Discussion > The Moral and Intellectual Poverty of Climate Alarm
Ahh, you have opted for the “Because he is wrong!” option. Wonderful scientific argument, that (/sarc).
As for young Miss Thunberg, I can only feel pity for the poor lass. When she does eventually realise how her parents and carers have used and abused her, using her as a shield to push their own agendas, she is going to be truly broken.
Radical Rodent
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong
Phil Clarke
Even Joanne Nova, usually credulous of any and all denier tosh gets it.
Venus only absorbs 10% more solar energy than does Earth yet its temperature at equivalent atmospheric pressure is 66C vs 14C. The difference in black body emission is 749 watts/sqM versus 390 watts/sqM. The close equivalence cited by Mr Huffman would appear to only exist if one ignores the difference in albedo.
Guest post at Jo Nova.
See also https://scienceofdoom.com/2010/06/12/venusian-mysteries/#comment-13633
For this hypothesis to be true we would need to burn all our physics and astronomy textbooks, but when someone is determined to believe in the fringiest of fringe science, nobody can stop them.....
Phil Clarke
An excellent post at ClisScep highlights the spectacle (or should I say 'spectre') of CO2 Alarm extremists distancing themselves from the central IPCC position on climate variation. It seems that scientists who are not also extremists in their 'science' as well as in their politics are no longer to be heeded. In other words, the panic, for these campaigners at least, has really set in. Our house is on fire, run! Do something! Put it out! And all that sort of stuff.
Oh tempora,oh mores.
Jaime's post is well worth reading in full: https://cliscep.com/2019/10/27/climate-change-the-facts-as-seen-in-the-mirror/
Here's how it ends: 'The public are being asked, nay required, to give up their gas boilers and their cars, and thus are rightly entitled to the facts which justify these extreme measures. What they are being dished up with instead is half-baked lies, uninformed opinion, worst case scenarios based upon bad science and diagnostic analyses of bad weather based upon equally bad science or, increasingly, based upon nothing but an activist’s whim.'
John Shade
471999 from Avaaz and one from Phil
fred
Jaime's post is well worth reading in full:
Not sure about that, he is after all, taking aim at the Daily Mirror, and their list of facts...
1. The increase in ocean temperatures means that we are set to lose between 70% and 90% of the world’s coral reefs.
2. Floods in the UK have become more frequent. In 2000, we had the highest level of rainfall since records began at 337.3mm, topping the 330.7mm of 2012.
3. Globally, the six warmest years on record were notched in the last seven years – and it is predicted that by 2050, the UK is facing a trebling of deaths caused by heat.
4. This year saw the UK experience the hottest temperature since records began. It was 38.7C at the Cambridge University Botanic Garden on Thursday, July 25.
5. A study found 68% of all extreme weather events, including droughts, flooding, hurricanes and tropical storms, were either made more likely to occur or more severe.
6. Our cities are getting hotter. A rise in global temperatures of only 1.5 degrees centigrade will leave 350 million people at the risk of heat stress.
7. The Arctic ice cap has shrunk in every successive decade since 1979.
8. Glaciers in Central Europe, Caucasus, North Asia, Scandinavia, the Andes, eastern Africa and Indonesia are expected to lose 80% of their mass by 2100.
9. More than 1.1 billion people – 17% of the population – could face life with severe shortages of water.
10. Farming will suffer. If global temperatures rise by another two degrees centigrade this will see a fall in livestock production by between 7% and 10%.
11. There has been a 60% decline in wildlife populations in 40 years. A report found that of 976 species, 47% of extinctions could be blamed on the effects of climate change.
12. Experts predict that climate change could force between three and 16 million people into extreme poverty because of rising food prices and crop failures.
13. Illegal logging, fires and deforestation have led to 20% of the Amazon rainforest vanishing in the past 50 years.
15. Oceans are dying, with 30% of sharks and rays and 27% of crustaceans on the brink. Rising temperatures and pollution have created 500 dead zones – areas without oxygen and life.
16. According to a 2016 report by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, climate change will cause global food prices to rise 20%.
(etc)
The only point Jaime takes specific issue with is No.2, flooding, which he 'rebuts' with annual and October graphs of the England and Wales Precipitation series from the Met Office which he claims show no climate signal. So I went to the source: the 2001 paper the Met Office say should be cited and I found
The national results date back even further to 1766 and show a significant increase in winter (JFM) and winter half-year (Oct.±Mar.) precipitation contrasting with a significant decrease in summer (JA) and summer half-year (Apr.±Sep.) precipitation. In particular 1995 was the driest high summer (JA) on record but also attained the accolade of being the second wettest winter (JFM). The automated results currently show that April 2000 with a monthly total of 143 mm was the wettest April in the 235-year England and Wales record (Figure 3d) contributing to Spring 2000 being the eighth wettest.
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadukp/alexander_and_jones_ukp.pdf
Phil Clarke
Phil C:
<< wrt to the atmosphere of Venus, it's interesting to note that Mars' atmosphere is 95% CO2. The average surface temperature is around -60 degrees C.
And if you were wrong by 500C? What then? >>
Not sure what you mean. According to Matt Damon, aka "The Martian", that's the typical surface temp. Wiki says much the same.
Mike Higton
My apologies, didn't read the post properly.
It may be CO2 rich but the Martian atmosphere is thin, surface pressure is about 1% of the Terrestial value, and of course it is more distant from Sol.
Phil Clarke
Phil, Jaime is a she.
Your rebuttal of her rebuttal isn't actually a rebuttal at all.
Mark Hodgson
While science - in the form of DNA tests - freed Guy-Paul Morin last week, it's important to remember that science was also used to wrongly convict him.By Donna Laframboise, Toronto Star, 30 January 1995
https://injusticebusters.org/index.htm/morin14.html
Explains why Donna sees the IPCC for what it is.
clipe
Mark, I do agree that Phil's comment on Jaime's post is not a rebuttal. His comments are often too hasty, careless, and superficial to be able to refute anything. Indeed sometimes, the information he provides, or links to, undermines his apparent take. They do serve to help keep this discussion thread more visible, so it is not all bad.
John Shade
Jaime's post at CliScep about the silliness at the Daily Mirror about climate made me hunt out a vaguely remembered post from Ben Pile taking a wider view. Here's an extract (my italics):
'This blog has long observed that the more an institution embraces the climate issue, the surer we can be that the embrace signifies a crisis of some kind, analogous to an existential or identity crisis. Political parties, trade unions, and even giant corporations have sought to attach themselves to the image of planet-saving. The newspaper resorts to climate catastrophism, not simply as some kind of pornography in order to sell copies, but to attempt to identify itself in a world it has trouble making sense of. (That’s why people buy newspapers, after all.)'
The Daily Mirror does not have a good track record in this area. Their bias has been examined in this report from the University of Oxford in 2011.
Here is a more recent example described by no less than the Bish himself: https://www.thegwpf.com/how-climate-nonsense-gets-published/. Well worth a read.
John Shade
I hope you didn't miss my point. Jaime: But we don’t have to wait for Lynas’s book to get the answer. Here it is, courtesy of empirically measured monthly (October) rainfall in England and Wales – rather closer I would imagine to actual fact (within the limits of measurement error) – than Lynas’s random assertions regarding the current weather.
Jaime then posts a graph of the EWP, implying that there is no trend. But if you go to the EWP page it says...
When using this dataset in reports, publications or presentations, please use the following citation:
Alexander, L.V. and Jones, P.D. (2001) Updated precipitation series for the U.K. and discussion of recent extremes, Atmospheric Science Letters doi:10.1006/asle.2001.0025.
And if you go to the section on England and Wales it says
The national results date back even further to 1766 and show a significant increase in winter (JFM) and winter half-year (Oct.±Mar.) precipitation
In other words the source Jaime relies on to show no October trend, well it shows a significant increase for the half year containing October. Partial rebuttal, anyway.
Phil Clarke
To put the discussion into perspective:
"On daily times-scales, the widespread flooding in England and Wales in October 2000 can be linked with the 40 mm of rainfall that fell on average on the 29th of that month. Only the 42 mm that fell on 25 August 1986 was higher in the daily record which began in 1931. Daily values of 42 mm and 50 mm on 29 October 2000 in south-east England (SEE) and SWE respectively exceeded the previous October maximum daily values for those regions. However October 2000 (188 mm) was not as wet as October 1903 (218 mm) in the England and Wales series but autumn 2000 (502 mm) beat the previous record breaker of 1852 (455 mm)."
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadukp/alexander_and_jones_ukp.pdf
Mark Hodgson
Greta is doing fine
https://twitter.com/jamesdeeganMC/status/1189085210178195457
fred
Climate alarmers dominate the Californian Democrats, and their moral failures and intellectual weaknesses have cost the people of that state dearly. For example:
'The Wall Street Journal published a superb article that exposes the government lunacy in California where its climate alarmist propaganda driven Democratic politicians have wasted tens of billions of dollars on energy schemes that are totally useless in having any meaningful impacts on global emissions levels while ignoring the statewide wildfire disaster that is destroying massive amounts of property, thousands of homes and taking hundreds of lives.'
and
'Democratic Party politicians in Sacramento have created this colossal wildfire debacle mess by their hugely misguided, monumentally incompetent and totally useless climate alarmist policy priorities wasting tens of billions of dollars on globally meaningless actions while ignoring the disastrous failures of the state to deal with its forest management responsibilities.'
John Shade
fred: ouch! Harsh 😉
Radical Rodent
Standing on a table at a conference for schools, he proceeds to tell the children present that they may not live very much longer because of climate change. Climate change which to date during their lifetimes and his has been a beneficial, gentle warming, as food production continues to rise, and all manner of bad things like starvation and dire poverty reduce. Let us hope these children have wise enough families to explain that this talk was from a foolish man, sick with hatred for humanity, and woefully ignorant of climate variation and its many causes.
Some details here: https://metro.co.uk/2019/10/29/climate-scientists-blast-extinction-rebellion-speaker-told-kids-may-not-grow-11006887/
John Shade
Good to see you behind the climate scientists, finally.
Phil Clarke
But these seem to be the scientists you are behind, Mr Clarke...
Radical Rodent
Another day, another window into the mental state of academics who want us to panic over climate variation and follow their prescriptions for our salvation. What can we see there? Silly, superficial, emotive, immature, half-baked, manipulative, dangerous and irresponsible ignorance and arrogance. You can find it here: bioscience blot.
Some reactions to it already: Tony Heller, and Jo Nova.
Target practice for sceptics of alarmism. Early potshots at WUWT are mainly on the composition of the signatories of the associated assertion 'More than 11,000 scientists endorse six steps to address climate emergency.', but the paper itself could be a focus for ridicule for years to come. Let us hope so.
John Shade
Do KUATB
I notice nobody is really taking issue with the science.
Phil Clarke
The political polemic defacing the pages of what ought to be a scientific journal continues to be undermined by its promotion of '11,000 scientists' as signatories. Here is a recent one of interest:
'In keyword searches across 324 pages of signing signatories, spanning 11,224 scientists, I found 240 (2%) individuals with professions that can be construed as bona fide meteorologists, climatologists, or atmospheric scientists. As a frame of reference, the Department of Labor reports that there are 10,000 atmospheric scientists in the U.S. Conversely, this list contains plenty of "experts" who have zero credibility on the topic of climate change, coming from fields such as infectious diseases, paleontology, ecology, zoology, epidemiology and nutrition, insect ecology, anthropology, computer science, OB-GYN, and linguistics. Bluntly, and no offense intended, I could not care less what a French professor or a zookeeper thinks about climate change — let alone allow him to tell me how to live my life.'
The alarmers on the other hand are pleased to get the French professor and the like on board because they sense they are having an impact on their target market of people poorly informed about climate variation. Read the full post here:
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/11/who_are_these_11000_concerned_scientists.html
And of course, they know that the mass media will headline the '11,000 scientists' and that's what they want for their efforts.
John Shade
Try actually reading the list, most signatories don't give their speciality so a keyword search is utterly useless. Also the report covered a lot more than climate science, detailing impacts on ecosystems, agriculture and economies.
American Thinker, is that meant to be irony?
Phil Clarke
Greta is doing just fine, thanks
Facebook. 472,000 'likes'