What’s Natural?
Guest essay by Jim Steele
Several politicians and a few scientists tell us we are facing a climate crisis. They warn if we do not act now, we’ll leave our children an uninhabitable world. Naturally nobody wants that. But throughout history, the public has been bamboozled by various “end of the world” stories. I’m reminded of the Heaven’s Gate Cult. Highly educated members were conned into believing a spaceship, hiding behind the approaching Hale-Bopp comet, was coming to save them from our deteriorating world. On March 26, 1997, 39 followers committed mass suicide. Its disturbing how easily end of the world fears override basic critical thinking.
My whole professional career I’ve advocated for wise environmental stewardship. My research in the Sierra Nevada restored a watershed and increased wildlife. I’ve warned that landscape abuse destroys ecosystems. I’ve pointed out how over-hunting and invasive organisms endanger species. I’ve noted island extinctions occurred when humans imported rats, cats and mosquitoes that attacked ill-prepared native species. But, in contrast to abundant media hype, I have yet to verify a single climate-change induced extinction.
Understandably, to most people, a one degree change in global temperature over the past 150 years, does not seem fatal. I studied micro-climates. Over a distance of a few hundred feet from bare ground to forest shade, summer temperatures will vary by over 20 degrees. We endure a greater temperature change between night and day. Still some scientists and politicians push a narrative that just a one-degree change in global temperature over a period of 100 years has been deadly. But what’s their evidence?
The first highly publicized climate “tragedy” was Camille Parmesan’s claim that global warming had caused population extinctions that pushed California’s Checkerspot butterfly’s range northward and upward. Such a catastrophic assertion attracted the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). So, Parmesan became one of just 4 biologists on the IPCC in 2001. The Union of Concerned Scientists’ website also hyped Parmesan as a climate change heroine! In contrast, every other butterfly researcher argued it was California’s growing sprawl and resulting landscape changes that decimated the Checkerspot’s prime habitat.
Hoping to separate landscape changes from climate change, I tried to replicate Parmesan’s iconic study. But she never published her data. In a gross violation of scientific process, she refused to share her data. We battled, but it was finally admitted many populations that she had claimed had been extirpated by climate change, were now thriving. Unfortunately, such good news was never publicized. That was my first taste of dishonest climate fear-mongering.
In 2010 so-called experts suggested polar bear populations were declining. They claimed global warming would extirpate two thirds of all polar bears by 2050. But today no populations are in decline. Basic biology argues less sea ice allows more photosynthesis which increases plankton abundance. More plankton support more fish and seals, which in turn feed more polar bears. Like the Inuit who steadfastly claim it is the “time of the most polar bears”, my 2012 analyses found polar bear populations were increasing. Accordingly, the global population has now increased from about 25,000 to 30,000 and researchers from Norway to Alaska are reporting very fat polar bears.
In Antarctica, a few scientists hyped penguins were “marching to extinction.” In 2009 both Emperor and Adelie penguins were considered healthy and “species of least concern”. Oddly, despite larger populations, both species were downgraded in 2012 to “near threatened” based only on climate change predictions. Nonetheless with the discovery of new colonies and the robust growth of known colonies, Adelie penguin abundance increased from 4 million to 8 million. Perhaps climate change benefitted Adelie penguins? So, in 2016 experts reverted their status back to “species of least concern”.
Elsewhere a few scientists argued global warming was pushing adorable rabbit-like pikas off mountain tops into extinction throughout the western USA. Instead, further research proved pikas are actually expanding into lower and warmer elevations.
In 2008 climate scientists claimed children would no longer know what snow is. Yet in 2019 snowfall from Hawaii to Wisconsin has been breaking records. Inconsistent with global warming theory, in the northern hemisphere, winter and autumn snow cover has increased. Only spring-time snow cover has decreased.
For several decades, bogus catastrophic climate-change claims have come and gone. Claiming the world is destined for climate hell in 12 years is just another scary campfire story. In contrast, scientists are observing that rising CO2 has a fertilization effect promoting a greening of our planet! If we truly care about nature, rising CO2 is not the problem. There are far more important problems to address! Detrimental changes to our ecosystems are driven by overhunting, invasive species and loss of habitat.
Jim Steele authored Landscapes and Cycles: An Environmentalist’s Journey to Climate Skepticism
Contact: naturalclimatechange@earthlink.net
Those of us who are old enough remember the alarm about a threatening nuclear holocaust. The alarmists had an absolute field day and we were told about the pretty meaningless steps we could take to preserve ourselves. We thankfully did not have the internet and 24/7 TV news – some us even lived in countries with no TV. Now that climate has become the fad and media obsessed with sensationalism, we have alarmists on steroids. These clever people, however, not only dish up questionable science but seem pretty ignorant of history and geography.
Wasn’t the nuclear on about putting your head between your knees and ….?
They also have an extremely poor appreciation of scale and proportion.
‘They also have an extremely poor appreciation of scale and proportion.’
Yes – exactly – very fundamental to the issue.
Well, fellas, I just want you all to know that Illinois has (officially) recorded its coldest temperature (so far) on record at minus 38 degrees Fahrenheit. (That’s on another WUWT article.)
It’s official. The snow has still not melted in my yard. I’m expecting snow again tonight. I want the warm weather back. What do I have to do to get warm weather back??????
Buy a new snowblower?
Breathe a lot
Or declare independence. Donald Tusk says there is a special place in hell reserved for Britons who don’t like the EU.
Its just one emotional narrative after another.
Let me rush to be the first to say that Parmesan was not the only cheesy researcher that the IPCC embraced over a the years!
I saw what you did there….. 🙂
International Parmesan Commission Codex, IPCC for short, refers to a court case on protected products, right? Or am I in the wrong blog?
It’s all about ‘impacts’ claiming something is ‘doomed ‘ gets headlines , saying something is getting smaller may not and when you are selling ‘doom’ you have no interest at all in saying things are actually getting better .
Whilst such ‘studies ‘ tell us that the AGW research bucket is still deep and very well filled , so you can see why other areas look to it as a ‘means to get funding ‘ when their own areas may have little. And given they know what this area is like they are well aware of what ‘type’ of results keep the money flowing in .
In addition to this you have two factors, one most journalists have little ability , if they have the interest, in looking at the scientific validity of such claims. And secondly, todays news is tomorrows ‘chip wrapping ‘ as the public interest moves on, so even when its turns out the claims are BS it get little or any coverage all that gets remembered is the ‘impact’ of the first story .
Of course its ‘dirty playing ‘ but this is area that considered ‘tails you lose , heads I win ‘ to be a valid approach to take in its research.
“That was my first taste of dishonest climate fear-mongering.”
I actually think they can’t help it…
today’s guardian from the bovinely fragrant Monbiot…
“Because, while fewer drivers and passengers are dying, the number of pedestrians killed has risen by 11%.”
In the ONS publication from which he gleaned this figure….
“The trend in the number of fatalities has been broadly flat since 2010.
Previously, and particularly between 2006 and 2010, the general
trend was for fatalities to fall. Since that point, most of the year on
year changes are either explained by one-off causes (for instance, the
snow in 2010) or natural variation. The evidence points towards Britain
being in a period when the fatality numbers are stable and most of the
changes relate to random variation”
The Guardian being one of those organs inflamed at the prospect of “Fake News”. The incidence of which would fall if they desisted from printing it.
If selling google ads was ‘banned’ from the internet, >90% of the doom and catastrophe hysterics would go away with it,
Switzerland, October 1994. Tenths of “Order of the Solar Temple” members commit mass suicide in cozy mountain cabins. Preset fire bombs somehow fail to obliterate all evidence.
Abundant documentation was found.
Members had plastic bags on their heads to protect them from an imminent yet unspecified ecological catastrophic disaster.
Officially they relocated to Sirius before the imminent annihilation of planet earth.
Dr. Krombacher, airlifted to/from the premises “professionally hardened” legal expert could not hold his genuine emotions. Most of the bodies, kids included, had their hands tied and were shot in unusual positions for someone who deliberately wanted to die. Most faces expressed ultimate fear.
Victims were high-profile socially elevated persons and their families.
Their personal fortunes and capitals are to this day unaccounted for.
Interesting.
OST was a multimillion-dollar British-run Lodge, run under different names, Rosicrucian in character. Someone, high up in the circles of the British royal family, pulled the plug, in a hurry, on “a lodge project,” to protect an oligarch, a prince maybe. There is a Canadian parallel.
Someone high up might pull the plug on CO2 now – it is getting so blatantly crazy.
The CAN (Cult Awareness Network) did everything to keep the Rosicrucian’s out of an obvious mass murder. Traced to Alistair Crowley’s Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO), a Royal Quattro Coronati “research lodge”. There are links to BCCI weapons and money laundering.
Truly a scary campfire story, that.
Here is a BBC retrospective on the 1994 Order of the Solar Temple deaths.
I had no idea. It’s a lurid and very strange story, with associated mysterious murders in France and Quebec.
As rational and scientific as our brain is, it does contain a superstition and confirmation bias bug in the operating system and that is why things like snake oil, good luck charms, and climate change are good business.
https://tambonthongchai.com/2018/08/03/confirmationbias/
“As rational and scientific as our brain is, it does contain a superstition and confirmation bias bug in the operating system and that is why things like snake oil, good luck charms, and climate change are good business.”
And believing in gods…
We are not self created and we’re not the pinnacle of creation that we want to believe. There is/are beings of higher intelligence in the Universe. Probability of humans being the only sentient beings in our galaxy, let alone the Universe, is effectively ZERO! Does that prove the existence of GOD or gods, no! But where is the proof God or gods do not exist? Almost impossible to prove the negative.
The more we learn about our world and our universe, the more implausible our existence becomes and we come to realize how little we know.
Explain where Fermi went wrong then – his famous calculation must have some lurking error of composition.
By the way, an implausibly large number of atoms just harmoniously acted together to write these few letter. That is statistically impossible by any measure.
“As rational and scientific as our brain is”
All evidence to the contrary, with a few exceptions.
Maurice Strong was one of the Primary Godfathers of the CAGW agenda
The BioDiversity agenda is the evil twin of the junk science of Climate Change
Interview: Maurice Strong on a “People’s Earth Charter”
But, let us be very clear, the UN action is not going to be the only goal. The real goal of the Earth Charter is that it will in fact become like the Ten Commandments, like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It will become a symbol of the aspirations and the commitments of people everywhere. And, that is where the political influence, where the long-term results of the Earth Charter will really come.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/02/09/why-the-green-new-deal-is-a-bad-deal-for-america/#comment-2621406
I updated the image to reflect the current ‘CO2 gaslighting’ going on, feel free to drop it into your clip lib.
I thought CO2 was colorless.
Anyway, here’s a scary story. Eleven years and ten months into the future, a group of democratic socialists are taking the high speed train from SF to Honolulu for Bernie Sanders funeral who died of a heart attack at Obama’s sea side estate (I won’t say what he was doing but rest assured it didn’t involve Naomi Oreskes).
On of the socialists in a private first class cabin was doing yoga and suffered massive flatulence after a lunch consisting mostly of falafel. He decided to open a window, the train flooded and all perished.
I want to see this in cartoon format. You could call the magazine Future Records.
Conservation and the Misuse of Science
Hedgehogs, Bats and Badgers
Dr James Irvine
FRSE, DSc, FInstBiol, FRCPath, FRCPEd
Teviot Scientific Consultancy, Edinburgh
Teviot Agriculture, Cultybraggan Farm, Comrie, Perthshire
http://www.land-care.org.uk/environment/current_topics/2003/april2003/conservation_science_15_04/conservation_science_15_04.htm
I agree with your essay. hanks for posting it.
Coincidentally I was reading some information on animal extinctions and came across this little beast from an atoll between Australia and New Guinea. under the headline “First mammal species goes extinct due to climate change” The animal concerned is a small rodent called the Bramble Cay Melomys. A google search will pull up several articles. Apparently the island it lived on was a mere 3 feet high at it’s highest point and it was a victim of some heavy wave action. Naturally the cause is claimed to wholly due to human induced sea level rise. Not one of the several articles I read prove that it was actually sea level rise or just a series of storms that did in this unfortunate critter. One article contradicts the whole extinction scenario in that other populations exist in other locations. I was puzzzled that none of the articles said much about introduced predators that have done so much damage on other similar habitats, or any other cause. It HAD to be CAGW. I would be interested in any insight you or other readers may have on this.
its pretty much a adapted rat, and i betcha some of the buggers floated to other islands
also bet other things get a better chance now , like birds etc
A further one degree increase in global temperature could be a complete disaster or it could be hugely beneficial. It’s a calculated value. There are all kinds of scenarios that would give rise to the same 1 degree increase in global temperature. The question is about which scenarios are plausible.
We have historical evidence from all over the world that a warmer climate would be beneficial. Warmer is Richer When we’re evaluating possible scenarios, that evidence should be exhibit ‘A’. All the scary scenarios conflict with the historical evidence about what has happened before.
Honestly I don’t see how a further 1 degree of warming could be a disaster under any circumstances. What do you have in mind?
OF ANTS AND MEN
David Suzuki
Is seven-billion people too many?
I once asked the great ecologist E.O.Wilson how many people the planet could sustain indefinitely. He responded, “If you want to live like North Americans, 200 million.” North Americans, Europeans, Japanese, and Australians, who make up 20 per cent of the world’s population, are consuming more than 80 per cent of the world’s resources. We are the major predators and despoilers of the planet, and so we blame the problem on overpopulation. Keep in mind, though, that most environmental devastation is not directly caused by individuals or households, but by corporations driven more by profits than human needs.
https://web.archive.org/web/20120601020645/http://www.davidsuzuki.org/blogs/science-matters/2011/11/is-seven-billion-people-too-many/
Putting Humans In Their Place
Eminent Harvard ecologist and ant expert E.O. Wilson once told me that if humans disappeared overnight, only a handful of organisms would also go extinct: creatures that live on our skin, in our armpits, and our groins and guts. The rest of nature would rebound, the planet would green up, and animals would increase in abundance. But if all the ants went extinct overnight, whole terrestrial ecosystems would collapse, and the makeup of animals and plants would change catastrophically. Kind of puts humans into perspective.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170206065307/https://davidsuzuki.org/blogs/science-matters/2008/10/putting-humans-in-their-place/
E.O Wilson Quotes
If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.
Science and religion are the two most powerful forces in the world. Having them at odds… is not productive.
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/e/e_o_wilson.html
Possibly here in the Holocene, or just before 10 or 20 thousand years ago, life hit a peak of diversity. Then we appeared. We are the great meteorite.”
― Edward O. Wilson
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1210226-possibly-here-in-the-holocene-or-just-before-10-or
Now what are E.O.Wilson (and Suzuki) Smoking?? It certainly must be high potency stuff :: ))
Equilibrium????
18K years ago, virtually the whole of Canada was under the Ice Sheet. This is only a speck in geologic time. Even 10K years ago Ice Cover was still extensive
The problem with the implementation of conservation biology (eg BioDiversity agenda) is that it is arbitrary. What version of nature are they talking about when only 18K years ago all Canada was under the Ice Sheet and that too was natural. All flora and fauna since that time is new (recolonization). Yet they have this ideology that somehow nature (which they misdefine) was pristine and in equilibrium, and mankind are the despoilers of same : (
Timeline of Recent Glaciation
http://www.nps.gov/features/romo/feat0001/BasicsIceAges.swf
Don’t Listen to E.O. Wilson
Math can help you in almost any career. There’s no reason to fear it.
E.O. Wilson is an eminent Harvard biologist and best-selling author. I salute him for his accomplishments. But he couldn’t be more wrong in his recent piece in the Wall Street Journal (adapted from his new book Letters to a Young Scientist), in which he tells aspiring scientists that they don’t need mathematics to thrive. He starts out by saying: “Many of the most successful scientists in the world today are mathematically no more than semiliterate … I speak as an authority on this subject because I myself am an extreme case.” This would have been fine if he had followed with: “But you, young scientists, don’t have to be like me, so let’s see if I can help you overcome your fear of math.” Alas, the octogenarian authority on social insects takes the opposite tack. Turns out he actually believes not only that the fear is justified, but that most scientists don’t need math. “I got by, and so can you” is his attitude. Sadly, it’s clear from the article that the reason Wilson makes these errors is that, based on his own limited experience, he does not understand what mathematics is and how it is used in science.
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2013/04/e_o_wilson_is_wrong_about_math_and_science.html
He is strictly correct. You can do science without math as long as somebody else collaborates doing the math for the study. A good mind with little math knowledge is still a good mind. There’s plenty of people with a lot of math knowledge who are handicapped for science. Tamino comes to mind. And another one which I won’t name.
But it is like composing music without knowing how to read music. Some people can do it very well. Most people won’t.
E.O. Wilson
We should preserve every scrap of biodiversity as priceless while we learn to use it and come to understand what it means to humanity. E. O. Wilson
https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/e_o_wilson_164833
He founded the field of sociobiology, which transformed the nature-nurture debate, but also earned him plenty of enemies. He introduced the idea of “biophilia” to suggest that humans have an innate affinity for nature. And in recent decades, he’s been the most prominent advocate for biodiversity. In fact, his new book “Half-Earth” argues that the only way to stave off mass extinctions is to set aside half the planet’s surface as nature reserves.
So when Wilson publicly embraced the proposal to wipe out several entire species of mosquitoes — particularly those carrying malaria and the Zika virus — it stunned a lot of people. How could the great champion of biodiversity call for the extinction of another species?
https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-04-04/why-famous-biologist-wants-eradicate-killer-mosquitoes
Curb your enthusiasm
High priests, holy writ and excommunications – how did Humanism end up acting like a religion?
In the second half of the 20th century, the outstanding Humanist in my sense has been my long-time friend Edward O Wilson, retired now from his post as professor of biology at Harvard but still going strong at 82 and always immersed in controversy. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book On Human Nature, he declares explicitly that Darwinism is a new mythology replacing the old religious forms. The story is now a familiar one:
… make no mistake about the power of scientific materialism. It presents the human mind with an alternative mythology that until now has always, point for point in zones of conflict, defeated traditional religion. Its narrative form is the epic: the evolution of the universe from the big bang of 15 billion years ago through the origin of the elements and celestial bodies to the beginnings of life on earth… Every part of existence is considered to be obedient to physical laws requiring no external control. The scientist’s devotion to parsimony in explanation excludes the divine spirit and other extraneous agents.
Snip
By temperament, Wilson is a deeply religious man. This goes back to his Baptist childhood in the American South. He describes his discovery of evolutionary biology as a conversion experience. His faith did not fall away: it changed horses.
https://aeon.co/essays/how-humanism-lost-its-way-in-a-charismatic-crusade
Double-Dealing in Darwin
Are intellectuals allowing dogma in science but not in religion?
Today, likewise, we see that evolutionism has its priests and devotees. Entomologist and sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson of Harvard University tells us that the “evolutionary epic is mythology,” depending on laws that are “believed but can never be definitively proved,” taking us “backward through time to the beginning of the universe.” Wilson knows that any good religion must have its moral dimension, and so he urges us to promote biodiversity, to amend our original sin of despoiling the earth. There is an apocalyptic ring to Wilson’s writings, and in true dispensationalist style, he warns that there is but a short time before all collapses into an ecological Armageddon. Repent! The time is near!
http://tinyurl.com/yae38ho3
“17,000 to 100,000 species vanish each year.” –E. O. Wilson
I wonder where all the bodies are?
Jim
They get eaten by species that haven’t vanished yet.
He’s spouting his Religious Dogma. I’m strongly disinclined to accept advice from some admittedly innumerate Biologist.
Bob Carter
10 min 11:15
Yet every week I read some Idiot Biologist in the newspaper telling me the Biodiversity of the planet is going to be destroyed by another temperature rise of a degree or two. It is complete nonsense and it mostly comes again from computer models.
https://tinyurl.com/gthkglu
No bodies
by Rud Istvan
https://judithcurry.com/2014/08/20/no-bodies/
The two great extinctions I have noted (and which we can undo) are the Arctic Penguin, and the Antarctic Polar Bear.
Both of these species are highly adaptable like their surviving polar-opposite counterparts. For heaven’s sake, there are penguins living on the beaches east of Cape Town. Smart!
I think we have a responsibility to reintroduce these critters to their appropriate habitats.
The penguins are a must see part of any visit to Cape Town and the Cape of Good Hope.
One factor in discounting scary climate change stories is that almost all the beasties and plants evolved well before, and have survived, several periods rather warmer (and colder) than anything predicted from the current warming.
If the Holocene Climactic Optimum did not kill off the polar bears, the current warming is really unlikely to.
“If the Holocene Climactic Optimum did not kill off the polar bears, the current warming is really unlikely to”
Also previous inter-glacials over the past half million years have been significantly warmer according to Antarctic ice cores:
“researchers from Norway to Alaska are reporting very fat polar bears.”
That’s because they’re all sitting around watching their favorite comedy on Netflix, “An Inconvenient Truth”.
1. By reflecting away 30% of the incoming solar energy the atmosphere/albedo make the earth cooler than it would be without the atmosphere.
Greenhouse theory has it wrong.
2. The non-radiative processes of a contiguous participating media, i.e. atmospheric molecules, render ideal black body LWIR from the surface impossible. The 396 W/m^2 upwelling from the surface is a “what if” calculation without physical reality. (TFK_bams09)
Greenhouse theory has it wrong.
3. Without the 396 W/m^2 upwelling there is no 333 W/m^2 GHG energy loop to “warm” the earth.
Greenhouse theory has it wrong.
These three points are all that matter. The rest is irrelevant noise.
Jim Steele,
Under hunting can cause much greater threats to a species as a failure or serious (even temporary) decline of the food source could decimate the population. Also, an increase in predators utilizing a prey species can throw the balance out of whack until the prey diminishes at which point the predators may suffer the same fate. Are the polar bears heading in this direction?
But your point is well taken. Management strategy of wildlife populations is key.
Rather than “Management” of wildlife populations, we should manage our own and stop encroaching and interfering with theirs. It seems that wherever mankind tries to “Help” wildlife, we do damage. Left alone with space to live, they seem to do fine.
Greytide
I managed my own this past hunting season. Whacked 4 deer and will continue consuming the choice cuts and always a pocket full of jerky. Will do it all again next season. Not intending to have any more kids so I guess it’s sustainable! But the clover and oats help out when the acorn crop fails. I don’t want to see a deer go hungry and they eat like it’s their last meal!
Greytide,
BTW for 4 deer it was their last meal. Others will flourish until next season. Hope you we’re triggered or otherwise disturbed. I could whack a couple for you if you like and agree to gut them.
TYPO >>>> drop the apostrophe in “we’re” or substitute “weren’t”. All the same. 😉
“But throughout history, the public has been bamboozled by various “end of the world” stories.”
It seems to me that doomsaying has to be one of the contenders in ‘the world’s oldest profession’ sweepstakes. It sometimes seems humans are psychologically prewired to give unwarranted credence to this sort of alarming news. And in every age we know of, there are people who have profited off our predilection. In the early part of the twentieth century they were usually of a street-corner preacher variety, the more savvy among them upping the game to take advantage of early mass-media then evolving. For the last half century the practitioners of this age old scam have doffed their robes for lab coats, in both cases it being a mere costume.
Lies have been used throughout the history to achieve less-than-honest goals. What we see are not scary campfire stories; they are simply lies as usual (for a good cause, of cause). An old Russian joke comes to mind: Is it true than Ivan Ivanovich won a car in Moscow? – Yes, it’s true, but it was not Ivan Ivanovich but Pavel Pavlovich, it was not in Moscow but in Vladivostok, it was not a car but a bike, and he did not win, but someone stole it from him.
Perhaps climate change benefitted Adelie penguins? So, in 2016 experts reverted their status back to “species of least concern”.
After AR5 and Paris COP21 of course.
This oldie but goodie article needs to be mentioned again.
https://medium.com/the-polymath-project/the-ideological-turing-test-how-to-be-less-wrong-6803a8c290cf
“The Ideological Turing Test: How to Be Less Wrong” by Charles Chu
Note the cartoon. “Tell me a scary story, gramma”
(Dakota McFadzean, “Deep Down”)
The participation of scientists from diverse biology and ecology disciplines in the climate hustle is of course frequently driven by the prospect of increasing a researcher’s grant submission score from NIH/NSF study groups. Those scores determine that next grant. Climate change alarmism is a honey-pot trap. Include some aspect of climate change alarmism in their research to claim disaster lurks — need more funding to study.
Once a researcher starts walking down that alarmist-activist path of shading their work with climate alarmism stories, it is difficult to escape back to scientific integrity, even as more data rolls in showing decreased concerned about supposedly threatened species or ecosystems. The polar bear story, as highlighted here at WUWT by Susan Crockford, is a primary example where other researchers continue to try to shade their polar bear research to keep an alarmist message coming, their grants and reputations are at stake.
How else can you get impact to keep receving fat grants if the researcher reports the study subject not a concern and thriving or not apparently immediately threatened? There is only so much research money to go around, and far more hungry academic mouths than available grants can support.
This of course has created one major aspect of the Destruction of the Age of Reason occurring across many disciplines of natural science today, a destruction driven by the intersection of the grant process with climate change alarmism as the honey-pot trap for needy researchers. One must incorporate the worst-case cargo cult climate model projection called RCP8.5, which they intentionally deceptively named “business-as-usual”. RCP 8.5 was tailor made for such abuse, the honey-pot trap to lure in researchers. In the almost 6 years or so since RCP8.5 worst-case scenario publication, there has been the predictable explosion of its exploitation by many biology, ecology, and earth science disciplines to hype the impacts that such a high-emission scenario would bring to their study subject. A Google Scholar search for “RCP 8.5” term by year returns 1,180 articles for 2014, to more than double at 2,960 for 2018. The RCP 8.5 scare-mongering story has indeed become a lucrative go-to business model for needy researchers unconcerned with that scenario’s implausibility.
Richard Lindzen discusses many issues of concern in this presentation
Alarming Global Warming: What Happens to Science in the Public Square. Richard S. Lindzen, Ph.D
Science is always problematic as an institution, and often valuable as a process.
https://tinyurl.com/pkd7w7q
Chicken Little Dawkins wants to escape to NZ (because Brexit, Trump, and CLIMATE CHANGE)
Richard Dawkins urges New Zealand to offer UK and US scientists citizenship so they can escape ‘redneck bigotry’
‘Dear New Zealand, you are a deeply civilized small nation … you care about climate change, the future of the planet and other scientifically important issues’
“There are top scientists in America and Britain – talented, creative people, desperate to escape the redneck bigotry of their home countries. Dear New Zealand, you are a deeply civilized small nation, with a low population in a pair of beautiful, spacious islands. You care about climate change, the future of the planet and other scientifically important issues.”
He continued to urge New Zealand to offer refuge to the scientific community, saying “you could make New Zealand the Athens of the modern world”.
“Why not write to all the Nobel Prize winners in Britain and America, write to the Fields medalists, Kyoto and Crafoord Prize and International Cosmos Prize winners, the Fellows of the Royal Society, the elite scientists in the National Academy of Sciences, the Fellows of the British Academy and similar bodies in America. Offer them citizenship,” he wrote.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/richard-dawkins-donald-trump-us-election-win-new-zealand-offer-british-american-scientists-a7413426.html
Why NZ?
According to the Goracle all the rabbits there were blinded by the “Ozone Hole”?
Do they like blind rabbits?
So Dawkins urged NZ to offer citizenship to dismayed US and UK ‘climate’ scientists. France actually did offer this to US ‘climate’ scientists.
Is it known how many of them actually moved?
Apparently Camille Parmesan moved
Camille Parmesan, a biologist at the universities of Texas and Plymouth, is one of the world’s most influential climate change scientists, having shown how butterflies and other species are affected by it across all continents. She is one of 18 US scientists moving to France to take up President Macron’s invitation of refuge after Donald Trump’s decision to cut science funding and withdraw the US from the 2015 Paris agreement.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/dec/31/camille-parmesan-trump-extremism-climate-change-interview
Dawkins and Hellfire !!
Dawkins & Mehdi Hasan Debate – Religion & The Quran
Dawkins on Religion.Is Religion Evil?
https://tinyurl.com/kugxbvw
I particularly want to comment on the exchange that starts just before 20mins exploring Dawkins comment that being raised Catholic was a worse form of abuse than sexual abuse (of children)
20 mins
Catholic child abuse scandal Ireland
Quote from Dawkins book:
“As horrible as sexual abuse no doubt was, the damage was arguably less than the long term psychological damage inflicted by bringing the child up Catholic in the first place”
Dawkins:
“There are shades of being abused by a Priest, and I quoted the example of a woman in America who wrote to me saying when she was seven years old she was sexually abused by a Priest in his car .And at the same time a friend of hers who was also seven who was Protestant.. of Protestant family I should say… died. And she was told that because her friend was Protestant, she had gone to Hell and would be roasting in Hell forever. And she told me that of those two abuses, she got over the physical abuse, it was yukky but she got over it. The mental abuse of being told about Hell, she took years to get over.”
“It seems to me that telling children such that they really really believe that people who sin are going to go to Hell and roast forever.. forever. That your skin grows again and peels off when it burns..with burning. It seems to me to be intuitively entirely reasonable, that that is a worse form of child abuse that will give more nightmares, that will give more genuine distress because they genuinely believe it.. .Of course if they don’t believe it, it’s not a problem of course.
I’ve been put on the spot about this Hellfire thing.”
Dawkins repeatedly contends that he is strongly against belief/faith in something for which there is no “evidence”. He cares about “Science” and “Truth” he says. He also says he’s not much interested in right and wrong.
As such he is incredulous that Medhi Hasan believes that Mohammed ascended to Heaven on a Winged Horse !!
Dawkins, however although not his field of biology, nevertheless supports the PC “narrative” about “Anthropogenic” climate change “ALARM”… for which there is no evidence!!
Given Dawkins view about what he terms “abuse” of scaring children with visions of “Hellfire”, it’s not inappropriate to point out the people who are NOW terrorizing children (and everyone else).
That is of course the (supposed) “Scientific community”!!
We’ve lost our fear of hellfire, but put climate change in its place
By Boris Johnson
12:01AM GMT 02 Feb 2006
“Billions will die,” says Lovelock, who tells us that he is not normally a gloomy type. Human civilisation will be reduced to a “broken rabble ruled by brutal warlords”, and the plague-ridden remainder of the species will flee the cracked and broken earth to the Arctic, the last temperate spot, where a few breeding couples will survive.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/3622794/Weve-lost-our-fear-of-hellfire-but-put-climate-change-in-its-place.html
“Somebody told me how frightening it was how much topsoil we are losing each year, but I told that story around the campfire and nobody got scared.”
– Jack Handey
Thanks Jim.
You mention Pikas. Here’s my bit:
Having been raised in the eastern USA, I had never seen a Pika until the summer of 1971 (?), on a mountain side near Banff. We were on a popular trail, so the animals were not seriously afraid of people. For years I thought that an alpine-type hike was needed to find them.
Then, in Washington State, on a hike, I found a Pika “haystack” at just over 4,400 feet. This wasn’t of much interest to me at that time.
15 years passed and faculty and students at Central Washington University became involved with a major Interstate Highway rebuild. This was I-90 just east of Snoqualmie Pass.
One of the projects (we know both the PI and the student) involved investigating the use of highway-fill [think big rocks piled on top of each other] as Pika habitat. The elevation is near 2,400 feet. I went to a presentation by the student, one of my wife’s GIS folks. She did a great job with her research, and of course the maps, and I came away with a new appreciation of Pikas, as Lowlanders.
[The main part of the highway project involved an overpass for wildlife, and several under passes. Construction photo 2018, now completed ]
Fat polar bears will likely die from heart disease or diabetes.
So the fear mongers were right!
“Science is self-correcting.”
Been reading you for a long time. This one was the best.
Short, clear, concise and powerful.