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'Gaia' Scientist Admits Mispredicting Rate of Climate Change
DesScorp writes "James Lovelock, the scientist that came up with the 'Gaia Theory' and a prominent herald of climate change, once predicted utter disaster for the planet from climate change, writing 'before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.' Now Lovelock is walking back his rhetoric, admitting that he and other prominent global warming advocates were being alarmists. In a new interview with MSNBC he says: '"The problem is we don't know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books — mine included — because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn't happened," Lovelock said. "The climate is doing its usual tricks. There's nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now," he said. "The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium. Twelve years is a reasonable time it (the temperature) has stayed almost constant, whereas it should have been rising — carbon dioxide is rising, no question about that," he added.' Lovelock still believes the climate is changing, but at a much, much slower pace."
This guy is saying the sort of things that have been getting me downmodded here on slashdot for years.
Global Warming/Climate Change may or may not be happening. But if it is it ain't happening at anything like the rate that would justify dismantling civilization over, we still aren't sure whether it is us or a natural cycle we don't undertstand, etc. And he doesn't go there but I will: too many politicians with a preexisting anti-civilization (Western industrial captialism based ccivilization that is...) bias glommed onto AGW with the willing consent of a lot of brand name scientists, thereby (rightly) harming the public's trust of all science.
Democrat delenda est
This guy is saying the sort of things that have been getting me downmodded here on slashdot for years.
Really? There seems to be some discrepancy with your statement:
Global Warming/Climate Change may or may not be happening.
There appears to be no room for that "may not" area in his statements (and largely public sentiment). And the end of the summary:
'Lovelock still believes the climate is changing, but at a much, much slower pace.'
I could see how your sentiment would be downmodded, I think the scientific community largely agrees Climate Change is happening, man-made or not.
My work here is dung.
Exactly right. Lovelock has finally realized what most climate scientists and ecologists have know for decades: Lovelock is out of his frickin' mind.
Conversely: Anthropogenic global warming would very convenient for all the scientists researching it, as it brings in tons of research money, therefore it must exist, and be ridiculously powerful. (The thing is that GW as a whole is being exaggerated by both sides one way or the other, and I fear not enough unbiased info is being collected either way.)
So where's the news here? This nut was never a credible climate scientist in the first place, and I don't think any of his previous views were shared by anybody who is a credible climate scientist.
Lovelock makes a living out of making sensational, half-baked pronouncements and selling them as science. Good for him for admitting he was wrong, but that doesn't discredit any of the actual science.
There's a difference between agreeing the data is correct, and agreeing WHY it's like that.
I would probably agree that their data is correct and temperatures are rising.
Somehow linking that to humans, that's the REALLY controversial part and it's MUCH harder to provide fact in that case. Almost impossible. At least without a several-million-year-long scientifically controlled investigation (and, no, fossil records, ice-cores, etc. do NOT give us the reason, they give us some facts).
WHY Earth is heating is still completely unknown - why it's EVER heated has always been unknown. We don't even know what prompted ice-ages in the past and they were seriously major events. Thus, forming government policy or charging me indirectly via my tax for related green initiatives because "humans are warming the planet" is ludicrous at best.
Facts are easy to confirm or deny - and anyone who goes against them is usually an idiot. It's the WHY of the facts and the things that you CAN'T collect facts for - that's where science is made.
Since when is James Lovelock a climate scientist ?!? His predictions on the subject always had the same value as just about any other rambling slashdoter.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
The fact is he is wrong, there has been significant warming already due to global warming. Also he could be wrong about affects, there have been a lot of disasters and the frequency and trends could be increasing. The problem with human perception is that unless something happens immediately, it is not happening. Climate change will be a gradual trend, its not like we go to bed one day and everything is okay and the next day its a total disaster. With gradual worsening change, lets say 2% per year, people often end up seeing the new situation as the "new normal" and "just the way things are". For instance, the level of malnutrition has increased drastically to 1 billion, but because the rate of change has been 1% per year or whatever, it happens overnight, for many people this has just become the new background, the new normal, just the way things are. The earthquakes get news coverage and are immediately recognized as a disaster because it lies withim peoples short memory span, but, a longer term trend which takes centueries to occur, like malnutrition. All people see is the 1% change per annum, not the big picture of the really long term drastic changes. Humans have caused drastic changes to the earth in the past 100 years, vast areas of wildlife habitat have been destroyed, vast amounts of resources have been consumed, the CO2 level has increased greatly, and so on.
Yeah, I read this as "Discredited Scientist Makes New Prediction!"
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Sorry. Show me a model made between 1995 and 2010 that fits the observed data of the last decade. Not one single fits. They were enough for policy making though.
I hold nothing but skepticism for the people who say "scientific consensus!". Because for the Piltdown Man to turn from consensus to hoax it took 45 years. And many reputations of the people who said it was a hoax with it.
Of course now Lovelock is declared to be a nut, an extremist, on the alarmist edge. But before he was:
- elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1974. He served as the president of the Marine Biological Association (MBA) from 1986 to 1990, and has been an Honorary Visiting Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford (formerly Green College, Oxford) since 1994. He has been awarded a number of prestigious prizes including the Tswett Medal (1975), an ACS chromatography award (1980), the WMO Norbert Gerbier Prize (1988), the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for the Environment (1990) and the RGS Discovery Lifetime award (2001). In 2006 he received the Wollaston Medal, the Geological Society's highest Award, whose previous recipients include Charles Darwin. He became a CBE in 1990, and a Companion of Honour in 2003.
Just like De-Stalinization, his own kind reject him now. So excuse me while I say, Lovelock, you son of a b****! Go to hell.
I take my children to see Madonna(..), but I never for once ever thought I was in the same business.Chris Rea.
This is a little like saying "evolution can't be proved without a several-million-year-long scientifically controlled investigation." We have very good evidence that humans are increasing the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We also have very good evidence that increasing the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere causes warming (and this evidence is NOT from ice cores; it's from physics).
We don't know what caused ice ages, but we do know some things. For example, we know that if the sun increases its output, earth will get hotter. We know that if carbon dioxide is injected into the atmosphere, the earth will get hotter, at least for the short term (centuries to millennia). And we know that if albedo decreases, the earth will get hotter (again, for the short term of centuries to millennia).
We also know that humans are doing a couple of those things.
What more do you want?
Don't be silly. Earth is warmer than its orbital position would indicate, so something is trapping solar heat. It has been known since the turn of the 19th century that carbon dioxide will do just that, even in small concentrations.
So, we have an observed rising of CO2 in the atmosphere, an observed rising temperature, and a mechanism connecting the two: it's fair to say that CO2 is the main driver of the rise in temperature.
We know the isotope ratio of carbon in naturally occurring processes. We know the isotope ratio of carbon in fossil fuels. Measurements confirm that the rising CO2 is mostly the product of burnt fossil fuel hydrocarbons.
What other mechanism has been proposed to explain the above points? Elf farts?
Mart
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
Conversely: Anthropogenic global warming would very convenient for all the scientists researching it, as it brings in tons of research money, therefore it must exist, and be ridiculously powerful.
People keep making this assertion over and over like it is proven fact, but nowhere have I ever seen any proof that there is substantial economic incentive for any given scientist to come out in support of global warming theory. In fact, the most likely Nash equilibrium if they were to game it would be to have half of them come down on either side of the issue so that they could use the debate to fuel research dollars. That is absolutely nothing like what is happening.
The thing is that GW as a whole is being exaggerated by both sides one way or the other, and I fear not enough unbiased info is being collected either way.
Okay, let's pretend that there is a bunch of bias like you are talking about. What portion of the 90+% of climatologists who purport to believe AGW is a real and dangerous thing do you think are being manipulated? Can you pick a high enough number to convince anybody that we shouldn't at least be highly concerned without also picking a number so high that it would be impossible without a massive global tinfoil-hat conspiracy?
I couldn't agree more.
The problem is though, that people like Lovegood are very rarely called out on their crap. We have people (*cough* Al Gore *cough*) going around literally calling it a _crysis_. And what do we get from it? Politics. 'Action!'. But if anyone says that we ought to really just slow down (and even look at the data!), they get labeled a "denier" and all discourse is shut down.
> Look at the data.
Like... I dunno, maybe IPCC's claim that the Himalayan glaciers will be gone by 2035? But that turned out to be unreviewed speculation and the glaciers actually haven't lost any net ice over the decade... Oops!
Now, I don't mean to extrapolate that to saying all climate data as bunk, but I _do_ mean to use it as an example of how data can be flawed, interpretations can be flawed, and just plain human stupidity and bias can get in the way (which is the only way you can 'excuse' the above reporting of a media interview as a scientific finding). There is far more room for discussion than is presently allowed by the various groups looking to use climate change as a blank check for political gain, personal gain, or simply a cause to blindly fight for. I just wish people were even half as interested in calling out the alarmists as are the 'deniers'.
The exaggerating of climate change made it political and did more harm to rationality than anything else ever could. The "alarmism" was so intense that leftists took the opportunity to attempt government takeovers and management of productions, leaving economic conservatives on the defensive against outrageous claims. Since then it has fallen into left/right political realms with both sides frequently ignoring the real science. The alarmists have done a lot more harm than people think. It will take decades to get people to moderate on this issue again.
People got alarmist over Global Cooling then Global Warming and then Climate Change when the first two didn't pan out by name at hyped levels. The biggest problem is that people are fighting the wrong fight, being too concerned about CO2 levels. These energies are well intentioned, however they are misplaced.
Climate change is inevitable no matter what we as a species do or don't do. We have a fossil record going back billions of years proving this, forces like plate tectonics and changes from our own solar system or even supernova's all impact our climate.
People have forgotten their environmental basics and in their zeal have created a self feeding hype machine. Scheduled catastrophes kept turning out to be false alarms. The problem is that this is causing a loss of credibility in scientists and science. People need to be concerned about pollution, for the sake of fighting pollution.
Were spending so much time worrying about whether or not the concrete being poured for a windmill is going to have the proper carbon offset. As a result were forgetting about bigger things like rampant unregulated coal power plants in China and the smelting of old electronics by hand in Africa.
We need to get back to science, back to fighting pollution and away from the hype.
What pisses me off are the people who think that wealth redistribution in the form of carbon-credit trading will do anything to solve the problem,
Ah, but that's a very different question from the question of whether carbon dioxide emissions are affecting the climate... and it is a question that gets almost no discussion at all, because the people who think that carbon-credit trading is not a good idea don't address it, but instead argue that the greenhouse effect doesn't exist, or it exists but is saturated, or it exists but volcanoes emit more carbon dioxide than humans so it doesn't matter what we do, or the weather data is wrong, or the scientists who study the problem are all frauds, or the cosmic rays are changing the climate more then humans do, or solar activity has gone up recently, or solar activity has gone down recently, or some hithertofore unknown feedback mechanism cancels out the changes created by humans, or... every six months there's a new purported explanation for why human-generated carbon dioxide doesn't affect the climate. (Yes, I've heard all those arguments, and many more that make even less sense.)
By denying that a possible problem even exists, the discussion of solutions ends up being completely one-sided. No one critiques carbon-credit trading, because the people who would do so are spending their efforts denying that the science.
if there really is a problem.
See? You can't even complete a single sentence before you start suggesting the greenhouse effect isn't real.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
> Don't be silly. Earth is warmer than its orbital position would indicate, so something is trapping solar heat.
Oh bullpoop. The Earth has been warmer than it is today and colder. And guess what, it's orbit has been pretty darned constant. The problem is somewhat more complicated and we are still discovering new variables every couple of years. They just recently started considering the effect of solar effects other than direct radiation and are finding it to be at least to the same rough scale as the CO2 variable. And it isn't in ANY model from the 20th Century being touted as predicting DOOM! Are we now arrogant enough to think that was the last piece of the puzzle or do we have the humility to consider that we will find still more.
We only have halfway reliable data for a century, really good sat based data for less than half that. But we have pretty good knowledge that the Earth's temp has been far beyond the top and bottom of the observed ranges in the last 100K years. So we have a very poor data set. To try to make firm predictions based on such poor samples and the piss poor things they are calling 'climate models' is laughable. In another couple hundred years we still won't have very much direct data compared to the time scales we are talking about. On the other hand it is hard to argue that we can make the sort of changes we are making to our environment and expect no changes.
It isn't an easy problem. Which is why it pisses some of us off when funding grubbing hucksters in lab coats team up with watermellons like Al Gore to scam the world into poverty to enrich themselves. By debasing science it makes it hard for real science. Why did so many fall for the vaccine/autism scam? Yup. Folks don't trust science anymore. And that is dangerous.
Democrat delenda est
12 years worth of data, combined with the AGE OF THE EARTH is what....a few seconds worth of data? If "man made" global warming was happening, explain the unearthed silver mines that had been covered in glacier ice? Obviously, it was warm enough back then to support someone mining something. Explain how rivers were routinely "walked on" all winter long, but now they never freeze over? It's called A CYCLE. The earth warms, the earth cools. I'll betcha if you really did the research, you would find an almost parallel to the earth cycles and the sun cycles. Amazing! When the sun heats up, has a ton of sunspot cycles, CME's...it effects OUR EARTH. But, this "researcher" saying he was wrong about man made global warming won't get much press, because it doesn't fit the "global warming" agenda of our current administration, the anti capitalist and the "one world order" idiots in the UN.
You are wrong in fact and wrong in logic.
The impact of climate change is not equal. The poor live disproportionately in vulnerable areas. This is true not just for climate change, but for environmental disasters in general. It is mostly the poor, not the rich, who live on the deforested hillsides that collapse in landslides. It is mostly the poor, not the rich, who live in flood-prone areas. It is mostly the poor, not the rich, who make a living from dry and marginal soils susceptible to droubt. And it is the poor who lack the resources to cope when the water dries up, when food prices rise, when hit by torrential rains or brush fires. Global warming is not like an asteroid. It will not wipe out all life. But it will create great suffering, and that suffering will fall disproportionately on the poor. That is your error in fact.
Your error in logic is your claim of equal responsibility. If you and I are in a car crash, are we equally responsible because we both suffer the same loss? Even though I was speeding, talking on my cell phone and weaving in traffic while you were driving predictably and defensively, but were unable to avoid me when I suddenly swerved in front of you? Of course not. Responsibility results from the actions we take and the choices we make. We in the developed countries have produced most of the emissions and reaped most of the benefits. We are far more responsible for climate change than the peasants of India or Mexico or Bangladesh. Responsibility flows from actions, not consequences.