Essay by Eric Worrall
Sabine is a high profile Physics YouTuber who creates brilliantly skeptical videos about the latest science claims – except when it comes to climate change.
If you have ever tried to search for information about black holes, string theory, dark matter or artificial intelligence, most likely a link to one of Sabine’s videos has appeared in the first few pages of your search results.
Sabine’s latest video is worth watching, despite her alarmist viewpoint – it contains a detailed list of all the ways climate skeptics are winning. Though at one point, Sabine accuses President Trump of not caring about climate change “because he will be dead by the time everything goes to hell”, without presenting any evidence to back this nasty accusation.
Sabine also fails to explain how President Trump is making us do anything – as far as I know, people who believe in the climate crisis are still free to practice whatever mitigation measures they want, on their own dime. It is the rest of us who are being liberated from having to follow the commandments of the climate cult.
I’m not the only person to notice and comment on Sabine’s curious blind spot when it comes to climate science. Our favourite reef scientist Dr Peter Ridd also recently called Sabine out on her climate views.
Despite Sabine’s climate blind spot, I’m optimistic about Sabine’s journey towards climate skepticism. Sabine seems to be someone who takes the scientific method seriously. In the video above Ridd points out how the flaws Sabine has uncovered in climate models bother her – though she believes “the reality might be far worse”, that climate model flaws might be concealing rather than exaggerating the full impact of rising CO2.
I sure wish Sabine would do a little more research into her concern that climate models are underestimating the negative impact of CO2, because there is plenty of paleo evidence which contradicts such concerns. Past periods of high CO2 were periods of abundance, not devastation.
Be courageous and examine the evidence, Sabine. Research your remaining concerns. There is no plausible scenario in which global warming endangers human survival and prosperity.
My favourite proof that high CO2 levels are benign involves monkeys. The Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, 5-8C hotter than today, was the age when monkeys first became prominent in the fossil record. Our monkey ancestors thrived on the abundance of the hothouse PETM, and colonised much of the world including Greenland and Siberia, only retreating when the cold returned.
Only a benign climate could have delivered such ecological success.
Even if anthropogenic CO2 emissions somehow returned us to the hothouse conditions of the PETM, that hothouse world would still be a benign climate for humans. Climatic conditions which allowed our closest animal relatives to thrive would also allow humans to thrive.
I look forward to Sabine overcoming whatever mental block is preventing her from embracing the full truth about the unfounded alarmism of establishment climate science, because on the day Sabine wakes up and realises she was wrong, lets just say I’m pretty confident WUWT will publish that video. Hell hath no fury like an honest scientist who realises she has been deceived by pseudoscience.
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I like Sabine, but I’ve seen a couple of her climate videos were she was almost in tears.
She finally admits that we will have to adapt to climate change. Same as it ever was.
These climate goals are not worth the paper they are printed on
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/co2-has-a-very-minor-role-in-the-atmosphere
If cloud cover increases from 60 to 65%, the upward IR radiation (cooling) from earth surface would decrease by (0.40 – 0.35) x 260 = 13 W/m^2, and downward IR radiation (warming) from cloud bottoms would increase by (0.65 – 0.60) x 340 = 17 W/m^2, for a net warming increase of 30 W/m^2
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Because cloud cover changes of much more than 1% routinely occur, such as during El Ninos, over time-scales of a few years, the role of CO2 within the greenhouse effect is insignificant, if not irrelevant.
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Cloud cover changes are the only plausible explanation for most of the modest “secular” warming of the past two centuries.
Together with ocean current fluctuations (see below URLs), cloud cover changes are also the only physical mechanism that could account for fluctuating temperature changes with time scales of a few years.
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Based on fundamental physics, one should expect some warming from increasing CO2. But this warming will be too small to account for what has been observed.
Cloud cover changes provide the only rational explanation that does not violate basic physics.
“Cloud cover changes are the only plausible explanation for most of the modest “secular” warming of the past two centuries.”
That is data free speculation’
aka Claptrap
There are no data for the global average effect of clouds on incoming solar energy.
There are only a few decades of a very roughly measured proxy: Cloud coverage percentage. The change in cloud coverage percentage over the past few decades was smaller than the likely margin of error in the measurements, so the data are statistically insignificant.
There are no statistically significant data to support your cloud theory. A theory not backed by any accurate data is junk science.
She’s a climate communist.
I used to like her YouTube videos, but she seemed to go off the rails a about a year ago, when she started rethinking Climate Change. I think it may have been simple economics… she wanted all the attention and money that came with placating the greenie weenies. Maybe she was paid off by USAID money, to toe the line.
Climate science is more like religion than science.
Climatology is a liberal art, not a physical science.
100% climastrology.
Climate Scientology.
1. Impossible to disprove.
2. Entirely made up.
3. Designed to part you from your money.
4. Intended to deprive you of your freedoms.
Like all ‘social sciences’
Lindy Li, the former Biden campaign insider and fundraiser, equates the democratic party to a religion.
It is certainly a belief system . Like many belief systems, it has few facts to back it up.
Like all the other climate “scientists”, you have to play your cards correctly to make money off YouTube videos (unless you
arewere a USAID beneficiary). You need the views and if you don’t play the game you will be penalized by YouTube immediately or outright banned. What she puts in her videos is totally expected, whether she believes it or not.I’ve never heard her name before, but that strikes me as a reasonable conclusion. She’s doing YouTube videos for fun and profit, and there’s no fun or profit in having YouTube squash your channel.
She does science media because she was struggling with personal and theoretical studies … her words not mine. (http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2015/06/the-plight-of-postdocs-academia-and.html)
I find her overly cynical and prone to getting some basic physics wrong or as many would say “not even wrong”.
It was a whiney post. She whines that she left her boyfriend (that she was going to marry) behind to move to America only to discover that she didn’t have healthcare. Seems like a basic question to me before signing a contract, particularly from someone who insists she needs psychotherapy to treat depression and has a supposed IQ over 200. Then she whines about the short term nature of the positions available to her. Well, every career path comes with pros and cons. You either accept the cons or change professions like the rest of us mere mortals with sub 200 IQ’s. Being smart doesn’t entitle you to a profession custom designed to your personal needs. OK, so whiney and arrogant.
So I decided to watch one of her videos, a non climate video, preferably in an area of physics with which I had some level of familiarity already. First up on the google search was “I believe the universe might be able to think”. Not my area, but… seriously?
Yes she’s serious, not that she has evidence that it does, but some whack amole theories about possible mechanisms that might exist and which we have no evidence that allows us to rule out that they don’t exist. That’s about as flimsy as you can get. As you said “not even wrong”. Then at the end she does a pitch for some learning company, the sales pitch is pretty strong.
She’s in it for the revenue, that could not be more obvious. She’s already abandoned any interest in real research or she would be doing that instead.
Not just climate, but that kind of video got me to stop watching her.
I wonder how much Alphabet, Google and YouTube’s parent company was jawboned by the US government to discourage “disinformation”? And just what subject matter drew instruction from the apparatchiks?
DOGE dismantling USAID revealed an incestuous relationship between various NGOs and the Democratic Party, and certain politicians such as Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation. I really doubt European legislators are any more pure minded than Americans.
Trofim Lysenko seems to have been revived as a zombie.
Yes, like real life, for some people, you burn coal or you freeze.
She could avoid controversy by just not doing any videos on climate.
Yeah, but she is in it for the clicks. When you watch Sabine talk in other venues it’s a different presentation.
Though to be fair she is not, nor claims to be, a climate scientist. She is a pretty seriously well credentialled physicist.
She believes in the scientific method, and I opine that she will come around in the end. Not all conversions occur instantaneously,
Believing in scientific method sounds to me like an oxymoron, but perhaps it is only me…
You either practice it or not.
When I hear people say they “believe in” or “have faith in” the scientific method, I take it as a colloquialism only. I even occasionally find myself using those phrases, though “have confidence in”, or “trust” reflects the reality better.
“if you don’t play the game you will be penalized by YouTube immediately or outright banned”
That makes sense. I don’t think there is any doubt that YouTube would penalize her if she disputed the climate alarmist narrative.
WINNING!
My climate goal is that it doesn’t get any colder.
Tuesday, Wed & Thurs mornings may be just 5°F in central WA State.
Is that winning? 🤔
Yeah, I hate cold weather! 🙂
When it comes to climate, Hossenfelder is a whining, alarmist that accepts the consensus narrative without question and her input is valueless, speculative, regurgitated drivel. In that respect, on the same level as Greene.
“…I’m optimistic about Sabine’s journey towards climate skepticism…”
I have NO faith that Dr.Hossenfelder will have any kind of an ‘awaking’ unless someone with as high profile a channel as she has calls her out on every last piece of climate alarmism she posts. Consider that she has >1.6M followers, Dr. Ridd ~26K. Dr. Hossenfelder’s videos are about her making money.
To the extent that her other videos about String theory, black holes etc. have no bearing on policy her ‘skepticism’ is well placed to allow her a huge platform to make money. If she were ever to unilaterally change to being a ‘climate change skeptic’ I guarantee her audience would abandon her in droves and have a significant impact on her lifestyle.
For the evidence of just how embedded she is in the false climate narrative you just have to watch even one of her climate related videos. The contrary evidence to whatever she’s talking about is right in front of her nose but she ALWAYS chooses to ignore it or spin it as ‘it could be worse than we think’. The video that Dr. Ridd is critiquing is a perfect example. A TRUE skeptic scientist would not look at the extreme problems of the models and proclaim “I’m worried because it could be WORSE than we think!”…at a minimum they would acknowledge that both cases are equally likely (e.g. “It could be better than we think.”) but better yet they’d actually have overlaid the actual data on the predictions and acknowledge that there is NO sign of ‘the extreme doom due to warming the models predict’.
Almost all of her climate videos have the same fundamental lack of scientific curiosity and skepticism. How she even continues to make them without questioning her own presentation of the material is unfathomable.
The only way someone like Dr.Hoffensfelder will change her mind on climate science is for someone to directly and without mercy call out just how extremely hypocritical she is. Dr. Ridd almost gets there but doesn’t complete his critique and does not fundamentally call her out on her obvious extreme hypocrisy. It’s not an attempt to ’embarrass’ her but ‘wake her up’. Dr. Hoffensfelder is trying to make a career as a ‘trusted skeptical scientific voice’, it is entirely proper to call out just how deeply hypocritical she is on climate science in never taking the ‘skeptical’ side of the fence. If she wakes up maybe she has a ‘mea culpa’ moment and apologizes to her audience. There would be no need for Dr. Ridd or anyone else to apologize for being hard on her.
More power to Dr. Ridd for trying to help Dr. Hoffensfelder to a conversion but it will take much more than a tepid criticism to help her turn her powerful skeptical view of science in on her own beliefs.
I watched several of her YT videos. But I started getting irritated by her snark and cheap shots. I had pretty much signed off on her before she did any climate treatments. I did watch the one on “proof” of the greenhouse effect. I’m not an expert on this subject, but it seemed a bit superficial. And I got the feeling she didn’t really understand the material she was presenting. Oh, but if you didn’t absolutely agree with her, well, she made it clear you are a denier.
I wonder what these “climate goals™” are?
All they have accomplished so far with all those COP meetings is a slightly accelerating rise in atmospheric CO2. 🙂
Perhaps their goal is to reach 700ppm !!
I expect the average guy to dig in his heels and stubbornly cling to ideas he is learning are wrong. I didn’t realize how prevalent that behavior is in the scientific community. I am not surprised to see average guys act this way, most don’t have the knowledge that these scientists/academics have. The academics/scientists are highly educated and you would think that some critical thinking would be a big part of that. Watching the first video was very irritating but Peter Ridd helped to cool my heels. Now I am glad that Sabine is struggling and hope she hurries out of the dark and into the light.
” A physicist who could support her prophesy with mathematical formulae and terminology could be quite wrong, yet believed by nearly everyone.”
A paraphrase of I. Asimov.
In other words, a broken clock is still correct twice a day.
Must you put every comment in bold?
I usually skip by them for that very reason but Asimov’s name always catches my eye. But that’s a one off.
I just wish we were able to mute individual commenters
Starting with you, Mr. Censor?
I’ve asked several times, now I just skip bold comments – your comment caught my eye
Bold print is much easier to read for those of us with a vision disability. I wish every comment was bold. If that bothers you SO MUCH that you have to complain, I feel sorry for you.
Asking Grok, there are ways to make all the font bold on your browser. Check it out.
Anybody serious about reducing CO2 emissions should pack off to Asia. The West is doing pretty well on controlling CO2 emissions. Not so Asia.
Verdict: Hypocrite.
The Climate Alarmists never complain to the biggest CO2 producers in the world, China and India. This just shows that the Climate Alarmists know they would be wasting their time complaining. Therefore, CO2 will continue to increase in the atmosphere and there is nothing Climate Alarmists can do about it.
It’s over, Jim!
According to her, scientists that accept that the climate is changing, but our contribution to this is still not settled, are Climate Deniers.
So according to her, the IPCC are Climate Deniers. Interesting.
I hear absolutely nothing from her except kookery. She’s a full-on koolaid drinker.
Yes
Eric, The Internet is a big place. Perhaps she has not seen your articles you say would open her eyes. She is a scientist that does proclaim to value the scientific method, so she may be reachable. If nothing else, she may understand the math behind the logic (something that is beyond me). She would be a good ally for combating global warming/change if you could enlighten her. Your references do not appear to mention an estimated ppm of CO2 or CH4 (that I noticed). I don’t know if that would matter but an estimate of the PPM of CO2 during the Monkey period to compare to today may help. That seems to be a sticking point with the warmites.
Ridd has faith she will realise climate science is corrupt, he compares Sabine’s growing doubts to his own journey of realisation.
Some easy to digest maths (rounded for simplicity):
Water vapour: 98% of greenhouse gases (~2% avg, 20,000ppm)
CO2: 2% of greenhouse gases (~0.04% avg, 400ppm)
Amount of CO2 we’ve apparently added: 0.5% (~0.01%, 100ppm)
So of the total greenhouse effect, assuming all gases are equal^1, assuming our contribution^2 to them is 0.5%. The greenhouse effect is estimated to keep the surface 30K warmer than it would be otherwise (and ain’t that great?). Assuming an equal marginal effect^3, our maximum contribution to this could be 0.5% of 30K, which is 0.15K. That’s not per year or decade, that’s in total so far in 150 years. 0.1K per century. Impossible to measure.
^1 They’re not equal. Water vapour is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.
^2 Debatable. Excess CO2 may well be merely outgassing from oceans due to natural warming. Al Gore’s lovely (and misleading) graph actually demonstrates this, with CO2 lagging temperature by 800 years.
^3 It isn’t. The effects are logarithmic. Each additional doubling is estimated to have an equal effect, so each additional amount has less effect than the previous.
When the USAID money runs out, she will find other things to talk about.
I have watched some of her output and have a lingering concern for her motivational reasons for it.
My feeling is she is the current version of Bill Nye the Science guy.
Need I say more?
Conservatives lose the arguments when they claim:
CO2 Does Nothing
CO2 is 97% Natural
CO2 is saturated
AGW is a scam
There is no warming, just bad measurments
It’s all El Ninos
It’s all absorbed solar radiation
It’s all clouds
The climate model argument is better but fails too:
That climate models are no good is true.
BUT their wild guess predictions on average, from 50 years ago, were by luck, accurate.
Accurate only when using their average 3.0 C. ECS of CO2 and the ACTUAL CO2 growth in the past 50 years. Not the exaggerated RCP8.5 CO2 growth rate
Average model prediction from 1975
+0.2 degrees C. per decade global warming
Actual surface temperature (NASA-GISS_
+0.2 degrees C. per decade global warming
(+0.15 C., per decade for UAH since 1979)
That looks like accuracy to most people, so models should not be the subject of a debate
The best subjects to refute claims of a coming climate crisis:
Why is global warming bad?
Does that mean global cooling is good?
They can’t both be bad.
Why more CO2 is great for plats?
Why are long range climate predictions always negative and always wrong?
These simple questions work with the people, eve some leftists. They question the foundation of the Net Zero Nutter’s claims.
Concerning Net Zero”
Even if you believed CO2 was a satanic gas that was going to end the planet, …
you need to think about the impossible goal of stopping the rise of atmospheric CO2.
Even beyond the fact that there are 175 of 195 nations that really don’t care about CO2 emissions. They are just leftist style virtue signaling.
The only way to stop the rise of atmospheric CO2 would be to halt all modern economies.
Almost all economic activity requires some energy.
Nature does only half of all manmade CO2 emissions. That’s why the atmospheric CO2 level rises each year.
That means the ONLY way to stop rising CO2 is for humans to not produce ay CO2 emissions.
Then, gradually, nature will continue its multi-billion year very slow process of absorbing atmospheric CO2
I can only wonder why intelligent people, including some scientists, think Net Zero is even possible. In reality, Net Zero it is just a green zealot pipedream, probably first imagined by a group of male college students after drinking a case of beer and sharing a cigarette of Wacky Tobaccy.
Mr. Greene: Conservatives have won arguments, and seem to be winning the AGW argument, because we won elections. Done without the help of libertarians, who win no elections and only win arguments in their own head.
And without rant after rant by Janus Greene.
Climate science was not discussed before the election. It was irrelevant. Trump got 49.9% of the popular vote. That does not mean AGW WAS REFUTED.
Any more than Biden winning in 2020 was not proof of AGW.
Wining presidential elections does not determine which science theories are correct. What are you drinking?
nobody anywhere said anything about which ‘science theories are correct’. I am guessing that you are not smoking anything … you are just plain stupid in your arguments.
Then you go on to lecture others how to argue.
The fact is that the voters don’t seem to really care, or believe in the premise, ‘that carbon di-oxide is an existential threat’. The bad guys have thrown billions and billions and billions of dollars trying start and win an argument to the contrary. The public is now realizing that the bad guys are bad. Period.
And you can argue your points all day long. The other side will just continue to change the narrative as you argue with yourself.
So, under full disclosure, where do you get you funding from Mr. Greene?
You hide behind a moniker
Why don’t YOU tell us where YOU get your funding from first.
Then I will give you my source of funding while using my real name. I will even list my home town.
Don’t most human beings adapt to local climate (30 year weather patterns) and pass on their advisory messages to those who will take their places in society? Don’t we all adapt to local conditions as necessary and haven’t we always done so for survival sake if nothing else?
A surprisingly small number of British people who relocate to Australia drop dead from climate shock. Dropping dead after being bitten by one of our venomous snakes, spiders, ticks, jellyfish, octopuses or disease bearing mosquitos is a different story.
By the way the fire ants, bull ants and horse flies won’t kill you, you’ll just wish you were dead.
I’m old enough that I want to adapt to Florida’s climate
It’s pretty clear that the “fix climate change” technologies we are employing to date have virtually zero to negative efficacy. We would be better off saving the money for a rainy, or dry, or cold, or hot day in the future while we study better methods such as all kinds of nuclear energy and better water and forest management strategies. We may even “discover” that there IS no pressing problem with man-made climate change. The only scary part of this strategy is that it will send power-hungry globalists off on some other tangent to gain dominion over the plebes. You know, like a health crisis or something.
She uses FF every minute of every day.
When I talk to my left-leaning friends about “climate change” the principal issue I find is that they refuse to countenance the possibility that Science is corruptible, and they worship “peer review” is if it is a cure all mechanism protecting the integrity of Science, not noticing that the Greens in particular have completely captured the relevant journals and societies to further promote their political/religious agenda via advocacy and censorship.
Fortunately, cracks have appeared in the monolithic refusal to accept that Science has been corrupted. In particular, there is now widespread recognition that the “Social Sciences” are rife with political corruption. Not surprising, because almost every topic in the Social Sciences intersects with deeply advocated politics of one sort or another. Truth doesn’t matter, only advocacy leading to outcomes.
The other revelation was COVID, and the very public demonstration that the Medical Sciences were absolutely subordinate to powerful political and economic interests. They didn’t even try hard to conceal the censorship and government and industry advocacy for a singular viewpoint and brutal suppression of dissent. Everyone could see that Science is readily manipulable when the stakes are high.
I believe that these two developments have opened many to the likelihood that “Climate Science” is itself heavily corrupted by political power and the attendant massive money flows involved. It’s all about advocacy of outcomes, not seeking truths.
Idealists like Sabine just have a very hard time even contemplating that Climate Science is a corrupt discipline. But it is.
its not a mental block its emotion … rational arguments will never overcome emotion …
….and here’s Climate Cosmos with AI answers presumably to the burning question-
Why Are the Rich Buying Beachfront Mansions If Sea Levels Are Rising?
Yeah yeah and maybe they’re rich because they’re a lot smarter than the average lefty and don’t believe a word of the dooming.
Yeah, and the worse part most of those buying up beachfront properties are mostly the same folks getting rich on the scam… like the Obama’s, Al Gore, etc.
For a scientist, she relies a lot on beliefs. I have seen some of her videos and now avoid them.
The job of scientists is to disprove their hypotheses, IMHO.
Hey Sabine, ask the Uyghurs in western China what their goals are.
Since her original science videos that were informative on quantum mechanics and relativity….she has acquired a “team” that cranks out nearly a YouTube video a day. It is pretty obvious she knows only popular mechanics magazine level info plus maybe 20 minutes of buzzword research about most of these topics and is more interested in how many clicks, clickbait topics, and advertisers she can accumulate. Disappointing really.
Neil deGrasse Tyson was an astrophysicist before he became a stand-up comedian.
Bill Nye was a mechanical engineer before the kid’s science show gig.
The list of sellouts to celebrityhood goes on.
Sabine just adds another name to it.
I’ve watched a few of her climate-change related videos over the last year or two. I would love to give her the benefit of the doubt. Nope. No sympathy from me. As a physicist she should know better. That said, I hope she somehow sees the light. Also, your references to NdGT and Nye are apt.