A guest post from John Hurlburt.
The trouble with today’s post title is that while the analogy with the loss of the Titanic is accurate, indeed too bloody accurate, the phrase has dissolved into the depths of the barrel of smart, clever-dick sayings. The brutal consequence of ‘fiddling while Rome burns‘, to use another ‘smart’ saying, is obscured.
So before you read this guest post from regular contributor, John Hurlburt, let me plead for something?
That is that you don’t treat this as just another anecdote in the affairs of man, but a symptom of the blindness of societies right across the world. As my guest essay tomorrow reveals, waiting for leadership on this planet is a wait that you and I and millions of others just can’t afford. Each and every one of us has to do something, however minute, to make a difference. Even just sharing John’s words.
It seems that there’s no escaping politics in daily life.
I recently got together one evening with two friends at our local Elks Club.
They are a couple. Two old friends of about ten years who live across the street and around the corner from me during the summer season. They’ve been together for more than half their lifetimes and spend the fall, winter and early spring in Yuma.
He is a frequent fishing buddy. Sometimes wears a side arm when we fish the beautiful mountain lakes above Payson. Mountain lakes and related campgrounds that are maintained and supervised by the U.S. Forest Service. Rather cheekily, I once asked if the plan was to hook trout or shoot them!
Anyhow, this was our first get together of the season. It was noted that attendance and participation is down in Arizona for such fraternal organizations as the Elks and the Moose. We had a discussion with club management about the nature of the problem.
Fraternal club management tends to be cautious and well paid. However, it seems that placing discomforting restrictions on people is not popular. The case in point was a recent club smoking ban. The logic seemed reasonable enough. Unfortunately, no realistic accommodation was made for the members who chose to smoke. The reaction was emotional.
For many, it was apparently the last straw. There were perhaps four other people at the Payson Elks club at 5:30 p.m. that Friday evening. An evening with a moderately priced dinner buffet on hand that had been advertised online, in a newsletter and by word of mouth.
There was a point when a comment seemed appropriate. I offered the observation that the source of the problem might be political. No one seemed to register the observation.
We talked a bit about aches and pains; the usual organ recital. We spoke about what we’ve been doing. I told them about church and transition town activities. The conversation turned to our illusion of a stable economy. An observation was made that the USA was leveraged over twenty-two times above any material foundation. There was no disagreement.
Despite the clear New York Times warning that morning, climate change never entered the conversation. A remedy was to note that so far Katrina has cost U.S. taxpayers over sixteen Billion dollars and climbing. Sandy is expected to cost American taxpayers as much as sixty Billion dollars.
It was a pleasant evening and we plan to get together again soon.
Take care out there.
John.
oooOOOooo
The sound of scraping deckchairs is deafening!
Learning from Dogs 
I would like to recommend a couple of DVDs for the Elks Club’s next two meetings: (1) James Cameron’s blockbuster movie Avatar and (2) Titanic: The Final Word with James Cameron. Whereas the former speaks to the folly of mistaking Nature’s capital for a source of income, the latter ultimately speaks to the folly of mistaking civilisation for an unsinkable ship.
http://lackofenvironment.wordpress.com/2012/04/14/from-titanic-to-avatar-and-back-again/
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Thanks Martin.
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At the end of the article, there is an allusion to the idea that Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy were linked to climate change.
What the IPCC says about tropical cyclones in its 2012 SREX report (hurricanes are a form of tropical cyclone in that they originate in the tropics) is:
“The uncertainties in the historical tropical cyclone records, the incomplete understanding of the physical
mechanisms linking tropical cyclone metrics to climate change, and the degree of tropical cyclone variability provide only low confidence for the attribution of any detectable changes in tropical cyclone activity to anthropogenic influences.”
http://ipcc-wg2.gov/SREX/report/
There is no long-term trend in hurricane activity. Katrina occurred in a peak year, but there have been queiter years since.
I find one of the problems in the climate change debate is the often ‘easy assumption’ that so many bad things (especially weather events) are linked to climate change. Now, what would help the victims of Katrina, Sandy and future hurricanes the most? That we stop CO2 emissions immediately? (or even just reduce significantly soon?)
The biggest cause of suffering for Katrina was the very poor disaster relief. The best future protection will be much improved disaster preparation and relief. Whether or not we have any chance to reduce the number and intensity of future hurricanes, we cannot stop them, and we cannot move whole cities away from the vulnerable US east coast. If we truly want to help and protect people, we really need to be clear and honest about the cause of the problems. If we get it wrong, we spend time, effort and money on the ‘wrong’ solutions that may eventually help no-one.
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I wouldn’t argue for a moment with your criticism but, of course, that is not the essence of John’s anecdote. Sometimes we need to step back to see the intended message.
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Paul, I see what you mean. I think the point of the story is that we spend so much of our time talking and worrying about relatively trivial things as the world ‘goes to pot’. Though I don’t really agree with that last point.
The demands of over population is undoubtedly a big concern for the future. However, that comes out of our success at solving problems rather than twiddling our thumbs. Such things as: peace in many parts of the world that did not have it for centuries (eg. Europe), understanding waterborne disease, water treatments, the green (agricultural) revolution, health care and medicines, etc, etc. Most parts of the world have a longer life expectancy than at any time in human history – not because of self-indulgent breeding, but because people are just not dying as fast as they used to, while the trend is to have fewer babies. Most ‘solutions’ generate another problem, but on average, life for most people in the world is getting better. Compare your own (I believer retirement?) to that of your parents, grandparents, etc.
Regarding the hurricanes. Its interesting, and notable that the developed world has the luxury to measure its disasters in billions of dollars (ie. material things) rather than lives. Of course, there were too many lives lost in Katrina (2000) and Sandy (285), but developing countries often fair much worse in natural disasters: eg. Bangladesh cyclones 1991 (139,000) 1970 (500,000), where financial costs were only 10s of millions of dollars. And compare Japan tsunami (20,000 deaths) with Haiti earthquake (>250,000).
Regards
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Hi Oakwood. Repeating misleading arguments does not make them any more legitimate. Nothing you will ever cherry-pick from the SREX report will ever change the fact that a warming atmosphere with more moisture in it more of the time will provide more energy for a greater frequency of extreme weather events of all kinds. Given this fact, arguing about whether or not we can already see this in the meteorological statistics from the last 5 decades (as Hansen et al demonstrated last year) is in danger of seeming like an act of desperation.
The tobacco industry disputed the adverse health effects of smoking for decades and, astonishingly, the fossil fuel industry continues to get away with doing exactly the same thing. Therefore, in claiming that the science is uncertain and/or unreliable, even though you insist you are thinking for yourself, you are just repeating their propaganda. The truth is that we have understood that additional CO2 in the atmosphere would be bad for at least 50 years now. People often say the industry-led misinformation campaign began when James Hansen testified before Congress in 1988 but, in reality, it began when President Lyndon B Johnson dared to publish the scientific advice he had received in 1965.
In summary, the Laws of Physics (governing the Earth’s climate) do not become less valid simply because you or the fossil fuel industry don’t want them to be valid. Anthropogenic climate disruption is not like any other environmental problem – adaptation and/or mitigation get exponentially harder the longer we argue about the nature of the problem. I really would recommend that you read the ‘Assessing the costs of adaptation to climate change’ report, which I have quoted from on this very blog recently.
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Thanks Martin. Said with great passion.
Oakwood, how do you reply?
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Martin and I seem to see the world through very different prisms. One of us sees facts and evidence, the other conspiracy theories. You’re free to decide which. Its impossible for us to have any rational discussion.
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Thank you. That was generous of you to offer that. As the byline of this blog suggests, Learning from Dogs is about integrity. That means accepting that differing views, expressed honestly, are an essential part of embracing truth.
To my mind, that is an entirely rational way of facing a complex issue. All a long-winded way of me expressing my appreciation for your comments.
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If you see facts and evidence at all, Oakwood, you appear to dismiss most of it. As George Monbiot once said, you climb over a mountain of evidence to pick up a crumb…
I don’t believe in any conspiracy theories. You are the one that repeatedly fails to distinguish conspiracy theories (i.e. reasons to dismiss the consensus that human activity is the main driver of climate change) from historical facts (i.e. the time and money spent by big business trying to discredit science and scientists).
When presented with unwelcome facts, such as well-reasoned arguments indicating that UNFCCC has underestimated the costs of adaptation, you seem to ignore them. If so, that is not scepticism, it is willful blindness.
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“I don’t believe in any conspiracy theories….i.e. the time and money spent by big business trying to discredit science and scientists”.
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Oakwood, do you follow Damn the Matrix? If not you may find this recent post about as compelling as it gets. That post concludes:
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Paul, perhaps you could explain what your post has to do with anything I have said.
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Now you have lost me. When you write post do you mean John’s guest post or a comment to the post?
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I refer to your comment above directing me to “The active disinformation agents….” which inevitably indicates you think I am as described.
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Not so, dear Sir. I referred you to an article which if read in full shows the compelling evidence of “12,000 peer-reviewed climate science papers published between 1991-2011“. But happy to leave it however you wish.
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Dear Paul
I do not find this study compelling. There are two main problems with it:
1. It is not an objective, balanced survey. The Damnthematrix blogger incorrectly states that “the authors looked at over 12,000 peer-reviewed climate science papers…”. In fact, the survey was carried out by volunteer supporters of the blog Skeptical Science (SS). The front page of SS states: “Scientific skepticism is healthy. Scientists should always challenge themselves to improve their understanding. Yet this isn’t what happens with climate change denial. Skeptics vigorously criticise any evidence that supports man-made global warming and yet embrace any argument, op-ed, blog or study that purports to refute global warming. This website gets skeptical about global warming skepticism.” [my bold]. Such a survey is like asking a group of Christians whether they find evidence for God’s existence in the Bible. Or a group of Muslims if they find evidence for God/Allah in the Koran. Each would likely get as much as 97% agreement. As an Atheist, I should therefore conclude I am wrong and should believe in God.
2. Science is not decided by consensus. John Snow discovered that cholera was spread by polluted drinking water in 1854. (Google John Snow Broad Street). He was a sceptic of the prevalent theory that cholera was spread by ‘bad air’. Despite compelling evidence, his theory was not more widely accepted until the late 1860’s. Did his opposition to the consensus make him wrong in 1854? There are numerous examples in science where a consensus has since been proven wrong. And of course many other cases where they remain ‘right’. It is widely accepted the Earth is round, not because of consensus, but because the evidence is so compelling. Same for evolution by natural selection.
A problem with the climate change debate is how it has become so polarised, and is presented by many as a fight between good and evil, environmentalist and non-environmentalist, left wing and right wing. There are extreme views on both sides. Each side has its eccentric advocates who use obvious methods of propaganda. There remains a middle ground where scientists want to have a sensible debate, but this ground is more and more squeezed. This is the ground I prefer to stick to.
I am a scientist, environmentalist and politically central (previously left-of-centre). I would fall into many definitions of the ‘97%.’ I believe the world warmed during the 20th C by around 0.8 degC, I accept CO2 is a greenhouse gas, whose concentration we have increased, and that man’s activities have probably contributed to the warming. But things I do not find compelling include: that most of 20th C warming was manmade, that current temperatures are unprecedented in past 1000 or 2000 years, that rate of increase is unprecedented, that there is a clear case that temperatures will rise 2 to 4 degC by 2100, that extreme weather is shown to be caused by global warming to date, that climate change is the biggest threat to the planet.
My conclusions are reached through reading and following the scientific arguments over many years. I am not a climate scientist, but then, climate scientists are not statisticians, whereas a major part of their case (the hockey sticks) are dependent on advanced statistical analyses. My own science, hydrogeology, has many things in common with climate science. Neither is a single discipline, but rely on pulling many different aspects together. You do not need to be a climate scientist to see some of the very basic gaps in their case. I give a couple of examples:
1. Tree ring proxies are by nature an approximation of true temperature, and are not as accurate as thermometer or modern instrumental measurements. The tree ring proxy reconstructions are unreliable since the 1960s, the very period when manmade global warming is claimed to be observable. This is known as the ‘divergence problem’. Michael Mann acknowledges it. This is why the instrumental data are routinely overlaid onto the end of proxy graphs, and the last few decades of declining proxy data are normally omitted (‘hiding the decline’). The fundamental problem here is that, if proxy data are not reliable for the past 50 years, we cannot rely on them for previous centuries, and certainly cannot rely on them to tell us whether it is warmer now or not than during the Medieval Warm Period.
2. As the warming has stalled for the past 10 to 15 years (which both James Hansen and Phil Jones agree to), there are more and more desperate attempts to come up with an explanation of why this does not invalidate any aspect of AGW. While the theory of global warming is presented as ‘settled science’, the same scientists do not know why warming has stopped. It might be just an overriding natural signal, it might be aerosols from India and China, or even better, its explained by lost ocean heat – that the heat is disappearing into the deep oceans, waiting to pop up again in a few years time (see Skeptical Science). Funny we had never heard of this ocean heat phenomenon until it was needed. In the 80s and 90s, rising surface temperatures were totally sufficient to ‘prove’ that manmade global warming was happening (no suggestion that it could be due to previous ocean heat being released). But now surface temperatures are not rising, we now hear they are trivial compared to the much more important ocean heat.
Climate Change “denial” is routinely blamed on a conspiracy of ‘Big Oil’ to spread doubt. As I say, my doubt has nothing to do with big oil. I don’t follow much what it says. But today, I’ve checked the websites of Shell, BP and Exxon, all of which state they clearly accept manmade global warming by CO2 emissions.
Shell:
http://www.shell.com/global/environment-society/environment/climate-change.html
“CO2 emissions must be reduced to avoid serious climate change.”
BP
http://www.bp.com/sectiongenericarticle800.do?categoryId=9048954&contentId=7083120
“Addressing the global challenge of climate change will require the efforts of governments, industry and individuals”
Exxon
http://www.exxonmobil.co.uk/Corporate/safety_climate.aspx
“Rising greenhouse gas emissions pose significant risks to society and ecosystems.”
So Paul, you may be ready to believe these conspiracy theories about the motivations of AGW-sceptics, and the aim to suggest they’re as bad as Holocaust Deniers – by uding the term ‘denier’. If that’s the case, I hope my comments will encourage you to step back and be a bit more open to listening to different sides of the debate.
In the end, only time will tell. What will AGW-believers come up with if temperatures still have not increased by 2020, 2025 or 2030. Is that possible? In fact, we have the rather bizarre situation whereby AGW-believers appear to ‘want’ temperatures to rise further just to prove they are right.
And its not about good and bad or right and wrong. In fact, one of my main concerns regarding the AGW-scare is that it diverts time, effort and money from prioritising the big problems that we know 100%, without a shadow of a doubt, are happening every day. Examples: 5000 children dying each day from lack of safe drinking water; millions dying each year from malaria. In my view, worrying about climate change is a luxury of a comfortable society that has relatively little else to worry about.
I’ve gone on a bit long, but there’s a lot to say, and it reflects your implication (even if only by accident) that I am perhaps linked to ‘disinformation agents’.
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Dear Oakwood, this blog is fundamentally about integrity. Being true to oneself and one’s beliefs is core to integrity. That is not the same as being closed-minded. I readily admit to not knowing the science behind the complexity of the planet’s atmosphere but being convinced by the weight of arguments that AGW is real.
I find your lengthy post, very much appreciated by the way, to be compelling. Because you set out the evidence as a scientist.
Ultimately, I can do no more than highlight the arguments being used and let those that really know argue it out between them.
Thank you so much for your interest in this post.
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I agree, integrity is paramount, especially in Science.
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