Fear’s a great motivator, right? So what better way to motivate people to care about climate change than to scare the crap out of them? Even if you have to leave out some details to do it?
New York Magazine climate columnist David Wallace-Wells seems to be a student at the School of We’re Hurtling Toward Global Environmental Catastrophe and We’re All Gonna Die. Last night, he shared a short piece by James Dyke, a senior lecturer in global systems at the University of Exeter, explaining some of the horrible things humanity is in for:
’”Oh, I think we’re heading towards 3°C at least,” he said. “But what about the many millions of people directly threatened,” I went on. He gave a sigh. “They will die.”’ https://t.co/CRiHEza6wg
— David Wallace-Wells (@dwallacewells) June 3, 2019
“I was born in the early 1970s. This means in my lifetime the number of people on Earth has doubled, while the size of wild animal populations has been reduced by 60%. Humanity has swung a wrecking ball through the biosphere.”
— David Wallace-Wells (@dwallacewells) June 3, 2019
“The most effective guard against climate breakdown may not be technological, but a fundamental reimagining of what constitutes a good life on this planet. … So far our response to the challenge of climate change exposes a fundamental failure of collective imagination.”
— David Wallace-Wells (@dwallacewells) June 3, 2019
Speaking of fundamental failures of the imagination, if climate change is such a serious threat, why do climate change alarmists insist on addressing it in such unserious ways? Author and “Skeptical Environmentalist” Bjorn Lomborg, for one, is fed up with the fearmongering, and
Unbridled climate alarmism:
"But what about the many millions of people directly threatened, living in low-lying nations?"
"They will die"Sorry, no:
1) Over 81 years, they will move, not die
2) Adaptation means almost none will moveUnfounded terror scaring people needlessly https://t.co/fMdJqja2tN
— Bjorn Lomborg (@BjornLomborg) June 3, 2019
Take this new alarmist paper, which made the rounds in the last weeks. It talks about 187 million people displaced — not flooded, not killed.
Obviously, people will not stay and drown.https://t.co/aB2sYpoEfQ, I wrote about how badly wrong this is here: https://t.co/bIQhgowdGQ pic.twitter.com/2XDWa5fYRk
— Bjorn Lomborg (@BjornLomborg) June 3, 2019
But notice their reference for the 187 million (#38)
Here is the paper.
It says the following in the abstract:
187 million, but can be avoided by paying 0.02% of GDPShould reporters not be responsible for pointing this out, so people don't get so scared?https://t.co/HYNe9dM0PI pic.twitter.com/DD4VGKONSx
— Bjorn Lomborg (@BjornLomborg) June 3, 2019
Will adaptation happen — absolutely:
Everyone will accept paying <0.02% to avoid >5% of GDP costsAnd then, instead of 187,000,000 displaced, you have less than 305,000 (at least 600x less)
Shouldn't reporters be obliged to tell people that?
Or okay to just scare them silly? pic.twitter.com/bFGqRBHRvN— Bjorn Lomborg (@BjornLomborg) June 3, 2019
Claim: Millions will die from rising seas
Fact: They won't die, and almost none have to moveThe outcome of this climate alarmism porn is to frighten children and many adults needlessly
How is such outrageous scare campaigning okay?
— Bjorn Lomborg (@BjornLomborg) June 3, 2019
It’s not. At least it shouldn’t be.
PS. I only analyzed first part of scare:
'many millions directly threatened: low-lying nations farmers affected by abrupt changes in weather, kids exposed to new diseases?”
Others similar: 5.4 million kids die from entirely well-known, easily curable diseases, not new ones
— Bjorn Lomborg (@BjornLomborg) June 3, 2019
Dispelling the faulty “science” behind climate change alarmism is no easy task, but Lomborg is up to the challenge:
Eh, you may want to read all the way to the middle of the first tweet: "Adaptation means almost none will move"
No mass immigration
But thanks for making my point of how climate alarmism takes a bit of unscary truth and turns it into Armageddon
— Bjorn Lomborg (@BjornLomborg) June 3, 2019
Adaptation. Well good luck with that!! I don't currently see Mozambique adapting very well…
— 🌳Felix Doran🍾 (@felixd0r) June 3, 2019
Maybe because of blinkered prejudice of Mozambique?
According to the UN's middle-of-road climate scenario (SSP2), the average person in Mozambique will at $42,000 be as rich as a Dutchman today
(and adaptation will cost 0.02% of that)https://t.co/pEht1X27dG pic.twitter.com/UWB7NkyV8q— Bjorn Lomborg (@BjornLomborg) June 3, 2019
At what certainty can you predict "adaptation" when this is the first time humans will live in a planet warmer than 1.5 or 2 or 3C? Genuine question. Armageddon only happens once.
— 🌳Felix Doran🍾 (@felixd0r) June 3, 2019
Because humanity has many times before handled relative sea level rise, e.g. from massive land movement from water extraction (5 meters in Jakarta) or from earthquakes (1 meter for Tubigon in the Philippines)
— and tackled it finehttps://t.co/yInawvjE2s pic.twitter.com/2JFacoKk2h— Bjorn Lomborg (@BjornLomborg) June 3, 2019
Bjorn, what formal training in the climate sciences do you have again? – #climatechange #sciencematters
— @GeraldKutney (@GeraldKutney) June 3, 2019
Ah, how constructive:
Climate alarmist: millions will die
I point out the research showing: 1) none will die 2) very few will moveAnd then PhD in chemistry joins —not with a substantial contribution (maybe challenging my points)
but instead trying to disallow conversation https://t.co/KCpG3czyIB— Bjorn Lomborg (@BjornLomborg) June 3, 2019
A claim of 187 million displaced when right number <305K — 600x less
Or someone claiming millions will die, when right number is ~zeroIf you missed this, maybe try to read twitter-thread again?
— Bjorn Lomborg (@BjornLomborg) June 3, 2019
Alarmist: someone who *incorrectly* say millions will die, when right number close to ~zero
Not a complicated definition, I would think
— Bjorn Lomborg (@BjornLomborg) June 3, 2019
I do appreciate your response, and now I understand. I am not aware of any peer-reviewed studies that have suggested such things. "Alarmist papers must be quite rare. Or are you saying that only some public press are alarmist?
— @GeraldKutney (@GeraldKutney) June 3, 2019
"Zero"? People dying in climate driven heat waves already.
— 💧Rob Mailler (@rlmailler) June 3, 2019
It goes on and on.
See the whole epic thread here.
H/T Richard B
Lomborg is a star.
Check out his recent tweets taking down Naomi Oreskes
https://twitter.com/BjornLomborg/status/1136762378283094021
I don’t think he is a star he is just a normal pragmatic person. The general public also seem to be quite capable of making the same evaluations and voting accordingly.
Maybe the Danish guy needs to remember what happened to Doggerland and who used to live there.
Schokland is a better example Rocketscientist.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/08/28/climate-change-threatened-shishmaref-town-on-sarichef-island-lessons-from-vlieland-and-schokland-in-the-netherlands/
German island sand strand is NATURALLY wandering with the west winds to the east.
NO need for “climate change”.
For tourism the sand strands every year are cemented back again:
https://www.google.com/search?client=ms-android-samsung&q=Heligoland+sands+wandering+returned+by+machines+for+tourism&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiQ2tmVp9riAhWGuIsKHQzfAv8Q7xYoAHoECAoQAg&biw=360&bih=560
I can’t follow all this twitter back and forth. It’s aptly named if you’ve ever heard the cacophony of birds at dawn all trying to shout over each other.
Thanks, Gary!! I am wondering in what way repetitive after repetitive after repetitive screen shots of the same tweet make our understanding of the discussion any easier. Frankly I gave up on this article halfway through!
PS It’s not only here; every MSM site does the same. We don’t need the entire back history of the exchange every time it’s added to! How about just a wee bit of editing?
They will not move in 81 years if governments (Florida) provides a non-market insurance policy to stay. And they will not move (NY) if their leaders play up climate fear to rebuild with Federal money in the same place as a result of Super storm Sandy positioning. and get other unrelated projects funded depending on the volume of the squawk.
They also will not move if the most likely thing happens: Nothing.
There is no indication that a single word of this is anything but inane blathering.
No indication of CO2 rise causing temps to follow, and zero indication that the warming of the past 150 years has caused even a slight increase in the rate of sea level rise, which remains at a very unscary and harmless 8-10 inches per century.
Close examination of the actual changes to the actual ocean show exactly zero measurable or observable change in the position of the ocean in relation to structures, except where erosion might have done so.
Pleased to see the WSJ publishing him a lot lately; keep up the good work, Mr. Lomborg!
Bjorn Lomborg is a voice of reason in the cacophony of politicians, environmentalists, financiers, quack scientists, unqualified journalists & child truants who either haven’t got a clue……or know exactly what’s going on and are milking it for personal gain or self-aggrandisement!
Lomborg still things CO2 is a problem. He just doesn’t think it’s as big a problem as the press makes it out to be. His number of <300k displaced… IF it happens, it won't be due to CO2, but to natural sea level rise, and erosion, storms, etc.
JA
Exactly correct. Lomborg is no Skeptic. He believes the Myth, he just doesn’t buy the looney ideas the Alarmists are putting out to fix it.
I said Lomborg is a voice of reason…..I didn’t label him as anything other than that! He has been fighting the good fight for almost 20 years since he published “The Skeptical Environmentalist” and “Cool It” so regardless of how you want to categorise him, I’d say he’s earned his stripes as a force for good. He argues on economic issues and mercilessly points out the folly of squandering money on “climate change” when it would be much better to invest it in human health & education.
I’d love to know how big his house is, and where he takes his family on vacation.
People have always died in heat waves.
There is no evidence that there are more heatwaves.
There is no evidence that more people are dying.
Indeed, the evidence is that except when climate do gooders prevent them from improving their lives, the number of people dying from climate “disasters” is going down.
A lot more die to wars and political upheaval than anything else.
There’s no such thing as a “climate disaster”, just weather phenomena.
Props to Bjorn.
He’s got his work cut out for him.
That Lomborg can accept all the alarmists assumptions regarding what is going to happen to the climate, and still prove that there is no need for alarm really drives the alarmists bonkers.
The reason greens like Rabbett and McKibbin focus on deaths from warming at the exclusion of the far greater number of deaths from cooling and poverty is that they want the poor to die. That is the very point of the Green movement. To reduce the population by killing the poor.
The poor are wanting to not be poor. And as the Greens believe in finite resources they also believe the poor are wanting to share the Green’s resources.
Therefore the Greens campaign to get the poor dead first.
The fact that the poor whom they are killing happen to have brown skins is not a coincidence.
The irony is they are terrible at what they do, even when what they want is for poor people to die.
If they were good at what they do, they would prevent poor people from flooding into rich countries where they can reproduce like crazy and have little chance of dying at all, from anything…except eventual old age.
Instead they advocate tirelessly for unrestricted migration of hordes of people from poor countries to successful ones.
It is worse than that. It is not merely the poor that they are after it is poor people of color they want to persecute. Warmunism is the last socially acceptable form of racism.
If warmists thought logically, they would understand that the green world of their wet dreams could be reached most quickly by wiping out the people of the First World. They are always talking about leading by example, so, perhaps they should lead the way by wiping themselves out first.
Another aspect of the equation is that some (likely small) number of people will live due to climate change. Others who would have moved without the climate changing will be able to stay. It all depends on what the change is in each individual location on earth – something very, very far beyond powers of prediction.
Yea, you deniers go ahead and have your fun. The truth is about to hit hard because Robert Downey Jr., currently out of both jail and rehab, has announced he will tackle climate change. Thar’s right he’s coming for you.
Oh noes Iron Man is after us … meh we have the good stuff and then he is just a man, high in a tin suit
If Coastal Flooding is bound to occur, and the Maldives are the hotbed for going underwater,
why then are they investing in New Airports at sea level and new Resorts built beach side?
Twould seem to me that IF there was eminent danger of coastal flooding, the Maldives wouldn’t be investing heavily in beach side infrastructure
98% of the real estate “threatened” by ocean rise are 1%ers. I’m sure they will adapt.
Twitter is toxic. But if it exist (and it does of course), then people like Bjorn Lomborg need to be there to push back on the nonsense, outright lies, and climate porn.
Twitter will ban him if he’s not progressive enough.
It is actually entertaining to witness the gross unseriousness of alarmists when confronted with someone like Lomborg who cuts through the BS with pure logic and facts, and therefore completely obliterates their stupid arguments.
As if humans didn’t adapt.
Well as a species, homo sapiens has existed for 350,000 years give or take … enough to have weathered three complete glaciation-interglacial cycles … not to mention H. sapien’s homo ancestors dating back several millions of years to before the Pleistocene Epoch and its roughly two dozen glaciation-interglacial cycles.
If we humans can adapt to THAT, then well, it will take a helluva lot more than 3 degrees C to throw us for a loop.
Of course, with today’s technology, we humans are vastly better equipped to adapt to climate change than all of our ancestors even as recently as one century ago, let alone 350 thousand years ago … or 3 million years ago.
The net result of sea rise, even at the fantastically juiced rates that the alarmists’s models predict at the top end will just mean some humans will like always adapt with easily constructed infrastructure, and perhaps a tiny minority will have to move .. and the overwhelmingly vast majority of humans won’t have to do a damned thing … at worst, turn up our air conditioners, and enjoy the milder winters, and go diving on the brand new coral reefs that move northwards a few hundred miles from where they are today in the subtropics.
About degrees. Not Fahrenheit, Celsius or Kelvin, but the ones that used in the sentence:
“What degree do you have in climate science?”
Well, what degree Nick Lewis has? The man who took a cursory glance into the climate paper making dire predictions and trumpeted by alarmist press. To remind you, he immediately spotted an error in their statistics methodology, so that the paper was consequently retracted…
So, when Nick is saying that Transient Climate response is 1.5 degree, while some alarmist with PHD in climate science (small caps) insists it is twice of that, whom do I to believe?
Exactly which Universities offer a PhD in a subject called “climate science”?
You don’t “believe” either.
Just know what Dr Crichton said about those “scientists’ who invoke “consensus” to try to get you to believe what they are selling. And distrust them. Because they are likely wrong.
Believe Nick. His partner in that paper was Judy Curry former chairman of the climate science department at Georgia Tech.
Lomborg is a political scientist by training which is acutely relevant to te who climate hysteria because it is politics not physics.
H.L. Mencken said, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed — and hence clamorous to be led to safety — by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
No. Lomborgs PhD is in applied statistics.
It’s an issue they have always had if you want to disqualify some of the opponents then most of the climate scientists are disqualified as well and you would be left with a very small handful. Climate science is full of activist refugees from other fields.
it’s 1 inch a decade……8 inches in 81 years
The bottom line for these so-called news operations is that fear sells.
But he still wants to fix global warming.
https://youtu.be/tbGZo8D5gnI
What makes him think we can fix it ? How does he want the climate stop changing ?
We all knew CO2 is not about temperature or climate when they started using ocean acidification. It made the ‘problem’ really scary .
Lomborg is a political scientist and that the most relevant science in diagnosing climate hysteria. He should point that out to the jerk asking him about his training.
OH MY !!!
Instead of Global Mean Temperature going from 288°K to 290°K, it’s going to 291°K.
Will the catfish still bite? Will the ProV1 still be the best golf ball? Will 6.5 Creedmoor still be the best caliber?
187 million over many decades will have to move?
So what? About 19 million ethnic Germans had to move after WW II, out of Poland, East Prussia, Czechoslovakia, and other places occupied by Russian forces determined to make these areas free of all German influence. Might as well throw in the 1 million Volga Germans moved to Siberia by Stalin.
Only a million ethnic Germans died during the move from things like disease, hunger, being run over by tanks, etc.
If that displacement over a couple of years did not stir the conscious of the world, and has been forgotten about by that same world as a matter of fact, an event not worthy of teaching in schools, this new potential displacement is no huge deal.
“And then PhD in chemistry joins —not with a substantial contribution (maybe challenging my points)
but instead trying to disallow conversation”
ROTFLMAO!!
Oh that’s a good one made even more perfect by the fact it is true!
I like how Lomborg has his data set up ready to skewer these hapless, easily led useful idjits. I like to ask him how he dies this. It would eventually clam these empty vessels up if they met this type of reply every time.
That was, I’m not sure how to put it, frickin AMAZING!!! I love this guy. He literally shredded these fear mongers to shreds. And yet Bjorn is a villain to be hated across the globe. Man, this world is a mess.
Gerald Kutney: Asks Lomborg what are his bona fides to question alarmist drivel of 183 million deaths.
Also Gerald Kutney: Tells Lomborg there is no science behind the 183 million deaths malarkey, and acts like that is on Lomborg too.
Not Gerald Kutney: Agreeing with Lomborg that 183 millions deaths is unsupportable crap.
So, the apparent logic is that only alarmists can dispute alarmist drivel, but that the only time it is proper to do so is when criticizing a skeptic for disputing alarmist drivel.
This is how we know Kutney is a gen-u-whine dyed in the wool climate science eggspurt.
The climate is dominated by natural variation and the scale of any human affect is minuscule compared to what nature will do. Fortunately, the one thing nature abhors is getting warmer in an interglacial – or to be precise UNFORTUNATELY, because almost no one is going to be concerned about getting a few degrees warmer but a lot MORE people (as a lot already do) will die if we get colder.
“…but a fundamental reimagining of what constitutes a good life on this planet. ” So, do we want someone like David Wallace-Wells telling us what constitutes a good life?
“but a lot MORE people (as a lot already do) will die if we get colder.”
That “if” should probably be a “when”.
Paradoxically for that generation the problems will be how to maximise the greenhouse effect and decrease albedo. I can only imagine what they will think of our contribution to their misfortune.
“Climate driven heatwaves” 😀
No. Lomborgs PhD is in applied statistics.
The climate fear industry know ‘s their con game results in 10’s of thousands of fuel poverty deaths each year
and is racist suppression of some of the poorest people on the planet, so their solution is make up absolute fiction about how scary climate changes are going to wipe out untold millions.
You don’t have to spend a great deal of time with a true believer to know they want half the worlds population eradicated . What better way … rob them of energy .
The ring leaders know what they are doing and need to be held to account .
Aldo Leopold:
“I have no hope for conservation born of fear.”