong regarding the rather theoretical lapse rate effect GHE is based on, it appears. Real atmosphere's don't work like that, as the data now shows. and any small effect in terms of near IR absorption and desorption decays logarithmically with concentration. Not a problem, really.
So, I suggest, the heat any GHE is hypothesised to create by IPCC models isn't lost, to the oceans or beyond, because it was never there, as the tropospheric data is now showing. The models that created it were just wrong, running hot. And, crucially, the natural fact of several ice age interglacial endings. w/o industrialised anthropoids around to affect them, shows galloping CO2 desorption from the world's oceans being ignored by the far greater natural forces that stop it dead in a short thousand years or so, and really control Earth's climate – I suggest these are simply clouds from oceans in natural balance with solar insolation, with the biosphere responding to keep things between survivable limits for life by modifying the dominant physical absolutes.
The very small range between the ice age two state limit conditions on a 100Ka periodic sawtooth profile show this quite well. Roughly between 280 and 288 in mid ranging latitudes, assuming the range at the poles is 12 degrees and at the equator is c.5 deg K.
Nothing really supports the climate assertions of modellers for accelerating disaster that has no evidence to support it., when the macro level conditions of the last few 100Ka are examined to compare with the assertions, and the data is obtained for what is actually happening to compare with prophesy of climate priests, sorry dodgy scientists in the pay of the consensus University and publishing elites who are themselves rewarded to control what is allowed to be published, and block access to anything that challenges their consensus, which is exactly how science is supposed to to be validated. Will real science ever return or will soft pseudo science as religion for easy money dominate the 21st Century?
PS Have to stop as it is over 30 degrees in the UK again today and we have no a/c in homes (except the Russians and Arabs who spend their people's money on themselves here where they are not so obvious). Bloody global warming again….. at last the wind is useful, but from electrically driven fans, not vice versa.
Brian RL Catt CEng, CPhys
“Same old legalised protection racket that was started by religion for control beyond the tribal level……..”
My enduring contention is that science is becoming the new religion and the downside to that is that genuine, destructive religion is where people will turn when science is publicly seen to fail, as in the climate science concencus. Perhaps we are being misdirected in the sceptics belief that climate change is a political imperative, it might be far more sinister.
And may I make an observation. It wasn’t “30 degrees in the UK again today”, it was 30 degrees in certain parts of the UK.
Glasgow (Scotland) had high’s of 18 to 21 degrees over the last week, Aberystwyth (Wales) 20 to 23 degrees with 25 degrees today and Belfast (Northern Ireland) between 19 and 21 degrees with a high of 23 degrees today.
Manchester (England) was 23 degrees to 27 degrees, Truro in Cornwall (England) 18 degrees to 24 degrees, Isle of Wight between 19 degrees and 26 degrees.
Better to have kept to the “climate change” topic. Plenty of legitimate criticisms there, to discuss.
Some many years ago, I was working in a chlorine/PVC factory, at that time under attack of Greenpeace, which is again all chlorine uses (“chlorine is the element of the devil”, Greenpeace magazine Belgium).
Dr. Moore was one of the few people openly defending its use and condemning Greenpeace’s campaign as completely stupid.
Since that time I am a big fan of Dr. Moore!
The food pesticide issue is addressing glyphosate(?)
Would love to read the author’s take on plastics and microwave ovens…
Astounding. Too bad we cannot split into two planets, one for the people who believe all of this stuff, and one for the people who don’t buy it. And then they can watch how each other‘s planet evolves ..
You forgot to include the sea levels rising (only) at the middle of oceans which is one of the funnies claims they nowadays make to make non-truths non-observable.