Wait, which predictions that climate scientists made have come true? We sure haven’t lost all of our glaciers which someone said we would do by the year 2000, didn’t they? And then they changed it to 2010, and that hasn’t happened either. Florida, and the Netherlands aren’t underwater as expected.
None of the climate scientists I’ve ever had contact with have suggested that. In fact I was writing a futuristic screenplay and wanted to know when the sea would possibly rise some 60 meters in a worse case scenario (due to glacier melt, sea expansion due to warming, etc), and they told me 100s of years, if not 1000s. So I set the story I think around 2800.
Anyway, meanwhile I was working on an article re food rights and climate change, and read p. 493, Ch. 10 Asia of the WGII (impacts) chapters of the IPCC, and came across the claim that the Himalayan glaciers could all melt by 2035. Since that was not what I had heard from the climate scientists I knew and trusted (and the source cited was a World Wildlife Fund report…not a peer-reviewed study), I didn’t include that tidbit in my paper. Some months later a glaciologist happened to read that chapter and realized a mistake had been made and drew attention to it, and the IPCC later admitted it was an error. The problem is the top climate scientists mainly work on the WGI chapters (the science) and not the impact chapters. Also (I came to find out) the WGII chapters don’t have aa strict rules, and can include non-peer-reviewed materials. I’m not knocking such reports, like the WWF one, because they are often good and based on peer-reviewed studies, and often give a good synthesis and overview, but they are unacceptable for scholarly work.
It seems that mistake happened because a non-glaciologist wrote that section of the report and really didn’t know about what was realistically possible even under the worst-case scenario; neither did the head of the IPCC. They got the info from the WWF report, which got it from an editorial in the NEW SCIENTIST (an interesting journal, but not a top-tier peer-reviewed one). The editor apparently got the date from a phone conversation from an Indian glaciologist who either said they could all melt away by 2350, or that some could melt by 2035, and just like the game “telephone” we used to play, the editor heard it wrong. Considering the 1000s of pages in the total IPCC 4AR report, it is amazing they made so few errors (also 100s of scientists work on them for free in their spare time, so they don’t have a whole lot of time to check other portions of it).
In any case there was absolutely NO HARM done by that 2035 mistake, since I and that lone glaciologist were the ONLY ONES WHO EVER READ IT – and I didn’t include it in my paper, and he saw to it the mistake was corrected. Not harm done - error corrected.
The really tragic story is that no one had read it, except us, bec no one gives a damn about AGW’s impacts on Asia. The world has written off the majority of humanity (doubt people have read the Africa chapter either). That’s the real story and real tragedy.
I would be fine with your statements if you were talking about pollution. But please tell me how have you mitigated AGW? According to you the temps are still rising and so is CO2. You cannot quantify anything you or anybody has done to mitigate global warming. In fact according to AGW proponents, the lack of response to the mitigation efforts, should provide evidence against the anthropic part of the global warming. Not to mention the governments have instituted mitigation efforts that even you are against, This is why we demand empirical proof.
I kept records of my energy consumption and saw how it went down over the months and years as I implemented various measures…such as buying a SunFrost frig (uses 1/12 of the energy of my old frig), etc. I actually measured the water from our old showerhead and our new one (cut it in half) – that involves energy to pump and heat. I guessimated the savings from other measures – reduce, reuse, recycle, etc. I kept a notebook for years, and had it all written down – a clear indication of reductions. One has to consider that there are GHGs involved in nearly every product – in it’s resource extraction, manufacture, etc. For instance much of bauxite mining to make aluminum involves tearing up rainforests, and the energy saved recycling aluminum is 95% – so recycling aluminum is really beneficial.
Because people who are pushing AGW are also heavily involved in pushing immoral and even environmentally questionable tactics to mitigating it (Al Gore has his own carbon credit trading firm
).
Then why don’t supposedly “good” people get involved and do it the right way, as I am. We could outnumber and outvote the evil-doers. When good people do nothing, the evil ones take over the projects.
I know you are already doing many many things to help the environment, and those things also help reduce GHGs, so I’m not referring to you. You’re really great, and I admire that. If everyone would just do as you are doing, then we wouldn’t have any problems, and there really wouldn’t be any evidence for the climate scientists because there wouldn’t be enough GHGs in the atmosphere to have enough impact to show up.
Keep up the good work and try to help others also do so, then we will truly have a good and beautiful world.
