Friday, July 1, 2016

Eric Worrall celebrates misery, at WUWT

One thing you'll soon discover about hard-core science deniers is how much distaste they have for the world they live in. Today Eric Worrall (archived here) is celebrating the fact that it's very unlikely we'll be able to keep the global temperature below 1.5 C above pre-industrial and will be battling to keep the temperature rise under 2 C.

I'm not kidding. His headline was: "Celebrate: We’ve Finally Hit a Climate “Tipping Point”". He was writing about another new paper in Nature, written by a team led by Joeri Rogelj. The scientists looked at the Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) made by countries around the world, which set out the proposals to limit emissions. What they found is described in the opening paragraph of the press release:
Pledges made for the Paris agreement on climate change last winter would lead to global temperature rise of 2.6 to 3.1°C by the end of the century, according to a new analysis published in the journal Nature. In fact, the entire carbon budget for limiting warming to below 2°C might have been emitted by 2030, according to the study.
What I found hard to understand was how Eric Worrall could write this:
The one degree or so of warming we have experienced has not made a noticeable difference to people’s lives, other than a slightly longer growing season, and less severe winters. Even if another 0.5C – 1C warming occurs, which is far from certain, there is no reason to think that the kind of temperature change you experience moving a few hundred feet up or down a hillside will make a major difference to people’s lives.



Here are a few of the headlines from around the world just from the last month or so. An incredible amount of water has been poured onto land the world over:
And that's just the damage from all the extra water being moved through the air. I could also have written about the disastrous wildfires these past few weeks.

If the above had been spread out over a decade or so, that would have been bad enough. However the above all happened in the last five weeks.

19 comments:

  1. The floods in northeastern BC are the same rains that allowed the Fort McMurray fire to be contained months ahead of schedule.

    ReplyDelete
  2. The floods in northeastern BC are the same rains that allowed the Fort McMurray fire to be contained months ahead of schedule.

    Ah, so it's all good then.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I had sarcasm and /sarcasm tags in there, but they were stripped. Should have anticipated that :-/

      Delete
    2. Oh, wait, let's try this:

      <sarcasm>Ah, so it's all good then.</sarcasm>

      Delete
    3. Yay! It worked. Just try to defeat someone who has been programming computers since 1974. We will find a way to pwn you every time. Well... eventually :-)

      Delete
    4. \ How? \ Attempt 1

      <> How? <> Attempt 2

      <sarcasm> How? </sarcasm> Attempt 3


      Got it!



      Delete
    5. Just go read the FORTRAN manual. It has everything!

      (Although, through weird circumstances, I learned APL at the same time.)

      Delete
    6. For the lolz:

      [ampersand + lt + ;] = < while [ampersand + gt + ;] = >

      Just leave out the square brackets, plus signs, and the spaces between those characters and you wind up with 'less than' and 'greater than' symbols respectively.

      Delete
  3. So Eric has reached Denial Stage 3: after 1) It's not happening and 2) It's happening but we're not doing it, to 3) It's happening and we're doing it, but it's not that bad.

    Each stage, of course, requires selective denial of evidence. Stage 1 is a rejection of all evidence entirely. Stage 2 is an acceptance of (at least some) observations, but rejection of the evidence of casual links and the physics behind them. Stage 3 is a rejection of discomforting events, i.e., I'm only going to look at the effects I like, and pretend the others don't exist. What storms? What droughts? What sea level? etc.

    The denial just changes focus, and remains denial, since the intent is to not do anything about it.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Replies
    1. "... there is no reason to think that the kind of temperature change you experience moving a few hundred feet up or down a hillside will make a major difference to people’s lives..."

      Except that doesn't really rise to the level of analogy, being stuck at the level of asinine misdirection in complete ignorance of the scientific case.

      Shucks, Eric. You really are well exposed out on your hillside. Does WUWT offer you an protection?

      Delete
  5. ... there is no reason to think that the kind of temperature change you experience moving a few hundred feet up or down a hillside will make a major difference to people’s lives.

    Except when you run out of hill, as is expected to happen to numerous species in Australia. Unfortunately most species aren't as mobile as humans.

    I wonder how many WUWTians live in areas with cold winters, and think climate change will be beneficial for them, and couldn't care less about the rest of the world where it will be disastrous.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. When wine grape growers run out of hill they move elsewhere, like to Tasmania (which they have).

      http://www.smh.com.au/business/climate-drives-big-wine-deal-20100816-1272s.html

      When Tasmania gets too hot, they'll have to wait a few thousand years before moving to Antarctica.

      Delete
    2. Well, there's Macquarie Island...

      Delete
    3. Lol, Bill. Even if it was possible to set up a wine-grape industry there ... Deniers wouldn't object. They are almost all against any and all natural habitats. However the other 90% of the world would surely protest :(

      https://www.environment.gov.au/heritage/places/world/macquarie-island

      Delete
    4. Or from France to England,as some have. This one has political consequences, since it now means leaving the Euroean Union.

      Delete
  6. So today Eric Worrall 'knows better' than the World Health Organisation. Its baffling how the man has managed to avoid picking up any prestigious scientific awards for his genius.

    ReplyDelete
  7. OT, but assuming Antony Green is correct - usually a reasonable assumption - please to see McGowan holding Mirabella off; great result for Indi! Not at all pleased to see Pauline Hanson, however...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Being from the Indi electorate I'm relieved. It would have been horrible to have Sophie Mirabella back. Hopefully she's gone for good this time.

      Delete

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