Discuss: The Big Talk

So rather than teach children to think for themselves and instill the lesson that life is and ALWAYS has been unpredictable we’re going to drag them down into the dread? NO ONE knows the true extent of changes that MIGHT be brought around by global warming in this century and beyond. In our rush to eliminate what little our screwed up culture has left of childhood we’ve found the ultimate bummer we can all wallow in together. Sorry, this is crap.

Clearly somebody in the boat must learn to fly. Above the little waves and above the big, big wave.
To the land of the wave-makers, where your heroic flyer can talk to the Wave-makers and find out why they are making such big waves.

Already, some amongst these powerful creatures have felt that it is time to change their way. It is a message that has come to them in dreams and in songs. And because these seers are expecting a traveler, they will welcome the one who flies to them, and will take this bold individual to see their Decider.

But then what happens? That is for your children to decide.

-D

This a letter in response to an email from a AGW supporter in the Canadian Civil Service.

By Lord Monckton

Dear Sir Humphrey - The “Abundance of scientific statements” that you mention is no sound or logical basis for deciding or believing anything. The question is whether the scientific statements have any rational justification, and whether those making them are in effect making statements that are political rather than scientific, rent-seeking rather than objective. After all, this is the age of reason (or it was).

Therefore, one should not accord to “scientists” the status of infallible high priests merely because they mumble a hieratic language with which one is unfamiliar. There is clear, compelling evidence that many of the major conclusions of the IPCC, your new religion’s constantly-changing Holy Book, are based on evidence that has been fabricated. The “hockey stick” graph that purported to abolish the mediaeval warm period is just one example. So let me try to lure you away from feeble-minded, religious belief in the Church of “Global Warming” and back towards the use of the faculty of reason.

Let us begin with the “devastation of New Orleans” that you mention. Even the High Priests of your Church are entirely clear that individual extreme-weather events such as Hurricane Katrina cannot, repeat cannot, be attributed to “global warming”. Even the Holy Book makes this entirely plain. There was one priest - Emanuel (a good, religious name) - who had suggested there might be a link between “global warming” and hurricanes; but he has recently recanted, at least to some extent. Very nearly all others in the hierarchy of your Church are clear that ascribing individual extreme-weather events to “global warming” is impossible. Why? Well, let’s take the question of landfalling Atlantic hurricanes such as Katrina. The implication of your attribution of Hurricane Katrina to “global warming” is twofold: that “global warming” is happening, and that in consequence either the frequency or the intensity of tropical weather systems such as hurricanes is increasing. Neither of these propositions is true. Yes, there has been “global warming” for 300 years, since the end of the 60-year period of unusually low solar activity known as the Maunder Minimum (after the celebrated Astronomer Royal who studied it). But there has been no net warming since 1995, and Keenlyside et al, in the theological journal Nature a few months ago, say they do not expect a new record year for global temperatures until 2015 at the earliest. If these theologians are correct, there will have been a 20-year period of no net “global warming” even though the presence of the devil Siotu in the ether grows inexorably stronger. And, secondly, the number of Atlantic hurricanes making landfall has actually fallen throughout the 20th century, even as temperatures have risen. Indeed, some theologians have argued that warmer weather actually reduces the temperature differential between sea and sky that generates hurricanes, reducing their frequency, and that the extra heat in the coupled ocean-atmosphere system increases wind-shear in tropical storms, tending to reduce their intensity. Certainly the frequency of intense tropical cyclones has fallen throughout the 30-year satellite record, even though temperatures have increased compared with 30 years ago. Also, the damage done by Hurricane Katrina was chiefly caused by the failure of the Democrat-led city administration to heed repeated warnings from the Corps of Engineers that the levees needed to be strengthened.

Next, you mention the recent earthquake damage at Galveston, and you imply that this is something new and terrible. Perhaps you would like to do some research of your own to verify whether the High Priests of your Church, some of whom have blamed the Galveston incident on the wrath of the devil Siotu, are likely to be telling the truth. And how, you may ask, may a non-theologian such as yourself argue theology with your High Priests? Well, the Galveston incident will give you just one indication of the many ways in which a lay member of the Church of “Global Warming” may verify for himself whether or not the Great Druids of his religion are speaking the truth from their pulpits in the media. Cast your eye back just over a century, to 1906, and look up what happened to Galveston then. Which was worse - Galveston 2008 or Galveston 1906? Next, check the global mean surface temperature in 1906: many theology faculties compile surface temperature data and make it publicly available to the faithful and to infidels alike. Was the global mean surface temperature significantly lower or significantly higher in 2008 than in 1906? What implications do your two answers have for your proposition that Galveston 2008 can be attributed to “global warming”?

Next, you mention fires in California. Once again, you can either sit slumped in your pew, gazing in adoration at the Archdruids as their pious faces flicker across your television screen, or you can do a little research for yourself. It may, for instance, occur to you to ask whether droughts were worse in the United States in the second half of the 20th century than they were in the first half. Once again, you may want to check with your local theological faculty to obtain the answer to this question. Or you may like to pick up a copy of The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck. And you may want to verify whether temperatures in the second half of the 20th century were warmer than in the first half. Once again, what are the implications of your two answers for your proposition that “global warming” is causing forest fires? You could also talk to the Fire Department in California and obtain its data on the causes of forest fires. You might be mightily surprised by the answers you get.

Next, you talk of beetles in your forests destroying natural resources. Here, you could ask the Druids just a couple of simple questions. What evidence do they have, if any, that whichever species of beetle you have in mind has not wrought havoc in the forests before? And, even if your clergy think that they have evidence that the beetle-damage is new, what evidence do they have, if any, that the beetle-damage is greater because of “global warming” than it would otherwise have been? Of course, you could ask them the wider question what evidence there is that anthropogenic “global warming”, as opposed to solar warming, is the reason for the temperature increases that have occurred over the past 300 years. The more honest parish priests will admit that for 250 of the past 300 years none of the inferred warming can be attributed to human industry. They will also be compelled to concede, if you press them, that the warming of the most recent 50 years has not occurred at a rate any greater than that which was observed before, so that it is in fact very difficult to discern any anthropogenic signal at all in the temperature record.

Next, you talk of people migrating from one place to another because in some places water has become scarce. Once again, it is easy for a layman, whether a true believer such as yourself or not, to verify whether such migrations are as a result of “global warming”. For instance, you could ask whether there have been changing patterns of drought and flood before in human history. Once you have collected some historical data - most theological faculties have quite a lot of this available, though you may have to dig a little to get it - you could compare previous migrations with those of which you now speak. And you could also ask your local parish priest whether a theological phenomenon known as the Clausius-Clapeyron relation mandates that, as the atmosphere warms, the carrying-capacity of the space occupied by the atmosphere for water vapor decreases, remains static, or increases near-exponentially. Once you have found the answers to these not particularly difficult questions, you may like to spend some of your devotional time meditating on the question whether, or to what extent, the changes in patterns of flood and drought that have occurred in the past give you any confidence that such changes occurring today are either worse than those in the past or attributable to “global warming”, whether caused by the increasing presence of the devil Siotu in the atmosphere or by the natural evolution of the climate. During your meditation, you may like to refer to the passage from the 2001 edition of the Holy Book of the IPCC that describes the climate as “a complex, non-linear, chaotic object” whose long-term future evolution cannot reliably be predicted.

If you are willing to reflect a little on the questions I have raised - and, with the exception of the Clausius-Clapeyron relation, I have done my best to avoid anything that might be too technical for a layman to find out for himself - you will perhaps come to realize that there is very little basis in scientific fact for the alarmist, hellfire preaching in which your clergy love to indulge. And you may even find your faith in your new religion beginning to weaken a little in the face of the truths that you will have unearthed by the not particularly difficult process of simply checking those statements of your clergy that you can easily and independently verify. There are, of course, many environmental problems posed by the astonishing recent success of humankind. If you were concerned, for instance, about deforestation, or the loss of species whose habitats have been displaced by humans, then your concerns would have a good grounding in fact. But, given the abject failure of global temperatures to rise as the Druids had forecast, it must surely be clear to you that the influence of the devil Siotu on global temperatures - your theologians call this “climate sensitivity” - must be a great deal smaller than your Holy Book asks you to believe.

Finally, you may wonder why I have so scathingly described your pious belief in your new religion as founded upon blind faith rather than upon the light of reason. I have drafted this email in this way so that you can perhaps come to see for yourself just how baffling it is to the likes of me, who were educated in the light of TH Huxley’s dictum that the first duty of the scientist is skepticism, to see how easily your hierarchy is able to prey upon your naive credulity. I do not target this comment at you alone: there are far too many others who, like you, are in positions of some authority and whose duty to think these things through logically is great, and yet who simply fail to ask even the most elementary and blindingly obvious questions before sappily, happily, clappily believing in, and parroting by rote, whatever the current Establishment proposes. I do not know whether you merely believe all that you are told by the Druids because otherwise you will find yourself in conflict with other true believers among your colleagues or, worse, among your superiors. If you are under pressures of this kind, I do sympathize. But if you are free to think for yourself without penalty, may I beg you - in the name of humanity - to give the use of reason a try?

Why “in the name of humanity”? Because, although the noisy preachers from the media pulpits have found it expedient not to say so, there have been food riots all round the world as the biofuel scam whipped up by the High Priests of your religion takes vast tracts of agricultural land out of food production. Millions are now starving because the price of food has doubled in little more than a year. A leaked report by the World Bank says that fully three-quarters of that doubling has occurred as a direct result of the biofuel scam. So your religion is causing mass starvation in faraway countries, and is even causing hardship to the poorest in your own country. Can you, in conscience, look away from the sufferings that your beliefs are inflicting upon the poorest and most helpless people in the world?

Read this excellent paper and understand why science has been corrupted by politics and environmentalists
http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0809/0809.3762.pdf

Great article! 

How about those in the boat talking to each other and deciding that perhaps instead of the big coal engine in the one huge boat, they all get busy helping each other build small safe life boats powered by wind in the sails, oars, pedals, paddles, solar cells, and other solutions we have, all surfing the big wave of climate change.  The life boats could have small gardens which would produce food and habitat until they all reached land and used the lessons they learned in the life boats to take care of the land and each other for ever after.

Thanks for this thought-provoking piece, Sandra. It seems wise to take the cue from your children.

As an educator, I wonder often about this issue. David Sobel says “no environmental tragedies before grade 4.” An acquaintance who lived and worked in Africa for 20 years once asked, “Why are our children so precious? African children are overwhelmed with tragedy after tragedy, day after day, year after year.”

The great educator Maria Montessori believed that children need to learn the “great story” of life in order to be able to understand everything else they learn in life. She taught them five great lessons: how the Universe began, how life began, how humans began, how literature began, and how mathematics began.

My sense is that once children learn the story of evolution, they will be able to understand ecology and the interconnectedness of all life. Once they’ve learned ecology, they’ll understand how valuable biodiversity is. And once they “get” biodiversity, then they will understand all the ecosystem services or “nature’s gifts” that we receive from the rest of nature.

These are vital stories and lessons for our children—but most youngsters don’t learn them. If they did learn them, I wonder if we’d have to have that “climate change talk” with them—or would they just trust their own observations of a rapidly changing climate (in their short lifetimes!) and know that this can’t be good for all the life around them?

At the very least, they’ll be on the path to scientific and ecological literacy (something most of us can’t claim), and will just know what we adults should be doing. (Behaving like we want our kids to behave!!)

Dear Sandra,
You mentioned my book that I co-authored with photojournalist Gary Braasch, How We KNow What We Know About Our Changing Climate: Scientists and Kids Explore Global Warming,  and I wanted to share some wonderful stories with you. As I was researching the science in the book, stories about kids doing the science began to serendipitously fall into my lap and they continue to find me. So I have been interviewing kids who are reducing the carbon footprint of their schools, their communities and, in the case of school kids who got a ban on school bus idling, even their states.
Obama’s “YES WE CAN!” is appropriate for the issue of kids and climate change. Kids can do things today that reduce their carbon emissions immediately. Millions of kids doing these things, mindfully, can prevent hundreds of thousands of tons of co2 from entering the atmosphere.
Just take a look at the pie chart in the back of the book which shows how seemingly small actions can have a big effect… just as all those VOTES cast by millions of individuals have gotten us a leader who, I hope, will tackle climate change (as long as he realizes the folly of “clean coal”.. That’s 1984 doublespeak—for dirty coal.)
The take home message: Kids can make a difference as long as they have a vision of what’s possible. As a parent, a teacher or a friend of children, you can encourage kids to make changes in their consumption habits; and you can be willing to make changes in your life when they ask you to.
Lynne Cherry

to Sandra Steinberger…  Living Downstream of Climate Change…in Illinois…  is easy when the polar caps are melting and the melting physics generates a cool breeze that drifts to the mid latitudes and breeds a false security when a sense of utmost urgency is most needed.  Our culture revolts against anyone with the audacity to save the planet with the cultural simplicity that has been the time honored, time-proven balm of a healthy planet, but charms to most any instance of anyone with the audacity to transform the the planet with a suite of ecologically unproven technological salvations.  Savage/Galesburg, IL