The Grandest of Climate Conspiracies, Uncovered By The Intrepid Efforts of ‘And Then There’s Physics’

Posted on by thomaswfuller2In Conspiracy Theory, Greta, Silly Season3 Minutes Read

 

How would you feel if a meteor was hurtling towards our planet and the astronomers decided not to tell us?

Tom Wigley is a respected climate scientist and a staunch supporter of the consensus. “He was named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) for his major contributions to climate and carbon cycle modeling and to climate data analysis, and because he is “one of the world’s foremost experts on climate change and one of the most highly cited scientists in the discipline.”

So when Mr. Wigley is quoted as follows, “I asked the Australian climate scientist Tom Wigley what he thought of the claim that climate change threatens civilization. “It really does bother me because it’s wrong,” he said. “All these young people have been misinformed. And partly it’s Greta Thunberg’s fault. Not deliberately. But she’s wrong,” You would think that people everywhere would be relieved.

Ahh, but not so fast–the masterminds at And Then There’s Physics saw Wigley palm that card:.  “Okay, time for you to put up. Please quote where the IPCC says “the impacts do not threaten civilisation.”

It is actually easy to show what the IPCC thinks about future impacts of climate change will be on civilization. They list them in Chapter 19 of their report ‘AR5 Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability.’

Your humble reporter pasted the IPCC list of Key Risks from page 1044 from that report. Not to be fooled, And Then There’s Physics prudently pruned, disappeared, magicked away the offending list. Because not one of the Key Risks listed by the IPCC was Collapse of Civilization. I show them here anyways:

i) Risk of death, injury, ill-health, or disrupted livelihoods in low-lying coastal zones and small island developing states and other small islands,
due to storm surges, coastal flooding, and sea level rise. [RFC 1-5]
ii) Risk of severe ill-health and disrupted livelihoods for large urban populations due to inland flooding in some regions. [RFC 2 and 3]
iii) Systemic risks due to extreme weather events leading to breakdown of infrastructure networks and critical services such as electricity,
water supply, and health and emergency services. [RFC 2-4]
iv) Risk of mortality and morbidity during periods of extreme heat, particularly for vulnerable urban populations and those working outdoors
in urban or rural areas. [RFC 2 and 3]
v) Risk of food insecurity and the breakdown of food systems linked to warming, drought, flooding, and precipitation variability and extremes,
particularly for poorer populations in urban and rural settings. [RFC 2-4]
vi) Risk of loss of rural livelihoods and income due to insufficient access to drinking and irrigation water and reduced agricultural productivity,
particularly for farmers and pastoralists with minimal capital in semi-arid regions. [RFC 2 and 3]
vii) Risk of loss of marine and coastal ecosystems, biodiversity, and the ecosystem goods, functions, and services they provide for coastal
livelihoods, especially for fishing communities in the tropics and the Arctic. [RFC 1, 2, and 4]
viii) Risk of loss of terrestrial and inland water ecosystems, biodiversity, and the ecosystem goods, functions, and services they provide for
livelihoods. [RFC 1, 3, and 4]

After deleting two more of your humble reporter’s comments, And Then There’s Physics deigned to explain his thinking: “It’s getting rather tedious posting your comments where you claim the IPCC supports you because it doesn’t say something that it was never going to say, one way or the other. The IPCC has a number of Working Groups, one of which addresses the science, one of which discusses mitigation, and one which discusses adaptation. These largely describe what could happen, or what we might do, but don’t actually consider if climate change could be catastrophic or if it could destroy our global civilisation.”

Which exposes the entire conspiracy! Climate scientists know that climate change threatens civilization, BUT THEY REFUSE TO TELL US!

As I hypothesized at And Then There’s Physics, “ATTP, you are in effect alleging a grand conspiracy amongst climate scientists.

1. That climate change is a threat to civilization

2. That they refuse to call our attention to it.

‘Dr. Oppenheimer, my studies show that climate change threatens civilization!’

‘Sssshh… Don’t tell a soul. And for God’s sakes don’t include it in our report on the Impacts of Climate Change!’

How do you feel about the moon landings? Stephan Lewandowski awaits your reply…”

Curse that Tom Wigley! We must make him confess!

Or not. Perhaps it is better if we march to our doom unaware. For if scientists choose not to back up the hysterics like Greta Thunberg, Bill McKibben, Guy McPherson and so many others who try to warn us without the benefits of a scientific education or a functioning brain, we may ignore their entreaties and continue living a normal life.

Can’t have that now, can we?

18 Comments

  1. Rule #1 Projection is a Climate alarmist characteristic
    They place labels on challengers and then you realise that so often they get the idea of how the challenger is thinking by projecting their own mode of behaviour onto challenger.

    Rule #2 If the debater is being fair and honest he/she is probably a skeptic
    cos in my experience they alarmist side are not doing fair and honest debate,
    … they are doing PR
    So being disingenuous seems to be a characteristic.
    Here in your case A TTP chose to delete your posts.
    but they use a whole string of other fallacious tricks
    usually starting with an Ad Hom label to Smear/Label/Dismiss you

    Another trick is to misrepresent your argument.
    ie put up a straw man.

    I am naive as I tend to take debaters at face value
    but sometimes you can be sure if different people are running one account as a team, perhaps family members
    .. or other times if one person is running a whole set of sock-puppets
    I imagine them as like those those call centre staff that are on 5 calls simultaneously, switching between the callers in sequence in the thinking pauses.

    If you pin them down you realise they are a BS-er or bluffer as they come out with bold statements and labels on you
    … putting you on the back foot and having to defend yourself, when in fact their own case is just front
    e.g. they might accuse you of not having read a report but when you pin them down you realise it’s them that hasn’t read it.

    Another trick is the Block and run away ..which is common with a lot of metro-liberal tweeters. With so many accounts you spot an open goal, and so put a simple question to them, but no ..bam they block you so their followers can’t see their #fail.

    Liked by 1 person

  2. Eliminating the redundant verbiage from the IPCC risk list (“…in urban or rural areas” etc.) you get this:

    i) risk from living on a small flat space surrounded by ocean
    ii) risk of flooding in cities
    iii) risk of power outages
    iv) risk of hot weather
    v) risk of hunger due to heat, drought, flood or rain
    vi) risk of unemployment due to thirst and hunger
    vii) risk of lack of fish
    vii) risk of lack of water

    It’s all there except the risk of slipping and falling over on a flooded surface during a power cut while suffering from heat stroke.

    It’s easy to understand how the IPCC can come up with such nonsense, given that they are three thousand unpaid amateurs, working alone, in their spare time, 90% of them in a foreign language, communicating by email and subject to revision and oversight by 200 governments. We know what a bunch of ignoramuses our government contains, but what about the other 199?

    Liked by 3 people

  3. I’m sure it’s just a spelling mistake, or perhaps a slipped decimal place. aTTP part of a conspiracy to hide and cover up a different and devastating climatic emergency? (Puts “hide the decline” in its rightful place, doesn’t it?) And by someone who discovers entire planets? Tell me it cannot be true? I cannot verify; his site is full of ruffians and ghosts of deleted posts.

    Liked by 3 people

  4. Tom,

    It is clear from Ken’s exasperated response to your commentary that he does not see estimation of the scale of societal impact to be within the remit of the scientists contributing to AR5. For example, he says:

    “Climate scientists, as you should know, study climate *science*, not climate *social science*, hence it is not all that surprising that there is a tendency for them to not comment on how our civilisation will respond to the possible climate disruption.”

    It seems that Ken would not expect there to be a statement in AR5 discounting ‘threat to civilisation’, simply because it would be outside the scope of a strictly scientific risk assessment for said report to do so, particularly since the report is not expected to “comment on how our civilisation will respond”. The absence of a statement suggesting the demise of civilisation, therefore, carries no significance (although, strangely, he sees significance in the absence of a statement discounting such a demise).

    I decided to check the scope of AR5, Chapter 19, by consulting what it had to say under the heading ‘Foundations for Decision Making”. The opening paragraph reads as follows:

    “Decision support for impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability is expanding from science-driven linear methods to a wide range of methods drawing from many disciplines (robust evidence, high agreement).

    This chapter introduces new material from disciplines including behavioral science, ethics, and cultural and organizational theory, thus providing a broader perspective on climate change decision
    making. Previous assessment methods and policy advice have been framed by the assumption that better science will lead to better decisions. Extensive evidence from the decision sciences shows that while good scientific and technical information is necessary, it is not sufficient, and decisions require context-appropriate decision-support processes and tools (robust evidence, high agreement).”

    Further down, in the same section, one can read the following:

    “Scenarios are a key tool for addressing uncertainty (robust evidence, high agreement). They can be divided into those that explore how futures may unfold under various drivers (problem exploration) and those that test how various interventions may play out (solution exploration).”

    In conclusion, Ken is unequivocally wrong (robust evidence, high agreement). If global social collapse were a significant risk, it would have been well within the scope of AR5, Chapter 19 to have said so.

    It only took me about 30 seconds to ascertain the above. It would only take me another 30 seconds to post the scope of AR5 on ATTP — and only a lifetime to regret it.

    Liked by 11 people

  5. And we have from distinguished atmospheric radiation expert William Happer that the risks are exaggerated. In his latest paper submitted to a “civil debate” on global warming/climate change:

    “Some people claim that increased levels of atmospheric CO2 will cause catastrophic global warming, flooding from rising oceans, spreading tropical diseases, ocean acidification, and other horrors. But these frightening scenarios have almost no basis in genuine science. This Statement reviews facts that have persuaded me that more CO2 will be a major benefit to the Earth.”

    “Discussions of climate today almost always involve fossil fuels. Some people claim that fossil fuels are inherently evil. Quite the contrary, the use of fossil fuels to power modern society gives the average person a standard of living that only the wealthiest could enjoy a few centuries ago. But fossil fuels must be extracted responsibly, minimizing environmental damage from mining and drilling operations, and with due consideration of costs and benefits. Similarly, fossil fuels must be burned responsibly, deploying cost-effective technologies that minimize emissions of real pollutants such as fly ash, carbon monoxide, oxides of sulfur and nitrogen, heavy metals, volatile organic compounds, etc.”

    https://res.cloudinary.com/highereducation/image/upload/w_740,c_scale,f_auto,q_auto/v1/TheBestSchools.org/fcd-global-warming-power-plant-v-human

    “Extremists have conflated these genuine environmental concerns with the emission of CO2, which cannot be economically removed from exhaust gases. Calling CO2 a “pollutant” that must be eliminated, with even more zeal than real pollutants, is Orwellian Newspeak.[3] “Buying insurance” against potential climate disasters by forcibly curtailing the use of fossil fuels is like buying “protection” from the mafia. There is nothing to insure against, except the threats of an increasingly totalitarian coalition of politicians, government bureaucrats, crony capitalists, thuggish nongovernmental organizations like Greenpeace, etc.”

    https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2019/11/28/climate-advice-dont-worry-be-happer/

    Liked by 3 people

  6. The problem here is that in fact over the last 140 years, temperatures have warmed about 0.8 – 1.0C and we have gone in America from an essentially pre-industrial civilization to a highly advanced one. Food production has increased probably an order of magnitude and its quality is immensely better because of refrigeration and rapid transport, the environment is actually cleaner because we have switched from coal to much cleaner fuels and replaced horses with automobiles. Average life expectancy has increased dramatically and because of scientific medicine quality of health has immensely improved. It’s amazing that in 2019, the biggest public health problem in America is obesity and its complications such as diabetes. In 1880, no one was much aware of public health and few cared.

    There is so far as I know, no definitive evidence that much has gotten worse except perhaps with rising sea levels and heat waves. Some things have actually improved such as severe tornadoes in North America. Plants are doing much better and are also more drought resistant. America is more forested than at any time since pre-colonial times.

    We live in an age of propaganda and lies and this lie about the “extsitential crisis” has been repeated over the last 20 years many many times with respect to many many things. This is partly the advances of the dark arts of “science communication” and the increasingly corrupt corporate media that no longer really fact checks anything. In this environment, science itself is losing credibility. That’s what is so shameful about what Skeptical Science and ATTP are doing. By claiming the mantle of “science” and then misrepresenting it, they are doing as much harm as those they call “deniers.” They are too self-righteous to even contemplate such a conclusion however. That’s the one characteristic I see over and over again with the crusading science communicators. They are often relatively young and are often quite self-righteous and always seem to expect everyone else to do the heavy lifting when sacrifices are required.

    Of course, there are always dangers to be dealt with. To do that rationally requires first and foremost accurate information.

    Liked by 1 person

  7. ATTP once again demonstrates, Ike the great inpector who clearly inspires him, that the primary impact of climate change is the damaged cognitive abilities of its true believers.

    Like

  8. Excellent. Is that what they call a Gotcha?

    Tom Wigley is famous for his MAGGIC/SCENGEN model, first produced in 1990, with revised versions still being used today: “MAGICC/SCENGEN, a coupled gas-cycle/climate model (Model for the Assessment of Greenhouse-gas Induced Climate Change) that drives a spatial climate-change SCENario GENerator (SCENGEN)”.

    It is still possible to download an instruction manual for v5.3 2008, http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/wigley/magicc/UserMan5.3.v2.pdf.

    MAGICC 6 was being used in 2015: http://wiki.magicc.org/index.php?title=Model_Description

    5.3 says:
    “Global-mean temperatures from MAGICC are used to drive SCENGEN. SCENGEN uses a version of the pattern scaling method described in Santer et al. (1990) to produce spatial patterns of change from a data base of atmosphere/ocean GCM (AOGCM) data from the CMIP3/AR4 archive.

    For the SCENGEN scaling component, the user can select from a number of different AOGCMs for the patterns of greenhouse-gas-induced climate. The method for using MAGICC/SCENGEN is essentially unchanged from the year-2000 version (Version 2.4; Hulme et al., 2000). What has changed is the MAGICC code (2.4 used the IPCC SAR – Second Assessment Report – version of MAGICC), the data base of AOGCMs used for pattern scaling, and the much greater number of SCENGEN output options open to the user.

    As before, the first step is to run MAGICC. The user begins by selecting a pair of emissions scenarios, referred to as a Reference scenario and a Policy scenario. The emissions library from which these selections are made is now based on the no-climate-policy SRES scenarios, and includes new versions of the WRE (Wigley et al., 1996) CO2 stabilization scenarios.

    The SRES scenarios have a much wider range of gases for which emissions are prescribed than was the case with the scenarios used in the SAR. Because of this, emissions scenarios can now only be edited or added to off-line, using whatever editing software the user chooses.

    The labels “Reference” and “Policy” are arbitrary, and the user may compare any two emissions scenarios in the library. The user then selects a set of gas-cycle and climate model parameters. The default (“best estimate”) set may be chosen, or a user set prescribed. Both default and user results are carried through to SCENGEN.”

    “Changes have been made to MAGICC to ensure, as nearly as possible, consistency with the IPCC AR4.”

    MAGICC and SCENGEN contain the templates that produce the colourful global pictures showing a heating planet. Anyone can obtain the program and use the pre-installed databases to produce “new research” for any region in the world. With SCENGEN, you can dial up a climate. Enter your inputs from the supplied database, move the slider to a date in the future and voila, “New Research Shows”.

    UNFCCC produces training modules for developing countries so they can produce their own results, eg,
    http://unfccc.int/resource/cd_roms/na1/v_and_a/v_a_presentations/Climate_1_Formatted.ppt

    One slide says, “By Now You May Be Confused – So many choices, what to do?
    First, let’s remember the basics, Scenarios are essentially educational tools to help See ranges of potential climate change, Provide tools for better understanding the sensitivities of affected systems
    So, we need to select scenarios that enable us to meet these goals.”

    Tom Wigley would indeed know that there is no climate emergency.

    Like

  10. Further to my previous comment, I would just like to make it abundantly clear that the IPCC’s introduction of “new material from disciplines including behavioral science, ethics, and cultural and organizational theory” wasn’t just to broaden the approach taken towards deciding societal response; these disciplines were also applied in the assessment of global societal impact. This is made clear in the ‘Summary for Policy Makers’, which states:

    “The WGII AR5 is presented in two parts (Part A: Global and Sectoral Aspects, and Part B: Regional Aspects), reflecting the expanded literature basis and multidisciplinary approach, increased focus on societal impacts and responses, and continued regionally comprehensive coverage.”

    Despite the above, AR5 Chapter 19, whilst listing a host of scary looking risks, falls short of positing the demise of civilization, preferring instead to deliberate extensively upon matters of adaptation and resilience. Tom thinks this significant. In turn, Ken accuses Tom of failing to understand the scope of climate risk assessment and suggests that ‘silly’ Tom should ‘try reading the IPCC reports again’. I think Ken owes Tom an apology.

    The bottom line is that a risk report that examined ‘Global and Sectoral Aspects’, with ‘increased focus on societal impacts’, failed to specify a risk of global societal collapse, let alone quantify it.

    Liked by 3 people

  11. St. Greta has spoken:
    Ending fossil fuel is not about the environment. It is about ending wicked colonialist patriarchal capitalism. This from a child of some of the most affluent people from one of the most affluent nations on Earth. From St. Greta, who is so affluent she gets to sail as the sole passenger on luxury sailing yachts dedicated to satisfying her whims. Who claims she can see CO2. Who is a highschool dropout, admits to knowing no science, yet who has discovered her temper tantums can get her thevdevout attention of many of the world’s leaders. And who’s tenants and demands climate scientists implicitly or in the case of ATTP, explicitly, endorse.

    Liked by 1 person

  13. Geoff
    “It’s all there except the risk of slipping and falling over on a flooded surface during a power cut while suffering from heat stroke”

    Simple question.

    Suppose we come to understand based on the best solar physics we have available that over the next 100 years the output of the sun will increase and drive an estimated or even Guestimated 2 to 4C
    of warming.

    In short, our best available understanding of the sun, limited as it is, suggests that we will see a warming
    over the next century.

    Now given that, somebody asks you what kind of bad effects that could have. what would you say?

    Like

  14. The best science says the changes have been, are and will continue to be trivial to slightly problematic.
    The grown-up question is why do we allow the Greta’s and other psychos pose the worst science?

    Like

  15. The climatocracy hides behind claiming we ragtag skeptics are part of a vast conspiracy, even as they conspired.
    Yet at the end of the day their actions are not so much clever but venal and shallow, clinging to the crisis if the moment with no grasp at all of history or data. Here is a review of how this plays out in the UK over the last several decades:

    Like

  16. @Steven Mosher says:08 Dec 19 at 2:14 p
    directed at Geoff, – the next 100 years the output of the sun will increase and drive an estimated or even Guestimated 2 to 4C of warming”…

    “Now given that, somebody asks you what kind of bad effects that could have. what would you say?”

    my answer – more cloud cover from higher temps. so flooding in flood prone area’s (flood plains).

    100yrs gives most affected to adapt (grow gills) or move (unless they don’t believe)

    Like

  17. SM frames all change as bad in his hypothetical.
    Sort of reveals a major failing of the science.
    SM has given strong insight on those who have created the social madness of Extinction Rebellion and Greta and the COP televangelist endtime cult that climate consensus has devolved into.

    Like

  18. Thomas

    I note that you have been having another go over at ATTP, trying to introduce a sensible perspective regarding the predictive skill of climate models. I happen to believe there is an interesting debate to be had regarding the relative roles of aleatory and epistemic uncertainties in predictive models. Alas, however, not on a site where everyone seems to think that a posited non-linear loss function over-rules all other considerations.

    Like

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