Climate-Related Hazards: time to warn your nearest and dearest about irresponsible adults howling at the moon over carbon dioxide and climate

If you are not careful, you can pick up foolish ideas in the same way as you can catch the flu – simply by contact with someone already afflicted.  No thinking is required on your part, no analysis, no checking things out for yourself – you just acquire the opinion along with some superficial support for it.  Thus you decide that CO2 emissions must be dramatically reduced because CO2 is a greenhouse gas that is ‘trapping’ heat in the atmosphere.  Suitably debilitated by this, you are vulnerable to secondary infections such as the facile attribution of any or all bad weather to ‘climate change’, and you are already using those two words not as a platitude (since climate has always changed) but as shorthand for ‘catastrophic anthropogenic global warming’ (cagw).

In some cases, the afflicted ones feel driven to share, or spread, their troubles with others and take to campaigning and lobbying.  It seems that the condition is aggravated if all the people around you don’t suffer from it, or if you learn of large groups who seem to have some kind of immunity.  

In the worst cases, there emerges an evangelical zeal reminiscent of religious zealots who have achieved a state in which all contrarian appeals to reason are shrugged off as the work of the devil.  In the climate-related cults, fossil-fuel companies are seen as the source of much evil, and are held to be providing colossal levels of funding to help devils pursue their wicked ways.  No one has yet found any evidence of this, but of course that goes to show just how clever Big Coal etc have been.  

One High Temple and One Cheerleader for Alarm

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 One of the high temples of climate alarm has been the UK Meteorological Office, led as it has been by such as John Houghton (a key schemer in the IPCC), and Robert Napier (a man who helped lead the WWF and other bodies into climate-alarm evangelism ). 

This commitment to giving CO2 a driving role in the climate system has not been a success as far the public is concerned, since the warm-bias this has given their seasonal predictions has been seriously misleading both for winters which turned out to be colder and snowier than we were told to expect, or summers which turned out to be cooler and wetter.

A few days ago, an anonymous (sad to say) commenter called 'ntropyalwayswins' on one of their web sites urged the MetOffice to get back to concentrating on weather forecasts:

The Met Office should stick to what it is good at – namely forecasting the weather and should only do this for a period of time where forecasts can be relied upon. To issue a longer term forecast that suggests 30% hot 30% cold 40% somewhere in between is really not very useful and invites ridicule.

You need to continue to rein back heavily on your embarrassingly overconfident statements on climate. Recent announcements from the MO indicate that at long last you are admitting that you do not understand natural variability. Until you do it is ok to answer all questions about the future climate of Britain and the world with a simple ‘We do not know’

As your false confidence has already caused immeasurable harm to the citizens and economy of the UK you should issue a statement encouraging the UK government to disregard all prior climate advice from the MO and, lest they do not have the good sense themselves to see the implications thereof, suggest that they may need to re-assess the need for the Climate Change Act which the rest of the world rightly sees as the Economic Suicide Act.

Plus it would do no harm to issue a public apology for getting it consistently wrong. That is the grown-up thing to do.

In the States, the American Geophysical Union (AGU) has emerged as a major cheerleader for climate alarm, choosing a decidedly non-geophysical Chris Mooney to be one of their directors for a while – he is a graduate in English who has spotted climate agitation as a means of furthering his left-wing views, and appointing to lead their Ethics Committee, of all things, a Peter Gleick who shortly thereafter resigned in disgrace after displaying decidely unethical behaviour to further his own crusade for more alarm.  A podcast interview on this with the president of the AGU during that unhappy time is available on David Appell's blog, an interview in which this president reveals himself as also being afflicted with climate alarm (‘the evidence is pretty much incontrovertible’).

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The new president seems also to be a victim.  The picture shows her speaking at one of their conferences.  A conference about which the physicist Norman Rogers has written a scathing report, extracts from which follow:

"What they are doing is howling at the moon that the sky is falling.  The president of the AGU, Carol Finn, who, incidentally, is employed by the federal government, opened the lobbying/communications workshop on the first day of the conference with this:

'AGU's mission is to promote discovery ... for the benefit of humanity[.] ... I live in Colorado[.] ... [L]ast week's Black Forest fire ... was the worst wildfire in Colorado's history[.] ... I live in Boulder County[.] ... [T]he county and the city of Longmont have just outlawed fracking[.] ... [A]ll these communities need to be able to try to figure out how to balance energy development and putting drill rigs next to schools[.]'

The subtext here, repeated over and over at the conference, is that global warming causes forest fires and that hydrocarbon development is undesirable, if not dangerous.  But perhaps forest fires are started by matches.  Maybe hydrocarbon development is preferable to riding around on horses.

How trustworthy is an organization that claims to be organized for the "benefit of humanity," anyway?

The illogical thinking and ever-changing stories about global warming doom are puzzling.  What motivates the global warming proselytizers?  Is there a root belief that explains their behavior?  My suggestion is that their behavior is religious in nature and can be explained if we postulate that they believe in the following commandment:

Thou shalt not add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

If you realize that the story is not really about global warming, but rather about changing the composition of the atmosphere, it becomes easy to understand why the believers are not disturbed by the fact that global warming, as measured by surface temperature, stopped 16 years ago.  They easily find other scientific theories to buttress their faith.  They ignore or discredit any science that challenges their faith.  They tell us that if we don't stop adding carbon dioxide to the air, we will have extreme weather and the oceans will become acidified.  The polar bears will die.  The wine will lose its flavor.  We will catch exotic diseases.  If one theory of doom is refuted, or becomes boring, there are plenty of others to take its place.  Embarrassing information, such as the fact that adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere makes plants grow faster, with less water, is dismissed.  They say plants grow faster, but they are less nutritious, or they grow faster, but they deplete the soil of its nutrients.

What we have is an obsession with the evil of carbon dioxide -- a carbon cult.

The great majority of people who are members of the AGU are interested in science, not in a new religion centered on carbon.  They have not woken up to the fact that their organization has been infiltrated by a carbon cult." ...

... "The attendees were told to explain why the weather would be more extreme by comparing carbon dioxide to steroids.  If an athlete takes steroids, he will still play the game, but his performance will be more extreme.

 

One difference between a cult and a legitimate religion is that the cults usually hide their true nature.  The more bizarre the cult, the greater the imperative to hide its doctrines.  The general public must not be allowed to realize that the advocates of global warming alarmism are in reality making up the story to propagate a fanatical faith that carbon dioxide is bad.

The science behind global warming is very shoddy.  Yes, there is a nugget of real science buried in all the alarmist, made-up stuff.  Carbon dioxide does absorb infrared radiation, and increased carbon dioxide probably will warm the Earth by a small amount.  The mechanism is quite complicated, involving the atmospheric lapse rate and a slight relocation of the tropopause.

The complicated and jargon-laden science is reduced, by the missionaries of the carbon cult, for public consumption, to "carbon dioxide is a heat-trapping gas."  The formal predictions of global warming from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are the product of an opinion poll of computer models that disagree with each other and that have been manipulated to make them look better than they really are.  The carbon cultists accept those predications as serious and profound scientific truth, because the predictions provide support for their faith."

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So, how are we to warn our nearest and dearest about these people who are seized with an urge to scare the wits out of us?  I do not have any new ideas for this.  Until the Fabled Fossil Fuel Funds or something like them are located, and there is not the slightest sign of them even existing, it will have to be through low-cost means.  Fortunately we still have the Internet for the fast sharing of thoughts, and to take part in discussions to test and sharpen our criticisms of the harmful zealotry of climate alarm.  There are books which contain the bigger picture, including at least one specifically aimed at helping parents talk with their children about climate and other eco-scares.   We can all help those nearest to us to listen more calmly to the panic-stricken calls for more alarm and more radical actions on CO2, and help them get these calls into perspective.  From there, the word will surely spread through the mass media and into the political class, where there are already leaders of this school of thought writing and campaigning.  Eventually, even state-controlled schools will surely want to be less welcoming to alarmists, and to be vigorously pro-active at helping their pupils handle their insidious views and methods.