Tuesday
May032011
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Climate catastrophe deja vu
May 3, 2011 Climate: WG2 Climate: WG3 Sir John Houghton once famously said:
Unless we announce disasters, no one will listen.
Except actually he didn't say that. His real words were:
“If we want a good environmental policy in the future we’ll have to have a disaster.”
Now, in an eerie echo of the learned Sir John, we have the words of Robert Stavins, the head of Harvard's Environmental Economics program
It’s unlikely that the U.S. is going to take serious action on climate change until there are observable, dramatic events, almost catastrophic in nature, that drive public opinion and drive the political process in that direction
Reader Comments (16)
Well that's perfectly true. The trouble comes when you link statements to facts. Should they be linked ? Are they linked ? Hyperbole is the master of reporting.
The trouble is we have had a fair number of disasters just recently, and none of these have resulted in turning public opinion on climate change. Indeed we seem to have an inverse effect. The more the alarmists shout when a catastrophe happens the less a sceptical public listen.
The CAGWists has cried wolf too often.
This seems to me like ecoluddites have actually and actively volunteered to meet a standard that creationists have disingenuously imposed on Darwinists: "Point to an instance of evolution that is happening now."
This is of course hard / impossible, because it is fundamental to Darwinism that evolutionary changes occur over generations. Any evolutionary change is either unobservable within one human generation or, like that bacterium that has recently evolved to eat nylon, can be dismissed as so trivial as to be unconvincing.
Using such an argument is the clearest evidence that creationists are being dishonest, because Darwinists have never claimed such evidence would be observable. But ecoluddists on the contrary have made quite specific claims that CAGW will manifest - Himalayan glaciers all gone within 25 years, New York under 20 feet of water by 2020, 50 million climate refugees by last year.
These have all ended up looking silly. This remark seems to me to be a veiled call to ecofascists to start hailing any and all natural disasters as evidence of global warming. Floods, droughts, cold winters, cold summers - they're all to be recruited in the service of the noble cause.
Is there a word for lying by misattribution?
The inadvertent harm in how statements get progressively shortened (by serial whispering as Kloor has done here) is amazing. Stavins' larger point is forgotten by Keith Kloor.
Stavins says, in his interview: “There’s a legit reason for the public to be skeptical about climate change because they don’t see it,”
Yes indeed. There are climatically grounded legitimate reasons for the 'public' to be skeptical of climate change because it cannot be seen. The trick then was to 'attribute' what can be seen to global warming, in which arose the Himalayan nonsense, the Amazon nonsense, the African nonsense, the Holland nonsense, the use of WWF reports, the use of mountaineering magazine reports etc.
This makes the effective case that 'global warming' is effectively a media construct as percieved in the minds of the public, who don't see any evidence with their own eyes, but yet hear and read about it in the news, everyday. 'Global warming' therefore is indeed a completely artificial creation.
Stavins also wishes for some “well-observed melting of parts of polar ice caps that result in some amount of sea-level rise,”. Specifically to this point, Stavins is wrong. Not all polar ice melting is going to result in sea-level rise and the Antarctic ice is increasing due to global warming, rather than decreasing. Arctic ice melt will not result in sea level rise either.
Justice 4Rinka,
Environmental Mastribution, the ability to stimulate individually or in groups from thoughts and desires without any recourse to reality!
Group mastribution follows the same expressionism but includes more people seeking self satisfication from a singular source.
Perhaps OTT, it's been a bank holiday.
Given the metrics of climate change Robert Stavins' wish is nigh on impossible as they are, at best, the long term accumulated averages of averages of averages of weather rather than being weather itself.
It is time for the political leadership to wake up and start seeing the AGW movement for the sham it is.
Isn't it basically the cry of the child who isn't taken seriously? One day I'll be dead and then you'll be sorry....
It's also time for the progressive/liberal/democrat/statist on the street to grow up and start supporting politicians who arent complete liars.
Andrew
What's so "eerie" about these statements? I find them quite sensible, especially when we turn them from head to foot: As long as there are no observable catastrophic effects of climate change, there is no reason for us to take drastic measures (or even to have an "environmental policy" at all). What's wrong with saying our politicians - and the general public - should deal with real, observable problems rather than hypothetical ones?
Ah, the 'Climate Pearl Harbour' again.
Weather, or climate?
Luckily we have the 'Schneider balance' between being honest and being 'effective' to ensure attribution is rigorously impartial.
Let's just hope there's nobody called Climate bin Laden out there ready to "help" the catastrophes occur
"The time is now past when science believed its task was to search for the truth, such as it is. Now the task of science is to proceed with its prophecy, to awaken. Like the morning dawn, it will light a new day".
Not the late Stephen Schneider, Sir John Houghton or a colleague but Herman WIrth, a prehistorian, one of the academics in the "Ahnenerbe" organisation, set up by Himmler to provide scientific backing for the Aryan master race theory.
This early example of "post normal" science suggests that something happens when political patronage cascades huge funding into scientific endeavours. I think Wirth would have understood the dynamic of the "Hockey Team" and the IPCC entirely.
ChrisZ asks "What's so "eerie" about these statements? I find them quite sensible".
Indeed, you are quite right. The statement in itself is defensible. But, after the quote "Unless we announce disasters, no one will listen" became widely re-quoted by climate sceptics, Sir John Houghton denied making it and claimed it was fabricated by sceptics to discredit him. The Guardian and Independent newspapers then made great play of this to show how dishonest climate sceptics actually were, e.g "The quotation has since become the iconic smoking gun of the climate sceptic community. The words are the very first to appear in the 'manual' of climate denialism written by the journalist and arch-sceptic Christopher Booker"
In fact, Houghton claimed "It's not the sort of thing I would ever say. It's quite the opposite of what I think and it pains me to see this quote being used repeatedly in this way. I would never say we should hype up the risk of climate disasters in order to get noticed"
See Independent article here
I think I will give Stavins the benefit of the doubt on this one. Several years ago California passed it's own cap and trade bill. What a sham. Shortly after, this editorial appeared in the San Diego Union newspaper, written by Stavins. From this I, for now tend to think he's at least an honest believer.
Jack
San Francisco Bay Area
Oops, I'm new to this. I forgot to add the link.
http://www.ab32ig.com/documents/121108_Stavins%20Op-ed.pdf
Jack