I was introduced to global warming in May of 1979 by my boss at Los Alamos, and was a true believer for most of the last 35 years. During the 1990’s, it seemed believable.
It doesn’t seem believable any more, and it is time for this scam to end.
Disrupting the Borg is expensive and time consuming!
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It was not an issue for me that long. Only because I was apathetic and figured time would tell. It changed when they decided that euthanasia and impoverishment were the ways to their end.
I was basically neutral with a couple of shots of apathy mixed in. I figured the jury was still out, because the climate is so freaking complicated. I know a little bit about fluid dynamics…not enough to do me any good but enough to know that trying to model the whole globe with the oceans and the atmosphere and the land and the clouds and condensation and freezing and thawing, etc is going to take awhile. When I heard the phrase “the science is settled”, I knew that this dog don’t hunt, and the alarmists were starting to run scared. Also, when I saw that the alarmist claims of unprecedented extreme weather events are so easy to disprove with simple searches of newspaper archives, I really sat up and took notice. My problem is who in their right mind would try to float such a scam? And what real scientist can say “the science is settled” and then live with himself? I do not want to believe that there are scientists who would stoop that low, but I guess there are some.
I bought into it from around 2000 – 2004. Some of Manbearpig’s foolishness made me look more closely at the data (notably the NH hurricanes spinning the wrong direction on the posters for An Inconvenient Truth, the ‘pollution’ [really just steam] from power plants, and the anti-data stance of the AGW crowd). Also the stupidity of carpool lanes (they make pollution and traffic worse). These people are dangerous idiots. A repeat of history again and again and again–and a threat to freedom and logic.
Man-made global warming was plausible, but was never believable.
I should correct this: Man-made global warming was a plausible theory, but was never believable.
I too was a believer for many years, in fact I had a sense of pride that the scientific community was using its skills for the good of mankind.
What a rude awakening to discover that we had been sold our own inflated opinions of ourselves!
Turns out the propaganda artists were more clever than the scientists.
The scientific community who are worth their weight, have a very impressive skill set. let’s see how they use it! (passes popcorn).
Geologist. Nough said.
Geologists have an appreciation for the difference between 100 000 years and two months, don’t they.
But thanks to Twitter we can now get hourly “climate” updates
As a young geologist, I became concerned when I realized mankind was conducting an uncontrolled experiment by converting enormous quantites of fossil fuel into CO2 and water vapor. My concern lead me to investigate for myself, to see if there was cause for alarm. I was appalled at the crap that was being passed off as science, and at Mike Mann’s refusal to share his data and methods. Since then, I haven’t seen a shred of credible evidence that CAGW is real. It only exists in climate models and in the minds of faux scientists.
Yep, six years of geology here, and I never believed the claims. I reserved a 1% possibility just to be fair, and cast that aside once I saw the data manipulation and piss poor excuses for those changes. This just goes to show what a powerhouse the left has built through their takeover of education, pop culture, and 90% of the media.
Me too. I never bought into it at all.
Back in about 1990 a geologist colleague explained his attitude to me. He calculated the total available supply of fossil fuels as lasting in the range of 400-500 years, if I remember correctly. Human inputs would begin to decline before any dangerous warming had kicked in, so he wasn’t worrying about it.
I know that we have continued to discover more deposits, particularly oil and gas, but is my friend’s old estimate still in the right ballpark?
Up until about 2007 or so I was a sort of luke warmer, I guess. I had not looked into it in any depth, but based on all the reports I figured, “It is probably a serious problem, but maybe not as bad as they say.” About then, two of my good friends — both VERY bright people — became strongly and deeply worried about CAGW. “Gee whiz..” I thought, “maybe I ought to look in to this!”
Within just a few weeks it became pretty clear that the hardcore CAGW crowd was not playing an honest game. The clincher was when I started reading the site reports from WattsUpWithThat and saw just how bad the raw data was. The thing that convinced me was that Watts was trying so hard to get the “climate scientists” to see the siting issues — and the “climate scientists” were basically not interested. “Oh, we can just adjust for those things..” seemed to be their attitude. That was it for me. Anyone who claims to be a scientist and yet is unconcerned about obvious poor data — well, they are not real scientists and cannot be trusted.
To make things even worse, the so-called “scientists” then took the already compromised raw data and REALLY screwed it up! This is Lysenko version 2.0.
By the way — the two friends who got me interested in the subject? One is still a good friend and is slowly becoming sceptical. The other, sadly, stopped talking to me some years back. I think that our disagreement about CAGW is the main reason. He was convinced that human civilization and most of the biosphere was already a lost cause. He had trouble sleeping at night. Understandable, considering… I think that to him, my lack of CAGW belief was a sort of treason toward life on Earth.
Steven, this blog is a good reminder not to angrily vent our frustrations on those who still believe.
I was traveling from Fayetteville to Berkeley in 1963 or 1964, stopped by Los Alamos and considered taking a job there instead of going to a post-doc position in Berkeley. Time flies!
It was hard for the global warming concept to get any traction during the 1960’s and 1970’s when the world was cooling. Finally, between 1980 and 1998, there was some actual warming, so the theory seemed plausible. Then they overplayed their hand with end of the world scare tactics, the hockey stick and ever increasing warming. Instead nature threw them a nasty curve when warming abruptly stopped. Their response has been to become even more shrill, along with a massive disinformation and data doctoring campaign. They have now been exposed as the total frauds and buffoons that they are.
Steve, I never believed in catastrophic man made global warming for even a tiny moment. What I learned of science in the 70s told me that it was not possible.
Besides, a Taoist finds it damn hard to believe that mankind can trump mother nature.
After reading a paper by Ramanathan in 1979, I thought the theory would soon be laughed at. It seems climate scientists are less intelligent than I thought.
Off topic: In 1976, Gribbin published a book called “Forecasts, famines, and freezes : climate and man’s future”. It was mostly about the continuing and soon to be increasing cooling that they now say never happened.
Ironically, it was watching “An inconvenient Truth” that opened my eyes to the fact that much of the global warming alarmism was based on junk science.
Thanks, Al!
Bog Oaks, birches at the bottom of 5000 year old Scottish blanket bogs, records of ice fairs on the Thames., and various other bits of climate history always sowed the seeds of doubt in my mind. When I was a boy the old wife’s tale was that all those rockets were messing up the weather, I was doubtful about that too.
Didn’t some one in Roman times write about “that part of Libya where the wild beasts are” which is something I seem to remember from my schooling.
I still laugh about the “rockets are messing up the weather” thing. Back in the early 1970s my grandmother firmly believed that. “You know that the reason why we are having all this bad weather is because of those men going to the moon!” These days, people still try to tell me that the weather has gone wonky. When they do, I say, “Yeah, I know what you mean. Ever since we stopped sending men to the moon, the weather has gotten worse and worse and worse!”
I think it is funny, but hardly anyone sees the humor in it… 🙂
I never believed a word of it. The whole “tipping point” for earth turning into Venus, that started the whole thing, was pure science fiction to me. Like a bad episode of Lost In Space.
As someone reminded me, what episode of LIS was good?
Maybe the first and second; got kind of campy and predictable after that. For a kid, the various props were kinda interesting, those and the Robot. Smith was unbearable. Plots were, um, way out there (as in unfeasible), but not in an Outer Limits way.
I have a good memory for certain things. When I was little kid in the 1970s I was told we were going into a new ice age. That didn’t happen. Then when global warming came around I was immediately skeptical. I had already been lied to. Warmists told me the cooling scare never happened. I smelled bullshit from day one. I couldn’t prove it, but it just did not make any sense.
By the late 1990s I was asking warmists inconvenient questions on sci.environment. My favorite was to ask them about the water, because burning a hydrocarbon produces CO2 and H2O. Water vapor is a far more powerful green house gas and adding water to the environment is going to do something if enough is added, and each hydro carbon yield one more molecule of water than CO2 when burned (ideally). Instead of answering they came back with demeaning responses like ‘it rains’, name calling, and accusing me of being on oil company payrolls. As a result I now knew it was bullshit.
Looking at the things that were brought out as truth, as proof of warming, closer than I was supposed to only exposed them as lies. Temperature and CO2 were clearly not related. Polar bears were fine, etc and so on. Warmists still didn’t make sense. If polar ice never melted, if glaciers only grew, then eventually the earth’s mass balance would be screwed up and that doesn’t work well for a spinning ball. They had to melt back, grow, melt back within some limits. It’s just basic mechanics. I also have a passing interest in old war birds. Planes parked on the ice of Greenland in the 1940s ended up 250+ feet down, some knowledge of Viking history, etc and so forth that told me the Greenland ice sheet stuff was also crap.
I then ignored the topic and treated as a political excuse to impoverish people and control them. Now I’ve landed here, where the data tampering is exposed.
Thank you for the account and observation.
They were still trying to sell their “Nuclear Winter” nonsense up into the 1990s, after Sagan et al had been demonstrably wrong quite enough for my taste. No offense to Carlos Sagan, wherever he is, after all he was quite good at droning on nasally about things he, in retrospect, had no clue about.
I never believed the “I can tell you the weather in a century schtick”, got my engineering BS meter pegged to full scale.
And the “trapping heat” bit ? REALLY ??? in the 20th and 21 first century folks are talking about trapping heat, like heat is a substance you can pour in a Mason Jar ™ and close the lid and trap it, really ???? It’s the amount of energy in a substance at any one point in time/space, it’s not a fricking butterfly.
Then I examined the “greenhouse effect” and realized that it is really just a hybrid thermal-optical delay line. The energy just bounces back and forth between the surface and the gases in the atmosphere alternating as radiation and heat, then leaving for the energy free void of space. The delay is seconds or less. The missing heat is long gone. Of course, I might just be a lunatic.
Cheers, Kevin.
Yes, it is time for this scam to come to an end, but I fear it is going to continue for some time. Just a gut feeling though – I’m no expert at public opinion. I mean, there are still people out there that think Obamacare is great (from reading their bumper stickers!)
My wake-up was Climategate in late 2009 although I never took any of it too seriously. I lived through the global cooling scare of the 70s and was full-time military stationed in a combat-arms unit in Europe; and let me tell you, it was cold in the winters and I was outdoors for extended periods of time in the 70s; and then worked in construction, followed by work in the oil patch.
I remember reading about an immanent ice age caused by Mankind’s pollution blotting out the sun, overpopulation, immanent famine; (funny now that obesity is a world-wide problem!) blah, blah, blah, they couldn’t have got it more wrong. The trolls, bots, and sophists claiming there was no Man-Made global-cooling scare are FOS – I was there, there was a scare.
Anyhow, they switched to warming and I was looking forward to an ice-free Arctic, quite honestly. There are valuable petroleum and mineral deposits there we could exploit (I mean humanity – not just Americans – at least the Russians and I would hope, the Norwegians would go for it if we were too wimpy for the job).
After Climategate I did a little research – read the old Ramanathan paper; read Mosher and Fuller’s book (it was pretty good!); read a bunch more; downloaded a bunch of temperature data; and so forth.
Anyone with at least average intelligence, some technical background – I have a BSME – mechanical engineering degree – but heck, that isn’t needed – someone trained in elementary economics or business has enough numeric smarts to see the theory is busted. CO2 goes up. Temperature goes up. Down. Does nothing much. Mostly does nothing much.
Nothing, I mean nothing by means of extreme weather can be remote linked to Man-Made CO2. Sea-level rise; inconsequential. Heat spells? Always had them. Cold snaps? Always had them.
Really a shame the media is complicit, not too surprising charlatans are cashing in, and not too surprising dishonest politicians are making hay with it too. Really horrible that the scientific societies and Universities are complicit. They know better. Or should.
“”I have a BSME – mechanical engineering degree – but heck, that isn’t needed – someone trained in elementary economics or business has enough numeric smarts to see the theory is busted. CO2 goes up….”
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Formally I have none of the above, As the disaster claims were so serious, about 12 years ago I decided to investigate on my own. I only own that I understand the basic scientific method, and have a capacity for deductive reaseon, and an open mind.
After about 200 hours reading climate audit, and then WUWT, I was a firm sceptic. I could read the debates at climate audit, see the flaws in the alarmist arm waving arguements, and then see the response of well educated sceptics, making the exact points I KNEW they would.
I got into a debate with a young scientist at Scipps in San Diego. Sticking to fundemental flaws in the CAGW theory, I am afraid I calmly ran over him without mercy. His “uncle” cry was to state..”I support my family through this” Really, that is what he said.
I’m a literature professor who never did fall for the warming theory and who has been puzzled all along by the fact that trained scientists have been respectful toward it. It looked transparently unscientific to me from the start. No one was citing rigorous tests of falsification that the theory had passed, for one thing. They still aren’t. It’s predictable, now, that former believers like the commenters above have started making excuses for their initial gullibility. (“The climate was warming slightly, so catastrophic anthropogenic warming seemed believable at the time.”) No doubt the entire scientific community has a Plan B ready, by which it will grease its exit from this fiasco. I, for one, am in no mood to be charitable or forgiving. I look forward to spending the next few decades ridiculing the morons who have been saying insulting things to my face for the past ten years. And I doubt I’ll ever give much credence again to anything the scientific community cooks up. The scientific boy has cried wolf.
Frank,
Great comment – points all well taken. I’d like to flesh out and elaborate on a couple of things you said.
“I’m a literature professor who never did fall for the warming theory and who has been puzzled all along by the fact that trained scientists have been respectful toward it. It looked transparently unscientific to me from the start.”
Awesome. There is a ton of crap flying under the banner of “science” that is pure nonsense to anyone intelligent and energetic enough to investigate facts. Eugenics. Hey, it was top-notch “science” at one time. Medical research – particularly drug research. Much of it as fake as magnetic-healing and homeopathy. Immanent Ice Age. Man-Made of course. The list goes on. Buyer beware; but bring your critical thinking skills. Amazing how many so-called technically-trained science, engineering, and technology people lack said skills outside their specialty.
“No doubt the entire scientific community has a Plan B ready, by which it will grease its exit from this fiasco.” Of course. You know they do. Fashions change; the public will develop a new fetish. And so-called science will be there to “explain” it all. For a price.
But let’s get inside this idea a bit further, from an angle I have an insight into, being an engineer and dealing with this particular variant of group-think on a daily basis.
Technically trained people do not naturally cross-over into other disciplines – by training, by professional ethics, and mostly by habit. For example, I am quite competent at electrical engineering. My current employer doesn’t even know I know how to lay out a circuit board! They were surprised when I could use an oscilloscope.
Further, there is a kind of trade-guild psychology at work particularly at the PhD level, where a united front is projected to the public (or in commercial settings “management”); but in private, controversies rage between them. It is highly ego-centric and political. Damn the facts. Climategate laid it all bare.
As an engineer, I was howling with laughter reading Climategate emails: clumsy prose, bitter, petty squabbles, and their doubts about their cherished little theory. It was just like a day at work; the PhDs all piously spouting their theoretical nonsense to management (with the engineers and technicians left to actually make their BS work…); but with climate science these charlatans are informing the populace, our elected officials and bureaucracies. Bad. Oh, incidentally, not all PhDs are idiots. Just the vast majority that I have worked with – some however are absolutely super-humanly intelligent and great people with magnificent character.
“I, for one, am in no mood to be charitable or forgiving. I look forward to spending the next few decades ridiculing the morons who have been saying insulting things to my face for the past ten years.”
Cut no slack. You know, we actually live in a wonderful world, a wonderful society as a matter of fact. These people, these frauds, these hucksters and charlatans these CAGW alarmists, have been masquerading as rational, knowledgeable, specialists simply innocently warning us of the consequences, the horrible consequences, of our evil, thoughtless pollution of the atmosphere with CO2! Of all things. The chemical giver of all terrestrial life. Idiots. Total idiots. Yes, morons. But, our society permits rational discourse. I love our wonderful society. Ram it down their throats. Sideways. “Hey Dr. Climatebux, Manhattan flooded yet? Say, is any major seaport flooding? No? Hmmm.”
There are people that deserve no pity, and no compassion.
In New Zealand, it was a talkback host called Leighton Smith, on NewstalkZB, who convinced me and many other listeners to research the topic, and not just blindly *believe* what we were being fed by the mainstream. … (The history of science shows that a new hypothesis and new papers are not necessarily incorrect if they don’t follow the “mainstream” theories.)
Any researcher with some knowledge of science and the scientific method would realize that the ‘projections’ did not agree with what was really happening in the world. .. As another example, anybody with some knowledge of plant life would know that CO2 is most definitely not a pollutant, and at the present time, the plants need more of it, not less.
I often try to remember the wise words of our old teachers :-
~ note the scientific need for extraordinary evidence;
~ ensure that the hypothesis agrees with the experiments and real-life observations;
~ recall the story about Kepler preferring the most precise observations, rather than his dearest illusions;
~ remember that science isn’t based on consensus or belief, and correlation does not prove causation;
~ remember that the ‘claim of consensus’ is used only in situations where the science is not solid enough.
Don’t worry, the history of cults shows that many cult members will leave the group when they realize that the ‘projections’ turn out to be little more than the output of contrived computer programs, .. and science that is based on empirical evidence will once again prove to be the correct method for explaining the complex and chaotic nature of Earth’s environment.
… oops, please ignore what is in the brackets in the first paragraph. It seems disjointed — not really connected with the rest of the paragraph.
Don’t second-guess yourself. Let it stand, it’s fine.
I’ve been around long enough to have lived through the ice age scare back in the 70s. I didn’t believe that and when they changed the propaganda to Global Warming I didn’t believe that either. I think I was born cynical, which has helped immeasurably in separating the wheat from the chaff throughout my life.
Logically speaking, we are already heading into another Ice Age. The signs are all around us. The warm spells we experience are usually more transient and less intense than warm spells 6,000 years ago. We know that interglacials are much shorter than glacials and don’t last more than 15,000 years.
We know that these cycles are persistent and ongoing. We know that the Ice Age cycles last ten times longer than Interglacial cycles.
All the warning signs are there right in our faces which is why worry about ‘global warming’ baffles me.
The answer of course is power. The desire for power, in and of itself, is not evil. In fact it is, to various degrees, quite universal in human nature. The desire for power becomes evil when it transends from power over your OWN life, to poser OVER others, and that desire my friend, is the root of evil.
Of couse Thomas Jefferson said this very succintly, “Government is a necessary evil.”
“The Growing Religious Self-Righteousness of Science”
Slogging through S. McIntyre’s work on Climate Audit over a couple years convinced me; I was doubting CAGW prior to that having some innate ‘feel’ for large systems with multiple feedback and control paths, and it seemed to simple a ‘call’ that we were all doomed due to a trace gas and disregarding most everything else!
For Pete’s sake, we are in an “interglacial” period, that alone should speak volumes that we need every source of heat and insulation (i.e. GHG) surrounding the planet on account of the MUCH bigger threat that a cold period represents. A few simple calcs with SB equation with deep space as a ‘sink’ (for thermal IR energy) and sol as the ‘input’ energy source ought to give one ‘pause’ of the precarious position we find ourselves vis-a-vis the planetary energy budget! Much more risk (and probability) of a colder period than anything even **remotely** approaching a ‘spike’ in temps let alone an expected ‘soaring’ of surface temps, all IMO of course …