To quote a Facebook friend of mine: Yawn.
More than 11,000 scientists endorse six steps to address climate emergency
University of Sydney
A global team of scientists including Dr Thomas Newsome at the University of Sydney and international colleagues has warned that “untold human suffering” is unavoidable without deep and lasting shifts in human activities that contribute to greenhouse gas emissions and other factors related to climate change.
The declaration is based on scientific analysis of more than 40 years of publicly available data covering a broad range of measures, including energy use, surface temperature, population growth, land clearing, deforestation, polar ice mass, fertility rates, gross domestic product and carbon emissions.
“Scientists have a moral obligation to warn humanity of any great threat,” said Dr Newsome from the School of Life and Environment Sciences. “From the data we have, it is clear we are facing a climate emergency.”
In a paper published today in BioScience, the authors from the University of Sydney, Oregon State University, University of Cape Town and Tufts University, along with more than 11,000 scientist signatories from 153 countries, declare a climate emergency, present data showing trends as benchmarks against which to measure progress and outline six areas of action to mitigate the worst effects of a human-induced climate change.
“Despite 40 years of major global negotiations, we have generally conducted business as usual and are essentially failing to address this crisis,” said Professor William Ripple, distinguished professor of ecology in the Oregon State University College of Forestry and co-lead author of the paper. “Climate change has arrived and is accelerating faster than many scientists expected.”
Dr Newsome said that measuring global surface temperatures will continue to remain important. However, he said that a “broader set of indicators should be monitored, including human population growth, meat consumption, tree-cover loss, energy consumption, fossil-fuel subsidies and annual economic losses to extreme weather events”.
He said the indicators are intended to be useful for the public, policymakers and the business community to track progress over time.
“While things are bad, all is not hopeless. We can take steps to address the climate emergency,” Dr Newsome said.
The scientists point to six areas in which humanity should take immediate steps to slow down the effects of a warming planet:
- Energy. Implement massive conservation practices; replace fossil fuels with clean renewables; leave remaining stocks of fossil fuels in the ground; eliminate subsidies to fossil fuel companies; and impose carbon fees that are high enough to restrain the use of fossil fuels.
- Short-lived pollutants. Swiftly cut emissions of methane, hydrofluorocarbons, soot and other short-lived climate pollutants. This has the potential to reduce the short-term warming trend by more than 50 percent over the next few decades.
- Nature. Restrain massive land clearing. Restore and protect ecosystems such as forests, grasslands and mangroves, which would greatly contribute to the sequestration of atmospheric carbon dioxide, a key greenhouse gas.
- Food. Eat mostly plants and consume fewer animal products. This dietary shift would significantly reduce emissions of methane and other greenhouse gases and free up agricultural lands for growing human food rather than livestock feed. Reducing food waste is also critical – the scientists say at least one-third of all food produced ends up as garbage.
- Economy. Convert the economy’s reliance on carbon fuels to address human dependence on the biosphere. Shift goals away from the growth of gross domestic product and the pursuit of affluence. Curtail the extraction of materials and exploitation of ecosystems to maintain long-term biosphere sustainability.
- Population. Stabilise global population, which is increasing by more than 200,000 people a day, using approaches that ensure social and economic justice.
The paper states: “Mitigating and adapting to climate change means transforming the ways we govern, manage, eat, and fulfil material and energy requirements.
“We are encouraged by a recent global surge of concern – governments adopting new policies; schoolchildren striking; lawsuits proceeding; and grassroots citizen movements demanding change.
“As scientists, we urge widespread use of the vital signs and hope the graphical indicators will better allow policymakers and the public to understand the magnitude of the crisis, realign priorities and track progress.”
The graphs illustrate how climate-change indicators and factors have changed over the past 40 years, since scientists from 50 nations met at the First World Climate Conference in Geneva in 1979.
In the ensuing decades, multiple other global assemblies have agreed that urgent action is necessary, but greenhouse gas emissions are still rapidly rising. Other ominous signs from human activities include sustained increases in per-capita meat production, global tree cover loss and number of airline passengers.
There are also some encouraging signs – including decreases in global birth rates and decelerated forest loss in the Brazilian Amazon and increases in wind and solar power – but even those are tinged with worry.
The decline in birth rates has slowed over the last 20 years, for example, and the pace of Amazon forest loss may be starting to increase again.
“Global surface temperature, ocean heat content, extreme weather and its costs, sea level, ocean acidity and land area are all rising,” Professor Ripple said.
“Ice is rapidly disappearing as shown by declining trends in minimum summer Arctic sea ice, Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, and glacier thickness. All of these rapid changes highlight the urgent need for action.”
###
Joining Dr Newsome and Professor Ripple are co-lead author Dr Christopher Wolf, a postdoctoral scholar in the Oregon State University College of Forestry; Dr Phoebe Barnard of the Biological Conservation Institute and the University of Cape Town; and Emeritus Professor William Moomaw of Tufts University.
MULTIMEDIA
VIDEO explainer of the climate emergency declaration.
Available in 16:9 and square ratios, with or without subtitles.
Download at this link.
PHOTOGRAPHS of Dr Thomas Newsome and PDF of research at this link.
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Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ……………….
This is ripe shit that a rational (and intelligent) person couldn’t derive from the altered-mind state of their wildest dreams.
We can all give an Opinion:
Agree with most comments I read above, the 11k fellow ‘scientists’ who have declared their confirmation bias & therefore should IMHO pave the way and march to the nearest volcano along with the priests of Climate Cult and offer themselves to Gaia to start this process, which is what it seems the elites want to reduce population to 1/2 Billion except they forget that these ‘others’ in the 7 billion sacrificed produce consumables for their ultra deluxe lifestyles.
Critics blast a proposal to curb climate change by halting population growth.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/614682/critics-blast-a-proposal-to-curb-climate-change-by-halting-population-growth/
Why is it that after reading this thread one of the first questions that popped into my head was: “Is Dr. Thomas Newsome a distant relative of California’s governor Gavin Newsom?”
This ‘NEW ALARMISM ‘by modern scientists, was first made up in 1991, according to Tim Balls book of 2016: “…the objective was set out by Alexander King, an eminent Scottish scientist and president of the Club of Rome, who joined with his assistant secretary, Bertrand Schneider, in the 1991 publication: ‘The First Global Revolution’, which said: “In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine, and the like, would fit the bill. In their totality and their interaction these phenomena do contstitute a common threat which must be confronted by everyone together. But in designating these dangers as the enemy, we fall into the trap, which we have already warned readers about, namely mistaking symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention in natural processes, and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy is humanity itself.” The list of enemies or threats to the planet was designed to unite people. In reality, the challenge was to overcome individual nation-states that might oppose the establishment of one-world government or global socialism”. (Ball, p. 80-81, 2016)
How many are climate psychologists?……voting twice?
“untold human suffering”
Untold is the only thing they got right.
The money quote-
“Especially worrisome are potential irreversible climate tipping points and nature’s reinforcing feedbacks (atmospheric, marine, and terrestrial) that could lead to a catastrophic “hothouse Earth,” well beyond the control of humans (Steffen et al. 2018). ”
Embarrassing for the 11,000 to be signers to that statement.
Getting more eco points leads to a much larger carbon footprint from increased travel, promotions, and extra wealth effect. So it pays and it burns.
WE ARE ALL GONNA DIE .. some day
The EIA states that 1,559 MMmt (million Metric tons) of CO2 was produced by transportation in the US in 2018. The vast majority was burned in cars, trucks and busses. Guessing at, at least a 1,000 MMmt was for cars and trucks the reduction in CO2 by switching to CNG (or LNG) would result in a minimum 500 MMmt a year reduction in CO2 in US carbon dioxide emissions. Preventing political extremists like Cuomo from blocking NG pipelines could expand clean affordable NG heating for new homes and conversions from oil. Unless I’m wrong the only downside would be for politicians who would loose some of their control over our lives.
If they really want to cut CO2, they could stop using electric cars.
ELECTRIC VEHICLES EMIT MORE CO2 THAN DIESEL ONES, GERMAN STUDY SHOWS
* Date: 23/04/19
http://bit.ly/2ZYdUXJ
Catalytic converters produce the CO2. Get rid of those and CO2 emissions go down. Now, the other really bad emissions go back up but hey only CO2 matters.
I seem to recall that the petition to Ban DiHydrogen MonOxide garnered a far greater number.
Yawn about cuts it.
Who are these deluded children and who/what defines them as scientists.
Is there any evidence that any one of them is familiar with the use of the scientific method?
Here’s the thing, unless these 11,000 ‘scientists’ are willing to be the first to step into the suicide booths to save the planet, then I have serious reason to doubt their sincerity. We can make the booths nice and painless, push the button, it’s flooded with N2. The corpse drops into a refrigerated capsule for delivery to a hospital where they can be recycled into organs for donation. See, it’s a green operation, we’re recycling.
As a geologist working in the oilfield, I don’t count myself as a scientist and they count me as a Minion of Satan (Man do I miss my Halliburton coveralls sometimes), but I have enough of a background to see through the flimsy crap they push on the world. I applaud those actual scientists who are pushing the bounds of our knowledge and following where the science leads and not where a political agenda tells them to go. Science doesn’t require faith, but I do have faith that there are good people, doing real science and expanding our knowledge of the universe. My hard hat is off to you.
“Climate change has arrived and is accelerating faster than many scientists expected.”
PROVE IT! Assertions are meaningless if you are recommending draconian life style changes!
But in a movement that started out scaring us about “Global Warming”, what do you do when hard data about actual temperatures show a leveling off? Why simple, you add more metrics that have nothing to do with warming!
Monitor fossil fuel subsidies? (and who gets to define what a subsidy is?)
Tree cover loss? (why not measure the additional greening of the earth that could help feed the population growth you are so worried about?) BTW has he noticed that the developed countries that use fossil fuel have a negative population growth?
Economic losses due to extreme weather? Why not the actual frequency and intensity of “extreme weather”?
Meat consumption? (show me the paper that quantifies the resulting difference in global temperature if we all went vegan tomorrow)
Apparently there are 10,999 other academics who are starting to worry that the gravy train may be running out of steam.
It may be interesting to note that these authors have already caused untold human suffering and environmental degradation.
Thanks to Dr. Ripple and the OSU College of Forestry, Oregon has suffered under the Spotted Owl Plan since 1994, and really since 1989 when the Federal forests here were locked up.
The cost to Oregon has been $10 billion per year for 30 years, a total of $300 billion dollars to our economy. Over that time Oregon has led the nation in unemployment, business bankruptcy, mortgages in arrears, home foreclosures, food insecurity, and every other measure of economic decline. Our high school graduation rate is perennially the lowest in the US as poverty inflicts many wounds to families.
Meanwhile the spotted owl population has crashed by 80% or more, from more than 20,000 birds in 1989 to less than 3,000 today.
More than 5 million acres of Oregon spotted owl forests have been incinerated in Let It Burn fires, most but not all on Federal forests which are 60% of all Oregon forests (the Feds own 53% of the land in Oregon). The Feds have even carpet bombed (with helicopter-launched aerial incendiary bomblets) green old growth spotted owl nesting stands.
All this failure, suffering, and destruction has been done with the support and encouragement of the OSU CoF and their quackastic faculty. There is not one actual professional forester on that faculty (imagine a medical school with no doctors, a veterinary school with no vets, an architecture school with no architects, a beauty school with no actual trained beauticians, and you get the picture.)
Fraudulent pseudo science is not harmless. Much damage results when self-aggrandizing quacks and phonies are given the key to the public treasury. The alarmist/charlatans are exceedingly dangerous to people, birds, forests, and every living thing.
More than 11,000 scientists endorse six steps to address climate emergency
and yet, the missed out the very first and most basic step of all:
1) Prove that there actually is a climate emergency with actual observable, irrefutable facts (hint: models are not poof of anything and are not facts in any way shape or form).
Until you succeed in proving that one single important step, all the rest of their steps is garbage.
Sooner than later, most likely sooner, at least one of these “biologists” or “ecologists” is going to stand up at a meeting and shout, “Hitler was RIGHT! We need a Global Auschwitz Solution!” And the whole audience will stand with roaring applause and cheers and stomping of their feet on the floor (beer hall style).
Ha ha.
Great takedown by Andrew Bolt
https://www.skynews.com.au/details/_6100933346001
Tree cover fiddle!!
I found this rather astounding statement in the Supplemental information:
“tree cover loss does not take tree cover gain into account. Thus, net forest loss may be lower than the reported numbers.”
Well, quite possible, net tree cover is increasing! They haven’t bothered to assess it. Even warmists accept there has a significant increase in greening due to increased CO2. A recent NASA study states: “A quarter to half of Earth’s vegetated lands has shown significant greening over the last 35 years largely due to rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, according to a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change on April 25.”https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2436/co2-is-making-earth-greenerfor-now/
I got the list of 11000 scientists from https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/advance-article/doi/10.1093/biosci/biz088/5610806.
On p203 there is an entry as one of the 11000 as Mouse, Micky – Professor Micky Mouse Institute for the Blind – Namibia.
Clearly, after a pizza the action.
Canales, Valeria Customer Service Dominoes
So Dr Newsome has actually been to the School of Life?? I thought that was just a meme..
He must have missed the course ‘Reality 101’ and gone straight to the Models are Everything curriculum
“… human population growth, meat consumption, tree-cover loss, energy consumption, fossil-fuel subsidies and annual economic losses to extreme weather events”.
So those are the metrics they want “corrected.” Let’s examine them.
1. Human population growth – So whose population growth do they want to correct????
Most of the Western countries where they are trying to enact their destructive energy policies on are already at “replacement-only” levels for the cultural majority population. It is only through immigration now that most Western countries are even growing. That’s immigration from the 3rd World shitholes those immigrants are fleeing because of bad (socialist paradises like Venezuela, a country with more natural resources than most of the rest of South America) in governance, corruption, religious wars (Syria, Yemen) and the famines and death those conflicts bring. And if it is China, India, Pakistan, and Africa that they want to control their populations, that is very white racist of them. Eugenics anyone?
2. meat consumption – So whose meat consumption? The protein starved 3rd World? Or the middle class of the West socieities? I doubt seriously the rich elites in Cal or NY are denying themselves a big steak whenever they feel like it. This anti-meat movement is little more than a prescription for Soylent Green for the masses. And we know where that protein i sourced. And for the vegan grass munchers, where do they think those luscious green salads, berries, nuts, and fruits they like come from? And how do they arrive in nice clean displays at their favorite “local green” grocers from hundreds or thousands of miles away?
3. tree cover loss – Really?
The switch to fossil fuels over 100 years ago saved our remaining old growth forests from continued cutting for fuel. Logging now is just for paper and construction lumber. If we drastically cut back on fossil fuel use as they advocate for, where do these genius morons think the common folks are going to get their fuel to stay warm and cook? Just like what happens in fossil fuel-deprived and electricity-poor Africa. They cut down the forests for fuel. Massive regrowth of North American forests occurred in the 20th Century exactly after we switched to coal, oil, and natural gas for our fuels. Deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon is also being driven by Europe’s demand for biodiesel and bio-ethanol for their “green” fuels. These “scientists” are a bunch of morons if they think otherwise.
4. “energy consumption” ??? What a catch all meaningless statement. If they were worried about “energy consumption” of fossil fuels, they’d be advocating for nuclear power. Dumb doesn’t even begin to describe that metric.
5. “fossil fuel subsidies” – Maybe they are alluding to the Social Costs of Carbon (SCC)? A completely meaningless metric that totally ignores the massive far-reaching benefits of fossil fuel use by mankind. Any analysis that only considers costs and not benefits of a policy or action is simply a disingenuous deception. I suppose these idiots “scientists” would like their lives and their families’ lives to return to that wonderful period when life as “harsh, brutish, and short.” Or maybe they simply want that to happen to someone else, just not them? Immoral would be a good word to describe these “scientists.”
6. “annual economic losses to extreme weather events”
Let’s see — Roger Pielke, Jr has already taken this argument apart and shredded it. Our economic losses are only increasing (on a centennial time scale) because more people and more infrastructure are continually moving to and building in vulnerable areas. Not because extreme weather events are getting more frequent. Nothing to do with fossil fuel use. There is no trend in extreme weather events. And if they think just by reducing CO2 emissions that extreme weather events will begin to decline or lessen, well these moron scientist also must believe in magic and voodoo tricks. In fact our economic strengths and wealth and use of fossil fuels makes us more resilient, better able to cope, evacuate, and recover afer natural disasters, including earthquakes, tsunamis, blizzards. Do these scientist-acting morons think that eliminating fossil fuel use will help or hurt in those recoveries?
Overall, those signatories to that moronic statement are all a bunch of morons, charlatans, rent seekers, and in general – idiots. They are not scientists. Doing any of these things they advocate for regarding fossil fuel use would simply be far more destructive in the long run.
Excellent points, Joel, but it’s not just the Amazon that is being cut down for biomass and biofuels.
The Obvious Biomass Emissions Error
http://bit.ly/2YXSJre
February 7, 2019
…In the name of cutting CO2 emissions, four of the six Drax generating stations were converted to burn wood chips over the last seven years, at a cost of £700 million ($1 billion). Hailed as “the biggest decarbonization project in Europe,” this facility now consumes about 9 million tons of wood pellets per year, shipped 3,000 miles from the US and Canada.
An estimated 4,600 square miles of forest are needed to feed the voracious Drax plant, with acres of forest felled each day.
Green Shock: Entire Forests Being Murdered to Produce Wood Pellet Biomass
http://bit.ly/2OHpODJ
…Huge areas of hardwood forest in the state of Virginia are being chainsawed to create ‘biomass’ energy in Britain as the government attempts to reach targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in efforts to tackle climate change, an investigation by Channel 4 Dispatches has found…
__
It’s not just in these places but in Europe and Australia where old growth forests are being chopped down for wood pellets so Greens can feel virtuous that they’re not using coal and bask in the glory of meeting their Paris Accord targets even as they increase CO2 and actual emissions of real pollutants.
I
Regarding tree cover, large areas in New England which used to be farmland have reverted back to forest. True, some has been developed, but I’m guessing 90% or more hasn’t.
Carrying out these actions will cause massive human misery. Millions will die, tens of millions will be impoverished. It’s quite possible that will be tens of millions and hundreds of millions.
Are these “scientists” unable or unwilling to see that?
There are approximately 2 million scientists today. Give or take a few tens of thousands.
In fact it is said the 95% of the scientists of all times are alive today.
So 11,000 is about what 5 or so percent?
Much of them is in the science of basket weaving.
This is a nothing burger.