First, you unilaterally declare that there is some huge looming disaster a long ways in the future. Using a variety of methods fair and foul, you obtain the full cooperation of other scientists, governments, educational institutions, and the media the world around. With all of you, the whole chorus, baying for skeptic’s blood in full voice, you spend a quarter century trying to convince the people of the oncoming Thermageddon.
Second, after said quarter century you notice that despite having the entire resources of the educational and media institutions of the planet and the blind agreement of other scientists and billions of dollars poured into trying … you have not been able to establish your case. Heck, you haven’t even been able to falsify the null hypothesis. In fact, after a long string of predictions of doom, none of which came to pass, and at the tail end of a 15-year hiatus in the warming, the US public doesn’t believe a word you say. Oops. Over two-thirds of them think climate scientists sometimes falsify their research. Oops.
In response, you say that the problem is that scientists have been too retice … too re … sorry, it’s hard to type and laugh at the same time … you say that scientists have been to reticent, that they haven’t been alarmist enough or aggressive enough in promoting their views.
That’s the problem? After 25 years of unbridled alarm from scientists and everyone else from Presidents to my kid’s teachers, the problem is that scientists are not alarmist enough, they’re too reticent to state their true opinion? Really? That’s the reason the public doesn’t believe you? Is that your final answer?
– Willis Eschenbach takes a sledgehammer to the nut that is James Hansen, a nut who, alas, continues to be employed in a prominent and influential position by NASA.
The word Thermageddon has been around for quite a while, but it’s new to me. I like it.
The phenomenon that I despise most is that of politicizing EVERYTHING under the sun-a trend started years ago by the Left with their vapid “the personal is the political” nonsense.
It seems to me that the real question isn’t ‘is global warming caused by mankind’, but ‘is global warming good or bad’?
We hear endless propaganda to the effect that global warming will be a disaster, but warming seems to be concentrated in the Arctic, moreover, warming the Arctic in the winter months. This is bad, why? Seems to me that anyone who looks at a world globe, and the vast regions on Russia, Canada and Alaska that are uninhabitable due to the extreme cold would be rooting FOR global warming.
Think about it. Canada is bigger than the US in geographical area, and yet has only 10% of the US’s population, all crowded down to within 50 miles of the border. Just imagine what it would be like if, say, some hellhole like Saskatchewan became as temperate and livable as, say, Nebraska (assuming you can use words like ‘temperate’ to describe Nebraska’s present climate). How can that possibly be bad, for either mankind or ‘the environment’?
Yes, maybe Florida and Bengladesh will experience flooding, but big picture wise, that is small potatoes. Canada and Russia together comprise almost 20% of ALL THE LAND ON EARTH, and both are marginally livable. Why? Because the world is too damn cold.
I suppose more than anything it’s a viable career path in the almost universally acceptable bullshit industry.
dir: That.
Plus: no matter whether “good” or “bad”, what’s “evil” is the presumption that change per se provides moral grounds for statist attempts to “mitigate” the situation. If change is reason enough for the imposition of force, then we might as well give up this whole progress thing.
Thanks. Another cogent post about the AGW myth promulgated by the loony left green Facisma.
Up until Nov. 2008 (Climategate leaks) I had been sucked in by the Church of AGW due to having been very busy and having dropped my guard and allowing others to do my thinking for me meanwhile as a result.
I could have kicked myself as I read through the email and documents contained in that 61.9 Mb .ZIP file (FOI2009.zip).
Then I became very angry. I belatedly understood something about CCT (carbon credit trading). The idea of CCT, when I first encountered it in the mid-’80s, had always seemed rather odd to me, as though it was a conman’s get-rich-quick scheme. It apparently was/is something similar.
It now seems to be the creation of a world market monopoly – and a kind of pyramid scheme – with each government in the role of a sort of monopsony in its local sovereign economy.
It was apparently going to be a surreptitious tax on the efficient capitalist industrial economies, intended to transfer wealth to and subsidise the inefficient and 3rd world industrial economies, all the while managed through a world carbon credit administration authority.
A socialist-collectivist dream of Nirvana, and quite clever too. Maybe as clever as sub-prime mortgage trading?
“Thermageddon”?
New to me too. I like it a lot.
Thanks.
There are some excellent videos on youtube of a Freeman Dyson lecture where he goes to town on Global Warming which are well worth a watch.
Once again, it should be noted that there is nothing at all unusual about the earth either warming or cooling, as this has occurred repeatedly in the planet’s history.
When the “Little Ice Age” ended around 1800, the planet entered an extended warming phase. As Lomborg has noted, among many others, a warmer planet is friendlier to human life and its agricultural base than a colder one.
The issue that so often gets lost in the endless “it’s warming/it’s not warming” argument is that the true danger to the people of the world is the relentless attempts to concentrate more and more political power in the hands of the tranzi elites, and to expand that political power exponentially by extending its influence and control into each and every human activity of our increasingly complex global civilization.
It is the height of madness to contend that those who have so grotesquely mismanaged every aspect of any responsibility they have had in the past, or are supposed to be managing during the current worldwide turmoil, i.e., the political/academic/cultural elites who claim the right to direct the path of human activity, would somehow perform this task adequately now, when the world economy is many times more complex now than it was when they caused the deaths of millions during the collectivist era of the 20th century.
These are people, the pols especially, who could not properly manage the afternoon shift at any fast food shack, much less a multi-trillion dollar national or global economy. And yet, year after year, crisis after crisis, real or imagined, they rush to proclaim their intention to “save” the world from itself, and the fools that support them turn a blind eye to the inevitable chaos and degradation that follows.
It is not marginal increases in temperature which threaten the health and well-being of humanity, but the wholesale assumption of endless increases in political power by a corrupt and incompetent political class.
The plain fact is, just as the historical record demonstrates so clearly, they have never known what they were doing, and they don’t know now.
Spot on, veryretired.
Wot Laird rote.
“…who could not properly manage the afternoon shift at any fast food shack…”
LOL. veryretired strikes again! Direct hit! Fire for effect..
Where’s my ‘like’ button?
Very good article. I do like the “thermageddon”.