The “environmentalist” movement is a substitute for millenarian religion. We all face doom unless we stop “sinning”, with different sins defined. Jerry Falwell was mocked for claiming Katrina struck New Orleans as God’s wrath against their sinning. Al Gore blamed burning fossil fuels, with about as much proof as Falwell.
“And in the Book of Gaia, Chapter 1, Verse 29, the scripture sayeth, on January 1st, 1850, the temperature of the Earth was perfect.”
“And in the Book of Gaia, Chapter 1, Verse 35, the scripture sayeth, on January 1st, 1850, the carbon dioxide content of the blessed Aether was perfect.”
“So endeth our lesson today.”
To paraphrase, ‘there is no climate emergency, but there is a knowledge crisis.’
TRUE, and worth parsing why.
Starting with Hansen of NASA GISS in 1988 ‘climate scientists’ realized they could become both rich and famous by proclaiming a climate emergency. Mann’s bogus 1999 hockey stick is exhibit 1. So many then did. UNFCCC jumped on board, and has been holding big annual COPx parties ever since.
And, again as Mann illustrates, it wouldn’t do to have their bogus ‘climate emergency science’ exposed. So, as the 2009 Climategate email ‘leaks’ revealed, they conspired to shut down opposing real science. This got aided and abetted by pal review.
That directly produced the knowledge crisis, which is perpetuated by MSM, whose axiom for a long time has been ‘If it bleeds, it leads.’ Climate emergency bleeds so leads. No climate emergency doesn’t, so doesn’t. Exhibit A is Seattle Times alarming series ‘Sea Change’. Final summary article was completely bogus, based on two instances of easily proven academic misconduct ‘science’. Exposed in essay ‘Shell Games’ in ebook Blowing Smoke.
Knowledge crisis evidence. How many people know that:
The predicted sea level rise acceleration didn’t happen.The predicted Arctic summer sea ice disappearance didn’t happen.Climate models produce a spurious tropical troposphere hotspot, and an ECS twice that of observational EBM methods.Renewable capacity factors average 25-35% of nameplate at best because of intermittency. Sun doesn’t always shine, wind doesn’t always blow.There is no viable grid stability solution to renewable intermittency other than fossil fuel fired generation like CCGT or hot standby old coal (as conventional grid nucs don’t easily cycle so are run constant baseload).
To paraphrase, ‘there is no climate emergency, but there is a knowledge crisis.’
***********
Yes, a crisis of knowledge more generally and scientific and technical literacy in particular.
Dr Carl Sagan (may he R.I.P.) on PBS:
Carl Sagan warns about ill Education System | Last Interview of Carl Sagan | Carl Sagan – 1996
(youtube.com)
I find it quite incongruous that most of the younger generations want to “go without” the very things that hold everything the hold dear together…
… ie, plastics for their iphones and reliable electricity and energy for delivery of the ingredients of their soy lattes, designer jeans and fancy footwear etc….and no more SUVs for Mum to transport them from one protest to the next.
Their juvenile non-thinking idiotology, if it succeeds, will make their futures and the futures of their trans gender children so much more difficult as society degenerates and destroys itself.
Its important to realize they do not actually want to go without any of these things. The various movements are best seen as nihilistic protest movements.
But what are they protesting?
They are middle and upper class people and kids whose basic anger and frustration comes from the fact that they are elites by birth and education but surplus to the number of elite positions society has. This leads to a floating anger which then attaches itself to the latest fad. There is no expectation that the demands will be met. In fact they would be horrified if any government started doing that.
You find the same approach whether its anti-Israel, pro Trans, Climate, de-colonization of institutions and objects, BLM. Lots of cash siphoned off into foundations and think tanks – the purpose of which is only to provide work or at least posts for some of the surplus elite children.
Its demonstrate, make life inconvenient, do things which get a news splash. No effective political action, though.
I think your post has slipped by unnoticed, but to my mind it is a very very significant point.
It is abundantly clear that an alliance between people with far too much money, governments, and NGOs is busy creating the Nouveau pauvre of the average citizen, whilst they themselves live in undreamed of luxury. Putin’s Russia is the most extreme example, but it is broadly the same in the whole West.
That in and of itself would not be a huge problem – money isn’t everything – but the golden goose syndrome is creeping in.
Putin’s Russia’s citizens are now devoid of the very education they need to fight an effective war and maintain an economic infrastructure. The same is happening in Europe where Europeans languish in unemployment, the hi tech work is done in the Far East and Islamic immigrants who owe no one any allegiance except Hamas, are increasingly utilised.
Even the USA, a nation rich enough in resources to give its citizens a life every other country used to dream of, is hell bent on depriving its citizens of the ability to help themselves to do it. And the more ‘progressive’ the state the worse it is.
This will not end well. Feudal lords realised many many centuries ago that if you want your peasants to work for you and to fight for you, and to keep you in power against some other warlord’s potential incursions, you have better treat them better than they feel the other warlord might, or they will leave you in the lurch. It’s called Noblesse Obligé. This isn’t some moral duty. It is sheer pragmatics and imbued into the upper classes from birth. The problem is that today’s elite are not in any sense people of class.
They are more like Mafia Godfathers. People who have seized power by brute force and cunning and despise those who have none. Or who have worked their way through a dense bureaucracy by the application of lying cheating blackmail and nepotism, and even murder, to be in control of something they simply do not understand.
Their Nobless obligé is like the pretence of the newly promoted middle manager who thinks that management is all about control and lording over staff, while having pointless ‘meetings’ . ‘Climate change’ is simply their excuse for exercising power, Not a genuine effort to better their peasants lot.
Putin is the most extreme example, and is busy committing political suicide. The EU may be next – a top heavy bureaucracy that seeks to control, but offers little more than bribes to national government officials in exchange.
In the USA, where Trump represents an antidote to the status quo, the realisation is dawning that the Donald may not actually be your friend after all. Make Trump Great Again is the subtext.
For sure a new politics is on the way. The problem is that no one knows exactly what it is going to be, or ought to be. Or who will provide it.
It’s the young people that are most easily conned by this climate alarmism because they don’t do any basic research into the matter. Instead, they rely on social media drivel and leftist propaganda designed to make them accept higher taxes, prices and more general restrictions that will supposedly arrest the climate “threat”. These are the types that run to these demonstrations imploring us to take measures to save the earth. What’s even more disconcerting is finding that there’s a small percentage of older adults that buy into the same sort of nonsense. What alleviates the whole issue is that international surveys continue to show that climate change concern and actions continue to rank at or near the bottom among people’s priorities.
On the subject of climate science, geologists consistently have rocks in their heads
“The bottom line is that Earth is colder by nearly 3 degrees Celsius than it was 3,000 years ago”
This claim is total BS and marks the author as a fool. There is zero evidence that any period in the past 5,000 years was warmer than 2023. There is evidence of two warm periods from 5,000 to 10,000 years ago that were probably warmer than 2023, but no evidence of +3 degrees C. warmer. The evidence consists of averages of LOCAL proxies. Such averages are NOT rea; global averages and they tend to smooth variations
“Minuscule recent warming, whatever the cause, is inconsequential”
+1 degree C. warming from 1975 to early 2024 is NOT miniscule. Compared with 50 year periods in the Antarctica ice core record, it would be near the fastest 50 year warming rate in those proxies.
For Greenland ice cores,1975 to 2024 warming is was slow compared to Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles typically began with a sudden Greenland warming of 10–15 °C within several decades and persisted for about 500 to more than 2000 years. Thus far, 25 events have been identified with an apparent 1500-year periodicity.
“,they (climate alarmists) rely on computer models”
FALSE
Predictions of the effects of CO2 began in 1896. Science papers began talking about too much CO2 in the late 1950s. The predictions began BEFORE climate models existed.
The climate confuser games were LATER programmed to support the pre-existing predictions. They are just props. The Russian INM model may be an exception
” the 280-ppm concentration of the mid-19th century is uncomfortably close to the point at which plant life dies — below 150 ppm.”
280 ppm is NOT uncomfortably close to 150 ppm — it is almost 100% higher
C4 plants, 20% of Earth’s vegetation, can grow with only 10 ppm CO2.
“During the Little Ice Age in parts of England, the “yearly number of burials exceeded the births from the 1660’s until about 1730,” he reported.”
Irrelevant factoid that can not be blamed on the climate, except by speculation.
The last global pandemic which had lifelong affects was the “Black Death”, otherwise known as the Bubonic Plague, which began in Afro Eurasia during the medieval period from 1346-1353. An estimated 75-200 million deaths were caused, which notes the Bubonic Plague as the deadliest pandemic known in history.
1348-50 The Black Death first arrives in England, killing over a third of the population and helping the breakdown of the manorial and feudal systems.
The last few decades of the 1600s in England were COLDER than 1348 -1350, yet the plagues then were NOT worse. The theory that colder is deadlier did NOT prove to be true.
The average of local proxies for the past 5000 years never exceeds +0.5 degrees warmer than the average since 1975, for the so called warming periods … but NOT warmer than 2023
The claim of +3 degrees cooler now than 3000 years ago is fiction so of course YOU would believe it. You love total BS data and theories.
CORRECTION
In 1990, when they still had some interest in natural causes of climate change, IPCC published a chart showing a few WARM PERIODS IN THE PAST 5000 YEARS.
IPCC stripped the numbers off the chart fr their 1001 publication but the original chart showed +/-0.5 degree warmer/cooler periods compared with the recent years, most likely 1975 to 1990. I previously wrote “after 1975”
This chart was later replaced by The Hocket Stink Tree Ring Circus Chart.
?w=500&h=231
From “Holmes’ Principles of Physical Geology”
Since 1990, the GAT surface temperature has increased +0.7 degrees C. (1990 to 2023) so the +0.5 degree C. bump has disappeared.
There is NO EVIDENCE that any year in the past 5000 years was warmer than 2023.
“The predictions began BEFORE climate models existed.”
They weren’t predictions because they were not deductions from a valid physical theory.
They’re not predictions today, either, because climate models do not deploy a valid physical theory of the climate.
The whole AGW business is a mockery of science. And the pushers of it are incompetents.
In the last glacial period, the CO2 level dropped to 180 ppm only 30 ppm above 150 ppm, and it has been dropping over past glacial periods.
The next glacial period may start at any time, the Grand Solar Minimum that the Sun has entered may be the trigger. The land plants and animals need as much CO2 as possible in the air as insurance against extinction.
Hannibal and his elephants couldn’t cross the Alps today with the cold weather it has. About 4 million more people die each year from cold weather than from hot weather.
Some points:
The death rates during the Little Ice Age were certainly not an ‘irrelevant factoid’, especially for those who suffered in it. Excess deaths were due to hypothermia, cold weather causing crop failures and diseases linked to malnutrition, directly attributable to the prevailing weather. That sounds like a link to climate to me.
The other great loss of life attributable to the weather was the Great Famine of 1315 – 1317 (with food scarcity lasting until 1322), caused by unseasonally cold and very wet growing seasons in Western Europe. An estimated additional 7.5 million people died during that period. A clear link to climate.
It is true that C4 plants are able to photosynthesise at very low atmospheric concentrations of CO2, but C4 plants thrive best in hot and semi-arid environments typified by savanna climates. Most C4 plants are drought adapted pasture grasses and (sugar cane, sorghum, millet and maize excepted) not palatable to humans. The C4 biochemical pathway and its associated Kranz anatomy evolved within the last 20 million years or so in several plant genera, probably in response to the prevailing low atmospheric CO2 concentrations (estimated 200 ppmv) to which C3 plants were not adapted, having evolved in a much higher CO2 and lower oxygen atmosphere. The current CO2 concentrations (420+ ppmv) have raised productivity of C3 crops (wheat, rice, potatoes, etc) by an estimated 10 – 15%. A big bonus in a world of 8 billion mouths, I’d say.
It’s not a lack of knowledge
Billions of people have been living with climate change for up to the past 48 years. Hard to believe that few people noticed warmer winters in the past 50 years. Or at least noticed climate change harmed no one.
There is a lack of wisdom
The lack of wisdom is ignoring your actual experience with climate change and believing predictions of the future climate
Wisdom is knowing predictions are rarely right: There is no knowledge of the future climate …There are no data for the future
There are just wild guess climate predictions
I realize the mass media hides the fact that every long term climate prediction in the past century was wrong. I wish conservatives would talk about that fact every day.
A person does not need any climate science knowledge to know that predictions are rarely right. And that acting on a climate prediction is a leap of faith. Not science.
A person also does not need a geologist claiming 3000 years ago was +3 degrees C. warmer than today. Because that is nonsense.
Still denying geological science…. is that because it is one of your many areas of ignorance ?
Tree lines, tree stumps, permafrost peat moss, Viking graves and seed stores in Greenland, biodata from the Arctic showing far less sea ice….
Just DENY it all.
Seems to be the only way you can maintain your arrogant rants supporting CO2-based AGW lukewarmer kultism ?
Richard consider this from Ian Plimer’s ‘heaven and earth’
“In the summer of 2003 AD, the retreat of the ice at Schnidejoch (Switzerland) revealed a 4700 year old archer’s quiver. The Schnidejoch must have been a short unfrozen route across the Alps around 2700BC. Subsequent work has shown that there were four periods during the last 5000 years when the Scnidejoch was warmer than today” (page 51)
Hard to believe that few people noticed warmer winters in the past 50 years.
Possibly because by and large they weren’t?
I’ve lived a long time in the UK. My recollection is of two notably cold winters and two notably hot summers in 74 years. Otherwise the weather has with normal annual variations been pretty much oscillating around a mean of dull wet and miserable.
That is the problem with alarmism. People have been told to expect massively rising temperatures, and been told that temperatures are rising, but their common experience is that Britain is not Florida, and Sweden is not Spain. Over egging the pudding simply results in a wolf crying syndrome.
There may well have been half a degree °C rise in the UK, but who would notice that? It makes sod all difference to anything, even the growing season. Likewise sea levels have always risen, and the coastline of our island has always changed. So that’s nothing new either.
People are told that it’s been the ‘warmest April ever’ etc. but their central heating bills tell a far different story.
You can cite what you like Richard, but don’t be surprised if people ignore what the experts say and instead rely on their own experience to judge just how critical alleged ‘global warming’ really is.
“acting on a climate prediction is a leap of faith. Not science.”
Amen to that, brother.
Humanity is deprived of precious learning when so many favor the ideology and fearmongering of climate alarmists over the meticulous research of eminent physical scientists such as Richard Alley, professor of geoscience at Pennsylvania State University, who pioneered studies of ice cores,
__________________________________________________________________
Richard Alley? Don’t make me puke:
Leading Climate Scientist Confirms Up to 20 Feet of Sea Level Rise Possible by 2100 LINK
Richard Alley: “The Biggest Control Knob: Carbon Dioxide in Earth’s Climate History” You Tube
“Climate scientists would be less likely to issue dire warnings of planetary doom if they” were in fact scientists.
Lee, your “Climate change: Conflict of observational science, theory, and politics” was an inspiration in the opening stages of my deep look into the integrity of the science behind the AGW claim.
Meanwhile “Researchers develop roadmap to defossilize economy by reusing carbon atoms”
An initiative of a consortium of National Labs in the U.S., led by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and includes SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Ames National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
It’s led by highly trained scientists from each laboratory including Wendy Shaw of the DoE, James Morris, Max Delferro, Sanjaya Senanayake, Francesca Toma, Michelle Kidder and Simon R. Bare, respectively. Their roadmap appears in the XX issue of Nature Reviews Chemistry.
Here’s the core of the problem. it becomes nearly impossible to bring sanity to the subject of climate when so many prominent scientists and highly respectable national laboratories sign on to the insanity.
And with so much government money behind it, both the labs and the lab directors will be loath to give it all up.
It’s beyond comprehension that serious scientists could endorse the physical impossibility of, “The roadmap presents a future without waste.” They have banished entropy.
This is rational insanity, in which the insanity is hidden in the assumptions. Then otherwise intelligent people build a pseudo-rational superstructure upon the insane assumptions and proceed forward into catastrophe,.
None of these scientists can possibly have critically evaluated the AGW claim. Somehow it has escaped them that there is no valid physical theory of climate able to describe the effect of a 0.035 W/m² annual average perturbation.
Climate models are 10s of W/m², if not 100s, away from being able to correctly describe the climate energy state.
Insanity; there’s no other word to describe it.
Here’s a question.
I wish I could find a link, but an ancient Greek inscription or text talked of the teens in his age.
If you didn’t know it was an an ancient Greek inscription, it would be an accurate description of some of any ages youth as they are beginning to think on their own.
Reflex action at such an age is to reject and “stand against” what they were taught.
Most of them, like me, grow up.
Climate Ideology Ignores Science, Threatens Humanity
By Lee Gerhard
Climate scientists would be less likely to issue dire warnings of planetary doom if they gave more credence to the geological history of the past several million years. Instead, they rely on computer models that are biased by the preconceptions of their manipulators and incapable of accounting for the myriad factors influencing global temperatures.
Minuscule recent warming, whatever the cause, is inconsequential in light of the long record of data found in Antarctica ice cores that go back 800,000 years. The bottom line is that Earth is colder by nearly 3 degrees Celsius than it was 3,000 years ago and is just now climbing out of its longest cold spell of the last 10,000 years. Blaring headlines about record heat waves of the past 100 years are meaningless, hysterical blather.
A deeper dive into geologic history — based partly on the record stored over millions of years in deep-ocean sediments — shows that today’s carbon dioxide concentrations of 420 parts per million are a fraction of past levels that reached 5,000 ppm and more. Carbon dioxide is nearly at its lowest level ever since plant life began so many millions of years ago and well below the optimum amount for the health of most vegetation.
In fact, the 280-ppm concentration of the mid-19th century is uncomfortably close to the point at which plant life dies — below 150 ppm. Given that all life depends on adequate amounts of this gas, proposals to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide are nothing less than reckless.
Any global increase in carbon dioxide will be beneficial and have nearly no impact on future temperature. In contrast, demonstrated in the “bible” of human history and climate change compiled by the late professor Hubert Lamb at the University of East Anglia, cold kills.
During the Little Ice Age in parts of England, the “yearly number of burials exceeded the births from the 1660’s until about 1730,” he reported.
Why, then, are so many demonizing fossil fuels? The wealth enabled by coal, oil and natural gas has provided the leisure — and funding — for numerous researchers to focus on climate change instead of struggling to stay alive. Global society is absolutely dependent upon cheap and plentiful energy for its survival. Why would some demand that civilization retreat from useful energy sources to bring back mass starvation, poverty and horse-drawn buggies?
To dream of a utopian world is perhaps admirable, but to inflict suffering upon society through ignorance of science is deplorable.
Humanity is deprived of precious learning when so many favor the ideology and fearmongering of climate alarmists over the meticulous research of eminent physical scientists such as Richard Alley, professor of geoscience at Pennsylvania State University, who pioneered studies of ice cores, and Richard Lindzen, professor emeritus of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who explored the incredible complexity of atmospheric physics.
We could easily name dozens of others similarly credentialed, who are largely unknown outside the scientific community.
The public is “protected” from empirical data by legacy and social media censors who eagerly broadcast the supposed need to restrict global warming to 1.5 or 2.0 degrees Celsius — artificial constructs with no scientific basis.
We thus suffer the consequences of unwarranted regulatory intrusions into daily life, be they restrictions on heating, air conditioning, dishwashers and stoves or the increased price and reduced availability of electricity. The effects of these range from annoying to life-threatening.
There is no global climate emergency. There is, however, a widespread knowledge crisis.
This commentary was first published at The Washington Times on May 1, 2024.
Lee Gerhard is a senior scientist emeritus at the University of Kansas, past director of the Kansas Geological Survey, member of the CO2 Coalition, retired Getty Professor of Geological Engineering at the Colorado School of Mines, and co-author of “Geological Perspectives of Global Climate Change.” He has a doctorate in geology.
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