Bishop Hill Awarmism
Dec 8, 2010 Climate: other Greens This is a guest post by Roddy Campbell.
There’s been a good thread at CaS on alarmism and doom, what I like to call awarmism, with commenters batting back and forward on whether predicting doom and disaster, as Bill McKibben of 350.org does, helps or hinders the CO2 message.
It got me thinking, and then I read this piece at Climate Progress today by Veron, on coral reefs. It’s very good, very informative on the mass bleaching link with warming, and the upcoming acidification threat. I know nothing about coral reefs; I enjoyed reading it.
But why did it leave me …. well …. unmoved to action? What is it about ‘climate alarmism’ that is sometimes so…well…rebarbative? Is it that we ‘deniers’ just block our ears and chant ‘Heard it all before’ loudly as soon as someone says anything that might hint at taking away our 4x4, or suggest that ‘guvment’ should ‘do something about it’? Is it that simple?
Veron describes the threat as the coming 6th Mass Extinction, but is sensibly conscious that his readers will hear alarmism:
'You may well feel that dire predictions about anything almost always turn out to be exaggerations. You may think there may be something in it to worry about, but it won’t be as bad as doomsayers like me are predicting.'
Yes, that’s more or less what I thought as I started to read, so he is aware of the possible reaction to what he is about to say, and the way he says it. But what does he then do? What is it about the post itself that doesn't 'work', that I find off-putting, almost untrustworthy?
It's the language. Here are some sentences and phrases:
'Unless we change the way we live, the Earth’s coral reefs will be utterly destroyed within our children’s lifetimes.'
'...nothing comes close to the devastation waiting in the wings at the moment.'
'..here I am today, humbled to have spent the most productive scientific years of my life around the rich wonders of the underwater world, and utterly convinced that they will not be there for our children’s children to enjoy unless we drastically change our priorities and the way we live.'
'... my increasing concern for the plight of reefs in the face of global temperature changes...'
' ....my profound interests in geology, palaeontology, and oceanography'
'... the big picture that gradually emerged from my integration of these disparate disciplines left me shocked to the core.'
'In a long period of deep personal anguish....'
'......coral reefs can indeed be utterly trashed in the lifetime of today’s children.'
'.... the only corals not affected by mass bleaching by 2050 will be those hiding in refuges away from em sunlight...'
'What were once thriving coral gardens that supported the greatest biodiversity of the marine realm will become red-black bacterial slime, and they will stay that way.'
'How many of us wish to explain to our children and children’s children that the predictions were there but we wanted confirmation?'
'Coral reefs speak unambiguously about climate change.'
'Reefs are the ocean’s canaries and we must hear their call. This call is not just for themselves, for the other great ecosystems of the ocean stand behind reefs like a row of dominoes. If coral reefs fail, the rest will follow in rapid succession, and the Sixth Mass Extinction will be upon us — and will be of our making.'
Don't get me wrong, it's a good piece, good content, in between these anthropomorphic and emotive sentences is good stuff. But, for me anyway, articles describing coral reefs as the canaries of the ocean and blackmailing me with images of my reproving children's children with rickets start 3 - 0 down with a man sent off. Sorry. Maybe that just makes me a bastard. :-) More seriously, I think there is an issue in trusting someone suffering ‘deep personal anguish’ over an issue – it is likely, surely, that there is a decent risk of advocacy taking priority over truth when and if they clash? I also mistrust anyone with too high an adjective count; when I write something I go through it several times, each time removing any adjectives I find that add nothing to the sense of the writing, and substituting emotive verbs and nouns with less emotive synonyms. I feel that whatever small sense I may be communicating will then come through more clearly. Why does something have to be ‘utterly trashed’? Why children squared, as in children’s children? How many times can we really be ‘shocked to the core’ before we lose all ability to sense? This dislike of mine applies on a 360 basis – whenever Steve McIntyre refers to the ‘hapless’ Muir Russell he loses me just a little bit too.
Reader Comments (73)
Perhaps if Veron were to correspond more widely with his peers, they might dry his tears:
www.theaustralian.com.au/news/scientists-crying-wolf-over-coral/story-e6frg6xf-1225811910634
The problem is, Mike, that scientific evidence supporting the extraordinary claims of coral reef demise is far from conclusive and is hotly contested in the literature. The assertion that "Unless we change the way we live, the Earth’s coral reefs will be utterly destroyed within our children’s lifetimes" is simply not justifiable, is alarmist, is misleading and is inappropriately unrepresentative of current scientific understanding.
I don't know when I've broken up so completely reading a blog thread, with the unintended confusion of corals, morals, and molars. But a later post brought me back to Earth... ugg!
I don't know when I've broken up so completely reading a blog thread, with the unintended confusion of corals, morals, and molars. But a later post brought me back to Earth... ugg!
"More seriously, I think there is an issue in trusting someone suffering ‘deep personal anguish’ over an issue – it is likely, surely, that there is a decent risk of advocacy taking priority over truth when and if they clash?"
Plenty of examples of this here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzOwjFYXG4I
(Christiana Figueres meets the trackers at COP16 in Cancun, Mexico)
Mike
Before accusing nasty deniers such as myself of not doing our homework, you might like to check out:-
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/originals/acidification_database.html
And, for the avoidance of doubt, I am certainly NOT the friend of scaremongering trolls.
Mike @ 4am - that's what I was trying to say - I enjoyed the article, and found I could separate to a decent extent his science from his emoting, but there was a bit of wading through syrup to do so, and a sense of mistrust I tried to explain - if he feels so very strongly (anguish etc) then he will skew, won't he? He might?
I said:'It’s very good, very informative on the mass bleaching link with warming, and the upcoming acidification threat. I know nothing about coral reefs; I enjoyed reading it.'
I mistrusted it to an unknown extent (nothing unusual, I mistrust most things I read!), and found that as a call to action it was LESS effective than if it had been LESS emotive. Is that reasonable?
After all, he doesn't need to convert 'you', he needs to convert 'me', so as an advocate he might learn that expressing 'anguish' means I care less, through mistrust of motive and evidence, and dislike of having my heartstrings blackmailed!
As I said, maybe it just makes me a bastard! :)
@Mike - you're doing the same:
I don't pump CO2 into the atmosphere - do you? It just drifts out of the flue on my boiler and my car exhaust. And when I breathe out it wafts around. Is pump a neutral, scientific word for this process?
I think pump is fine. Back earlier in my lifetime we pumped chemical effluents into rivers, on our farm we pumped slurry into water-courses - whether the polluting liquids fell through gravity into the river, or ran down streams, or was pumped is slightly irrelevant. We didn't pump the slurry, gravity did it for us. We would have pumped it if we'd had to!
Emit would be more neutral, but no biggie.
But you're right, there's a whole slippery slope of words that make a little bird whisper 'Godwin' in my ear. 'Planet' is one of them, 'polar bears' obviously (The best line in M4GW's song was "I've got one thing to say to the polar bears - ADAPT!"), 'children', and as I said in the piece the 'sceptic' side have theirs too, 'plant food' being a particularly annoying one - Mike, what sceptic words or phrases make your teeth hurt, and your BS detector start wailing?
These general questions need answers:
1. If the temperature becomes too high at a location, cannot the organisms simply move a little deeper? Likewise if there is too much light. Ditto oxygen. Shallow thermal gradients are steep in the tropics. But then, tidal ranges of several meters each day are commonly met by the corals, which have coped.
2. What is the measured change in pH on the reef? What is the measured water temperature change on the reef?
3. The 1000 km N-S extent of the reef takes in many ambient temperature settings. Cannot the species migrate if their niche moves?
4. Banning fishing on many parts of the reef strikes out a lot of potential for food chain disturbance. This has already been done.
5. Population increase along the coastal strip leads to more human fresh water use and a reduced river flow. This might be a small effect, but it can be measured and projected. . The effects of storms and their timing cannot be. Ditto droughts. Recent dams have held back floods with dirty water, so overall, cleaner, soil-filtered water ought to be dischaging into the oceans now.
6. What are the actual increases in added nutrients that are claimed to exist? Farmers tend to try to conserve fertilizers that have cost them a lot of money.
7. AFAIK, the mechanism causing bleaching is either inkown or unrelatable so far to the conditions surrounding the corals.
8. The natural variability of tide and temperature is enormous compared with the much-discussed 0.8 deg C a century global warming. Only a brave person would include that small figure in the reckoning.
It is simply difficult to reconcile pin-prick man-made effects with the power of nature. The pH of most of the deep ocean mass is less alkaline than the surface water pH levels that are causing consternation. Mixing of deep with shallow waters has the potential to upset what researchers believe to be ideal conditions. Is there a suggestion about how to stop mixing?
Two things that always arouse my scepticism.
Absolute certainty of one's case and emotional blackmail.
Has this one already been mentioned? http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2010/dec/03/children-climate-change-television-santa
Veron says '...most significantly the rate of CO2 increase we are now experiencing has no precedent in all known geological history'. There is no way he can know the rate of CO2 changes during short, say 50 year time intervals, in the geological past.
One odd thing about the World's large coral reefs is that they are a fairly recent phenomenon. Drilling through them one almost always finds arenaceous (sandy) deposits less than a million years old.
This is probably connected to the shift from 40 000 year to 100 000 year glacial cycles about 800 000 - 1 000 000 years ago. The shorter interglacials were presumably to short to allow major reefs time do develop. Of course there was corals back then too, but probably no really large reefs like e. g. the Florida Keys, The Great Barrier reef, or the large Pacific atolls.
And yes of course, the corals have been moving up and down slopes and north and south for every glacial cycle for millions of years. And, of course, no coral reef in existence today is older than 12 000 years, how could it?
Mike
Please stop your use of the term 'my friend'. It is patronising and deeply inappropriate.
The fossil record that you misrepresent in your post above is discontinuous and incomplete.
All we can 'know' is that there are long gaps in the record of fossil reefs which are suggestive of little reef formation.
You seem to think that corals have re-evolved on multiple occasions, which is a brave assertion although I do understand what you are saying.
I didn't read the post by Veron because of things like this (far from unique):
www.theaustralian.com.au/news/scientists-crying-wolf-over-coral/story-e6frg6xf-1225811910634
Also, judging from the headpost Veron's tone would have grated after a while.
How are you getting on with improving your understanding of world grain yields, world grain prices, effect on same by Goldman Sachs - and others?
You absolutely dodged that in our last encounter.
Denial, I'd say.
I think Veron needs to stay in more.
Corals have probably only re-evolved once. The rugose and tabulate corals became extinct during the mass extinction at the end of the Permian and were subsequently replaced by the modern (Scleractinian) corals. The scleractinians are probably not descended from the rugosa or tabulata.
It is true that there is a number of "reef gaps" in the fossil record. With the notable exception of the Permo-Triassic they are not associated with major exctinctions of corals. Apparently corals survive such intervals without building reefs, and possibly even without building calcareous skeletons at all.
This presentation was total nonsense. Corals evolved ca. 400 million years ago, and have seen it all -- warmer interglacials, ice ages, more CO2, everything. Many corals "bleached" during the monster 1998 El Niño but had mostly completely recovered within five years. All you want to know about corals, temperature, and ocean "acidification" you can find at co2science.org -- look for coral in the subject index.
Why do these scientific illiterates keep spouting this rubbish?
"The atmospheric levels of CO2 we are already committed to reach, no matter what mitigation is now implemented, have no equal over the entire longevity of the Great Barrier Reef, perhaps 25 million years. And most significantly, the rate of CO2 increase we are now experiencing has no precedent in all known geological history."
Since we're already a third of the way to the famous CO2 doubling, wouldn't you expect there to already be some sign of the impending catastrophic damage? But there isn't. Not anywhere. Sea levels at Tuvalu have been steady for nearly half a century. Floods and droughts are following well-understood cycles, and are no worse than they have historically been.
The GBR is doing fine, except for one small area near a recently-developed marina complex, wihich is deteriorating from pollution. This is just one of my problems with AGW hysterics: They overlook real environmental problems -- and even cheerfully create huge ones, like clearing rainforest for biofuels or destroying vast swaths of wildlife habitat with futile industrial wind turbines -- while chasing the imaginary CO2 demon.
@tty
Thanks - useful clarification.
...and Ridley continues to be on the case: http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/asymmetry-effect
There is no upcoming acidification threat. The oceans are not acid and never will be. For a description of where the 30% came from, check out http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/originals/acid_seas.html
After reading the Awarmism post, I went and engaged the Veron stalwarts at Climate Progress. After a round or so, some of my posts never made it through moderation. Things got much better when not one of my last five posts appeared.
Those last five posts merely showed that the claims being made there, about universal death and destruction following a modest reduction in the pH of marine surface waters, were scientifically unfounded.
So, it appears that the scientific ethics so wonderfully bench-marked by the standard bearers of Climategate, are alive and well at Climate Progress.