For sheer breathtaking climate alarmist inanity, can I recommend Mark Lynas? He has produced a classic piece of apocalyptic-fevered writing that should be preserved for future generations.
Parents: make sure your children get a proper scientific education or they’ll end up like Mark Lynas.
I present: the easy way to stop climate change
We have about 100 months left. If global greenhouse gas emissions have not begun to decline by the end of 2015, then our chances of restraining climate change to within the two degrees “safety line” – the level of warming below which the impacts are severe but tolerable – diminish day by day thereafter. This is what the latest science now demands: the peaking of emissions within eight years, worldwide cuts of 60 per cent by 2030, and 80 per cent or more by 2050. Above two degrees, our chances of crossing “tipping points” in the earth’s system – such as the collapse of the Amazon rainforest, or the release of methane from thawing Siberian permafrost – is much higher.
Ah yes, Mark is a fundamentalist believer in the unstable equilibrium theory of climate - in this model, the climate is naturally stable, but a small perturbation (burning fossil fuels) can (by the magic of positive feedbacks!) lead to destabilization of the climate leading to runaway…well…unpleasantness.
Which leads me to the next part - democracy is over. Fall into line:
STEP ONE: Stop debating, start doing
Although there is now a very broad consensus on climate in the media and politics, opinion polls show that many people still harbour doubts about climate change. One of the peculiarities of the climate debate is that although more than 99 per cent of international climate change scientists agree on the causes of global warming, the denial lobby still only has to produce one contrarian to undermine the consensus in the public mind. Similarly, changes in our understanding can be magnified and distorted to suggest that, because we don’t know everything, therefore we must know nothing. Thus, data from one glacier that apparently bucks the global trend can be wielded as a trump card against all the accumulated knowledge of climate science.
A classic example of antiscience. In science, one piece of evidence that falsifies a hypothesis does indeed trump that hypothesis. Of course with global warming, every extreme event is evidence of global warming, whether warmth, cold, drought, floods, fire, more storminess, less storminess, more fish, less fish and so on.
Its Lynas’ “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain” trick.
But what of debate? Since when as Lynas ever advocated the debate tha he’s now calling a halt to? Here’s Lynas’ real attitude to debate with people who oppose him:
I wonder what sentences judges might hand down at future international criminal tribunals on those who will be partially but directly responsible for millions of deaths from starvation, famine and disease in decades ahead. I put this in a similar moral category to Holocaust denial – except that this time the Holocaust is yet to come, and we still have time to avoid it. Those who try to ensure we don’t will one day have to answer for their crimes.
Yep, its not as if Lynas hasn’t dragged the debate down far enough that he can’t just dispense with it altogether.
Read the whole screed. In 2015, I’m sure he’ll deny he ever wrote it.
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