By Robert Bradley Jr.
“If ‘some humans survive’ is the only thing we care about, then climate change is a non-issue. I think it’s certain that ‘some’ humans will survive almost any climate change. They may be living short, hard lives of poverty, but they’ll be alive.”
“Future humans, as they live in a climate dystopia: ‘I thought he cared about the environment’.”
“I find the path we’re on now — the rich world survives (if lucky), but abandons everyone else — to be morally problematic.”
Professor Andrew Dessler of Texas A&M is the alarmist’s alarmist. At a lunch some years ago, he remarked to me (and his more moderate colleague Gerald North) that humankind would have to live underground because of anthropogenic warming. And he stated that fossil fuels had made us slaves, a deep-ecology argument that has been ably turned around by Matt Ridley).
The IPCC estimates climate sensitivity between 1.5° – 4.5°C; Dessler estimates 2.4° – 4.6°C. The mid-to-upper range is a lot of warming–and much more than what we have seen to date well into the carbon-based energy era.
Dessler knows he is right. And I do not doubt that he believes himself, being a nature-is-optimal-and-fragile ecologist at heart and not knowing (or at least not acknowledging) important contrary arguments outside of his field of specialization (Vaclav Smil on energy density; Robert Mendelsohn on climate benefits and free-market adaptation).
Professor Dessler is certain that man-made climate change will be steep and wreck the ecosphere and economy. He attributes bad motives to those who disagree with him. And he downplays contrary argument and evidence. Sum it up and you get … an angry scientist letting off steam via stormy tweets.
I have previously described Dessler as the The Certain Climate Alarmist. I have warned Texas politicians to beware of his offer to present his (one-sided) view of climate science and public policy without a skeptic (of climate alarmism, not climate science) in the room.
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As part of my research of Dessler’s oeuvre, I performed a tweet review to understand the professor’s mentality for background re his books The Science and Politics of Global Climate Change (2011) and Introduction to Modern Climate Change (2016).
I categorize more than a dozen notable tweets in the last six or so months. (A far more interesting dive would look at several years of his tweets.)
Adaptation a Joke
- Adaptation does indeed work. When temps get too high, switch from black t-shirts to white ones. (January 4, 2019)
Comment:
Adaptation is no joke; it is a growing, central part of the whole climate debate. The mitigation window has long been closing. The climate math worsens over time with the log (not linear) forcing of CO2. Dessler himself pretty much said as much:
If we want to protect ecosystems & keep the Earth looking pretty much like it looks now, I have some bad news for you. That boat has sailed. The only possible way to achieve this is aggressive geoengineering (both SRM & CDR), and even if that’s possible it’s not a sure thing. (November 20, 2018)
And there is evidence that nature, not only humankind, is adapting to change to “internalize” the negative effects of weather/climate to leave the positive effects of the human influence on climate.
Also, Professor Dessler should make peace with what might be the most important climate statistic of all: the dramatic decline in human mortality from climate/weather extremes. In this regard, the risks of climate policy, not only the physical side of climate, should be acknowledged.
Blatant Disrespect for Skeptics – some examples of Dessler’s Tweets
And, of course, let’s not forget Roy Spencer’s window into the denial machine. You can be a scientist that no one takes seriously and national TV will come to you so you can mislead the audience. Pretty nice gig — and pretty easy. (December 18, 2018)
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I often think about how great it would be to be a skeptic. You don’t have to write papers, which is really hard. You don’t have to write proposals, which is also hard. You don’t even have to do research. Instead, you just say things that mislead to audience craving to be misled. (December 18, 2018)
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While he had credibility at one time, lately [Richard] Lindzen’s pronouncements on climate are more of a clown-show than anything else. Again, the fact that people still quote him is because there’s no one better. (December 17, 2018)
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The column quotes Lindzen to cast doubt on CO2’s impact on the climate system. Some people don’t believe the 97% consensus, but if the consensus weren’t so strong, why would the same few people get quoted all the time: Lindzen, Curry, Spencer, Christy, etc. — the list is short. (December 17, 2018)
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I love the Monckton et al. amicus brief the same way I love the Jackass movies. They’re dumb and of no redeeming value, but man are they entertaining. So here’s the question. Does anyone know what he’s referring to that has already been published? (March 22, 2018)
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If you wonder why “gone emeritus” scientists become skeptics … Ray Bates is a retired guy that the scientific community long ago moved past. But, as a skeptic, he’s suddenly the center of the debate, taken seriously by people who want to undermine policy. (December 24, 2018)
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Ultimately, I can’t be a skeptic because I can’t throw science under the bus. (December 18, 2018)
Comment:
This is a scary reminder that the “Climategate” mentality–where the ‘tribe’ employs methodological tricks, perverts the peer review process, and even dreams of physical harm to their intellectual adversaries–is alive and well.
While not of Climategate infamy, Professor Dessler has directly contributed to the freezeout by orchestrating a political statementfor his colleagues to sign at Texas A&M. He also dismissed Climategate as a mere distraction rather than a scandal.
Why would I or you go into this field where you would be discriminated against and marginalized by the Desslers of the world? Same thing for Sociology and History or Critical Studies in academia that are overwhelmingly Statist (versus free market) and intolerant of opposing views.
Politicization of quite unsettled science does two things: it attracts the wrong people to the field and discourages the right talent.
Certain Science, Certain Alarmism
I think we need a hashtag for #ScienceIsNotModest to educate climate deniers that we actually do know what’s going to happen. @stephenmoore @VanceGinn … .@StephenMoore: “Scientists should have the modesty to admit we have no idea what’ll happen as climate change continues. Too many variables to hazard a decent guess, but giving government more power is the most dangerous threat to our planet.” #ampFW https://ly/2DOpzzC
Comment:
Note the “denier” insult. Why can’t he just say “skeptic” as in critic of climate alarmism? And yes, Moore is right. The major threat to energy sustainability is Statism where an intellectual/political elite make energy choices instead of each of us as voluntary consumers. (Dessler loves the authoritarian Green New Deal, not surprisingly.)
The Pause (“Hiatus” of Warming)
I was just joking when I previously said that “no warming since 2016” would become a denier thing, but I didn’t take into account that deniers don’t have any better arguments, so they’re stuck making these transparently dumb arguments. (January 3, 2019)
are we still arguing over the hiatus? here’s what you need to know: slowdowns (and speedups) occur naturally. don’t let short-term variations mislead you. trends over 10-15 years can be quite different from the long-term trend. can we move on now? (December 19, 2018)
Comment:
Funny thing, coming out of the very hot El Nino-driven 1998, Richard Kerr in Science magazine reported the scientific consensus that that this level of global warming would soon be the new normal. And then in 2009 that a warming “jolt” would replace the “pause.” Yes, there was an El Nino driven jump in 2015/16, but we could well be back into the “pause.”
Not Easy Being Green
I fully support scientists who make the decision for themselves not to travel, fully aware of the consequences. But we should not bully younger scientists to commit career suicide in return for a de minimus contribution to the climate problem. (December 30, 2018)
Comment:
Everyone’s “de minimus” still adds up to a “de minimus.” Even major public policies result in de minimus. Asia is building or planning to build 1,200 coal plants–that’s a reality that puts the whole US in a bit of a “de minimus”.
Mitigation Policy
In the end, those arguing against carbon taxes are all eventually revealed to be climate deniers. I know of zero exceptions. November 30, 2018
Comment:
Does Dessler know of any alarmist that is against government pricing of CO2? I would take alarmism more seriously if climatologists said that the climate was highly sensitive to GHG forcing, the mitigation window was closing, and we needed to focus on free-market, health-is-wealth adaptation.
Unmitigated Alarmism
… I find the path we’re on now — the rich world survives (if lucky), but abandons everyone else — to be morally problematic. November 20, 2018
Comment:
With views like this, one would think that the good news about carbon dioxide–from CO2 fertilization to lower real-world (versus model) warming–would be welcomed with huge sighs of relief. But twitter rants against skeptics seem to be the substitute against mid-course corrections that maybe, just maybe, the climate alarm is overblown.
Something is very wrong here….
“I often think about how great it would be to be a skeptic. You don’t have to write papers, which is really hard. You don’t have to write proposals, which is also hard. You don’t even have to do research.” —Dessler
The little boy who called out the emperor didn’t need to write or research either.
Hansen was eventually retired when his paranoia became an unbearable embarrassment.
Dessler is well on his way.
Give em enough rope, I say.
Right now a lot of people, especially liberals, are sad over the cyclone hitting Mozambique, and yelling about how climate change disproportionately affects poor people.
It is true, the situation in Mozambique is very sad.
How much is climate change is to blame for a typhoon hitting a country on the coast during the peak of their their typhoon season? I will leave the scintillating question to the experts. Cyclone Idai was at it’s Peak what we call a Category 3, and made landfall as a Category 2. If it had made landfall where I live I probably wouldn’t have evacuated.
But the question of why the impact was so strong is clear – Mozambique is poor, poor poor poor.
Why is Mozambique so poor? Some would say”the lingering effects of European colonization” but it appears that ended over 40 years ago. Communists pushed out the Portuguese. This caused economic chaos. Then there was a civil war which lasted 15 years. Then the Communists won, which as everyone knows is terrible for an economy. Most people live on subsistence farms and in little huts. Little huts can’t stand up to a hurricane.
What is this guy a professor of? Postmodern feminist origami?
I’m late to the party, but…
Humans live in Dubai, they live in Greenland. We have a huge tolerance.
Humans do agriculture in Australia, in Rwanda, in Norway, in Canada. There is a huge range of temperature and precipitation where agriculture is possible.
That we could not adapt to a 2 degree or even to the pretty improbable 4.5K rise worldwide in bullshit. If the world warms by 4 degrees, many things change a lot, but then again, the calamities seen so far a warming of about 1 degree are basically nothing compared to what Maduro, Stalin and other totalitarians have caused.
Warming is all right. Do use nuclear power, no problem, if you are afraid. China emits so much if they stopped now, the atmospheric portion would practically stop growing. Will China kill us? Don’t believe so.
“Why can’t he just say “skeptic” as in critic of climate alarmism?”
I think critic is a reasonable term, though I have used contrarian, partially because climate science critics have told me they do not consider it an insult and because it seems more apt relative to the positions generally taken by adherents.
It is really unreasonable of you all to continue to demand the “skeptic” label. Skeptic has had a strong meaning – closely tied to scientific skepticism – long before movements sprouted up online in response to unwanted scientific findings. I’m sure you are aware that longstanding skeptic groups like CSICOP also dispute the use of the term for backlash type movements against scientific disciplines.
Traditionally, skeptics are the primary people *combating* conspiracy theories and the spread of false but viral urban myths, asking critical and skeptical questions about them. These things are absolutely rampant in the climate science critic community – I’m sure some of you well-intentioned folks would like that to be different but (a) you’re miles from slowing this down and (b) probably not recognizing how common these things are including unfortunately here at WUWT (there are certainly even more egregious epicenters, like Goddard.)
It’s honestly *way* too much to hijack the “skeptic” term and expect others to respect this. It is akin to wanting to claim the title of doing “real science” on blogs (absent peer review, empiricism, scientific testing, etc.)
There are people who question aspects of climate science who you could call skeptics, but those are people who ask, analyze and dig into data, and *also* critically question conspiracy theories, urban legends etc. They do not assert alternative or pseudo-scientific theories (think electric sun, Ned Nikolov, greenhouse-effect-is-violation-of-2nd-law etc.) as true without evidence, they do not repeat ‘fraud’ narratives without evidence, and so on.
I agree with you, Geoff. Just as all people who question the rightness of climate science aren’t “skeptics”, not everyone who generalizes about a diverse group of people can be called “a pompous ass.”
But still, a lot of them are.
Anyway, here’s the gist of a conversation you might be interested in that I’ve been having on my blog with some well-educated people, who were very well-behaved guests, and never sounded sarcastic and condescending. Some people are just naturally polite, you know?
But I digress. Here’s the topic of discussion: Just as mathematics have the rules of operation order, the physical sciences have rules for determining the significant digits and uncertainty in measurements, and to propagate the uncertainty throughout the calculations.
They’re very simple rules, and are taught right at the beginning of every physical science course one will ever take, be it physics, chemistry, engineering, etc. They explain the ins and outs, and whys and wherefores of taking physical measurements.
I won’t bother to go over them, because someone obviously so well-rounded in the sciences as you undoubtedly know them well already. So you will be as shocked as I was that none of the four who joined in the discussion knew or understood the rules at all. Most of them described them as “guidelines, rather than rules.” One seemed to think that “significant digits” meant “the digits that occurred most in the answer.” If a digit occurred three or four times repeated in a result, that number was highly significant, but if it only appeared once, then it wasn’t really significant at all.
The reason I was hosting this discussion was because many of the global average anomaly results one sees in the literature carry the precision of the result far beyond what is justified in the data. How can one expect to report a result with three places to the right of the decimal point when one started with measurements only to the tenths.
I quoted many articles and web pages from the US National Institutes of Health, Penn State University, the University of North Carolina, the Faraday Physics Department at the University of Toronto, and still they argued against the rules
I asked them all why they were so resistant to these rules, especially when they undoubtedly follow many other rules of math every day, but they didn’t answer.
What is your opinion on the subject?
I hear your sarcasm and condescension. My comment was non-sarcastic. You are free to judge it condescending, but we will disagree – we are not all “entitled to our own facts” which deserve equal respect, and in fact this truth is the very center of scientific skepticism.
Another relevant quote: “Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.” – RW Emerson
“many of the global average anomaly results one sees in the literature carry the precision of the result far beyond what is justified in the data … What is your opinion on the subject?”
I think I may have asked a question / made a comment about this here:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/04/04/australia-surface-temperatures-compared-to-uah-satellite-data-over-the-last-40-years/#comment-2673709
“I think critic is a reasonable term, though I have used contrarian, partially because climate science critics have told me they do not consider it an insult and because it seems more apt relative to the positions generally taken by adherents.”
I’ve been advocating the use of “contrarian” for so long I’ve forgotten all the reasons for my stance. (I flatter myself that I may have had some influence in its burgening popularity.) Three of them are 1) it’s acceptable to the other side; 2) it’s more accurate—we aren’t just dubious, we’re disbelievers; 3) it’s alliterative (“climate change contrarians”) The AP’s recommended term, “doubters,” isn’t very good.
I wonder which term was used for the scientists who disagreed with Wegener, Bretz, and Einstein?
I’m pretty sure it was just “scientists”, or maybe “other scientists”.
Not schlubs like us, but people like Curry, Lindzen, Soon, et all deserve better than a #hashtag on their names.
Perhaps it would depend on context. Were Wegener, Bretz, and Einstein’s critics claiming (without offering supporting evidence) that their targets were perpetrating fraud (faking/repressing data etc.), or did they dispute on scientific merits, attempting to challenge via scientific tests? Did they testify to Congress making claims that are not backed by published research and fly in the face of evidence which is? Those are the behaviors Dessler seems to be commenting on.
He of course uses the d-word, and it is fair game to be offended. Your use of “alarmists” is hardly a testament to any authentic interest in neutral terminology, however.
“Skeptic” is an appropriate term for those who doubt the climate “consensus”. You purport that “skeptic” is too high and lofty a term for the doubting rabble and should be reserved only for those doubters of the highest intellectual caliber. Well, that philosophy is not in accordance with the dictionary definition of Skeptic. “Contrarian” certainly is much more palatable to skeptics than the “denier” label but connotes deliberate reflexive opposition to mainstream ideas. As such, I see it as a demotion in credibility for those questioning the climate orthodoxy. But the motive this effort to demote us from skeptics to contrarians is manifest in your gratuitous attack on Tony Heller. We have here, Geoff Price, the unctuous concern troll.
“You purport that “skeptic” is too high and lofty a term”
No, I state that it has a clear, prior meaning that contradicts the new meaning.
“the doubting rabble”
The point is that mainstream AGW critic opinion does not do even a fraction of the doubting that it should – conspiracy theories and false factual claims are incredibly rampant and recirculated for years. It is quite trivial to highlight examples of this.
“But the motive this effort to demote us from skeptics to contrarians is manifest in your gratuitous attack on Tony Heller.”
Exactly the point – Heller literally and unapologetically speaks of “global collusion” and “fraud”, the dictionary definition of conspiracy theories. His argument is that adjustments motivated by things like moving station measurement times from noon to dawn are unjustifiable. For crying out loud, global raw data shows *more* global warming than adjusted global temperature data, and still his supporters advocating belief in the global conspiracy rage on, egged on by sites like his and this one.
We just disagree and you put your finger on the central point – advocating conspiracy theories is *not* the dictionary definition of skepticism, it is closer to the opposite. If you want to convince others that your position is different, you’re not going about it well. Otherwise it sounds like you might prefer ‘critic’ to ‘contrarian’. Thanks for the response.