Comments on: Only Four Years Left to Save Environmentalism

By: geoff chambers

geoff chambers — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 21:30:50 +0000

Alex Cull:
6 billion of us will die before the end of the century? Of course we will! We’re mortal! How anyone can take Lovelock and his resurrection of the goddess Gaia seriously is beyond me. He presumably doesn’t realise that even the ancient Greeks found her an embarrassment. Since CR has been caught going in for Freudian analysis, I’ll venture this: environmentalists who personify the greasy creaking sphere we inhabit as a woman have fearsomely ambivalent unconscious feelings about peeking underneath the old lady’s mantle. Stop poking around, you’re killing her!

By: Alex Cull

Alex Cull — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 17:29:38 +0000

Good comments from all here. Chambers Law of Aging, I like that.. ) James Lovelock is getting a little like that, I think, with his pronouncements that more than 6 billion of us will die before the end of the century. I can’t help but be reminded of the John Laurie character in Dad’s Army, who keeps muttering darkly that “we’re doomed. Aye, we’re all doomed…”

By: StuartR

StuartR — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 17:13:01 +0000

@Geoff Chambers
Yes I agree, a Godwin’s Law for those well poisoning examples would be a better idea. Like Godwin’s, it could just signify a helpful reminder to people that their thinking is becoming lazy.
I feel a bit guilty about applying Lysenko to Hansen, it is ad hominem I guess, but when I see his repeated advocacy in the social and economic realms, then I can’t help thinking of the comparison. It would be nice if more people studied history and applied the lessons learned, I think this would save so much time. But people seem awfully convinced by, what seems to me, a flawed argument. I could feel more persuaded by him if he put more effort in providing the compelling evidence and data that would help support his case. I may be a typical foolish example of the skeptical average Joe, but I don’t think if there was a real imminent preventable danger on the horizon (4 years?), of the scale he claims, then the evidence would not be so recondite even to the layman public.
However on the contrary, his offices have been seen to make some human errors, and I have seen enough following Climate Audit to suspect that his practices are not exactly rock solid. He seems very prone to confirmation bias. I think he should submit himself to some element of external oversight, but he appears to become upbraided by this talk, and falls back into accusatory ‘denier’ rhetoric to support himself.

As you say about the ‘law of aging’ , he seems to want to circumvent this dawdling normal boring scientific option, and go on straight to glory

By: geoff chambers

geoff chambers — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 06:52:54 +0000

to StuartR
If we’re going to have a Godwin’s law in discussion of global warming, let’s apply it to big oil money, watermelons, Koolaid, flatearthers, and a million other references less interesting than Lysenko.
You hit the nail on the head with the reference to speed. Hansen is an old man in a hurry. There’s something rather tragic about basing your life’s work on forecasting an event you’re not going to live to see, spending your last years hoping your predictions of death and disaster for everyone else will be realised. Luckily for Hansen, (and all us wrinklies), most people are too polite to point out the comic aspect of his mutterings.
Even if there were any truth in Hansen’s ramblings, he’d still eventually fall victim to the Gerontological Principle, or Chambers’ law of Aging, which states that by the time you’ve accumulated sufficient wisdom to have anything interesting to say, you’ve become a boring old fart that no-one wants to listen to.

By: StuartR

StuartR — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 22:28:09 +0000

The old clichéd description of a nervous scientist reluctantly shaking off his dandruff and venturing out into the world to make it aware of an Earth shattering discovery may not be breaking a new barrier. Although in Hansen’s case, he always seems to want to frame everything relative to himself in an egotistical way. Which I must admit, makes me distrust him more, I can’t think of anybody else who has had this same tendency and has been proven right.

Hansen seems to be claiming significance of something that is even more latent / hidden, than anything you may think could be possible,. The world cools but he knows the signs are fooling us. I would have thought this could make his job harder and his powers of persuasion more subtle, instead, when he isn’t accepted at face value, by an admittedly skeptical GW Bush administration he cries that he is being censored.

I certainly remember a moment (forgive the lack of reference, but I could find if pushed ) when he wanted to run ahead after processing some new data to claim an extremely warm year which implied some support of a new tipping point narrative a few years back. He was apparently prevented by the then pen pushing NASA administration, so he went on to make a claim to the newspapers that his NASA bosses censored him under government influence, whereas it could have been interpreted it was for the more mundane reason that he was being too hasty to make a scientific judgement in the timescale and with relevant data.

It wasn’t further investigated, his word was taken (it was GWBs NASA after all!) This was what was reported then, and has now become the legend of Hansen.

I see a running theme of speed with him. Maybe he generally thinks that we are all on a runaway train and he is the guy to be the advisor to the engine driver. Otherwise I could take the conclusion that he of the type of the worst kind of charlatan who harangues old ladies to get their roofs re-tiled whether needed or not.

Hansen is a scientist of the Lysenko school in my opinion, maybe he won’t get anyone sent to Siberia or shot, but it would’ve been the same with Lysenko if he was transported to today’s world. He couldn’t have plied his influence in modern day America.

He would need to change a few paradigms first

*BTW I suspect mentioning Lysenko and Hansen in the same breath could become a new kinda Godwins law

By: Editors

Editors — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 16:21:44 +0000

Ian,

We picked up on Lucas’ statement at the time, and ‘did the math’:

“Lucas speaks as though a consensus on climate-change allows her to say whatever she likes about the future. Her 99.999% figure is, of course, entirely made up. If it were true, it would mean that 1 in 100,000 climate scientists were sceptical, and we can think of enough sceptics to put the number of climate scientists in the world well into the tens of millions. Lucas has absolutely no idea what proportion of climate scientists constitutes the consensus position because no poll of scientists has been taken.” – http://www.climate-resistance.org/2007/07/more-on-lucas.html

How Lucas sustains a public profile without being called to account for her wild and fictional statements is a total mystery. She has a PhD in literature, so maybe she’s tapping into something existential.

Geoff, you’re right to point out that Hansen is getting control. We’ve pointed out elsewhere that Monbiot is too. Yet he is still in a tantrum.

What we would suggest (if we were to continue the Fruedian idea) is that their influence over the establishment is one thing (the elite are pretty much on side) but that it can’t move too far against the public as a whole. After all, they want to sustain the idea that there is a democracy. So, George, for example, will point to an hour of TV programme a week (Top Gear) and one of a small number of publications which offer a sustained criticism of environmentalism (eg, Spiked-Online) to explain the failure of millions of people – to which the establishment is accountable – to respond to his demands.

You’re probably right about environmentalism having popular appeal when it’s about charasmatic mega-fauna – but that’s Disney, rather than deep ecology.

Alex, that is an outragous story. Thanks for pointing it out. We’ll put up a link to Tony’s blog in a post.

By: Luke Warmer

Luke Warmer — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 16:01:26 +0000

I find the 2 degC “target” from the EU a very strange thing for another reason – best practice with environmental management systems such as ISO14001 is to recognise you cannot manage the impact (e.g. temp. change) but you can manage the aspect (e.g. CO2 release) causing it.

Thus improvement objectives and targets are set for the significant aspects of your organisation because you can control/influence these directly.

The EU (and the Lib Dems) cannot control China nor any other non-EU country’s emissions (and supposed concomittant temp. impact/rise) so to set any target based on global temp. change is clearly illogical. Not that I’ve come to expect politicians to be logical.

It brings to mind King Cnut (even though I know he was trying to show that he wasn’t all powerful). Stupid Cnuts!

By: Ian Wilson

Ian Wilson — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 15:56:22 +0000

Perhaps you’ve commented on this figure already elsewhere in another article since there are several having a (justifiable) go at Lucas. But her statement that 99.999% of international scientists do believe climate change is happening and its man made beggars belief surely?

That means 1 in 100,000 does not. So this means she has got a survey of more than 100,000 international scientist respondents? (with only 1 negative/positive? view). I’m trying to figure out how a survey with a smaller sample size could have worked out this number, but I haven’t come up with an answer yet.

Its statistics like this that bother me enormously and is an area you’ve picked up on before I know. Keep up the thought provoking articles.

By: Alex Cull

Alex Cull — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 12:39:51 +0000

Very good points, Editors and Geoff. To which I’ll add (re Obama’s inauguration and media servility) media distortion as well.

Check out this story at Harmless Sky to find out how the BBC appears to have spliced together sound bites from different parts of Obama’s speech, to make it appear he said something he actually didn’t:
http://www.harmlesssky.org

By: geoff chambers

geoff chambers — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 20:34:51 +0000

Following your link above to the Observer editorial, I came across your excellent comment there, where you say “… like an infant, environmentalists fail to make a distinction between its failure to assert its will over the world, and the end of the world”. A nice bit of Freudian analysis. Except that Hansen, by writing a personal letter to Obama, and getting worldwide publicity for it, seems rather closer to asserting his will over the world than most elected heads of government.

The obsession with tipping points is typical example of science being regurgitated by a half-educated elite as millenarian religious imagery. What’s a tipping point? It’s the sharp bit on a graph (cusp, or whatever) when things go chaotically non-linear. It’s what happens when we educated non-scientists start worrying about things we don’t understand. When life was smooth and graphs were gaussian or sine waves, you could surf into the future with a certain degree of confidence. You’ve only got to glance at the jagged stuff coming at us from Hansen and co to know that if you touch it, you’ll prick your finger and die. That’s the level of reflection to be found in the average Guardian/Observer Environment article.

You say: “..the environmental movement … has no popular appeal …”. But it has, when it sticks to saving cuddly beasts, keeping footpaths open, and abolishing famine in Africa. But none of these admirable activities on their own provide a solid base to satisfy the political or intellectual ambitions of a Lucas, a Hansen or a Monbiot. Only catastrophic global warming can do that, by federating disparate minority interests around an Incontrovertible Truth.

The big issue for me in the Observer interview and article was the abject servility of the interviewer, who failed to ask any questions about Dr Hansens’s abysmal 25 year prediction record, his implicit rejection of the IPCC “consensus”, or his grotesque lie in a British court that Kingsnorth power station would eliminate 400 species.