Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Climate scientist Myles Allen is worried the 12 year time limit until the end of the world has been taken out of context.
Why protesters should be wary of ‘12 years to climate breakdown’ rhetoric
April 19, 2019 12.06am AEST…
Today’s teenagers are absolutely right to be up in arms about climate change, and right that they need powerful images to grab people’s attention. Yet some of the slogans being bandied around are genuinely frightening: a colleague recently told me of her 11-year-old coming home in tears after being told that, because of climate change, human civilisation might not survive for her to have children.
My biggest concern is with the much-touted line that “the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says we have 12 years” before triggering an irreversible slide into climate chaos. Slogan writers are vague on whether they mean climate chaos will happen after 12 years, or if we have 12 years to avert it. But both are misleading.
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But an additional quarter of a degree of warming, more-or-less what has happened since the 1990s, is not going to feel like Armageddon to the vast majority of today’s striking teenagers (the striving taxpayers of 2030). And what will they think then?
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So please stop saying something globally bad is going to happen in 2030. Bad stuff is already happening and every half a degree of warming matters, but the IPCC does not draw a “planetary boundary” at 1.5°C beyond which lie climate dragons.
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So here is a conversation young activists could have with their parents: first work out what the parents’ CO₂ emissions were last year (there are various carbon calculators online – and the average is about seven tonnes of fossil CO₂ per person in Europe). Then multiply by £200 per tonne of CO₂, and suggest the parents pop that amount into a trust fund in case their kids have to clean up after them in the 2040s.
If the parents reply, “don’t worry, dear, that’s what we pay taxes for”, youngsters should ask them who they voted for in the last election and whether spending their taxes on solving climate change featured prominently in that party’s manifesto.
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Read more: https://theconversation.com/why-protesters-should-be-wary-of-12-years-to-climate-breakdown-rhetoric-115489
I guess we should thank Myles Allen for providing such a simple solution. All parents have to do to calm the fears of climate obsessed children is work longer hours, so they can give their kids more money.
So when we are asked by the young Green activates, “What are you going
to do about Climate Change ?””, we should reply, “What are you going to
do about India and China ? ?”
Anything that the Western countries do is wiped out in just a few days by
the CO2 emissions from both of those countries, so why wreak our
economy and standard of living trying to save the World. It is after all just
the one world, although the Greens seem to think otherwise.
MJE VK5ELL
What do 100% of climate scientists and countries have in common? They are all literally blind to temperature. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau did not pass on science advancements that allow sight of temperature with non invasive radiology. Trudeau and MP Stephen Fuhr were given qualified science by energy professionals with credentials recognized across Canada by all levels of government.
Myles Allen was not informed that solar EMFs were interacting with absorbent exterior finishes generating heat as much as 92 deg C on a 35 deg. C day. That is super heating the atmosphere 55.5 deg. C more than the
1.5 deg. C Myles refers to.
Thermal equilibrium is this hot energy transferring that energy, should children and students be worried now? Urban heat islands are heat generators first. Mid 20’s C is sub optimal to lethal for spawning fish, what is the domino effect losing fish?
This science is lectured in accredited medical education for education credits required for ongoing medical licensing and applicable to health professionals in North America.
There are real reasons they white wash or shade buildings. Here are 2 time time-lapsed infrared videos showing solar impact at sunrise and the domino effect into the building. In regards to accuracy, we were within 1/10th a deg. C imaging moving water from the air when tested by Hydrologists and forestry.
https://youtu.be/EA3py3us5VM
Who does he think is listening to him?
Not the liberal media, nor NGOs. Certainly not the parents of terrified children. Published in the Conversation too; which no one reads.
Perhaps it would be a smarter idea for the kids to start paying their own way. Don’t calculate the cost of the parent’s “emissions”, but the kids. Then, they could stop it with the TV, iPhone, designer clothes, etc. Or else pay for their own “pollution”.
No, didn’t think so, either. Demonstrates what today’s children really care about, which is protesting for any cause, no matter how pointless.
I don’t think Myles Allen understands what ’12 years’ means. It means:
in 2019 it is 12 yrs
in 2020 it will be 12 yrs
in 2021 it will be 12 yrs
in 2022 it will be 12 yrs
in 2023 it will be 12 yrs
.
.
.
THAT is the meaning of 12 yrs in the context of climate change.
Myles Allen suggests: “So here is a conversation young activists could have with their parents: first work out what the parents’ CO₂ emissions were last year (there are various carbon calculators online – and the average is about seven tonnes of fossil CO₂ per person in Europe). Then multiply by £200 per tonne of CO₂, and suggest the parents pop that amount into a trust fund in case their kids have to clean up after them in the 2040s.”
Eric sarcastically writes: “I guess we should thank Myles Allen for providing such a simple solution. All parents have to do to calm the fears of climate obsessed children is work longer hours, so they can give their kids more money.”
In the US at least, those parent should be paying higher employment taxes (Social Security and Medicare) to cover the cost of the benefits those parent will receive while their children and grandchildren are working. The discretionary portion of the budget (the part left over after entitlements and interest on the debt) as a fraction of GDP has already shrunk by a factor of two due to the squeeze from unfunded entitlements. Unfortunately, the fraction of GDP going to labor has dropped about 5% over the past several decades (and has double profit margins and the value of the stock market based on a constant P/E ratio). Many middle-class parents haven’t personally benefitted from our growing GDP. However, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to ask many of them to work longer to fund their longer retirements.
The net present value of the damages our children are likely to suffer from warmer climate in the 2040’s certainly isn’t £1,400/year/person. It might not even be £14/year/person. However at the warming rate experienced for the previous HALF-CENTURY (almost 0.2 K/decade) it will be about 0.5 K warmer than today. And things don’t look so optimistic if that trend continues for another half-century.
Eric’s frivolous comments about serious issues simply promote partisan warfare and gridlock.
Frank,
I don’t think Eric’s comments are frivolous.
And I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything Myles Allen has written that I take seriously.
Except in the sense that my tax pounds are being paid to venal, dishonest charlatans like Allen and his colleagues who are responsible for filling the heads of gormless arts-graduate politicians with pseudoscience and exhorting them to waste Billons of pounds on ‘solutions’ that don’t work, to problems that don’t exist.
I take that exceedingly seriously.
Martin: Myles Allen is correctly telling parents to take seriously the debts they are leaving their children. Eric is telling parents they don’t need to work harder to GIVE their children more money – that they have no obligations to be fair to the next generation.
I personally think the unfunded liabilities we are passing on to the next generation are a bigger problem than any environmental liabilities from rising CO2. However, the correct approach is to take seriously the problems we are leaving behind and have a sensible discussion about them. Is £1,400/year/person the right cost for the net present value of the future damage that will be caused our emissions of CO2? What will happen to economic growth if we made such an investment in the future? Won’t that reduce economic growth and make our descendants poorer than they would be otherwise?
Myles Allen is merely one in a long line of Malthusians who have questioned man’s ability to deal with the problems created by ever-growing prosperity. Living in an ivory tower shaped by radical environmentalist, he sees a future where his children are going to be much poorer than he is and feels a moral obligation to do what he can to avoid making their problems worse. He doesn’t understand that the best way to help his future descendants is private investment in future economic growth, not fiscally imprudent investments in low carbon energy.
Eric seems to think that parents are already doing too much for their children.
Sarcasm is justified, but scaring and manipulating children is not. It is reprehensible to burden a child with these fears. Teach them to read write calculate and think. During the Cold War it was necessary to a degree because we knew the danger was real. I advise parents and granparents to reverse this stuff and tell your child that these concerns are not justified.
Tell them that projections had been running 300% too hot and every 5 years they have to fiddle the temperatures and move the goalposts. In 2013, the threshold worry was 2C above 1950 by 2100. The totally unexpected 2 decade Pause (except for the 20-20 hindsight they cobbled together post hoc) caused a massive rethink and they pushed the 1930s highs down over half a degree C because they couldn’t live with all the warming in the 20th Century having occurred before 1940! Then they pushed the starting gate back to 1850 so they could put the 0.8C of warming from the Little Ice Age on their warming ledger and add 0.7C onto that – 1.5C by 2100. The worry we are supposed to have the in reality is 0.7C above 1940 – the increase in a 160 years.
Also tell your children, climate scientists were badly mistaken about the polar bears – they’ve trippled in numbers since the 1970s and the penguin population which was supposed to be alarmingly declining turned out to have moved to another part of Antarctica (probably to get away from the researchers who killed a bunch by harnessing cameras on their bodies and ruining their ability to fish.) A little humor helps – one Australian specialist (C. Turney) on Antarctica was moved to tears when he came across thousands of dead penguin chicks that he thought global warming had killed. It turned out they had died hundreds of years ago and since no animals or carrion- eating birds live there they accumulated frozen solid. It is normal for many chicks to die each year after hatching.
Give them a project. Tell them to copy the temperature series that was used up to the 1990s, then compare the same with today’s to see how the researchers invented data.
I think it would be great for a clever writer to prepare a book for children that countervails all this stuff. It could be interesting: settlers on Greenland, the warming periods through the Holocene, today’s exciting “Great Greening” of the planet, the periodic swings into glacial maxima, etc. Give these ugly people pushback.
Miles Allen, pretending to aleviate the scaring, is really looking to harness them against the parents, contributing to this Ugly Age’s malicious destruction of families so the little dears can be guided by our betters. Shame on you Miles.
Gary writes: “Tell them that projections had been running 300% too hot”
This is incorrect. Based on the warming and forcing, Lewis and Curry (and others) calculate a TCR (the transient warming from a forcing) of about 1.3 K/doubling, while the IPCC’s models project an average of 1.8 K/doubling (with a range of 1.3 to 2.4). The models are 40% higher than observations, not 300%. You can go back to the UAH Version 5 warming rate and get a different answer, but the UAH Version 6 warming rate is DOUBLE that of Version 5 and the current RSS warming rate is TRIPLE. The surface warming rate has only been modified slightly. You can cherry-pick different starting and finishing dates and get different answers for shorter periods. If you data ends with the Pause, you’ll miss the 0.2 degC of warming over the past five years. Over the last half-century (which has seen more than 60% of the forcing, 0.9 degC of warming, and far fewer adjustments to station data), the warming trend was been nearly 0.2 degC/decade.
The idea that the 1930’s warm period has been pushed down is only true in the US, where time of observation corrections were made (needed corrections IMO). The total adjustment added 0.2 degC of GLOBAL warming, mostly before the 1970’s.
Gary writes: “Give them a project. Tell them to copy the temperature series that was used up to the 1990s, then compare the same with today’s to see how the researchers invented data.”
A group of skeptics got funding from the Koch brothers and took on this project. They collected five times as many temperature records as used in the past, used a superior method of assembly all of the data and found basically the same amount of warming as activist scientists.
When you compare warming in the last half century to the proxy record for climate variation in the previous 140 half-centuries of the Holocene (the LIA, MWP, RWP, Minoan WP), remember that you are usually looking at local records from Greenland. You won’t find ANY of these warm periods in Antarctic ice cores, nor globally in ocean sediment cores. And everyone agrees that changes in polar regions are amplified (doubled) compared with change at lower latitudes. Everyone also agrees that there was a LIA (possibly caused by a weaker sun and more volcanos), but how much colder than 1900 was it? Less than 1 degC? And there was a warm period before the LIA – but one that peaked in different CENTURIES in different places. It was nothing like the near global warming of the last half-century.
Activists have greatly distorted many other things about our climate: extreme weather, polar bears, hurricanes. They often don’t deserve our scientific respect. However, it is essential to determine what is and isn’t true, and some of the information you’ve cited above is as bogus as the propaganda from activists.
Oh, sure. Launch the “we’re all gonna die in 12 years” hysteria, then quietly walk it back once the fire is blazing. All the while accepting the accolades and $$$ the Green Blob supplies.