The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Shun the Climate Change Deniers

Guest Post by *Eric A. Anderson* Guest Post

I have a little boy. He is my first, and most likely, only child — and he is everything to me.

I once thought that I knew what love is. I am still learning that I had no idea I could love anyone so deeply. I would lay my life down for him in a heartbeat, and will viciously attack any who dare threaten it.

There are those that threaten it every day.

Those that, in the past, I have professed to love and who, in turn, profess to love my son:

They are my parents.
They are my older sisters.
They are my Aunt, and my Uncle.

They move their mouths as they profess their love for my son, but I know in my heart that it’s not true. They are lying to both him and themselves.

They are lying because they are climate change deniers.

Because they vote for people, parties, policies and platforms that are actively contributing to the destruction of the planet my son depends on for his future survival. Or, they don’t vote at all.

When I confront them on this fact, they argue with me. They cajole and threaten. They scoff at the precautionary principle. Throughout, I am left dumbfounded. I ask them, “If there were even the tiniest chance you could be wrong, why would you risk the future of your family?” To which, they consistently reply in some manner of, “Well, it doesn’t matter anyway. I’m so old I’ll be long gone.” And so, their words of love are hollow. They are selfish. They are hypocrites. They are killers.

They care more about their ideology, than they care for my son. I have to call them what they are.

Therefore, if I continue to profess my love for both them, and my son, what does that make me? What does that make the man who professes that he is willing to go to any lengths to try and ensure that his son has a future that doesn’t read like a dystopian novel? A future wherein, my son doesn’t look at me and say “Daddy, why didn’t you do something???”

To do both makes me the hypocrite. But I’m not a hypocrite.

Which is why I have made the decision to shun them all.

They need to feel the repercussions of their actions.

Everyone one of them do. Immediately. There is simply no time to lose.

I would be lying if I told you this isn’t the most difficult decision of my life.

However, I believe this drastic act of protest is the only thing that will bring them to their senses about how deadly serious I am about the risk that their climate change denying poses to my son’s future.

We live in desperate times. And desperate times, call for desperate measures.
I’ve told them all that they are welcome to join my family again upon photographic proof that they have voted for political candidates who will work to ensure ecologically sane policies.

I exhort you to do the same, if indeed, the love you profess for your children is true.

We all must shun the climate change denying hypocrites that profess to love us from one side of their face, while they sell our future down the road with the other. Enough is enough.

Please think hard about joining me in shunning them all.

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109 Comments

  1. atcooper

    I can absolutely sympathize. I myself am childless, but still came to the same conclusion, and my sister, who had her first not long ago, has done the same. I suspect the generational dynamic described here is more common than supposed.

  2. Lemonhead

    You’re not the only parent. And the “science” is far from convincing. Go shun yourself.

  3. Jerry Brown

    I think you will come to realize you are making a mistake for your kid. Unless your dad is Donald Trump, as in the president, then these things don’t scale. Your kid is going to be worse off not knowing his family than the 10 or so votes you might get by using him as a tool to leverage support even if something was actually on the ballot. Don’t use a kid that way. They are not political tools or instruments for change.

  4. Herman

    The problem with shunning climate change deniers is that it doesn’t take into account that for the average person ignorance about major issues is rational. Most people cannot do anything about climate change, or neoliberalism or any of the other things that we discuss on this blog. Deep down most people know that they have little power to change governmental and corporate policy. So the average person either doesn’t follow current events much (the majority) or they only read and watch sources that confirm their beliefs.

    Most people are so worn out from work and the difficulties of daily life that they refuse to educate themselves. I used to think that these people were “sheep” but now I have more sympathy for this kind of attitude. The refusal to think deeply about important and potentially troubling issues is rational because it reduces stress and helps people focus on their immediate survival. To your average person worrying about something that seems distant like climate change seems ludicrous. It is like worrying about an asteroid hitting the Earth. Even if you convinced them that climate change was a serious problem they would say that there is nothing they can do about it.

    On top of all that you have some people saying that climate change is not happening or is overblown. Sure you can say that they are frauds in the pay of corporations (most of them probably are) but your average person has neither the time nor inclination to do the research to see who is right and who is wrong. To the average person it looks like dueling experts.

    Also, it doesn’t help that doomers have been saying that we will run out of oil/the economy will collapse/climate disaster will happen THIS YEAR so you better buy my books and prep gear to make sure you and your family are safe! There are a lot of grifters in doomer circles who are out to make money off of frightened people. Note that I am NOT talking about honest people like Ian who are just trying to discuss important issues and hopefully enlighten people. But the doomer world has developed the same problem that many millenarian religions have. When imminent doom is predicted over and over again and it doesn’t happen people naturally become skeptical.

    I would not shun your family and friends who are climate change deniers. I would have some patience and understanding about why they think the way they do. I have family members who hold what I consider to be repulsive political beliefs but I still associate with them because I understand that people are heavily formed by their environment and often cannot drop ideas they learned in their youth. Also, at the end of the day all you have is your family and maybe a few friends if you are lucky. Ideologies and nations and politicians will probably not help you when things get really bad. E.M. Forster had a point when he wrote: “I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.”

    I am not saying that you should totally give up on politics. If you want to vote for pro-environment politicians and advocate for environmentalism or take precautions to prepare yourself and your family in case of disaster you should do those things. But I wouldn’t shun people for their political beliefs. Sure, you can argue with them but don’t shun them. It really won’t make much of a difference in combating climate change and you will just destroy valuable relationships.

  5. V

    A bit too emotive, a bit too strident, a bit too self righteous.
    One can claim till the cows come home, but; it is not settled science.
    Good science is never settled…

  6. Shunner

    Shun them if you feel that way. That’s just being honest. You wouldn’t be doing anyone any favors pretending to feel otherwise.
    I have shunned my mother since bush v gore, and the half of my family that even remotely supports trump for the last two years, and,pretty much anyone who is republican or republican lite (for example any idiot who thinks Obama is or was a liberal).
    But you are delusional if you think it will make a bit of difference, much less for the good. And telling people they *must* also shun the asshole idiots is as silly as it is presumptuous. That is just a waste of effort, if not counterproductive. Hysterical deck chair rearrangement won’t do your kid any good.
    The fact that you saw fit to bring children into this world in the last 20 years doesn’t really speak to well of your own judgement. Get a grip and maybe work on a more constructive approach.

  7. Tom

    https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/

    Even without Global Warming, we are cooking ourselves to death with our energy use.

    Unfortunately politicians listen to economists more than physicists.

  8. Billikin

    Confronting deniers may not do any good, but shunning them won’t either. Separating your son from his relatives will not do anything to foster their love for him, just the opposite. Climate change is no longer a topic for debate. The evidence is all around, and things will continue to worsen. If your relatives’ hearts are open, their minds can open, too. Let them love your son.

  9. CO2 catastrophists have been shunning serious debates with qualified opponents since as long as at least Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth”. (E.g., Gore himself.) There have been a handful or so of exceptions that I know about – which ended up on youtube, anyway. (I know of only 2 exceptions within the last year; one that I posted in the previous diary; and also one involving Judith Curry and – much to my surprise – Michael Mann. I despise Mann, but give him credit for at least exposing himself to a debate.)

    This should make you very happy. Ah, but alas, it’s not enough for you, is it?

    There was a VERY interesting interview OF Tucker Carlson, that I heard just yesterday, that I believe properly contextualizes the mindset of the writer of a piece like this. (Significantly more interesting than a typical Carlson program). Carlson was interviewed by a former “lefty”, Dave Rubin. Unless you want to understand yourself, better, I suggest you NOT watch it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpTyHXOdlFs

  10. V

    I find it rather interesting that there hasn’t been a positive response to Eric A. Anderson’s thread, including mine.
    Shunning is a very old and damaging way of dealing with one who has broken some very important taboos within a given society.
    It is indeed a harsh punishment often leading to death; either symbolically or literally.
    The author exhibits a level of immaturity in dealing with his personal life.
    I wish him a good learning curve on life and its inevitable problems…

  11. Hugh

    I have no problem with shunning. There should be consequences to self-serving stupidity. There aren’t two sides to every argument. Climate change deniers are kith and kin to holocaust deniers and flat earthers. Human driven climate change is settled science. It is a deceptive, dishonest nihilist argument to maintain that we must understand completely all aspects of climate change before we can assert anything about it. This is a standard that occurs nowhere else in science and willfully disregards what science is and how it operates.

    Our first duty is to be responsible, informed citizens. So I also do not accept the “I’m too busy to pay attention to the critical issues of our times.” That’s a cop out. People have plenty of time for their cell phones, social media, video games, and TV. But they can’t find an hour or two a week for life and death questions that affect and will affect them and their children? Give me a break.

  12. Ed

    I’m a little sympathetic to Eric.

    In my day job, I work with climate scientists all the time. Yes, some of their work has been exaggerated, but the raw data record over the past 40 years is unambiguous. The Earth is warming up at a very high rate. The problems with the climate change proponents are usually the extrapolation to what it means next.

    However, the climate change deniers in my personal life are worse. Even the three family members who are scientists and climate science deniers won’t look at the raw data. Instead, they quote Fox News at me. Or they spend all their time cherry picking why one particular climate change argument is wrong. Their minds are closed, and it’s become apparent that they’re closed because “the liberals” are the ones arguing for why climate change is real.

    Frankly, life is too short to spend my time hanging out with people who are going to spend their time spouting off on the evils of “goddamn liberals” and “those idiot climate guys.” Yes, those are quotes, and yes, those were spouted off in social situations where we weren’t even discussing politics or climate change. I’m happy to hang out with my conservative relatives who can keep the dinner conversation to non-political topics. The others?

    Sorry. I’m shunning them.

    I haven’t taken it to Eric Anderson’s degree, but still. Life’s too short to waste it on loudmouthed close-minded people, even if they are my kin.

  13. The shunning of yore was a denial of community resources, often fatal. Doesn’t apply these drugged and distracted days. Doubtful they would even notice.

  14. atcooper

    Living by example is probably the only thing that works in the long run. And trying to find a like minded community would be a good next step so as to forstall the isolation being bemoaned here.

    Hell, even Christianity had a few things to say about separation from family if they were poison to one’s faith.

  15. Will

    Interesting post. It’s not my place to insert myself into such intimate family dynamics. I can see both sides depending on how much you weight different aspects of your life.

    But it does bring up an interesting follow up question: What about the people who claim to agree with the science of climate change and yet continue to live in ways that exacerbate the it?

    The person who buys expensive luxury cars? Check it out. CO2 emissions for production of a vehicle are a sizeable portion of lifecycle emissions and they do scale with cost. And that includes everyone’s favorite upscale virtue signaling device the Tesla.

    The guy who has a wife and one kid and yet buys a 3000 square foot (or even larger) McMansion with all the trimmings and a 55 minute commute?

    The lady with a $10,000 wardrobe that gets replaced every couple years?

    The kid who goes through thousand dollar phones like twizzlers?

    The couple who just have to redo the kitchen in the latest fashion every 3 years?

    And on and on and on and on and on?

    Consumption fuels climate change. Don’t let anyone tell you different. I’m not saying that anyone is a hypocrite because they don’t go around shaming anyone with a higher lifestyle than their own. I’m asking an honest question and really do want to hear the response of anyone who cares to do so.

    Reason I am asking is that I really do feel that there are implications to adequately addressing climate change. And they are anything but painless. Isn’t it possible that the pain that everyone but an economist can see coming if we cut CO2 emissions play more of a role than we are willing to admit?

    I really don’t think it is stupidity or intellectual laziness or anything of the kind in isolation. I could be wrong.

    Will

  16. Here we have a Case Study in the Most Vile Type of Denier, the De Facto Denier.

    Or, as I call them, the climate crocodiles, since they cry crocodile tears over the climate crisis yet are peas in a pod with ExxonMobil in wanting nothing to be done since actually do do anything requires nothing less than the dismantling/destruction of the economic civilization itself.

    Here’s the fact. There is one and only one way to avert the worst of the climate crisis:

    Stop emitting greenhouse gases; stop destroying sinks; rebuild sinks on a massive scale.

    All else is a lie. Most of all, the Big Lie is that anything constructive can be done within the congenitally destructive framework of capitalism, productionism, the economic civilization. Anyone who says otherwise is a liar.

    With that in mind, let’s consider this scribbler who clearly cares more about his electoral religion than about the physical Earth.

    They are lying because they are climate change deniers……..they vote for people, parties, policies and platforms that are actively contributing to the destruction of the planet my son depends on for his future survival. [IOW, they vote for anyone who supports the continuation of the economic civilization, which includes all candidates and especially the Democrat Party.]

    Or, they don’t vote at all. [I. e. didn’t vote for any ecological criminal. One of the many reasons I’ve never voted.]

    I’ve told them all that they are welcome to join my family again upon photographic proof that they have voted for political candidates who will work to ensure ecologically sane policies. [I.e. candidates who don’t exist and can never exist. Here the scribbler proves he’s a liar and a fraud, since he openly admits he’ll accept false proof.]

    We all must shun the climate change denying hypocrites that profess to love us from one side of their face, while they sell our future down the road with the other. Enough is enough.

    Please think hard about joining me in shunning them all.

    Indeed, most of all we must shun the lying scum like the scribbler of this piece, the kind of denier and liar whose main message is that the answer to the climate crisis and the much greater ecological crisis is to Keep Shopping!; and most of all Keep Driving!

    And we must take a whip to anyone who is still capable of saying that the Democrat Party offers any alternative.

    https://attempter.wordpress.com/2018/10/22/the-vileness-of-progressives-on-the-climate-crisis/

  17. ponderer

    It sounds like you just realized you brought a child into a heartless world. You’ve realized it too late to accomplish anything. Though you egotistically think you have some sort of control over the outcome, you’ve decided to blame others and are showing your child how to use emotional blackmail to get other people to think just like you do, or at least say they do. Right now your teaching your son what happens when people don’t think like you do, you cut them off. I’m sure you’ll have a great future relationship where he’ll know he can come to you about all of life’s questions…
    I have no desire to join your self defeating cult though, even assuming the worse case scenario comes about. Firstly, because even if one assumes we live in a democracy, we would be hard pressed to do anything to change the current trajectory considering the economic impacts. There is no avoiding the coming crisis, only mitigating their aspects. The cost will be borne by everyone, not just the ones who think like you do. In times of crisis, one generally relies on “family”, if not blood relatives then the kind of family that arises from shared hardship. Removing people from that pool is irrational, especially if you have more than just yourself to take care of. Anyone who won’t kill you and your child, rape your wife, and take your resources should be looked at as a necessary potential ally.

    Second, you are talking about models. People made up the rules for those models and their interactions and people are often wrong. Being more shrill doesn’t make your models more correct. It is reasonable that someone would disagree or want to understand your model, just as it is reasonable that they might want to turn to expert opinion. That means there should be a process of learning, not berating or dismissing, that we should have been following for a long time now but have not. That is a problem on both sides of this issue. That combined with a working democracy might have put us in a better position now, but it never happened.
    Its everyone’s fault to some degree, but unless your relatives are all billionaires, they probably have less responsibility than most. Probably about as much as you have or will have in your sons eyes. A rational person could probably some that up to or close to 0% or 0.001% or so. How could it be more when you don’t have the power to change anything?
    Of course you have decided to limit your social power by closing off those who don’t believe like you. So does that make it 0.005%? I have no idea. It’s a useless exercise to play the blame game, especially with so many variables and outcomes and our lack of control over any of it.

    My only suggestion is to learn to come together with disparate people and teach your children the same. You’ll need them later. Oh and its worth mentioning that the climate denial movement was a brainchild of the tobacco companies and their assault on science. It wasn’t just laziness that brought your relatives to their erroneous conclusions.

  18. ponderer

    I took the above post at face value but I reread the article and it does look like political propaganda to get a certain group of people out to the polls. On the other hand, it would also be good propaganda for Conservative types, not exactly father of the year material. It’s very emotional and non specific. I think we got trolled.

  19. Willy

    Seriously deniers, what’s to lose? Would the global economy be obliterated if every government suddenly pulled together to limit CO2 production? What’s the downside for you, personally?

    Sounds far more like the defense of tribal strictures to me.

    Most change deniers are flock/school/herd… animals. They’ll do a 180 pivot as soon as the group does, after the leaders do, just alike a swirling flock of starlings or school of sardines. The difference with humans is they don’t rationalize why. Theoretically any bait ball of fish could turn on their predator to destroy it, if they only knew how and had the collective will. Even sharks have unprotected and vulnerable parts, easy for tiny fish to cripple. But most deniers are oblivious to who their predators even are. The most successful human predators cloak themselves well.

  20. Synoia

    Difficult decision, and one I could not uphold.

    I’m sorry, but I believe your sentiments are 20 to 40 years too late, 20 years ago, 1998, Al Gore brought the subject to the forefront, 40 years ago, 1978, I was reading articles about the threat of Global Cooling.

    The enemy is Greed, expressed as capitalism. Are there any signs that humans can overcome greed, and its children, capitalism and consumerism?

    I think not. And for that reason humans have created their own destruction, life will continue on this planet, but not life as we practice it today.

    I do wonder if the lack of success by SETI is related to our form of intelligence its accompanying greed and self destruction.

  21. Willy

    As for shunning, I’ve been hard shunned (workplace mobbed) and soft shunned (by conservative evangelical family). I’ve learned that the true purpose of any shunning is to cut off a declared interloper (actual or not) from tribal resources, and that shunnings are usually orchestrated by a single ‘leader’ for their own selfish purpose of retaining or enhancing their own power/control over a group.

    I’m not sure how well it works when a single member shuns the entire tribe. It might be smarter to put that energy into studying the situation first, before taking some action.

  22. sbt

    In my experience, shunning seems most effective when conducted by the dominant/mother culture, as opposed to its outliers. It’s a domination-based tactic, where removal of access to resources and personal networks is what penalizes the shunned.

    Objectively speaking, how is it your shunning will deprive your targets? Someone else spelled it out earlier, I reckon: you’re using the kid as emotional blackmail. Apparently your child is so great to hang around that people will abandon the mother culture just to be around it.

    I think you’re just setting yourself up to be miserable, and your child to be resentful of you. I don’t have children (and years ago made steps to ensure I never would), so I really can’t be sure on this. But as an outside observer with some understanding of fellow humans this is the way I see it going.

    I would think a more effective strategy than what you suggest is to cultivate one’s own community, network, resources, etc. that provides a fruitful alternative to the mother culture. Then, should they show the photographic evidence you hold as criteria for acceptance, you can let them in to your community. If they see value in that community but later come to violate its rules, then shunning becomes a powerful, useful tactic.

    Good luck to you in whatever you choose.

  23. Billikin

    People forget, or never knew, that global warming was generally accepted by politicians and the public during the Bush, Sr., administration. What happened was a concerted effort to combat that idea, by those who stood to lose profits if CO2 production was restricted. Al Gore was responding to that backlash.

    I grew up in a conservative area, where conservatives believed in conservation. OC, conservatives do not like government regulation, but by the 1980s the success of environmental regulation was obvious. It took real effort to reverse that trend in the 1990s. In part the backlash has been successful because of the success of previous environmental regulation. When you have people dying because of smog, when you have rivers catching fire, when you have people dying of skin cancer, people notice. Once regulation has significantly reduced those dangers, people start to chafe under that regulation. With the increasing dangers of hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, drought, and heat waves, people will take notice again and demand government action. It’s only a matter of time. When powerful companies like Allstate Insurance take out ads focusing on climate change, the days of denial are limited. Look for a resurgence of environmental movements, such as Zero Population Growth, Grow Your Own, and Back to the Earth.

  24. Hugh

    It certainly seems like Eric managed to push the buttons of a lot of people, especially climate change deniers. All he did was make a personal decision to do something. He can not reverse climate change on his own. None of us can. But he has taken a step. And the more people who do, the more chance we have for meaningful change.

  25. atcooper

    Nothing precludes re-connecting once said relatives pull their heads out of their ass.

  26. Do NOT shun your family! Convince them otherwise. Climate Disruption is not ideology. The poles are melting and ice has no ideology.

    Clearly humankind is responsible for this Climate Disruption — but suppose it were of purely natural origin. Would it make sense to add to a disaster if you had any alternative?

  27. Heliopause

    “proof that they have voted for political candidates who will work to ensure ecologically sane policies.”

    Slight problem here; those candidates don’t exist. Centrist liberalism in the style of Obama or Trudeau is basically the most “ecologically sane” style of politics that wealthy western nations will tolerate, and it’s laughably inadequate to address the problems that you see coming. In fact, not just inadequate, in some cases actively destructive, as I pointed out in my comment in the previous thread. If you think that shaming your relatives at Thanksgiving dinner into voting for the Green Party is going to make any headway on the problem I’ll just charitably call that charming.

    Do you drive a car, live in a heated house, consume mass-produced foods? If you do any of those things, or any of a hundred others I could name, not only will you have to commit immediately and irrevocably to scaling it way back, everybody else will also have to at the same time. See the problem?

    So you perceive the future as being such a catastrophe in the making that you are willing to destroy long-standing relationships because of it. That’s your call. But what else can you do?

    1. Stop having children. If the future is dystopian and your relatives are such awful people that you have to shield your children from them it seems strange to me that you’d want to have them in the first place.
    2. It’s OK to drive a Prius and recycle your Coke bottles. Doing so is probably a pathetically inadequate response to the problem but I can’t rule out that it will do SOME tiny bit of good, so go ahead and do those things.
    3. Move to Canada (if you aren’t there already) and vote Green. Unlike the US the Greens are not 100% irrelevant there (though they are close to it). In British Columbia they are even a small part of a coalition government, though that hasn’t stopped a huge LNG project, much beloved by the country’s Liberal PM, from going through. Understand, though, that moving to Canada and voting Green is mainly just to make you feel better, it won’t likely have a measurable impact on climate trajectory.
    4. Have a plan for 20-50 years from now and a mechanism in place to force yourself to stick to it. Our centrist liberal elites have such a plan, it’s to be retired in a Swiss chateau with a strong security perimeter, but assuming you’re not that rich you should start formulating your plan right now.

  28. iconoclast

    ‘I’ve told them all that they are welcome to join my family again upon photographic proof that they have voted for political candidates who will work to ensure ecologically sane policies.’

    Kindof imperious IMHO but WTFDIK……..

  29. scruff

    People have plenty of time for their cell phones, social media, video games, and TV. But they can’t find an hour or two a week for life and death questions that affect and will affect them and their children?

    In many cases, I think, people put so much time into distracting media precisely to avoid spending any time on life and death questions. When one feels powerless to affect change, the difficulties posed by social structures are nothing but stress, and avoiding that stress is an adaptive act. As Ian often says, humans are weak. I don’t think this problem can be fixed without addressing the despair issue first.

  30. scruff

    the Big Lie is that anything constructive can be done within the congenitally destructive framework of capitalism, productionism, the economic civilization.

    I have this argument with someone every time I go into Seattle. There’s always someone standing out on the streets who wants to talk to me about this because I look like I’m somewhere on the spectrum between ‘normal person’ and ‘hippie college kid’ but usually look much less of a radical environmentalist than the hippie college kid who wants my attention.

    “We can protect the environment without giving up Capitalism!” they say cheerily, as if I’ve just wandered out of a lobotomy and would gladly keep Capitalism if only they gave me an excuse.

    I then patiently explain that I don’t think that’s true, and that since it seems to me that in a choice between the world and Capitalism, Capitalism has to go.

    Literally without exception, every time I have said anything like this to anyone who wants to talk about this, some part of their brain breaks and they start responding to me as if I’ve said the exact opposite of what I’ve just said; that since we can’t have the world and Capitalism then the world has to go! Every fucking time!

    People are insane.

  31. Billikin

    What would a sustainable world look like? I suspect something like 100 years ago in advanced economies, with electronics and household gadgets. Transportation would be nothing like today, so globalization would not be the same. Forget long supply chains. Forget free shipping. 😉

    Our great grandparents lived that way, so it’s not so bad. However, without economic growth the opportunity for social mobility would be low. People have lived that way for centuries: look at India and feudal societies. But I think that people would rebel against high inequality. They did 100 years ago.

    Anyway, I don’t think we’re going to get back there in two decades.

  32. Herman

    @scruff,

    Noam Chomsky made a similar point about sports and why people put so much time and effort into sports and not important issues like international affairs.

    Here is an excerpt:

    “The gas station attendant who wants to use his mind isn’t going to waste his time on international affairs, because that’s useless; he can’t do anything about it anyhow, and he might learn unpleasant things and even get into trouble. So he might as well do it where it’s fun, and not threatening — professional football or basketball or something like that.”

    It is an old interview from The Chomsky Reader but I would still recommend reading the entire interview with Chomsky. What applies in the case of international affairs also applies to climate change and other environmental issues.

    https://www.alternet.org/noam-chomsky-why-americans-know-so-much-about-sports-so-little-about-world-affairs

  33. Willy

    Years ago I was in a night class with a Turk and a Kenyan. The three of us took breaks together. They were far more knowledgeable about American issues than the average American was. Later, same place I met a couple Gambians. Same thing. Wife has relatives in west Canada, myself in east. Knew more. Indians, yup. Iranians, Brits somewhat the same. Just a few personal samples. I’m starting to think that apathy due to feeling powerless is an American culture thing.

  34. bob mcmanus

    “I suspect something like 100 years ago in advanced economies…Forget long supply chains.”

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windjammer

    I have also been interested in blimps and flying wings. After oil, we didn’t even try. Just won’t be fast.

    Not that I think we’ll get a chance.

  35. Eric Anderson

    Thank you for the comments.
    I must say though, that I find the number of straw-man arguments troubling. Outside of those who maintain that the science is not settled (it is btw) the internal logic of my choice is unimpeachable.

    And that we proceed to ignore the precautionary principle is unforgivable.

    Blood is not thicker genocide.

  36. Willy

    It can be very hard to change some people (but not all). So many seem to need to hit bottom first. I’m dealing with an alcoholic family member (whose choices are affecting others) and know that shunning them would probably not positively influence that situation, aside from possibly hastening their “hit bottom”. But that’s not the result I want. There are hidden reasons for their addiction which they may need help in dealing with.

    I really wish this topic would’ve been discussed with more strategic hypotheticals, as in, what are all the possible outcomes. And what other ways are there to coax people out of irrationally self-destructive thinking?

  37. J. Bookly

    Wow, just wow. Punishing the kid, punishing the relatives, punishing himself too, come to think of it–all for the cause of voting for good candidates. What if there are only bad candidates? What if the good ones aren’t, on closer examination, all that good?

    Not a peep about lifestyle changes, which at least would give him the very human satisfaction of doing something. Plus he could do things that bring the family together instead of pulling them apart—things like sharing skills, running errands together, and enjoying free and low-cost recreation close to home. All of these actions would be just as good for the earth as waiting for the right politician to show up.

    What he’s doing is unproductive, like spraying Roundup on his vegetable garden.

  38. different clue

    @Synoia,

    I remember first reading an article in CoEvolution Quarterly about the eventual possibility of global warming based on vast CO2 output since the Industrial Revolution. I read that sometime in the late 1970s, about when MSM was saying ” Ice Age Coming”.

    The “Ice Age Coming” was based on predicting forward from natural and long-established earth system cycles. If the same old long-cycle things kept happening over and over and over again, what would be coming up? And based on the Natural Cycles Theory, we were due for an Ice Age.

    ( Or maybe just a Frosty Cool Age. Whenever I read about this, I offer a link to an old legacy interview of Reid Bryson in The Mother Earth News.
    https://www.motherearthnews.com/nature-and-environment/reid-bryson-zmaz76mazraw
    The most recent time I offered that link, someone wrote that Bryson was considered somewhat alarmist at the time for predicting an Ice Age when a Frosty Cool Age seemed more likely)

    Global Warming Denialisers cite those Frosty Cool Age predictions as a cause for mockery of the whole notion of “climate science”. Ha! Ha! Ha! Look how wrong they were THEN. How could they possibly be any righter NOW!? Ha! Ha! Ha!

    My response is to think that they were not wrong at the time. What happened is . . . is that they were OBE ( Overtaken By Events). The carbon skydumping trapped and is trapping and will trap so much heat as to steam out and overwhelm the natural cycle cooling we were due for.

  39. different clue

    So, I have read the post and the comments. Can Eric Anderson or anyone else explain which of the serious-on-their-face comments are straw men? And why?

    ( I am of course leaving aside simple blurts like Lemonhead’s comment, and leaving out any slickly argued denialist comments which may slither in here).

  40. Eric A. Anderson

    different clue:
    “Can Eric Anderson or anyone else explain which of the serious-on-their-face comments are straw men?”

    Eric A. Anderson is Webstir. You know Webstir’s politics. His lifestyle. Go back and re-read them with that context and see how many of them assume facts not in evidence to make an argument. That’s a straw man.

    Webbie is retired. No reason to hide my thoughts behind a pseudonym. That’s why I became a lawyer. And, as my last comment as Webstir stated, I really have no time to banter in the comments. I’m too busy trying to create a home for my son that will be able to survive whatever the future has in store. And the shelves in the store are looking bleak.

    Peace.

  41. Eric A. Anderson

    Willy:
    “aside from possibly hastening their “hit bottom”.

    Willy, I’ve gained nothing but the deepest respect for you over the years on here. Your honesty is admirable and I applaud it. So, I’ll take one last bite.

    You know Webstir the recovered alcoholic. That said, let ’em hit bottom. The sooner the better. Anything else is enabling.

    Which is precisely the point of my post. Calling my family’s “love” bluff.
    If you love yours, truly, then bottom is the only way. I probably wouldn’t be here today if my family hadn’t hastened my bottom by shunning me.

    “Love is constant interrogation.”
    — Milan Kundera

  42. V

    Well done Ian; a blindsided ambush by a poster now revealing his true posting identity; the whole thing stinks and I’m done with this duplicity.
    Happy trails…

  43. Willy

    Thanks WebEric.

    A wise old manager once told me that the smartest guys in the room are usually a combination of confidence and humility – they know much, but as a result now know how much more there is to know. Unfortunately his being a good guy was his undoing and he got blindsided by his mentor who took his job, then proceeded to run the place into the ground. Same thing happened again at the very next place I gigged at. I became a fan of the Dunning Kruger theory (and studies of sociopathy). But not so good at my perceived next step, how to keep their kind out of power. Still much to learn. So I’m here repeating all the same old questions looking for answers.

    You might be right. The alcoholic in my life only started changing after I set to shunning (albeit gradually). I still don’t understand the mechanism behind that.

    V has changed his own posting identity how many times? I’m also here for the laughs. My favorite DK posts elsewhere. After a heated exchange he (an oligarch-loving change denier neocon) started calling me a gay conspiracy theorist, which could not possibly be discerned from anything I’d ever typed there. The very next day his hometown meatspace buddy Jim Hoft came out as gay. Good stuff. I still laugh over that one to this day, but get too-serious again when I remember how common his kind is out there.

    I post quasi-anonymously because the less I reveal, the more I can say.

  44. That took a lot of balls Web Eric.

  45. realitychecker

    Starting to look like a classic case of inmates running the asylum.

    Bueller? Bueller?

  46. I believe shunning your family is a bad idea.

    1) Climate change is a fact of physics. It matters not one whit whether anyone believes in climate change—it is a fact anyway.

    2) Fire is the problem—especially the burning of ancient carbon stores (coal, petroleum, etc.) Rebuilding a world that doesn’t run on fire will be a massive project. One that will require millions of skilled specialists. Unless you have a family of civil engineers, materials experts, etc., there is a very low chance that they can do anything but fret anyway.

    3) If you want to rant on about climate denial—target the climate scientists who seem to think they are doing something meaningful by flying all over the world to attend conferences. Maybe if they stopped doing such things, more people would believe the problem is real.

    4) Spend you time and energy teaching you son about the things he CAN do. Have you swapped out your lights for LEDS? Did you include your kid in the shopping decisions? Have you taught him about the problems of electrical storage? Does he know how a solar cell is made and how it works? Etc.

    5) And stop worrying about your family. Just remember, time and the facts are on your side? They’ll come around. And when they do, provide them with an example of how to live a less carbon-intensive life.

  47. Plenue

    I understand the logic of what you’re saying, on a society wide scale. But within the confines of close family? What would even be the point? It isn’t likely to change their thinking, and even if it did what they, or a hundred thousand other people like them, think isn’t going to change anything. All you’d be doing is negatively impacting the familial ties of your kid.

    Also, I feel compelled to point out something that I feel is really obvious. And you’re really not going to like it. You have so much loathing for climate deniers, as well you should. But what can be said of someone who knows the climate is going to hell, and yet still chooses to have a kid?

    What to do about deniers is completely immaterial at this point. Twenty years ago it might have mattered, but we’re already over the edge of the cliff. We’ve already emitted enough CO2 to push us over the (almost certainly too low) two degrees danger threshold. The positive feedback loops have already started. It’s over. Humanity lost. At an absolute minimum we’re looking at the end of industrial civilization as we know it. Your son, if he’s still alive, is likely to be particularly healthy or happy forty or fifty years from now.

  48. Plenue

    Above should be *unlikely* to be happy or healthy.

  49. ” If you want to rant on about climate denial—target the climate scientists who seem to think they are doing something meaningful by flying all over the world to attend conferences. ”

    Nir Shaviv and Henrik Svensmark are physicists who have worked on climate change. They’re even worse than the climate change physicists that you mention. That’s because they do research that shows that the climate scientists making comfortable livings either embracing a catastrophist viewpoint, or else, as Lindzen has pointed out, just keeping their mouths shut about their non-catastrophism, because “it makes their lives easier”, have been surpassed. *

    Their GCM models have not only been found wanting (old news), but the mechanism underlying the highly variable solar magnetic effects on earth’s climate (unlike Total Solar Irradiance, which varies very little) are being elucidated by the likes of Shaviv and Svensmark.

    https://motls.blogspot.com/2017/12/svensmarks-enghoff-shaviv-publish.html

    As you are likely to be an American, which means a 60% probability that you don’t even have a single high school course in physics under your belt, you will likely not process the above. While you could seek out people capable of understanding it, why bother?

    Wouldn’t it be more fun to confront the likes of Shaviv and Svensmark, video camera rolling, and ask them why they’re such deniers? (Of course, they don’t deny that climate changes. They deny the catastrophist viewpoint, based on inferior research to their own. Ah, but why concern yourself with disambiguating the two? The goal here is to have fun at the expense of the sorts of people who are LITERALLY enabling the planet’s demise. As well as vengeance.)

    What you’re looking for is to capture the guilt-ridden bowing of heads that Shaviv and Svensmark will doubtless display. Their defensive evasions. Etc., etc. Ya know – you can document their shame, for all eternity. Or, if you’re lucky, for evidence to be presented in climate change denial trials – hopefully with death penalties meted out, involving excess heat. Boiling in oil, burning at the stake, that sort of thing.)

    Of course, if Shaviv and Svensmark look at you with pity, or just burst out laughing in your face, that would ruin part of your joy.

    Not to worry. The videographic evidence of such will infuriate the jury at their climate change denial trials, even more. They may opt for a slower form of death penalty to be executed. Ya know – SLOWLY immersing into a vat of boiling oil. That sort of thing.

    * Likewise, as both Happer and Lindzen have pointed out, framing or reframing research as climate related makes it MUCH easier to get funded. I myself used to play basketball with a guy in Princeton who hired Ph.D.’s, who told me he had run into 6 individuals (probably all physicists) who claimed climate related activities on their resumes. When he asked them what the connection was to climate, they all admitted – nothing.

  50. V

    Willy
    October 28, 2018

    Which I stated, including my previous ID’s.
    And your point is?
    Actually, it is irrelevant; I’m done!

  51. robotpliers

    People have plenty of time for their cell phones, social media, video games, and TV. But they can’t find an hour or two a week for life and death questions that affect and will affect them and their children?

    A bird in the hand is much more distracting and convenient than two in the bush.

    On the topic of the original post: If you’ve already decided that your family members don’t love your son and are too selfish and destructive (in their politics) to maintain contact with, then you actually have three paths to take. (1) Do/say nothing, just accept this is how they are, and maintain contact mostly for your son’s sake. (2) Shun them in the hopes that they will change their beliefs, as you have done. (3) Maintain even closer ties with them, which let’s you (a) keep talking to them about climate change and the likely impacts in the future, giving you more opportunities to change their minds and (b) utilize whatever contacts they have (social, business, political) and whatever money/inheritance-type resources they have to better safeguard your son’s future.

    I don’t know your situation, so I can’t say which is right for you, but, absent that information, (3) seems like the best generic choice, even if it is a bit mercenary.

  52. Willy

    Looks like somebody enjoys being the ankle-grabbing graveyard corpse. IMO, that’s a long ways from any kind of inspiringly glorious resurrection and ascension, but I guess it’s a start.

  53. ponderer

    @Eric

    Outside of those who maintain that the science is not settled (it is btw) the internal logic of my choice is unimpeachable.

    And that we proceed to ignore the precautionary principle is unforgivable.

    Blood is not thicker genocide.

    Everyone makes mistakes. One sign you might be making a logical error is to use assertions that contract each other.

    I apply the precautionary principle. I look both ways before crossing the road. I double check my math. I “sleep on” big decisions. I constantly reevaluate my stance based on new information.

    None of this jives with saying your logic is unimpeachable. Hubris and logic rarely work well together. Humility and Uncertainty are Reason’s handmaidens on the other hand.

    None of it is consistent with having family members that are committing genocide, which you don’t even really believe. Have you called the police, pressed charges. or filed suit? It sounds like you have family stuff to sort out that doesn’t have anything to do with environmental catastrophe. There is plenty of genocide going on by the way, actually real, verifiable and attributable genocide. If no ones interested in stopping that, do we have a right to expect a difference when it may impact us personally?

  54. Hugh

    metamars keeps citing these beyond the fringe cottage industry climate change deniers. There is the appeal to authority: Listen to Shaviv because he’s a physicist. OK, climate change isn’t his area of expertise, the data don’t support his thesis, literally thousands of scientists think he’s full of shit, and the vast weight of evidence supports human driven climate change, but we are supposed to believe him anyway. Why?

    Why is it that with human driven climate change, supported overwhelmingly by the data, all of a sudden, we are supposed to be skeptical of it and willing to accord equal time to every crack-brained theory that comes along? It’s not hubris. It’s good science, not to mention commonsense, to be open to new ideas and still accept the weight of the evidence.

  55. Willy

    And what’s up with deniers vacillating between “it’s not possibly happening” and “it won’t be so bad”? Jordan Peterson (anti-warming expert via the science of psychology), stated in his 12 rules that one should avoid lying. I’d think one is not being honest if they’re experimenting with both denier tracks, even claiming expertise with both. Maybe just pick one and stick with it?

  56. different clue

    Does the theory or theories that Metamars cites have a general name that can be referred to when wishing to have a discussion about them? Something like ” Solar MagnetoCyclism” or something?

    Whether that theory or group of theories ( and the scientists working them) has an easy referrent name or not . . . does that theory/ those theorists have a record of having made predictions about climate trends over the past few decades based on their solar magnetic field change observations? If there is a record of such near-future climate predictions on their part, could someone offer us a link to that body of published predictions by them? So we can see if they predicted near-term climate events accurately before those climate events happened? Because if there is, and if they did, and if their predictions came true more often than random chance would allow, then their theory will have proven to have some predictive value, and would therefor be worth a serious reading-about.

  57. Heliopause

    “the internal logic of my choice is unimpeachable.”

    Well, sure, assuming all the unstated premises. Namely, that family shunning will lead to any meaningful change in voting patterns, which will lead to the election of preferable candidates, which will lead to a slowing or halting climate change. All of those premises are problematic, some more than others. Now, if you’d simply made the case that shunning your denialist relatives is something you do to make yourself feel better, fine, it’s your own personal business and all of us make similar calculations in our family lives.

  58. different clue

    About shunning . . . . when people try shunning an economic/bussiness marketplace actor, that shunning is called “boycott” I believe. Do I have the definition right?

    It would be hard to shun ( boycott? shuncott?) the Merchants of Fossil Carbon because they have engineered, fabricated, machined and assembled the Built Environment World to run with THEIR product, THEIRS and none other. So it would be impossible to shun the Merchants of Fossil altogether. Does this mean no one can do anything about anything?

    Maybe not. On the field of economic combat, the effectiveness or not of a boycott is an additive numbers game . . . enough people boycotting the target enough so as to reach a threshhold of pain-bearability . . . . over which the target suddenly begins to fear losing some of its money and power.
    Perhaps in the crude arithmetic of economic combat, two people half-shunning Big Fossil would be equal to one person totally shunning Big Fossil altogether. In other words, two half-shuns equals one shun. Or 50 million half-shuns equals 25 million shuns.

    Can 50 million people bring themselves to grind their life around to where they are using half as much fossil carbon energy as what they are using today? In the teeth of a civilization designed to burn as much fossil fuel as fast as possible to do anything at all? Perhaps people need to make room in their hearts for some hatred . . . the cold bitter kind which lasts for years and decades . . . and let it direct their actions against the target.

    Imagine 50 millions pairs of Strong Blue Hands all wrapped around the neck of Big Koch and Coal. Squeezing flat the bussiness airway letting business reach the lungs of Koch and squeezing flat the carotid arteries which allow the revenue streams to reach Koch Brain-Command Central. Is it not a beautiful vision?

    Every dollar is a bullet on the field of economic combat.
    Nobody owes the rich a living.
    I am not my keeper’s brother.

    With a head full of plans and a heart full of hate, we can make things happen.

  59. Plenue

    @different clue

    As far as I know, it doesn’t have a singular name. It’s also bunk. It’s impossible to square with the simple fact that we’re in the weakest solar cycle in a century, and yet the planet continues to warm.

    metamars is a perfect example of someone who should be shunned. They have nothing beyond argument from authority, both for their sources (who they’re convinced are brave antiheroes, as opposed to hacks who are intellectually and ethically bankrupt), and for why you should listen to metamars (“I have degrees!”). Also they peddle in the downright hilarious conspiracy that there’s some vast nefarious plot by mainstream scientists to conjure up a fake climate crisis so they can live off the money it brings in. Oh yeah, those $40,000 a year research grants really let you live the high life!

    Svensmark, by the way, doesn’t just have different ideas about why the planet is warming. He doesn’t think it’s warming dangerously to begin with. That alone shows he’s not worth listening to. It’s 100% pure bullshit. The arctic has melted so much that tankers are now crossing it, in winter, without the aid of icebreakers. We’re well past the stage where ‘it’s not happening’ can be met with anything other than mockery. Hell, increasingly regular people can see first hand how the seasons are messed up right where they live.

  60. different clue

    @ Plenue,

    I would tend to agree with you about Metamars. But he deserves a fair chance to give us all a link to his scientists-of-choice’s predictions for the climate based on their theories. After all, if his scientists really have a theory, they ( or somebody) should have been able to make some predictions based on that theory. Right? So . . . I await the link to predictions based on the Metamars theory. I’ll go ahead and call it the Metamars theory as an easy referrent that anyone reading these threads will get.

  61. @Plenue

    “As far as I know, it doesn’t have a singular name. It’s also bunk. It’s impossible to square with the simple fact that we’re in the weakest solar cycle in a century, and yet the planet continues to warm.”

    And here we see the working of a political, tribalistic mind. Not a scientific one. A scientific mind can operate in a mental space of multiple causation, such that causal forces can reinforce, or counteract each other. Indeed, a scientific mind HAS to operate in a space of multiple causation, typically; and certainly when dealing with complex systems.

    Or are you just lazy? If you had bothered reading the article I linked to, you’d have read,

    “the calorimetric sea level based measurements imply that a bit more than half of the 20th century warming should be attributed to the sun.” (The rest is taken to be mostly anthropocentric GHG effects.)

    Apparently, his attribution to solar magnetic forcing has been revised upwards from as recently as 2011, as he says, (in his paper with Ziskin, http://www.phys.huji.ac.il/~shaviv/articles/20thCentury.pdf, that is also linked to in the linked blog post that I gave)

    “We also show that a non-thermal solar component is necessarily present, indicating that the total solar contribution to the 20th century global warming, of DTsolar = 0.27 ± 0.07 C, is much larger than can be expected from variation in the total solar irradiance alone. However, we also find that the largest contribution to the 20th century warming comes from anthropogenic sources, with DTman = 0.42 ± 0.11 C.”

    That is my general answer to your comment.

    As for more specifically squaring Shaviv’s ocean calorimetry analysis with the latest solar cycle, I’m not going to address it, but would welcome anybody who honestly looks into this. I retired from trying to rationally engage the climate doomsayers some years ago. The recent Shaviv/Svensmark paper was a pleasant surprise, that I wouldn’t have missed if I had been following climate science as I did before I gave up this fabulously expensive (in terms of time and sacrifice of career) hobby. Your comment, and that of the clueless hugh, are hardly incentive for me to give time and energy doing the equivalent of, to use Barney Frank’s colorful analogy, talking to a dining room table. (I do appreciate, however, different clue’s attitude, which shows him or her to have the sort of mind that could develop into an honest scientist. Even so, finally having a full time job, albeit one that ends in March, I intend to get my z’s, and do my 2 hour commute safely. You’d be better off exploring with the assistance of a professional, working physicist, anyway.)

    Of course, they’d have to understand that Shaviv’s method is deeper – both figuratively and literally – than just looking at surface temperatures (as you can grok from one of the comments, regarding a criticism of Svalgaard’s.) The thermal capacity of the oceans is (from memory) about 33x the thermal capacity of the atmosphere. While humans may naturally be “atmospheric-centric”, the laws of physics are not. Ultimately, the ocean’s thermal capacity will be the dog that wags the atmospheric thermal capacity tail.

    From Shaviv’s earlier paper, “Using the Oceans as a Calorimeter to Quantify the Solar
    Radiative Forcing”

    “We begin with a direct reconstruction of the global
    oceanic heat flux using the thermal heat content of the top
    700m of the global oceans over the past 5 decades [Ishii
    et al., 2006], and differentiate it. Since we do not expect the
    11-year oscillations to penetrate deeper than about 200m
    (depending on the mixed layer depth and the actual diffusion
    coefficient), there is no need to add deeper ocean data,
    which would just add noise.”

  62. Willy

    A scientific mind can operate in a mental space of multiple causation, such that causal forces can reinforce, or counteract each other.

    So science, with all its many worldwide organizations, no longer contains any scientific minds, while oil companies and conservative evangelicals (overwhelming percentage of deniers in my own travels) do? Can we now expect that cosmic rays is going to be that causal force and expect to find consistency between all the oil companies and evangelical deniers from now on?

  63. different clue

    I notice that neither Metamars nor anyone else has offered evidence of any near-future climate-changes which adherents of the Metamars Theories have made, so we can see if their predictions came true or not. In other words, no evidence that any of the Metamars Theories has been put to any sort of real-world stress test.

    If Metamars or someone else brings such links, I will go ahead and take a look at them.

  64. different clue

    By the way, different subject but same basic principle as in my comment just above. If a theory or analytical outlook has been used to make a real-world prediction about some within-our-own-lifetimes event, a prediction which can be observed to have come true or NOT come true; then that theory or analytical outlook has been subjected to a real-world stress test.

    And IF the prediction comes true, then the theory or analytical outlook which was used to make that prediction will have been proven to be reality-based to just that extent.

    And in that spirit of stress-testing and reality-basing of theories and outlooks, Colonel Pat Lang over at Sic Semper Tyrannis has just made a prediction which will be proven true or false in the observable real-world. And here it is.
    https://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2018/10/httpssouthfrontorgsyrian-war-report-october-29-2018-putin-says-idlib-offensive-is-still-option-if-terrorist-threat-remai.html

  65. @different clue

    “I notice that neither Metamars nor anyone else has offered evidence of any near-future climate-changes which adherents of the Metamars Theories have made, so we can see if their predictions came true or not.”

    I think you are asking for the impossible. The Shaviv theory integrally depends on solar magnetic effects. While there’s a well known fuzzy periodicity of 11 years in the sunspot cycle, the details are more complicated. It turns out that Svalgaard has recently posted a 9,000 year reconstruction of solar activity. See https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/10/27/svalgaard-paper-reconstruction-of-9000-years-of-solar-activity/, especially figure 4. It’s resolution is obviously nowhere near 11 year intervals. However, even if you had that sort of resolution, making it agree with the less finely grained results presented by Svalgaard would not inspire anybody into believing they could either predict or postdict sunspot activity with any significant accuracy. I’m not a solar physicist, but I will say that, AFAIK, nobody has even tried to to this.

    We can look back at historical data with some surety, but AFAIK, nobody can look forward, not even Svalgaard! Even if you somehow knew the magneto-hydrodynamics of the sun in great detail at any particular instant of time, it’s a chaotic system so you still would have no good means of predicting an exact future. And, of course, you’re not going to know the dynamic state of the sun in intimate detail, to begin with.

    So, while you can’t use Shaviv’s analysis to predict the future much, you can still study it’s veracity by examining the past. And Shaviv has done just that.

    I suggest you start out by reading Shaviv’s “Reply to Eschenbach” @ http://sciencebits.com/reply-eschenbach . Then, at least look his 2009 paper that he links to, in this section:

    “Figure 1: Eschenbach’s figure, where he correlates the altimetry data after it was detrended and had the ENSO component removed, with the sunspot number. He claims that there is no fit, but in fact, one expects the sea level rate to be largest when the sun is most active, and the sea level rate to be smallest when least active. This is seen in the data as expected!

    It is quite upsetting that Eschenbach did this mistake even though it was clearly explained in our paper, and it is also explained in my previous paper from 2008, where one can clearly see that the sea level change rate varies in sync with solar activity over more than 80 years.”

    Hopefully, you already took a look at Box 5 from the motls link I gave:

    “Box 5: Why is the CR/climate link ignored?

    Given all the empirical evidence that has accumulated until now, the climate community should have considered it seriously, and even if the actual mechanism was until now missing, the empirical evidence showing and quantifying the solar climate link shouldn’t have been ignored by most of the community.

    The reason is actually very simple and lays in the implication of the link. If the sun has a large effect on climate, then its increase activity over the 20th century should have contributed at least some of the global warming. In fact, the calorimetric sea level based measurements imply that a bit more than half of the 20th century warming should be attributed to the sun. If so, the role that humans have had is diminished. In fact, when one considers the role that the sun has had over the 20th century, one finds that a) the temperature variations can actually be much better explained (with a smaller residual) and the required climate sensitivity is on the low side (about 1 to 1.5°C increase per CO2 doubling, compared with the canonical range of 1.5 to 4.5°C advocated by the IPCC, see Ziskin & Shaviv 2012). The low climate sensitivity implies that the same emission scenarios will give rise to more modest temperature increases over the 21st century. These good news imply that we are not in as dire a situations as we often hear. But many do not like hearing this.

    Now that the mechanism is actually known, there should be no excuse in ignoring it any further, but given the above implications, it would most likely still be ignored.”

    Lastly, as with many things cosmological, the application of COSMIC rays impacting Earth’s climate, similarly to the solar magnetic effects, is sort of breath-taking. I would say even beautiful. We’re talking about an effect that follows from the earth passing through the spiral arms of the galaxy, with a periodicity of something like 100 million years, with 10 million of those years inside the spiral arm.

    There was a great film on the subject, I saw some years ago. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANMTPF1blpQ

  66. different clue

    @Metamars,

    I thank you for the obvious time and sincere intent invested in your detailed reply to my comment. While my initial psycho-mental reaction is-in-part one of disappointment, I will read the comment at slow, think, and then either respond or not depending on what usefulness I feel I can contribute.

  67. Mojave Wolf

    ::said in best Agent Smith voice:: Thank you, Mr Anderson.

    ::dropping the voice::

    That link is much appreciated. I used to cite studies out the wazoo many years ago, but have come to the conclusion that the people who still won’t admit human-caused climate change just don’t want to know, and know amount of evidence will convince them as long as someone posts some faux study gobbleydegook they can hang their hats on.

    And then you have “my scientists are better than your scientists” arguments, “we should actually be in a cooling cycle based on the sun etc and if it wasn’t for that things would be even worse” vs. “sunspots are worse than ever” (the “cosmic rays from out in the galaxy” is a new one), et al.

    And there are still a few hangers on claiming we’re not actually melting, and with them there’s really no point; if you refuse to understand something, nothing can make you understand. What was that old Saturday Night Live news skit from the late 80’s or early 90’s — “Dinosaurs roam North Dakota during record 100 degree December heat wave; Bush administration says no evidence this is due to hypothetical global warming”.

    But who’s willing to put up money, and who’s winning the bets based on their respective predictive models? Doesn’t take a lot of study to understand . . .

    Again, thank you. 🙂

    ******

    That said, I strongly disagree w/shunning as a persuasive tactic in this instance; and I do think simple ignorance/believing the wrong experts is the problem here, not that all climate deniers are evil. I know too many very nice people, who are only guilty of choosing the wrong influences (including one conservative Christian couple with a truly horrible preacher who they love dearly, & who do animal rescue and actually care about the environment, they just have stupid and will-get-us-all-killed beliefs); the people to go after are the people who do know and are deliberately spreading lies.

  68. Willy

    A lot of people know that guy who had the cool epiphany, some slick idea, elegant no matter how they looked at it, who wrapped their reputations around it, maybe even their livelihoods. But after a while serious problems appeared with the idea and that guy still defended his idea like some dieting lady gobbling olestra chips. And then somebody finally tells the dieting women that not only does her butt still look big, but she’s farting a lot too. I get why they know they’re wrong (at some level), but steadfastly continue to debate for it anyways. I probably do it myself.

    I don’t think this is like that.

    As the duly designated conspiracy theorist / representative from the kids table, who’s seen one too many Youtube videos about “Century of the Self” and Cambridge Analytica… I think this is how it’s done. You hire a bunch of guys who hire another bunch of guys to dissemble stuff at certain targets, to sow a bit of FUD. Okay, I may be wrong about this, but one thing’s for sure. For better or worse, metamars is now the Cosmic Ray Guy. He’s stuck with that theory. No changing to some other slicker denier theory. And last tag no tagbacks.

  69. @different clue

    @different clue

    And thank you for your politeness.

    I also appreciate your scientist-like interest, not to mention your honest skepticism. When I asked my undergrad math professor, who I took courses in topology from, to write me a recommendation for graduate school, he agreed, saying that I reminded him of himself. We had argued about some point or other, that I’ve long since forgotten, and he apparently was impressed that I cared enough about the truth of the matter, and wasn’t cowed by his position and obvious mastery of the material. I lost the argument, but got a good enough recommendation to go to a very good grad school (which I didn’t graduate from).

    Your desire for a predictive theory shows the right spirit, but we are constrained in how much we can know by Nature, itself. Karl Popper’s definition of science, which, IIRC, is as a “way of knowing”, always struck me as insightful. As well as the necessity of falsifiability. (Or, if not necessity, extreme desirability. I think writing physics papers on the first few seconds of the Big Bang, e.g., will forever elude complete falsifiability.)

    A few more points.

    The first is, that in the movie, they talk about the earth taking something like 250 million years to circle around the galaxy, passing through 4 main spiral arms. I quoted 100 million years via a quick google, since I hadn’t seen the movie in years, and wasn’t sure. I’ll guess that these 2 very different figures probably refer to the period of the earth’s rotation around the center of the galaxy, and the period of rotation of the spiral arms (i.e., the bulk of the galaxy, itself.) But I’m not sure, and don’t want to look further.

    Secondly, driving to work yesterday morning I heard a recent interview of Svensmark (I think here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFlNS2PX4yI) , and he thinks global cooling starting in the near futurev is possible, due to an anticipated period of a quiet sun, though he was shy to predict it with any certainty. He was more comfortable saying the temperature would either stagnate, or decline, for something like 20 years.

    3rdly, Shaviv’s analysis yields “smaller residuals” than IPCC models. From memory, he means “smaller residual errors” – i.e, greater accuracy.

    Lastly, I was interested in the biographical blurbs in my algebra textbook long before I developed a love of mathematics. I’ve also been convinced, even from a tender age of about 7, that people are fundamentally irrational. (That based on interactions with my own parents.) I also majored in biology and psychology, thinking to become a psychiatrist, before I switched to physics and math.

    My point here is that my interest in the human side of what we call science has made it relatively easy for me to process the dysfunction in what I’ve called ‘meta science’ (sociology, power structure, funding flows, etc.). If you want to understand how something as scandalous as a replication crisis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis) can FLOURISH, you simply can’t take claims by ‘scientific authorities’ at face value. There is more going on here than ‘honest mistakes.’.

    This, of course, makes things much harder for citizens who don’t have scientific credentials, and have lives to live, so can’t or won’t invest great globs of time trying to evaluate claims and counter claims completely beyond their level of expertise. I get that, even if I sometimes lose my patience with such people when lack humility and genuine skepticism.

  70. Willy

    Personally, I’d leave it to the big boys over at CERN. But sadly, they’re also mostly “scientists” who cannot be trusted (with many Europeans). Are there any liberty loving laymen available to help out with the CLOUD tests?

  71. totti fan

    Eric,
    Are you a vegan?

  72. Dr Roy Spencer, a famous climate science “denier” (who happens to be a climate scientist, who, of course, has never denied that the climate changes), recently criticized justifying CO2 catastrophism of various flavors, on the basis of protecting children.

    “This is the state of climate science today: if you support the alarmist narrative, you can exaggerate threats and connections with human activities, fake experiments, break government rules, intimidate scientific journal editors (and make them resign),and even violate the law.

    As long as you can say you are doing it for the children.”

    http://www.drroyspencer.com/2018/09/my-tucker-carlson-interview-last-night-and-calling-out-bill-nye-james-hansen/

    If you read the article, you’ll see that “fake experiments” refers to Bill Nye’s fraudulent experiment “demonstrating” the green house gas principle in a tube. It lives on, in youtube, brainwashing countless rubes. I wrote about Nye’s fraud some years ago: “AL GORE/BILL NYE ‘CLIMATE 101’ VIDEO FOUND TO BE FRAUDULENT + HOW YOU CAN REPLICATE THE EXPERIMENT, YOURSELF” @ https://shadowproof.com/2012/12/11/al-gorebill-nye-climate-101-video-found-to-be-fraudulent-how-you-can-replicate-the-experiment-yourself/

  73. Eric A. Anderson

    metamars:
    Do you have children?
    I’d be interested in hearing who, among those who commented on this thread, do.

  74. @Erik Anderson

    No, I do not.

    However, I often find myself feeling love and concern for the plight of younger Americans, moreso than other subgroups of suffering souls. Partly because of the fact that I’ve felt a connection to Newark, long before I lived there for just a few years….. ( I believe this is karmic. I was born in Newark, but this soul connection has to be deeper. I’ve felt it basically my whole life.) And partly because I’ve been touched by the series “Best Shot” (episode 4 book mark is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzSEONnq4Wc)…. And partly for other reasons, I believe my next civic oriented web application will not involve politics, at all.

    It will, instead, hopefully be used to turn Newark into the “hugging capital of the world”. And then, if successful, will naturally spread to other locations.

    I’m not the least bit concerned that the young people I hope to touch will be getting fried because of “climate change”.

    I respect the basic idea of following the precautionary principle. Wrt climate change, this was well articulated byNoam Chomsky. However, I’m not impressed with the superficial approach by Chomsky. Does he even know that, historically, cold has killed many times more people than heat? (As mentioned by Dr. Spencer in my last link.) Where is his concern with the precautionary principle for people freezing to death and/or starving to death during prolonged cold spells??

    Chomsky teaches at MIT. While Chomsky SAYS that “it’s actually much worse than climate scientist have been telling the public” (not an exact quote) one of the most famous of climate scientists who pooh pooh the alarmist is Richard Lindzen. That’s Richard Lindzen, of MIT. Where is his record of engaging Lindzen – who he literally could have walked over to talk to, or have lunch with?

    Oh, right. No accounts of such common sense actions exist – not that I’ve ever heard of, and I’ve paid a lot of attention to both Chomsky and Lindzen. Chomsky – who I take to be not just brilliant, but exceptionally ethical – completely FAILS when it comes to the subject of climate change. Just like he completely FAILED when it comes to so-called “conspiracy theories”. There’s enough evidence pointing to conspiracy behind the JFK assassination to drive a truck through, e.g., but Chomsky is quite the denier when it comes to conspiracies. (A much more rational approach is presented by Michael Parenti, who is also quite the articulate lefty.)

    As for you poisoning your own child’s relationships with close relatives – people who naturally have more concern for his welfare than complete strangers – I suggest that you explain carefully that this is your best judgement, and that, like all parents, you can and will make mistakes.

    If Svensmark is correct, and temperatures stagnate or decline for 20 years, and your child loses his opportunity to be nourished by loving relationships, during formative years, no less, you will want him to understand that you had his best interests in heart and mind, but that you were just wrong.

    Otherwise, you may find him shunning you, in years to come.

  75. Eric A. Anderson

    That’s a lot of words for a yes or no question. I stopped reading at no.

  76. Plenue

    @metamars

    I’m sorry, are you literally claiming that CO2 isn’t a greenhouse gas, or that greenhouse gases aren’t a thing?

    Again, ships are now traversing the arctic without the aid of icebreakers. No one is buying your bullshit anymore.

  77. @Plenue

    Wrong on both counts.

    though I’ll note that I’ve never studied the the derivation of the green house gas formula(s), nor know of any controlled lab experiments demonstrating the GHG effect (as Nye pretended to do)*, nor know the details of, or detailed evidence for, a fluid friction theory (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPTiTFMhZrg). I vaguely recall a paper reviewed on wattsupwiththat.com purportedly showing direct evidence of a green house gas effect, using satellite data.

    My belief is similar to that of most of ‘famous’ scientists who a) know the subject matter and b) have publicly expressed their beliefs. Viz., that climate sensitivity to CO2 (as a GHG) is about 1 – 1.5 deg C / CO2 doubling. (BTW guys like Happer, Lindzen and Dyson have actually worked on climate models, I believe of the GCM variety.)

    This in no way represents a global catastrophe, as such. The only plausible scenario in which such a small temperature increase might result in mass destruction involves melting of the Arctic ice cap. Not because of a trivial net air temperature change, or a trivial net surface temperature change; but rather because of changes in ocean circulation behavior.

    Roughly half (probably most) of the temperature increases over the last 100 years is from natural factors. Given the work of Shaviv and Svensmark, I consider the evidence of this being primarily driven by solar magnetic effects to be pretty much a slam dunk. And, furthermore, the IPCC suppressing of these same effects to be an example of omitted variable fraud.

    Finally, regarding arctic ice cover, the go to guy for a more comprehensive look is Tony Heller. You can start here: https://realclimatescience.com/government-arctic-sea-ice-fraud/

    * I’m sure it’s easy to demonstrate that CO2 can absorb photons in certain energy states implicated in the GHG theory. But demonstrating a net flux of energy in 1 direction, in a large column of air…. I’ve never heard of such an experiment.

  78. Willy

    Tony Heller (Steven Goddard) has the shtick of claiming that scientists are collectively lying about temperature increases. This flies in the face of cosmic ray causation, which agrees that temperatures are rising but the causes are not man-made.

    I’d advise deniers stick to one denier belief system.

    Christianity is in steep decline in the USA. The talent pool of faith-based reasoners is declining. Aside from that, younger Americans are more concerned about AGW than older ones:
    https://news.gallup.com/poll/234314/global-warming-age-gap-younger-americans-worried.aspx

    This all means that average citizens are increasingly wondering why deniers have so many different belief systems, when AGW proponents have only one.

    Think about it. The time is rapidly arriving when paid kleptocratic shills will be the first to feel the gores and burns from pitchforks and torches. As a simple armchair prognosticator, even I can foresee that it will not be pretty.

  79. “Tony Heller (Steven Goddard) has the shtick of claiming that scientists are collectively lying about temperature increases. This flies in the face of cosmic ray causation, which agrees that temperatures are rising but the causes are not man-made.”

    You seemed confused. Badly.

    An immediate red flag is your lack of specificity. Another is you not providing any links.

    Your first sentence seems to imply that Heller exposing the data manipulations changed a monotonic phenomena back to a statistically flat one. (I’d ask you exactly what you think you meant, if I was interested in engaging. But you are obviously so far gone, it’s not worth my time. It’s not even clear to me that you are capable of honestly understanding and characterizing Heller’s work.)

    A nice example of Heller’s work is this page: https://realclimatescience.com/2018/11/fake-data-the-basis-of-climate-science/ . E.g., if you look at the graph labeled “Average Us Annual Temperature” , which spans 123 years, you can see a gradual rise in temperature even in the “unadjusted” version. (Since the satellite data era began in the 70’s, I believe, that tells you immediately that something is wrong with the “adjustment” of per-1970 data. How did they get their revisions? Go back in a time machine? They can’t claim calibration errors of non-existent satellites.)

    This doesn’t square with your non-specific statement (even if you weren’t assuming monotonicity), so you’re basically making up crap to make yourself feel good.

    “The time is rapidly arriving when paid kleptocratic shills will be the first to feel the gores and burns from pitchforks and torches”

    It’s lunatic statements such as this, which I nevertheless take seriously, which have, for the first time, made me partisan. I now clearly and strongly prefer the “Mussolinis” (Republicans) to the “Nazis” (Democrats).

    If anybody finds the previous paragraph incomprehensible, or alarmist, they can read and listen to Jordan Peterson to grasp the logic.

  80. Willy

    Tony Heller = Steven Goddard
    http://www.seattleweekly.com/news/climate-change-denier-testifies-for-40-minutes-in-washington-senate-environment-committee/

    Climate scientists are intentionally altering their temperature data:
    https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2014/06/23/noaanasa-dramatically-altered-us-temperatures-after-the-year-2000/

    Tony Heller believes that climate scientists are lying. Yet, you’ve said right here (no link required) that cosmic rays is what’s causing increasing temperatures.

    You can’t have it both ways.

    And you were always partisan, just not being honest about it. Logic is what should persuade the ‘scientifically minded’ to choose ‘sides’, and never the rantings of “lunatics”.

  81. Yes, they are “lying”. Fudging data is a form of lying. And I EXPLICITLY pointed you to a SPECIFIC instance of a before/after graph to illustrate QUANTITATIVELY the sort of fudging/lying we’re talking about.

    BOTH graphs CLEARLY show temperatures increasing. Therefore, in the context of this particular graph, it is you who is lying. Or else you blind, or else “geometrically challenged”.(

    You have gone back up the abstraction ladder, after I gave you enough information to avoid that. Instead of educating yourself, and admitting that you were wrong, you have doubled down. It’s possible that you really don’t understand that the graph contradicts your bogus dichotomy. If the truth of the matter was a simple as you are suggesting, then you’d have a point. But the truth of the matter is NOT as simple as you’re suggesting.

    It’s also possible that you don’t understand what I’ve clearly written, about solar magnetic effects being responsible for about half (and probably most), but therefore (by implication) NOT ALL of global warming.

    In this case, you should ask a friend or family member to help you out. You’re clearly not up to the job.

    It scares me that people like you can (presumably) vote.

    “And you were always partisan”. Another lie. And, furthermore, one of those “I know you better than you know yourself” lies. Pathetic.

    It’s my belief that compulsive lying is a spiritual ill. Your problems are deeper than an apparent inability to understand simple graphs. Your malicious intent (“pitchforks and torches”) also point to you needing more than an education in math and critical thinking.

  82. Willy

    metamars, I couldn’t care less about your feelings. Trying to emotionally manipulate at the level of a toddler isn’t very scientific.

    People around here prefer intellectual honesty. I can admit that I’m a far better bullshit detector than I am a climate scientist. You can’t admit that climatic skepticism is no longer a healthy skepticism.

    Once, there were four distinct schools of skepticism:
    1. Not happening.
    2. Maybe happening, not our fault.
    3. Maybe happening, maybe our fault, not gonna be so bad.
    4. Maybe happening, maybe our fault, maybe gonna be bad, so lets party like it’s 1999.

    So now you’re saying that current denier science attempts to combine all four into a mix which also, accepts that climatologists may also be right about AGW. A little.

    Sadly for you, I’m also a skeptic. Healthy skepticism demands that you can call a spade a spade. You once mentioned scientific groupthink. So what motivates all these scientists into groupthink? The meme of “government pays our way” would make sense, if current American government (both major parties) weren’t in bed with big business (no link required, should be painfully obvious by now).

    Far more plausible is an energy cabal strategy to keep profits topped up by stalling anti-warming mandates (Google “I-1631” to find out who the primary opponents are) until warming becomes painfully obvious, after which their descendants (they hope) will employ and profit from some kind of CO2 capture technology.

    https://phys.org/news/2018-03-co2-usable-energy.html
    https://www.cnet.com/news/this-co2-machine-could-transform-the-way-we-fight-climate-change/

    Back in my corporate days, we called this “teeter-totter design”. Get the customer to buy that, then buy this as a fix for “that”. I lost my career by being honest, not lying as you claim you would not have, when one of their “this” could have led to many deaths. I doubt you would have had the courage to do what I did. Modern conservatives cannot be relied upon to do the right thing.

  83. Eric A. Anderson

    metamars:

    First you lost me with the fact that you don’t have kids, but care enough about your proxys that you have a stake in the fight.

    Then, you cited Goddard.

    Have you, by chance, taken a look at his twitter feed and witnessed all the rest of the corporatist propaganda he spews and retweets on a daily basis?

    Witness: https://twitter.com/SteveSGoddard

    He’s an agenda driven corporate flack that should be shunned by his family if they give two cents about the impact of climate change upon their progeny.

    At long last, have you left no sense of decency, sir?
    — Joseph N. Welch

  84. Willy

    But the Koch brothers pay so well. Two billionaires in the pocket is worth more than tens of thousands of scientists in the bush.

  85. Plenue

    @metamars

    “I vaguely recall a paper reviewed on wattsupwiththat.com purportedly showing direct evidence of a green house gas effect, using satellite data. ”

    Oh good. Anthony Watts (may) have caught up with 120 year old science.

    https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14786449608620846

  86. Jim

    Please reconsider taking that action.

    I was in approximate agreement with your politics on this until 6 months ago. Not being a climate scientist, I saw no alternative to simply accepting what ‘97% of climate scientists say’. If we can’t rely on the relevant branch of science, we have no collective decision-making mechanism at all, do we?

    I have since discovered, through unrelated reading, that consensus narratives in our society do not work the way I thought they did. For many issues, the top-down, establishment-backed secondary sources that most of us rely on flat-out contradict what bottom-up, primary sources say.

    This probably includes some scientific issues. I do not yet know if global warming is one of them, but there is simply no way for any citizen to know without studying primary sources. This is a terrible way to run a world, unworkable in fact, and I don’t like it one bit, but it is true.

    Here’s something I have looked into a bit: there’s a good chance institutional science doesn’t know how the freaking sun works.

    I’m probably average-left relative to the readership here, but having spent a few months looking at what’s been swept ‘under the carpet’ in a variety of areas, I’m coming to share the right wing’s distrust of the pronouncements of our present intellectual elites. This is by no means anti-intellectualism — I actually have a recent Ph.D. in an unrelated area of science. I think we have structural problems.

    Be kind to your right-wing friends and family. There’s some chance their instincts might be closer to the mark than yours here.

  87. Willy

    Jim, you do realize that you’ve just proclaimed that our species deepest and best thinkers, while trying their best to use the most objective methods available to our species for discerning truth, are collectively full of shit?

    Are you are saying that as ever increasing population and technology drives our species into a completely novel and uncertain future, that our best and brightest are themselves, incapable of leadership?

    If this is truly the case, then I’d think we all deserve to die and be replaced by something more sane and less destructive. If this is truly the case, then what’s the point of even trying to “be civilized”?

    Knowing “how the freaking sun works” is completely irrelevant to being able to measure that sun’s output:
    https://www.skepticalscience.com/solar-activity-sunspots-global-warming.htm

    I don’t want to pay any carbon tax, or see poor populations die, or be dominated by some kind of nihilistic scientific borg, any more than anybody else does. But I really do believe that common sense needs to be more common.

  88. Jim

    Willy,

    You are correct re: the scope of what I am claiming. Yes I am aware of it. I see that you find it as distasteful as I do. I cannot help that.

    I’m saying our society is presently structured in such a way that it is not at all irrational for citizens to doubt that accredited experts are free to “try their best to use the most objective methods available”, or that they are incentivized to do so.

    There’s no way for me, guy on the internet, to prove to you that I’ve come to this place reluctantly, after a half century of being a good little authority-believing straight-A student, so I won’t try. I’m probably just a crazed woo seeking conspiracy kook.

  89. Willy

    The incentives are far more on the denier side of the fence.

    In my own meatspace travels, the overwhelming majority of deniers come across just like Candace Owens, who “just don’t believe in global warming“:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRmAH9JhAxA

    IMO, there’s usually some kind of actual personal benefit in “not believing” hard data. Quite obviously, if Owens came out as an AGW believer she’d lose almost all of her fan base and income as a result. It’s not in her best selfish self-interest to publicly believe. Everything else is a rationalization, which comes across quite clearly in the video.

    I was once an authority believing straight A student / perfect employee who ignored the basic principles of tribal power and wound up with career ruined, ironically, mostly at the hands of my conservative Christian brethren, for not doing a single thing that Jesus would consider wrong.

    And no, metamars, there were five others with completely different personalities and behaviors than I who also got theirs, one at a time after I got mine. What we all had in common was high workplace integrity and competency. Management had wanted each of us out to get rid of what they’d perceived as personal threats to their own power.

    My primary motivation in all this is to better understand how it might be possible to use the principles of tribal power for the greater good. Or, to at least become more effective at combating those few who care nothing about such things and are skilled at getting their way to the detriment of the rest of us.

  90. Plenue

    @Jim

    I love the idea that a great mass of scientists trudging along on minuscule research grants are the villains, and the billionaires and oil companies whose livelihoods depend on fossil fuel industries continuing to exist are the ones we should trust.

    https://twitter.com/scottwesterfeld/status/446805144781348865?lang=en

  91. Jim

    @Willy, @Plenue:

    Yes, it does seem more likely that money would bias things in the direction of CO2 not being responsible. I’ve made that argument myself many times. However, our outsider guesses re: the plans of oligarchs are not a substitute for actually looking at primary sources. And I’ll reiterate that I have *not yet done this myself*. I’m making a more general point about our current mechanisms for determining consensus. I would probably not have posted an argument on such general grounds had I not been motivated by the OP’s stated plans to break up his family based on character assumptions which I suggest may be unwarranted.

  92. Hey, Erik, thanks for alerting me to Goddard/Heller’s twitter feed! One of his tweets points to a youtube of Rep Hank Johnson, a Democratic climate science expert who won reelection with 73 percent of the vote.

    https://realclimatescience.com/2018/11/guam-is-safe-again/

    Maybe you should show this video to your son, so he can appreciate the Democrats who have educated themselves on the climate change issue, and all the great politicians and scientist who have locked arms to save us from this coming scourge.

  93. @Plenue

    The average US salary for a Ph.D. scientist is $97,780 per year. That at least allows them to trudge along in style. https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/phd-scientist-salary-SRCH_KO0,13.htm

    Of course, there are some scientific trudge-alongers who do better. Take James Hanson, e.g..

    “NASA records released to resolve litigation filed by the American Tradition Institute reveal that Dr. James E. Hansen, an astronomer, received approximately $1.6 million in outside, direct cash income in the past five years for work related to — and, according to his benefactors, often expressly for — his public service as a global warming activist within NASA.”

    https://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/18/dr-james-hansens-growing-financial-scandal-now-over-a-million-dollars-of-outside-income/

    Dr. Michael Mann, the inventor of that famous hockey stick graph, is another over-achieving trudge-alonger. He reportedly pulls down $10,000 per speech. Plus travel expenses, of course. http://florida.mediatrackers.org/2013/01/16/climate-alarmist-michael-mann-charges-10000-speaker-fee/

  94. @ Willy

    “The incentives are far more on the denier side of the fence.”

    Oh, really? Why don’t you look into this SERIOUSLY, and report back your findings? (Preferably in a new diary, as this one is getting long in the tooth.) Fortunately for you, I didn’t find the reference I’ve quoted in years past, after searching for 3 minutes, so am not going to bother.

  95. To clarify, I’m specifically referring to where the big research $$ go.

  96. Willy

    metamars, how did you get to this place? I’ve already told you my story. You don’t really want us to assume that you were unfairly denied access to climate school and want revenge, do you? And you surely don’t want me to lump you in with the common tribal denier who makes a big deal out of a snowy day.

    As I’ve already stated, I’m open to the possibility that our corporate overlords have all of these things under control, with the perfect warming solution sitting in some secret warehouse awaiting that right time when it can be heroically unveiled, without profits skipping a beat.

    But then, I’ve had sit downs with three different VP level overlords from a famous name global corporation. I was not impressed. In fact, this regular schmuck came away extremely disturbed. I was expecting somebody worthy of the corner office, the fancy suit and the travel entourage well stocked with lovely assistants. But instead of some genius-wizard-guru I found a player. Those clowns didn’t know shit. Worse, they cared little about the company that fed them or about taking care of the grunt-level integrity it desperately needed to compete. If they are an accurate sample of the overall situation, we’re all gonna be in a world of hurt.

    No offense bro, but I won’t let you off the hook.

  97. Willy

    Again, I really wish this was more about the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of shunning.

  98. Plenue

    @metamars

    Haha. you really don’t comprehend that a million and a half is chump change to the oil industry, do you?

    Regardless, I don’t care particularly about any individual scientist. I care about the consensus. Which, yes, is over 90%.

  99. Eric A. Anderson

    I find it absolutely fascinating how many commenters in this thread have leapt to the unfounded conclusion that my decision will automatically result in breaking up my extended family — rather than bringing them closer together.

    Seems a sad statement on humanity’s ability to recognize the power of love to change people’s minds.

    Science can only take us so far. Maybe being resolute in our love for our children, our place, our home, and our planet has to get us the rest of the way.

  100. Jim

    @Eric, how would you react if one of your relatives decided to shun you, including telling their child(ren) to also shun you, because they think some political issue is important and you don’t?

    I sincerely hope your approach works and we’re wrong. Perhaps you would be kind enough to write a follow-up article in, say, a year’s time to share the results with us.

  101. @Plenue

    “Oh good. Anthony Watts (may) have caught up with 120 year old science.

    https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14786449608620846

    Your link didn’t resolve for me when I first saw tried it, some days ago.

    I didn’t read the paper, but, given it’s dated 1896, there’s a zero chance it has conclusive evidence. And probably, no evidence, at all. In fact, the wikipedia article on it’s author, Arrhenius, states the following:

    “In developing a theory to explain the ice ages, Arrhenius, in 1896, was the first to use basic principles of physical chemistry to calculate estimates of the extent to which increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) will increase Earth’s surface temperature through the greenhouse effect.[3][20][21] These calculations led him to conclude that human-caused CO2 emissions, from fossil-fuel burning and other combustion processes, are large enough to cause global warming. This conclusion has been extensively tested, winning a place at the core of modern climate science.[22][23]”

    Reference 23 is an article by John Cook, which states the following:

    “The effect of adding man-made CO2 is predicted in the theory of greenhouse gases. This theory was first proposed by Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius in 1896, based on earlier work by Fourier and Tyndall. Many scientist have refined the theory in the last century. Nearly all have reached the same conclusion: if we increase the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the Earth will warm up.”

    So, the Arrhenius paper is THEORETICAL. Theory is not evidence, much less proof.

    It’s hard for me to imagine conclusive evidence of the greenhouse gas effect without satellite data. Ah , but I suppose you have a much better imagination than I do.

  102. Willy

    Leviticus 18 implies that global warming is being caused by sexual deviancy. May want to add that one to the list.

  103. Predicting and postdicting solar magnetic activity might be far more doable than I presented. I’ve only half listened to about half of the following. The researcher apparently (I say apparently because I need to relisten, carefully, to confirm) used a program (I think she called it an ai program) to discover a non-linear equation, based on solar di-pole and and quadrupole moments that are experimentally observed. (I had been assuming that you’d have to use massive computer modeling of the whole she-bang – from fusion modeling of the ‘exact’ nuclear species to plasma currents.)

    See Zharkova: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=M_yqIj38UmY

    This reminds somewhat of a highly technical talk – well beyond my level of education – I heard during a chemical engineering talk at Princeton of a flame analysis. Part of the analysis was relegated to a genetic algorithm. I understood enough of the talk to realize that their level of analytical success was quite impressive.

    However, to CO2 catastrophists, her talk will be quite upsetting. She’s predicting a prolonged cooling spell (“solar grand minimum”), beginning in 2020. The energetic deficit created during this period (at least at it’s peak) will be many times the level of energetic forcing due to anthopogenic CO2.

    At it’s worst, she’s expecting that adverse effects on agriculture demands that world governments prepare by storing food, not just for human populations but also, I think, for animal populations. (I didn’t actually catch whatever details she gave for preserving animals. I’m pretty sure she doesn’t advocate just killing them or letting them starve.) She predicts a possible food shortage 2028-2032.

    I hope at least the more ethical people, who argued the precautionary principle wrt anthropogenic CO2, will quickly shift gears and, paying attention to the more significant danger, historically speaking, of global cooling, will admit their one-sided error, and help rally the planet to deal with food production going in the wrong direction.

    Noam Chomsky, where are you?

  104. Willy

    I once started with beliefs, as taught to me, then built up a system of facts to support them. The results were disastrous.

    Far wiser would have been to stay humble, objective and disciplined while collecting facts before coming up with beliefs. Part of that discipline would be to make sure all the facts jibe, lest I be shunned by those I could learn much more from.

  105. Plenue

    @metamars

    I never said it was conclusive. My point was that the idea is well over a century old. Since then, the evidence has only mounted that Arrhenius was correct *as your own quote shows*.

    Yet again, I am going to point out that the fucking arctic is melting. And yet again, you’re going to ignore it.

    As for global cooling? Seriously? That myth again? https://phys.org/news/2015-07-mini-ice-age-hoopla-giant.html

  106. So what if the idea is over 100 years old? Anthony Watts accepted CO2 as a green house gas well before I saw the article on his website about direct evidence for CO2 as a green house gas.

    I’m not interested in explaining the difference between an idea, and evidence for that idea; nor will I explain the difference between a quantitative statement or theory and a qualitative statement or theory.

    I doubt that you’d be interested in such ‘details’, anyway.

    You appear to know nothing about the details of the arctic “melting” over the course of the last hundred years, much less just a few millenia. History does not begin with the satellite era.

    Your physorg link is so superficial, it’s laughable.

  107. Willy

    Gaslighting? There is no gaslighting in science.

    https://www.skepticalscience.com/

  108. With a major caveat, there was another article at physorg regarding Zharkova, et.al., which treated the subject seriously, and not just as a lightweight exercize in reinforcing the catastrophist narrative: https://phys.org/news/2015-07-ice-age.html#nRlv

    The major caveat regards the following section:
    “The magnetic field of the Sun grows, which means that the flux of cosmic rays decreases, increasing the number of clouds and leading to the warming again. Next comes the reverse process, when the magnetic field of the sun decreases and the intensity of cosmic ray rises, reducing the clouds and making the atmosphere cool again.”

    Actually, increased cloud cover leads to a cooling effect, because solar radiation is reflected back out into space. So, the coming causal chain is as follows: lower solar magnetic shielding -> more cosmic ray bombardment -> increased clouds -> cooling effect

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