The nutcases are at it again
The World as We Know It Is About to End, Say Some Really Frightened Scientists
A new study by 22 biologists and ecologists has found that environmental changes on our planet are reaching a point of no return that leads to mass extinctions and harms human welfare. The situation, said one scientist, “scares the hell out of me.” That would be James H. Brown, one of the authors of alarming paper published by Nature, talking to New York Times Green blogger Justin Gillis. Brown is not one of your everyday cranks predicting raptures and the end of days. He is a macroecologist at the University of New Mexico. And as The Atlantic’s James Fallows, who pointed out this terrifying study to us, writes, this could be the most important news of 2012. How soon do these scientists expect the world as we know it to end? Gillis writes, “within a few human generations, if not sooner.” The most frightening thing is that this finding isn’t about what will come if we do not act, but that our effects on the planet’s environment — global warming, population growth, and overall resource extraction — means that we’ve already passed a “tipping point.”
There appears to be a forty year cycle of mental illness in the scientific community. This is what they were saying in 1970.
“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”
• George Wald, Harvard Biologist
“We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.”
• Barry Commoner, Washington University biologist“By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist“Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”
• Peter Gunter, professor, North Texas State University“It is already too late to avoid mass starvation.”
• Denis Hayes, chief organizer for Earth Day“Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….”
• Life Magazine, January 1970“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist“At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.”
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist“Air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.”
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist“We are prospecting for the very last of our resources and using up the nonrenewable things many times faster than we are finding new ones.”
• Martin Litton, Sierra Club director“By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, `I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’”
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist“Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.”
• New York Times editorial, the day after the first Earth Day“Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”
• Sen. Gaylord Nelson“We have about five more years at the outside to do something.”
• Kenneth Watt, ecologist“The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist
What form of mental illness makes people so desperate for attention? Maybe they should go to the pound and adopt a kitten.
__“The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years…..”
The ‘Newsweek’ magazine claimed in the issue of April 28, 1975 :
There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production– with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The Earth’s climate seems to be cooling down.
The climatic shift in the middle of the last century became an acknowledged global issue eventually, when the world felt confronted with lower temperatures and a cooling down trend. Actually since the Second World War the temperature in the Northern Hemisphere had merely decreased by 0.2°C. That was a very low figure, but this drop was big enough to be felt and subject to concern.
Other news media ran similar stories in the 1970s for example:
• Science News, November 15, 1969 (The Earth’s Cooling Climate);
• Washington Post, January 11 1970 (Colder Winters Held Dawn of New Ice Age);
• Fortune, February 1974, pp. 90-95, (Ominous Changes in the World’s Weather);
• Time, June 24, 1974 (Another Ice Age?);
• New York Times,. May 21 1975 (Scientists Ask Why World Climate Is Changing: Major Cooling May Be Ahead);
• Christian Science Monitor, Aug. 27, 1974 (Earth Seems to be Cooling Off Again).
The New York Times already raised the subject in 1961 by reporting that: “Scientists agree world is colder; But Climate Experts meeting here fail to agree on reason for change”. (NYT, Walter Sullivan; January 30 1961), and twenty years later Quirin Schiermeier (2010, NATURE 467, p. 381) regards:
“Three-tenths of a degree may seem a small dip — but, for climate researchers, the discovery that a large patch of the ocean cooled by 0.3 °C within a few years around 1970 is a small sensation.”
The role of the North Atlantic in the cooling period received only attention recently. D. Thomson et al. (2010) started a “Letter to Nature” with the sentence:
“The twentieth-century trend in global-mean surface temperature was not monotonic: temperatures rose from the start of the century to the 1940s, fell slightly during the middle part of the century, and rose rapidly from the mid-1970s onwards.”
In the same issue of Nature, Quirin Schiermeier (op. cit) addressed the findings in a comment as follows:
(Title): When the North Atlantic caught a chill. Surface cooling could have pushed down temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere 40 years ago.
(1st sentence): Three-tenths of a degree may seem a small dip — but, for climate researchers, the discovery that a large patch of the ocean cooled by 0.3 °C within a few years around 1970 is a small sensation.
Source: http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100922/full/467381a.html
The alleged correlation to the ocean seems to come as a surprise. Schiermeier welcomed the debate:
__The ocean cooling, which may have resulted from a shift in currents, also offers a reminder of the North Atlantic’s outsize role in climate”, and that
___Thompson and his colleagues think a circulation change in the North Atlantic is a more likely culprit. But Michael Mann, a climate researcher at Pennsylvania State University in University Park , isn’t so sure. He thinks that aerosols probably contributed to the global chill, and that the ocean cooling was probably the steep end of a natural climate oscillation spanning several decades. ‘I’m unconvinced they’ve shown that the model of an isolated brief event is a better fit to the data.’
More about the subject at: http://www.seaclimate.com/g/g1.html
And everyone forgets the Global Cooling scare.
There was no global cooling scare. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling William M Connolley says so, so it must be the truth.
Ecology is a bit like sociology, just not as scientifically rigorous.
Doomsday phobias are prevalent among group think scientists. Their delusional Hollywood science is always going to scare the crap out of them.
They need to form a Union of Concerned Scientists, actually hold that thought, it already exists.
They need to reinforce their position and join forces with other like-minded unions, like the Union of Concerned Astrologists, the Union of Concerned Palm Readers, the Union of Concerned Charlatans and the Union of Concerned Wimps and produce a big campaign to stop the sky falling in.
They could probably benefit from also inviting some hard science like the Union of Concerned Homeopaths.
The disease you identify is indeed still with us: http://www.scotsman.com/news/environment/tipping-point-before-planetary-collapse-is-only-decades-away-1-2341653
Is it the case than biologists are particularly susceptible to it? The link is to a report on a study led by one of them in California.
The cultures of both California and Biology may deserve special investigation to help find a cure for this pestilential and destructive illness.
Climate change group think scientists are a doomsday cult who spread the word via apocalypticism. The result is mental health problems like climate and weather phobias, where cognitive behavioral therapy(CBT) is the only known treatment for such doomsday phobias. The goal of this type of therapy is to help replace fearful tipping point delusions & end of the world scenarios with more positive messages that emphasize changes in weather and climate as normal.
It is not cyclical, it is climactic (that’s climactic, with a “c”). It is a climactic deluge of incompetence, over the entire last 40 years, in which current climate science was developed. You have merely uncovered the two ends of the same incompetent event.
It’s not new. It’s wack jobs who can’t stand prosperity. Here we are, living better than the kings of old and the nuts can’t stand it and feel this prosperity must be halted even destroyed. Well, there’s nothing new under the sun and this attitude will always be around. The sad thing is that the regular people are being sucked in to believe it. There’s one born every minute so the saying goes.
It appears they have taken Schopenhauer philosophical pessimism to a new low. They also have grasped Schopenhauer’s notion about stopping the discovery of truth –
“The discovery of truth is prevented more effectively, not by the false appearance things present and which mislead into error, not directly by weakness of the reasoning powers, but by preconceived opinion, by prejudice.”
But what happens when the Arctic doesn’t melt away? There’s a tipping point somewhere in the future, all right – and its tipensity will depend on how effective they are in preventing – or better, forestalling – the “discovery of truth”. That’s one of the things that’s so amazing about this whole episode – these fools act as if there’s no such tipping point.
Forty years ago they didn’t even have decent computers with which to help scare themselves.
Fast computer + cr*p software = Eeek!
The kooks just never stop coming….
Richard Black, BBC News Environment correspondent, has a neat line in doom that spans every conceivable catastrophe – forests; fishstocks; sustainability; air pollution; CO2; clean water; starvation; population growth, etc., etc. Everything except ebola and spontaneous combustion. He puts the doom-year as 2025 by quoting Prof Barnofsky’s modeling.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18339905
End-of-the-world nonsense has been going on for quite some time:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dates_predicted_for_apocalyptic_events
Mankind has sinned; a major deity (fill in blank here, Gaia works just fine for the Climate kooks) has been offended my mankind’s sin; end is coming; just you wait…
Holy crap! It’s worse than we thought!
As Henry James might have put it, it’s a nice question as to who are the greater fools here, the scientists or the journalists. I think I’d have to plump for the former. Journalists know they can get away with a certain amount of flim-flam, and that journalism, at least the day-in-day-out sort, isn’t all that serious. In contrast, scientists have a certain gravitus and are given a status in society and a degree of trust, so they stand to lose a lot more when this thing falls apart.
Don’t they know that the world’s population is slowing dramatically? The UNPD predicts a peak of 8 billion by 2040, then it will decline. The population will not double after that.
Malthusians always forget the primary source of evidence needed to prove their theory: birth rates. As for AGW, we know that that “theory” is failing, so “scientists” have to get increasingly desperate in order to get people to listen. This study doesn’t really prove anything, other than that it’s a scare-mongering technique. Science deals with facts, not fear.
I’m guessing the journalists decided to take a spin on this bogus study and make it look so “scary”, but to be quite honest: I’m more worried about the ageing population and where my money is going.
Doom-saying is a scam as old as the human race. Young virgins used to be sacrificed in order to satisfy the power lust of scammers who posed as high priests and prophets prophesying impending doom. They are not nutcases. People who fall for their scams are.
Au contraire: both are nutcases; the ones who fall for it are just worse. They tend to be politicians
So…. a new study by 22 biologists and ecologists has found that environmental changes on our planet are reaching a point of no return that leads to mass extinctions and harms human welfare.
I have not yet found anyone who can predict the future a year ahead let alone 5 years, 10 years, 20 years or 30, 40, 50 or 100 years. There is no way to predict this.
I say to these depressed 22 pessimists… look back at history. The warmest periods seem to be the most successful periods for mankind. The polar bears survived the warm arctic weather in the past… population growth of species increased, agriculture flourished and great achievements prevailed. My guess is a warmer world would have more positive effects than negative effects based on past history.
You see, the attitude of the 22 is what happens when people have no faith in something … even just faith in their fellow human beings. This is what happens when people prefer to being pessimists rather than optimists. The 22 bio and eco pessimists should understand that the ominous model-based scenarios have been debunked based on existing peer review literature and the real world observational data on climate… not the fudged data, but the real data.
Like clockwork, just before phase shift of PDO.
If anyone stil holds the article written by Dr. Kennetb E. Watt about the doomsday theory, I think it was published in Biocore, please send to [email protected], I will like to re-read carefully again.
Thanks