“Don’t call me an alarmist,” says alarmist
“Just don’t call me an alarmist,” says Sarah E. Myhre, a junior climate scientist from the University of Washington in Seattle, at the end of her article for Live Science.
Yet earlier in the same article she writes of “the immense challenge of communicating the terrifying and heartbreaking (and I mean those words specifically) risks that come with climate change”.
Here are some of her recent tweets:
Apart from climate alarm, her tweets feature remarks about white people and men.
The article contains some of the usual misleading comparisons used by climate alarmists – greenhouse gases “trap” heat like a “blanket” (no they don’t, a blanket traps warm air, but in the atmosphere hot air rises), and climate change is falsely compared to the smoking-cancer link.
She recently appeared in an odd video, intended as a response to the recent Dilbert cartoon on climate science, discussed by Ross McKitrick, who notes her alarmism and intent to shout from rooftops.
This is one of the problems of climate science. It has politicised itself into an echo-chamber of groupthink, to the extent that enthusiastic young activists who already have the alarmist mindset are attracted into the field, enhancing the bias further. The chances of these people doing decent, objective, professional science are very slim. Near the end, the article laments “a crisis of trust between the American public and climate scientists,” but sadly the author does not have the self-awareness to understand the causes of this mistrust.
Climate Scepticism 
The intellectual dishonesty if nearly every climate scientist when confronted about their obviously alarmist hype is actually fascinating.
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Thanks for the link to the McKitrick piece and thus the Dilbert cartoon in May Paul. Just last month. It seems an age ago. But excellent stuff. The points you make about the kind of younger person joining climate science convince and concern. But Dilbert’s a good ally.
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Hunter, I wouldn’t call it dishonesty. I think it’s more – as McKitrick explains very well in that link – a self-deluding groupthink of exaggeration and alarmism. She and Dessler and Mann and the others in the echo chamber know that they are right because they agree with each other and all shout the same things from the rooftops. They really believe that they are doing proper objective science and that anyone who questions them is politically motivated!
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They are most dangerous because they believe without doubts. There are several seductive forces. Belief that they’re saving the planet. Belief that fossil fuels and those that sell them are evil. Belief that even if they’re wrong, they’re doing it for the right reason. Belief that they’re righting some historical wrong where the white man took more than was theirs.
She was also patronising and deluded about her success. She went prepared to lecture to kids and instead just had a chat. Apparently even some of her relatives are right wing so she hate all of them.
She clearly met no opposition. Almost certainly those there wanted to hear what she had to say. Either that or a few of them fumed silently, not wanting to lock horns with a professional. I doubt she’d fare as well against us or almost anybody who’d spent time looking into the facts.
I have to say that climate scientists have seriously damaged my faith in science as a whole. I see too much group think and opinion dressed up as science. I’ve started to question why a lot of science is being funded, never mind their shoddy results.
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This article is part of the larger theme of selling climate risk. I wrote a post today explaining how this works and the thinking of people like Myhre.
https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2017/06/23/climate-risky-business/
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Here’s a comment at a recent article by climate scientist Richard Betts
http://theconversation.com/glastonbury-2070-how-the-festival-might-have-to-cope-with-4-of-global-warming-7978 from one Johan Montelius,
Johan is a software expert from Sweden (and Barcelona.) He doesn’t define “the community” but it obviously includes young dynamic sciency chaps like himself; and excludes people who asks questions. (You can see there are quite a lot of those from the number of comments deleted from the Betts thread.) Which is the dictionary definition of a sect.
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“Half of the harm that is done in this world
Is done by people who want to feel important.
They do not see the harm. Or they justify it.
Because they are engaged in the endless struggle
To think well of themselves.”
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I’m often struck by the impression that many people appear to have been educated (for want of a better word) to a level that greatly exceeds their intellectual capacity to appreciate the limits of mankind’s ability to predict the future. And that, my friends, really is terrifying.
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“Now, we, collectively, need to make decisions around the highest temperature projections. This is because, when we talk about carbon emission scenarios and climate sensitivity, we are ultimately talking about future risk management. The highest cost in public health and public resources will come with risk associated with the warmest possible futures — and this should be where we focus our attention. . . . .
I have chosen to walk a tightrope as a public scholar, by turning toward the immense challenge of communicating the terrifying and heartbreaking (and I mean those words specifically) risks that come with climate change. . . . .”
Myhre proves the point here that she is an alarmist, somebody who chooses to focus on a high end, high risk, very low probability scenario and communicate it to the public in the most alarming way possible, heavily invoking her own emotional response to that scenario – “terrifying and heartbreaking”. She does this, moreover, under the cover of pretending to do hard ‘science’, but she’s no more than a futures trader, trying to sell the public shares in a commodity which a minority of stock market trader models predict will take off big time in the coming decades. The younger and more ‘up and coming’ these climate ‘scientists’ get, the worse they get. Myhre is a particularly mediocre addition to the climate clan.
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“The younger and more ‘up and coming’ these climate ‘scientists’ get, the worse they get. ” Jaime
I’m fully expecting the day where some of the old school (like Ben Santer) finally have to admit that they cocked up and the young guns throw them on the bonfire. Much as Germaine Greer is now considered politically incorrect by the new wave of liberal thinkers. Which is both funny and terrifying. Where even if CAGW is absolutely proven untrue, it will be taboo to say so.
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‘Nature’ (sometimes seen as the world’s leading science journal) has a fine example of catastrophism this week::
https://www.nature.com/news/heatwaves-to-soar-above-the-hot-air-of-climate-politics-1.22164
The subtitle is “Future generations will fear, rather than fend for, the global environment” – a new usage of ‘fend’, rather alarming in itself;
Sample quote:
“A death zone is creeping over the surface of Earth, gaining a little more ground each year. As an analysis published this week in Nature Climate Change shows, since 1980, these temporary hells on Earth have opened up hundreds of times to take life“.
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Osseo. For just a moment I thought you were quoting from a Dr Who script. Such purple prose has no place in a scientific communication.
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She is a good (and growing) example of the main reason this whole warmunist thing is starting to collapse. Racheting up the doom and gloom predictions to absurd levels destroys any remaining scientific credibility. Arctic ice has not disappared (Wadhams). Sea level rise has not accelerated (Hansen). Polar bears are thriving (Sterling, Derocher). Children know snow (Viner). Models now provably wrong (Santer). No Texas permadrought (Hayhoe, Dessler). Provable climate science misconduct (Marcott, OLeary, Fabricius, PMEL, all documented by essays in ebook Blowing Smoke with a foreword from Judith Currry).
About 35% of the atmospheric CO2 increase since 1958 (Keeling curve) has occurred in this century, yet except for the now mostly cooled 2015-16 El Nino blip no warming this century. No one who has not yet graduated from high school has experienced any ‘AGW’. Mother Nature’s reality is biting hard.
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Paul, I think after decades of reading this sort of hype and noticing how well the hypesters do even as they are so incorrect, it is fair to simply call them for what they appear to be.
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Sarah us the poster child for cognitive dissonance. Now media us seeking to drive home just how evil deplorables are by recycling the claim of “we only have x years to save the Earth”. Thus time “x” = 3. And this time those who will suffer worse are living in the southern US, in other words the deplorables are going to finally get the punishment they deserve. It is hard to imagine how the ass hats who lead what passes for opinion leaders in the climate alarmist community can pretend to be serious and ethical. But here we have Sarah showing us in her own special way that alarmists just don’t care to worry about it.
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Sarah E. Myhre should visit the Temple of Luxor or read the greek γνῶθι σεαυτόν (know yourself).
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Here’s a short history of “Climate Tipping Points”
http://www.climatedepot.com/?s=tipping+points
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