Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Forbes has published an apology by high profile environmental activist Michael Shellenberger for his role in helping to create the climate scare, and his explanation for why he chose to speak out now.
24 views|Jun 28, 2020,06:48pm EDT
On Behalf Of Environmentalists, I Apologize For The Climate Scare
Michael Shellenberger
I write about energy and the environment.On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologize for the climate scare we created over the last 30 years. Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem.
I may seem like a strange person to be saying all of this. I have been a climate activist for 20 years and an environmentalist for 30.
But as an energy expert asked by Congress to provide objective expert testimony, and invited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to serve as Expert Reviewer of its next Assessment Report, I feel an obligation to apologize for how badly we environmentalists have misled the public.
…
I know that the above facts will sound like “climate denialism” to many people. But that just shows the power of climate alarmism.
…
I became an environmentalist at 16 when I threw a fundraiser for Rainforest Action Network. At 27 I helped save the last unprotected ancient redwoods in California. In my 30s I advocated renewables and successfully helped persuade the Obama administration to invest $90 billion into them. Over the last few years I helped save enough nuclear plants from being replaced by fossil fuels to prevent a sharp increase in emissions
But until last year, I mostly avoided speaking out against the climate scare. Partly that’s because I was embarrassed. After all, I am as guilty of alarmism as any other environmentalist. For years, I referred to climate change as an “existential” threat to human civilization, and called it a “crisis.”
…
But then, last year, things spiraled out of control.
…
Read more:https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2020/06/28/on-behalf-of-environmentalists-i-apologize-for-the-climate-scare/(Backup PDF Available Here)
Michael Schellenberger has provided a more complete explanation in his new book Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All.
Reading Schellenberger’s full apology in Forbes, I was pleasantly surprised how close his views are to mine. Despite Schellenberger’s highly commendable views on nuclear power, I assumed he was still an alarmist when it came to his views on anthropogenic CO2 emissions. I was wrong.
I am sorry I made an incorrect assumption about your views on climate change Michael.
Update (EW): The original Forbes link seems to have died. A backup copy is available here.
UPDATE2: Forbes has pulled his article, see Tweet below. – Anthony
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
https://yandex.com/search/?text=breitbart%20biden&lr=104634
https://www.breitbart.com/tag/joe-biden/
Can anybody else see this?
You may want to know that the acronym MST, on the shirt on the guy in his photo in Brazil, is for a radical-leftist ONG in Brazil that has tried to implement marxism via the violent route by means of stealing land from farmers.
Good for him – no longer just woke, be actually awake.
Events are a changing.
I think he smells which way the wind is blowing. Don’t be the last alarmist in town.
Here is what you’ve created Mr. Environmental Man”
“As a result, half of the people surveyed around the world last year said they thought climate change would make humanity extinct. And in January, one out of five British children told pollsters they were having nightmares about climate change.
Whether or not you have children you must see how wrong this is. I admit I may be sensitive because I have a teenage daughter.”
Don’t worry about our accepting your apology. Biden has already gone all in on AOC’s New Green Deal. If that becomes a reality humanity will have a serious brush with a New Green Depression. In that event look forward to hearing your daughter say, “How could you Dad? Worry about that.
Bewildered lefties, evicted from their intellectual home by the fall of Communism in 1989 and after, started to look for alternative accommodation. I watched them, over the course of the 1990s, find it in anti-capitalist environmentalism. CO2, and its purported warming effects, seemed to provide the mother of all ‘market failures’, and an excuse for government and regulatory intervention right across the range of private enterprise and capitalist economies. At first I thought that these ideas were not all that important; they grew, however, to hideous strength. I am profoundly grateful to WUWT and its contributors and readers for documenting the last fifteen years or so of this growth so thoroughly.
The renewable energy aspect of the green movement has lasted longer than I thought it would. Indeed, I have been astonished by its political ability to survive in the face of clear evidence from physics and economics that the outcome would be an expensive disaster. But I always knew that, short of global totalitarianism of a thoroughness that did not seem likely, the physics and economics would win in the end. Fossil fuels and nuclear it is.
I accept that those whose livelihoods have been damaged by renewable energy fantasies, and those who have been blowing the whistle on such fantasies for decades, should find it difficult to accept Shellenberger’s apology. It is for those damaged to decide on this, not for any bystanders. But Shellenberger said that he felt that writing a few articles would change nothing, but that a book might. Maybe he is right about that. Marx was not around to see the damage that, posthumously, he caused. Who knows what he might have said, if he had seen it? Shellenberger is in the middle of things. Physical truth and intellectual honesty will win in the end, and maybe things will now start to move. Let us hope so.
One thought, from an observer on the other side of the pond. From the point of view of this rather naive watcher of the U.S. political scene, the Democrat party seems close to backing itself into an impossible and surely electorally suicidal position on ‘Green New Deal’ lines. Might Shellenberger’s very public pronouncement be a way of providing a face-saving retreat for the Democrats into a realistic energy policy, based on nuclear rather than unicorns and rainbows? I ask this question only very tentatively, since U.S. politics is not my patch.
Its back at Forbes:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2020/06/28/on-behalf-of-environmentalists-i-apologize-for-the-climate-scare/?fbclid=IwAR1Y654d3PTHmWlU94moz6sYVDzgSa0djmK45kyJ_OK_5XYS2bf2mo93yiI#57c25e921fa8
Nope, still get “This page is no longer active. We regret any inconvenience.” when clicking that link
Tested it right after posting. Agreed not working now.
https://publicinterest.org.uk/debunking-shellenberger-and-nordhaus-again/
That link is 10years old Ghalfrunt, people are becoming wiser, they are starting finally to see through the lies of the left.
Thousands resort to apocalyptic language in regard to climate change, including air heads like AOC who said in twelve years we would no longer exist. Finally, experts like Shellenberger admit they have been peddling a greatly exaggerated theory which may not even be a world crisis. He is suddenly public enemy #1 just because he voiced what he fully believes but was terrified to admit.
I’ve rarely seen such rage when Climate Warmers are met with difference of opinion based on research. Is their rage partly due to the fact that they know there is much evidence out there that directly opposes their precious theory? It’s very debatable but why not use all, and I mean all of the evidence both pro and con and see what we come up with?
Yes, climate change is real. But environmentalists tell a truth in the effort to advance their broader lie. That lie is their agenda to impose the socialist Utopia upon anyone who falls under the governments they can influence. And that is their religion, that is their god, that is they way they hope to become at one with the universe, the Gaia. And it is forbidden for anyone to opt out, to quietly and peacefully decline to act as if their god was a real force in the universe.
As to climate change, we don’t have to go back too far in human history to prove it is changing in ways that humans could not have caused. If we went back only to 985 AD, we could see that Erik the Red led a small flotilla of settlers to live on Greenland and to subsist in a climate warm enough to grow row crops and cattle. Yet 400 years later the climate grew too cold for that form of agriculture to be sustainable and the colony withered away.
And buried deep in the middle of an article about 5,000 year old fishing tackle being discovered in a bog in Norway, is the statement that the ocean level was much higher than it is today. Not to mention how cold it was when the perfectly preserved body of 5,300 year old hunter Otzi finally thawed out in the Alps between Italy and Austria.
Climate change. Not my fault! Don’t tell me how you are going to force me to fix something that I didn’t break.
Have Forbes explained why they have done this?
That’s my question too and I can’t find anything about why.
It’s on Quillette :
https://quillette.com/2020/06/30/on-behalf-of-environmentalists-i-apologize-for-the-climate-scare/
My good angel says that accepting an apology is the right thing to do. This is how I’ve always tried to live, and it’s served me well so far. Moreover I believe that most people are basically good, even our enemies. So – forgive and move on!
But my evil angel says those on the left never forgive or forget. They play hard-ball, they don’t take prisoners, they hold grudges and are vindictive, and nowadays they even “cancel” people. So – string him up at dawn!
My view is that it’s what happens from now on that counts. There should be consequences for past actions, especially as a lot of us have had to pay for being sceptical. Apologies don’t count unless they’re accompanied by reparations. Going quietly into the night won’t cut it. Time will tell.
With Schellenberger’s criticism the extremes of environmentalism, maybe it is time for the conspiracy theorists and extremists who dismissive of climate science to be criticized by the “true” skeptics. We have seen the views of Watts, Curry and Spencer with respect the the sky dragon slayers at PSI in the past; not so much in the present.
We have heard from what you call “true skeptics ” for 30 years , we have seen them destroy livelihoods ,reputations , we have seen them infiltrate MSM were a opposing view has been banned, climate skeptics have never been able to put there point in public , and you know it dale ,
Maybe what you havent figured out is with MSM on side of true skeptics why they havent publicly demonised curry and Spencer, and never will.
Please re-read my post. Your reaction made very sense.
Please re-read my post. Your reaction made very little sense.
Me thinks you need to read what you wrote.
“maybe it is time for the conspiracy theorists and extremists who dismissive of climate science to be criticized by the “true” skeptics. “
“maybe it is time for the conspiracy theorists and extremists who dismiss climate science to be criticized by the “true” skeptics. “
Watts, Curry and Spencer had been critical of folks like the sky dragon slayers in the past. Little of that occurs now. Some, especially those associated with WUWT, seem to have joined the polarization of the debate.
Here is an earlier post from Watts:
“I have been badgered repeatedly to carry “Slayer” articles on WUWT, and with the exception of one cartoon by Josh, I have refused to do so since I view the work (and its derivatives) as pointless and fatally flawed. ”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/03/14/roy-spencer-on-the-alabama-two-step/
From The Policy (https://wattsupwiththat.com/policy/)
“For the same reasons as the absurd topics listed above, references to the “Slaying the Sky Dragon” Book and subsequent group “Principia Scientific” which have the misguided idea that the greenhouse effect doesn’t exist, and have elevated that idea into active zealotry, WUWT is a “Slayer Free Zone”. There are other blogs which will discuss this topic, take that commentary there.”
Yet WUWT continues to quote both John O’Sullivan ( John O’Sullivan John is CEO and co-founder (with Dr Tim Ball) of Principia Scientific International (PSI). ) and Tim Ball (Dr Tim Ball is co-founder and inaugural Chairman of Principia Scientific International)
NTZ, whose prinicpal contributor is a children’s entertainer, belong in the same category as PSI.
Does that help?
I have not read the book, I have heard only your side of the story, from what I’m gathering this is a split in skeptics philosophy?
The is faction who deny the greenhouse effect. That does not include Curry and Spencer and probably Watts. It does include NTZ, PSI, FOS, Electroverse, etc..
You will see folks on WUWT who deny the GHE.
You will see folks on WUWT who deny the GHE.”
I have ,but no heated debate, I can understand why the site does not reference “slay the sky dragon”
From my point of view the very term greenhouse is misleading , it seems to be used by the IPCC there scientists to explain, were as a hard core group of skeptics who are naturally opposed to the ramblings of IPCC
Use the same term to denie it, neither side paying much attention to feedback cycles, were as WUWT
PResents or explains a much more comprehensive approach,
And so back to your first post you would like to see more discussion from the hard core skeptics view ?
The term “greenhouse” is a metaphor. There is no equivalent to a glass roof in the atmosphere. CO2, CFCs, NO2, H2O absorb and re-radiate heat energy, thereby trapping some of that heat in the atmosphere. The science behind that GHE has been known for 2 centuries. https://history.aip.org/history/climate/index.htm
The IPCC looks at both anthropogenic and natural forcings. https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/WG1AR5_Chapter08_FINAL.pdf
Natural forcings such as Milankovitch cycles and solar cycles would have us cooling. Every data set shows long-term warming.
I re-read your post(s) and they do indeed make very little sense, as usual.
Schellenberger on Sky News Australia via youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WU_3dFDqsxQ&feature=youtu.be
Some really early material from Shellenberg that raised a big kerfuffle.
https://grist.org/article/doe-reprint/
https://grist.org/article/doe-intro/
Makes me wonder about this statment from Forbes:
“Until last year, I mostly avoided speaking out against the climate scare.
Partly that’s because I was embarrassed. After all, I am as guilty of
alarmism as any other environmentalist. For years, I referred to climate
change as an “existential” threat to human civilization, and called it a
“crisis.”
A Chinese nuclear plant slated to be built in the UK was guaranteed a “strike price” that was more than double the current rates at the time.
With fracking and shale and domestic production of natural resources, it would be entirely possible for electricity rates to remain reasonable, and the strategic metals and elements would be produced here again. Building nuclear would guarantee debt and higher prices because it is extremely high-tech, unlike coal plants.
The nuclear activists will not only put you into deep debt, they will probably contract it out to a foreign country. Chinese dams and reactors are not going to be any better for the countryside than the worthless wind and solar.
This man did make two interesting statements on his Sky News interview: that the greens are making “poverty sustainable” with renewables, and that frightening children and teens with green propaganda is wrong. Those are both true statements.
Shellenberg interview yesterday.
https://youtu.be/WG15on1PS9g
He’s been Shadowbanned for Wrongthink
It seems that Shellenberger has a long history of being somewhat misleading in his writings. From 2009:
“In just the last few months, TBI, and its founders Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus have gone on a disinformation rampage with the help of the media:”
https://archive.thinkprogress.org/memo-to-media-dont-be-suckered-by-bad-analyses-from-the-breakthrough-institute-the-way-time-wsj-npr-a0b77f6f846c/