The doom cult and Kevin Anderson’s memory lapse

Posted on by Paul MatthewsIn Uncategorized3 Minutes Read

 

Some of the more reasonable climate scientists on twitter, such as Steve Forden here (“There seems to be a growing love of vague societal collapse scenarios that if you don’t accept then you are either bad or naive”) and Richard Betts (“no excuse for making up doom stuff. In fact it quite likely puts off a lot of people”) are trying to push back against the fanatical climate doom cult.

Of course, it is truth that should be universally acknowledged that the problem is one of their own making. It is the relentless exaggeration and misleading claims from climate scientists themselves, aided by the media’s love of a good scare story, that has created this monster. They have nobody to blame but themselves. As I’ve said many times before, a relatively small number of high-profile activist climate scientists have misled the public, and have gone almost entirely unchallenged by the climate science community (the exception to prove the rule is that they have criticised Arctic ice “expert” Peter Wadhams, who according to James Annan has predicted 4 of the last 0 ice-free summers). We have all known for ten years now that when talking amongst themselves climate scientists describe Michael Mann’s work as “crap”, but they won’t criticise him publicly and he continues to receive awards and be invited to appear in BBC documentaries.

One of the victims of the cult, who got involved in the discussion with Richard Betts, calls himself “GreenAndRedTed ………….#VoteLabour” and declares in his twitter bio “Internationalist. Green. Left wing. Fight climate disaster & racism”. Another goes by the name of “Climate TRUTH #FBR #JC4PM Mark Cranfield”.  Their twitterrhea over the last couple of days includes “The chance that there will be any permanent ice left in the Arctic after 2022 is essentially zero,” (apparently a quote from a Harvard scientist, coincidentally named Anderson), “Well we’re deffo on the brink” (addressed to Richard) and “Kevin Anderson predicts 4° by 2050”. Ted cited an article at “Radio EcoShock”, Kevin Anderson: What They Won’t Tell You About Climate Catastrophe, full of alarmist claims attributed to Anderson, based on a talk he gave at the Cabot Institute.

Another climate scientist queried the 4C by 2050 and doubted whether Kevin Anderson said it. Anderson responded that he had not said 4C was likely by 2060:

So who is right? Did Kevin Anderson say 4C was likely by mid-century, or is he being misrepresented by GreenRedTed and EcoShock? If you can face it, there’s an audio link in the EcoShock article to an hour-long recording of Anderson’s talk. I did listen to the first few minutes, and Anderson says

“This is the conventional wisdom here. We’re on track for a three and a half degrees C  temperature rise by 2040, and they’re looking at that compared with today, so compared to pre-industrial times four degrees C or so rise by the middle of the century, that’s what we’re on track for at the moment according to the IEA. When Fatih Birol looks at this data the trend is perfectly in line with a temperature increase of 6 degrees Celsius by the end of the century.”

So he said exactly what he claimed in his tweet he didn’t say. Another falsehood in his tweet is that his comments were based on Richard’s models; they were in fact from alarmist economist Fatih Birol of the IEA. Doesn’t it seem a bit odd for a climate scientist talking about climate science to get his numbers from a non-scientist? The claim of the trend being “perfectly in line” with 6 degrees by the end of the century is total bullshit of course. The trend for the last 20 years is about 0.3C, which is in line with 1 – 2 degrees.

But fortunately, you don’t have to listen to the talk because Anderson has put the slides for Real Clothes for the Emperor: facing the challenges of climate change up on his website. The slides mention the IEA at the start but don’t have the quotes above. But very near the end there is the clear statement that “4°C by 2050-2070 looks ‘likely’ (could be earlier & on the way to 6°C+)”. So what he said he didn’t say is written there, by him, in purple and white.

What could possibly explain Kevin Anderson’s memory lapse and failure to bother to check his slides to see what he actually did say? Perhaps Kev, like Ted, is suffering from a severe case of Climate Derangement Syndrome.

TLDR summary: The members of the deranged doom cult get their misinformation from charlatans in the climate science community.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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19 Comments

  1. Oh dear, I’m afraid Richard and the Met Office more generally are not totally off the hook here and it may well be that Anderson was in fact using his projections:

    While it is still too early to say whether any particular scenario is being tracked by current emissions, A1FI is considered to be as plausible as other non-mitigation scenarios and cannot be ruled out. (A1FI is a part of the A1 family of scenarios, with ‘FI’ standing for ‘fossil intensive’.

    Using these GCM projections along with simple climate-model projections, including uncertainties in carbon-cycle feedbacks, and also comparing against other model projections from the IPCC, our best estimate is that the A1FI emissions scenario would lead to a warming of 4◦C relative to pre-industrial during the 2070s. If carbon-cycle feedbacks are stronger,which appears less likely but still credible, then 4◦C warming could be reached by the early 2060s in projections that are consistent with the IPCC’s ‘likely range’.

    Click to access RoySoc%204D%20When%20happen.pdf

    What’s fascinating is that this is a Royal Society transcript downloaded for the ecoshock.org website, so this may well in fact be the source of Anderson’s info. What is certain is that they all must share the blame for putting alarmist ultra-high warming doomsday scenarios out there, masquerading as ‘science’. Their current attempts to disown culpability for the appearance of the doom cults is laughable.

    Liked by 1 person

  2. “The evidence available from new simulations with the HadCM3 GCM and the MAGICC SCM, along with existing results presented in the IPCC AR4, suggests that the A1FI emissions scenario would lead to a rise in global mean temperature of between approximately 3◦C and 7◦C by the 2090s relative to pre-industrial,with best estimates being around 5◦C. Our best estimate is that a temperature rise of 4◦C would be reached in the 2070s, and if carbon-cycle feedbacks are strong,then 4◦C could be reached in the early 2060s—this latter projection appears to be consistent with the upper end of the IPCC’s likely range of warming for the A1FI scenario.”

    Bang to rights I’m afraid, Richard.

    Liked by 1 person

  3. Credit to Richard. He actually links to his paper projecting possible 4C rise by 2061 at the earliest. The fact remains: the doomsters get their ideas directly from the ‘science’.

    On the question of likelihood, that paper points out that all scenarios are equally plausible and that 4C warming by 2070 (just twenty years later than 2050) is ‘likely’ under the A1F1 scenario. Hence scientific credibility is given to the claim that catastrophe will happen by mid 21st century.

    Liked by 1 person

  4. There seems to be a theatrical side for some who enjoy the promotion of alarm over our CO2 emissions. It is as if they have a drama running inside their heads, and they long for leading roles in it. So reality is of secondary importance at best, and most important of all as a reinforcement for their fantasising is a strong emotional response from at least some of their audience.

    What does a more realistic view look like. My often daily scroll stroll down the rows of Spiel Climate (http://spielclimate.blogspot.com/) led to this piece ( https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/quotations-of-the-day-on-climate-alarmism/) quoting Richard Lindzen. Here are the quotes:

    1. “What historians will definitely wonder about in future centuries is how deeply flawed logic, obscured by shrewd and unrelenting propaganda, actually enabled a coalition of powerful special interests to convince nearly everyone in the world that CO2 from human industry was a dangerous, planet-destroying toxin. It will be remembered as the greatest mass delusion in the history of the world – that CO2, the life of plants, was considered for a time to be a deadly poison.”

    2. “Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a roll-back of the industrial age.”

    3. “Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves libeled as industry stooges, scientific hacks or worse. Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science that supposedly is their basis.”

    4. “Controlling carbon is a bureaucrat’s dream. If you control carbon, you control life.” (MP: Of course, you also control people.)

    5. “When an issue becomes a vital part of a political agenda, as is the case with climate, then the politically desired position becomes a goal rather than a consequence of scientific research.”

    6. “The influence of mankind on climate is trivially true and numerically insignificant.”

    7. “The public discourse on global warming has little in common with the standards of scientific discourse. Rather, it is part of political discourse where comments are made to secure the political base and frighten the opposition rather than to illuminate issues. In political discourse, information is to be ‘spun’ to reinforce pre-existing beliefs, and to discourage opposition.”

    8. “Climate science has been targeted by a major political movement, environmentalism, as the focus of their efforts, wherein the natural disasters of the earth system, have come to be identified with man’s activities – engendering fear as well as an agenda for societal reform and control… This greatly facilitates any conscious effort to politicize science via influence in such bodies where a handful of individuals (often not even scientists) speak on behalf of organizations that include thousands of scientists and even enforce specific scientific positions and agendas.”

    Like a drink of fresh water from a mountain stream. How unlike the turpid pools of the doomsters and the turgid inflows of their feeders – sometimes with an ugly surface foam whipped up by media professionals.

    Liked by 3 people

  6. But Beth the SLOUGH of despond, as a result of climate change, will either dry up and blow away leaving a parched land, or will flood creating a drowning pool. There is no favourable outcome, all is doom.

    Like

  10. This is Kevin Anderson’s recent offering at Bangor University:

    https://www.thebangoraye.com/climate-change-hope-from-despair-public-lecture-at-bangor-university/

    Professor Anderson said: “The mitigation challenge posed by the Paris Agreement now demands a rapid and profound re-shaping of contemporary society. Whilst the models dominating the agenda employ evermore speculative technologies to remain ‘politically palatable’, the arithmetic of emissions must surely lead us to conclude that it is ultimately a rationing issue. Against such a backdrop, I will consider whether the rapid emergence of new and vociferous groups and the heightened profile of climate change suggest the prospect of new hope.”

    Rationing has long been Kevin Anderson’s position. In 2005 he was advocating personal carbon ration cards, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1493219/Energy-ration-cards-for-everyone-planned.html

    “Kevin Anderson, of the Tyndall Centre, said: “Once you have accepted that we need a reduction of 60 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 – which it seems now that all parties have – you need to start soon.

    “We saw what the public thought of carbon taxes in the protests over the fuel tax escalator. The beauty of personal carbon allowances is that you only need to make about a 1.25 per cent reduction in carbon emissions every year.

    Kevin Anderson holds a joint Chair between the Universities of Manchester and Uppsala, Sweden. He was formerly Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. He has advised a number of governments on environmental issues, and his analysis contributed to the framing of the UK’s Climate Change Act.”

    He isn’t actually a climate scientist, he is a former marine engineer and a mathematician. He takes what comes from the IPCC and plays computer games with it.

    Liked by 1 person

  11. @Hans

    I have a naive model that coincidentally predicts emissions of 48 GtCO2/y in 2050. It’s based on continued population growth (+75 million/y) with no change in average per capita emissions. (It predicts 513 ppm CO2 that year, we’ll see how that goes…)

    @Beth/Alan

    It has to be de pond of despond surely?

    Liked by 1 person

  12. Good to see climate scientist (?) Chris Parker’s tweet making the point that for 4°C by 2040 “you would need decadal warming rate of almost 1°C. We are currently warming at about 0.2°C per decade.”
    In other words, You Can’t Get There From Here without a hockeystick-shaped bend in the temperature graph, and we’ve already had one right-angled bend thanks to Mann 1998. One more 90° turn would send us in a horizontal line of even temperatures right back to the stone age, or possibly the Brontocene.

    Liked by 1 person

  13. Geoff. Team Climate has been responsible for prodigious feats of data manipulation in the past, but invention of a time machine is probably beyond their even their persuasive powers.

    Like

  14. Has it occurred to the climate doomsters in all quarters that relentless exaggeration would be unnecessary if they had some genuine evidence to point to?

    Like

  16. Jaime:
    “I’m afraid Richard and the Met Office more generally are not totally off the hook”

    Indeed. I love this bit, “The evidence available from new simulations…” I’m puzzled that a simulation is regarded as “evidence” of anything.

    Richard Betts seems to be very much taking the line “it’s not me guv” in many of the claims that appear, yet he is the one who appears to have started the “global heating” meme, so beloved of the Guardian:

    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/dec/13/global-heating-more-accurate-to-describe-risks-to-planet-says-key-scientist

    “Global heating” is a more accurate term than “global warming” to describe the changes taking place to the world’s climate, according to a key scientist at the UK Met Office. Prof Richard Betts, who leads the climate research arm of Britain’s meteorological monitoring organisation, made the comments amid growing evidence that rising temperatures have passed the comfort zone and are now bringing increased threats to humanity.”

    Followed by, in the same article:
    “Earlier this month, the Met Office produced a new report that showed the searing heatwave that hit the UK this summer – along with other parts of the northern hemisphere – was made 30 times more likely by human-caused climate change.

    Betts said the shifting climate was pushing some natural processes – such as the blossoming of trees and laying of eggs – out of sync. “That’s already happening. We are also seeing higher temperatures of heatwaves. The kind of thing we saw this year will happen more often.”

    Presumably he was referring to this speculative report from https://www.usanpn.org/news/spring and covered by the NYT, with a cartoon of confused creatures and a wickedly smiling sun: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/climate/animals-seasons-mismatch.html

    “The Extended Spring Indices are mathematical models that predict the “start of spring” (timing of leaf out or bloom for species active in early spring) at a particular location (Schwartz 1997, Schwartz et al. 2006, Schwartz et al. 2013).”

    Hotter heatwaves? It seems he is quoting Professor in Detection and Attribution, Peter Stott, https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/about-us/press-office/news/weather-and-climate/2018/2018-uk-summer-heatwave

    Comparing climate models with climate models is also now “evidence”, but if your job title says “Attribution” then you gotta attribute.

    “Our provisional study compared computer models based on today’s climate with those of the natural climate we would have had without human-induced emissions. We find that the intensity of this summer’s heatwave is around 30 times more likely than would have been the case without climate change.”

    All this is a far cry from this Defra/Hadley piece from 2005, “Prepared by Geoff Jenkins, Richard Betts, Mat Collins, Dave Griggs, Jason Lowe, Richard Wood”

    “Stabilising climate to avoid dangerous climate change — a summary of relevant research at the Hadley Centre” January 2005 – I do have the pdf but I can’t seem to find the link anymore….

    What constitutes ‘dangerous’ climate change, in the context of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, remains open to debate. [But wasn’t “The Science” was already settled at Kyoto, 8 years earlier]

    Once we decide what degree of (for example) temperature rise the world can tolerate, [How would they know? The hubris, once WE decide] we then have to estimate what greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere should be limited to, and how quickly they should be allowed to change.

    These are very uncertain because we do not know exactly how the climate system responds to greenhouse gases. {Amazing admission]

    The next stage is to calculate what emissions of greenhouse gases would be allowable, in order to keep below the limit of greenhouse gas concentrations.

    This is even more uncertain, thanks to our imperfect understanding of the carbon cycle (and chemical cycles) and how this feeds back into the climate system.”

    [Really? That means their whole output couldn’t be validated, yet it became established fact and the basis of ever evolving climate models leading to the “certainty” of today]

    Just the following month, along came Blair’s Exeter Conference on “Avoiding Dangerous Global Climate Change”: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4234467.stm

    “The risks from global warming are more serious than previously thought, a major climate conference has concluded. In its final report, the committee which organised the UK Met Office meeting said the impacts of climate change were already being felt.”

    They had really learned a lot in less than a month….Perhaps there is a clue to their success here: In 2007, Defra was congratulating its scientists on sharing in the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore:

    “Defra provides financial support to the co-chairs and their supporting secretariats. As such the UK has provided underpinning funding for almost one-third of the major scientific reports produced by the IPCC, which the Nobel committee believes have “created an ever-broader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming.”

    On “The Science”:
    The Climate Prediction Programme was not an academic research programme; its work plan and deliverables was driven by Defra’s requirements for science to inform UK government policy on climate change mitigation and adaptation. As the policy requirements changed, so did the research programme objectives.

    The Met Office will focus on research that contributes to UK government policy objectives and will communicate the results to government and the public.”

    http://sciencesearch.defra.gov.uk/Default.aspx?Menu=Menu&Module=More&Location=None&Completed=0&ProjectID=12331

    and http://randd.defra.gov.uk
    Defra has recognised the value of the work funded under the CPP contract and has just agreed a 5 year fixed price contract for an Integrated Climate Programme jointly funded with MoD to deliver policy relevant science as follows.

    Met Office will support Defra in leading efforts to tackle climate change at a UK, European and International level to build an international consensus on the need for and shape of further action post 2012. In order to do this the Met Office will undertake world-leading research into climate change and variability on behalf of Defra, as part of a wholly integrated (joint) programme of climate research in the Met Office Hadley Centre, partly funded also by MoD (Defence Climate Research Programme – DCRP).

    Geographer Professor Martin Parry was co-chair of IPCC AR4 WGII and was a private contractor to DEFRA as “Martin Parry Associates”. The Met Office was awarded a contract worth £1,436,000, to run WGII and Martin Parry Associates (Co-Chair IPCC Working Group II – GA01056) a contract worth £330,187, to be Co-Chair of it. He later joined the Climate Change Committee and the Grantham Institute, where he is still based. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/environment/climatechange/7241093/IPCC-scientist-dismisses-furore-over-climate-change-report.html

    Policy driven science, who would have thunk it?

    Like

  17. Here’s the other Anderson, James, mentioned above by Doomster Mark Cranfield, who I haven’t come across before. He’s playing a similar game to Kevin, giving a talk to scare people

    https://www.earth.com/news/5-years-mitigate-climate-change/

    “We have five years”

    “The chance that there will be any permanent ice left in the Arctic after 2022 is essentially zero,”

    “As it stands, unless emissions are entirely eradicated in the next five years, there will be no recovering from climate change.”

    Like

  19. Pingback: Matt Ridley on Today | Climate Scepticism

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