Climate Change Experts Quotes

In other words, changing the earth’s climate in ways that will be chaotic and disastrous is easier to accept than the prospect of changing the fundamental, growth-based, profit-seeking logic of capitalism. We probably shouldn’t be surprised that some climate scientists are a little spooked by the radical implications of their own research. Most of them were quietly measuring ice cores, running global climate models, and studying ocean acidification, only to discover, as Australian climate expert and author Clive Hamilton puts it, that in breaking the news of the depth of our collective climate failure, they “were unwittingly destabilizing the political and social order.”55

Yet like many other human traits that made sense in past ages but cause trouble in the modern age, the knowledge illusion has its downside. The world is becoming ever more complex, and people fail to realise just how ignorant they are of what’s going on. Consequently some who know next to nothing about meteorology or biology nevertheless propose policies regarding climate change and genetically modified crops, while others hold extremely strong views about what should be done in Iraq or Ukraine without being able to locate these countries on a map. People rarely appreciate their ignorance, because they lock themselves inside an echo chamber of like-minded friends and self-confirming newsfeeds, where their beliefs are constantly reinforced and seldom challenged. Providing people with more and better information is unlikely to improve matters. Scientists hope to dispel wrong views by better science education, and pundits hope to sway public opinion on issues such as Obamacare or global warming by presenting the public with accurate facts and expert reports. Such hopes are grounded in a misunderstanding of how humans actually think. Most of our views are shaped by communal groupthink rather than individual rationality, and we hold on to these views out of group loyalty. Bombarding people with facts and exposing their individual ignorance is likely to backfire. Most people don’t like too many facts, and they certainly don’t like to feel stupid. Don’t be so sure that you can convince Tea Party supporters of the truth of global warming by presenting them with sheets of statistical data.

Despite the clear scientific consensus, a veritable brigade of self-proclaimed, underinformed armchair experts lurk on comment threads the world over, eager to pour scorn on climate science. Barrages of ad hominem attacks all too often await both the scientists working in climate research and journalists who communicate the research findings.

These two traits, impostor syndrome in intelligent people and illogical self-confidence in less intelligent people, regularly overlap in unhelpful ways. Modern public debate is disastrously skewed due to this. Important issues such as vaccination or climate change are invariably dominated by the impassioned rantings of those who have uninformed personal opinions rather than the calmer explanations of the trained experts, and it’s all thanks to a few quirks of the brain’s workings. Basically,

Dupont had a long history of analysing Australia’s position in the world. He was also a pioneer in the study of links between climate change and international security, an area that few defence experts had explored. In 2006 he asserted in an article, written with Graeme Pearman, that the security implications of climate change had been largely ignored by public policy experts, academics and journalists. ‘Climate change is fast emerging as the security issue of the 21st century,’ he wrote, ‘overshadowing terrorism and even the spread of weapons of mass destruction as the threat most likely to cause mega-death and contribute to state failure, forced population movements, food and water scarcity and the spread of infectious diseases.

Chapter 20 we will explore in far greater depth how to avoid brainwashing and how to distinguish reality from fiction. Here I would like to offer two simple rules of thumb. First, if you want reliable information, pay good money for it. If you get your news for free, you might well be the product. Suppose a shady billionaire offered you the following deal: “I will pay you $30 a month, and in exchange you will allow me to brainwash you for an hour every day, installing in your mind whichever political and commercial biases I want.” Would you take the deal? Few sane people would. So the shady billionaire offers a slightly different deal: “You will allow me to brainwash you for one hour every day, and in exchange, I will not charge you anything for this service.” Now the deal suddenly sounds tempting to hundreds of millions of people. Don’t follow their example. The second rule of thumb is that if some issue seems exceptionally important to you, make the effort to read the relevant scientific literature. And by scientific literature I mean peer-reviewed articles, books published by well-known academic publishers, and the writings of professors from reputable institutions. Science obviously has its limitations, and it has gotten many things wrong in the past. Nevertheless, the scientific community has been our most reliable source of knowledge for centuries. If you think the scientific community is wrong about something, that’s certainly possible, but at least know the scientific theories you are rejecting, and provide some empirical evidence to support your claim. Scientists, for their part, need to be far more engaged with current public debates. Scientists should not be afraid of making their voices heard when the debate wanders into their field of expertise, be it medicine or history. Of course, it is extremely important to go on doing academic research and to publish the results in scientific journals that only a few experts read. But it is equally important to communicate the latest scientific theories to the general public through popular science books, and even through the skillful use of art and fiction. Does that mean scientists should start writing science fiction? That is actually not such a bad idea. Art plays a key role in shaping people’s views of the world, and in the twenty-first century science fiction is arguably the most important genre of all, for it shapes how most people understand things such as AI, bioengineering, and climate change. We certainly need good science, but from a political perspective, a good science-fiction movie is worth far more than an article in Science or Nature.

set aside more preserves, extinguished fewer species, saved the ozone layer, and peaked in their consumption of oil, farmland, timber, paper, cars, coal, and perhaps even carbon. For all their differences, the world’s nations came to a historic agreement on climate change, as they did in previous years on nuclear testing, proliferation, security, and disarmament. Nuclear weapons, since the extraordinary circumstances of the closing days of World War II, have not been used in the seventy-two years they have existed. Nuclear terrorism, in defiance of forty years of expert predictions, has never happened. The world’s nuclear stockpiles have been reduced by 85 percent, with more reductions to come, and testing has ceased (except by the tiny rogue regime in Pyongyang) and proliferation has frozen. The world’s two most pressing problems, then, though not yet solved, are solvable: practicable long-term agendas have been laid out for eliminating nuclear weapons and for mitigating climate change. For all the bleeding headlines, for all the crises, collapses, scandals, plagues, epidemics, and existential threats, these are accomplishments to savor. The Enlightenment is working: for two and a half centuries, people have used knowledge to enhance human flourishing. Scientists have exposed the workings of matter, life, and mind. Inventors have harnessed the laws of nature to defy entropy, and entrepreneurs have made their innovations affordable. Lawmakers have made people better off by discouraging acts that are individually beneficial but collectively harmful. Diplomats have done the same with nations. Scholars have perpetuated the treasury of knowledge and augmented the power of reason. Artists have expanded the circle of sympathy. Activists have pressured the powerful to overturn repressive measures, and their fellow citizens to change repressive norms. All these efforts have been channeled into institutions that have allowed us to circumvent the flaws of human nature and empower our better angels. At the same time . . . Seven hundred million people in the world today live in extreme poverty. In the regions where they are concentrated, life expectancy is less than 60, and almost a quarter of the people are undernourished.

Beauty Junkies is the title of a recent book by New York Times writer Alex Kuczynski, “a self-confessed recovering addict of cosmetic surgery.” And, withour technological prowess, we succeed in creating fresh addictions. Some psychologists now describe a new clinical pathology — Internet sex addiction disorder. Physicians and psychologists may not be all that effective in treating addictions, but we’re expert at coming up with fresh names and categories. A recent study at Stanford University School of Medicine found that about 5.5 per cent of men and 6 per cent of women appear to be addicted shoppers. The lead researcher, Dr. Lorrin Koran, suggested that compulsive buying be recognized as a unique illness listed under its own heading in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the official psychiatric catalogue. Sufferers of this “new” disorder are afflicted by “an irresistible, intrusive and senseless impulse” to purchase objects they do not need. I don’t scoff at the harm done by shopping addiction — I’m in no position to do that — and I agree that Dr. Koran accurately describes the potential consequences of compulsive buying: “serious psychological, financial and family problems, including depression, overwhelming debt and the breakup of relationships.” But it’s clearly not a distinct entity — only another manifestation of addiction tendencies that run through our culture, and of the fundamental addiction process that varies only in its targets, not its basic characteristics. In his 2006 State of the Union address, President George W. Bush identified another item of addiction. “Here we have a serious problem,” he said. “America is addicted to oil.” Coming from a man who throughout his financial and political career has had the closest possible ties to the oil industry. The long-term ill effects of our society’s addiction, if not to oil then to the amenities and luxuries that oil makes possible, are obvious. They range from environmental destruction, climate change and the toxic effects of pollution on human health to the many wars that the need for oil, or the attachment to oil wealth, has triggered. Consider how much greater a price has been exacted by this socially sanctioned addiction than by the drug addiction for which Ralph and his peers have been declared outcasts. And oil is only one example among many: consider soul-, body-or Nature-destroying addictions to consumer goods, fast food, sugar cereals, television programs and glossy publications devoted to celebrity gossip—only a few examples of what American writer Kevin Baker calls “the growth industries that have grown out of gambling and hedonism.

The Future of Humanity Institute conducted a poll of academic experts on global risks. They gave an estimate of 19 percent probability that the human species will go extinct before the end of this century. The Stern Review: The Economics of Climate Change factored a 9.5 percent risk of extinction within the next century into its calculations.

I find that everyone, experts and non-experts alike, converts climate change into stories that embody their own values, assumptions, and prejudices. I describe how these stories can come to take on a life of their own, following their own rules, evolving and gaining authority as they pass between people. I suggest that the most pervasive narrative of all is the one that is not voiced: the collective social norm of silence. This response to climate change is all too similar to that other great taboo, death, and I suggest that they may have far more in common than we want to admit.

Anderson’s papers and slide shows have become more alarming. Under titles such as “Climate Change: Going Beyond Dangerous . . . Brutal Numbers and Tenuous Hope,” he points out that the chances of staying within anything like safe temperature levels are diminishing fast. With his colleague Alice Bows-Larkin, an atmospheric physicist and climate change mitigation expert at the Tyndall Centre, Anderson argues that we have lost so much time to political stalling and weak climate policies—all while emissions ballooned—that we are now facing cuts so drastic that they challenge the core expansionist logic at the heart of our economic system.

In the final months before the 2008 presidential election, Michael Mann, a tenured meteorology and geosciences professor at Penn State University who had become a leading figure in climate change research, told his wife that he would be happy whichever candidate won. Both the Republican and the Democratic presidential nominees had spoken about the importance of addressing global warming, which Mann regarded as the paramount issue of the day. But what he didn’t fully foresee was that the same forces stirring the Tea Party would expertly channel the public outrage at government against scientific experts like himself.

How is Science Governed? We have already seen how the changing nature of science, and its changing relationship with society, has left Polanyi’s self-governing republic of science somewhat defenceless. The boundaries of science have become more porous even if, in the heartland of the republic, the norms and practices of expert peer-review and disinterested enquiry continue to be aspired to. New complex phenomena such as climate change, and the role ascribed to scientific knowledge in public debates about climate change policy, demand adjustments to the way in which science is governed and how its knowledge is policed. With respect to climate change, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is the creation of this new operating environment for science or, one might say, is an attempt to create a new interface between science and policy suited to a ‘post-normal’ operation of science. Yet exactly what the IPCC is, how it is governed, what sort of knowledge it

Interestingly, [Kevin] Anderson says that when he presents his radical findings in climate circles, the core facts are rarely disputed. What he hears most often are confessions from colleagues that they have simply given up hope of meeting the 2 degree temperature target, precisely because reaching it would require such a profound challenge to economic growth. “This position is shared by many senior scientists and economists advising government,” Anderson reports. In other words, changing the earth’s climate in ways that will be chaotic and disastrous is easier to accept than the prospect of changing the fundamental, growth-based, profit-seeking logic of capitalism. We probably shouldn’t be surprised that some climate scientists are a little spooked by the radical implications of their own research. Most of them were quietly measuring ice cores, running global climate models, and studying ocean acidification, only to discover, as Australian climate expert and author Clive Hamilton puts it, that in breaking the news of the depth of our collective climate failure, they “were unwittingly destabilizing the political and social order.” Nonetheless, that order has now been destabilized, which means that the rest of us are going to have to quickly figure out how to turn “managed degrowth” into something that looks a lot less like the Great Depression and a lot more like what some innovative economic thinkers have taken to calling “The Great Transition.

The climate has been changing throughout history. Has man caused all these historical fluctuations in weather? No, of course not; but global warming alarmists want to make you feel responsible for natural cycles that have gone on for forever, and you need to know this is basically a moneymaker for some of them. In a way, global warming—or climate change as they now call it, to cover all their bases—is a pseudoscientific fad that comes complete with massive government grants and university research support for scientists, power and big budgets for bureaucrats, and a feel-good crusade for politicians. It’s an unholy combination that has left truth and common sense behind. With all the problems mankind has caused in this world, and all the deadly threats people currently face, claims that climate change is our number one threat, as the alarmists want you to believe, are downright ludicrous. Moreover, the idea that government can “fix” our future weather patterns doesn’t pass the straight-face test. Whatever government does in regulating power and siphoning off zillions of tax dollars for uneconomic, inefficient “green energy” projects will, according to some experts, chill our climate by less than two-hundredths of a degree Celsius over the course of a hundred years! And there is evidence, by the way, that our planet is entering a cooling trend anyway because of reduced solar flares and sunspot activity. What the government’s draconian regulations will actually achieve is not a healthier climate but scarcer and higher-cost energy, fewer jobs, a weaker economy, and a less secure America.

in the run-up to the 2002 elections, Republican pollster and political consultant Frank Luntz identified the issues for his clients in a memo that was leaked to the press. Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate. . . . The scientific debate is closing (against us) but not yet closed. There is still a window of opportunity to challenge the science. . . . You need to be even more active in recruiting experts who are sympathetic to your view. . . . 79

1. The coercive style. This “Do what I say” approach can be very effective in a turnaround situation, a natural disaster, or when working with problem employees. But in most situations, coercive leadership inhibits the organization’s flexibility and dampens employees’ motivation. 2. The authoritative style. An authoritative leader takes a “Come with me” approach: she states the overall goal but gives people the freedom to choose their own means of achieving it. This style works especially well when a business is adrift. It is less effective when the leader is working with a team of experts who are more experienced than he is. 3. The affiliative style. The hallmark of the affiliative leader is a “People come first” attitude. This style is particularly useful for building team harmony or increasing morale. But its exclusive focus on praise can allow poor performance to go uncorrected. Also, affiliative leaders rarely offer advice, which often leaves employees in a quandary. 4. The democratic style. This style’s impact on organizational climate is not as high as you might imagine. By giving workers a voice in decisions, democratic leaders build organizational flexibility and responsibility and help generate fresh ideas. But sometimes the price is endless meetings and confused employees who feel leaderless. 5. The pacesetting style. A leader who sets high performance standards and exemplifies them himself has a very positive impact on employees who are self-motivated and highly competent. But other employees tend to feel overwhelmed by such a leader’s demands for excellence—and to resent his tendency to take over a situation. 6. The coaching style. This style focuses more on personal development than on immediate work-related tasks. It works well when employees are already aware of their weaknesses and want to improve, but not when they are resistant to changing their ways.

Climate Change - "We cannot stop it but we can slow it down

Does my dog love me, or does he just want a treat?” A professor who is an expert in climate change—not dogs—recently asked me that question. I’ve often asked it myself. Short answer: your dog really does love you. Part of the reason is: because you are kind. If you were abusive, your dog would fear you. And they might still love you, out of duty or need—not so different from many people trapped in abusive relationships. But to answer the question directly: what we know about dogs’ brains, their brain chemistry, and the changes to their brains caused by domestication tells us that yes, your dog loves you. A dog’s ability to feel love for humans comes partly from the love wolves have for wolves, partly from the genetic changes of their domesticated ancestry. In dogs, we’ve bred the people we wish we could be: loyal, hardworking, watchful, fiercely protective, intuitive, sensitive, affectionate, helpful to those in need. No matter how they originated, their feelings are real to them. Your dog genuinely loves you, as you, in your domesticated state, activating the deep, old parts of your brain, love your dog.

Not all experts abhor the population increase that gave rise to their own birth. An American economist named Henry George gravely opposed Malthusian doctrine on the grounds that it “shelters selfishness from question and from conscience.” The way he saw things, the true cause of poverty among the masses was “the rapacity of man” and not the inadequacy of nature.

For example, consider the case of global warming. People from the 2-D world assume mass delusions are rare, and they apply that assumption to every topic. So when they notice that most scientists are on the same side, that observation is persuasive to them. A reasonable person wants to be on the same side with the smartest people who understand the topic. That makes sense, right? But people who live in the 3-D world, where persuasion rules, can often have a different view of climate change because we see mass delusions (even among experts) as normal and routine. My starting bias for this topic is that the scientists could easily be wrong about the horrors of climate change, even in the context of repeated experiments and peer review. Whenever you see a situation with complicated prediction models, you also have lots of room for bias to masquerade as reason. Just tweak the assumptions and you can get any outcome you want. Now add to that situation the fact that scientists who oppose the climate change consensus have a high degree of career and reputation risk. That’s the perfect setup for a mass delusion. You only need these two conditions: Complicated prediction models with lots of assumptions Financial and psychological pressure to agree with the consensus In the 2-D world, the scientific method and peer review squeeze out the bias over time. But in the 3-D world, the scientific method can’t detect bias when nearly everyone including the peer reviewers shares the same mass delusion.

Although no more than 10 percent of Americans are dismissive of climate change, it’s these rare deniers who get the most press. In an analysis of some hundred thousand media articles on climate change between 2000 and 2016, prominent climate contrarians received disproportionate coverage: they were featured 49 percent more often than expert scientists. As a result, people end up overestimating how common denial is—which in turn makes them more hesitant to advocate for policies that protect the environment. When the middle of the spectrum is invisible, the majority’s will to act vanishes with it. If other people aren’t going to do anything about it, why should I bother? When they become aware of just how many people are concerned about climate change, they’re more prepared to do something about it.

Humans exert a growing, but physically small, warming influence on the climate. The deficiencies of climate data challenge our ability to untangle the response to human influences from poorly understood natural changes. •​The results from the multitude of climate models disagree with, or even contradict, each other and many kinds of observations. A vague “expert judgment” was sometimes applied to adjust model results and obfuscate shortcomings. •​Government and UN press releases and summaries do not accurately reflect the reports themselves. There was a consensus at the meeting on some important issues, but not at all the strong consensus the media promulgates. Distinguished climate experts (including report authors themselves) are embarrassed by some media portrayals of the science. This was somewhat shocking. •​In short, the science is insufficient to make useful projections about how the climate will change over the coming decades, much less what effect our actions will have on it.

In an analysis of some hundred thousand media articles on climate change between 2000 and 2016, prominent climate contrarians received disproportionate coverage: they were featured 49 percent more often than expert scientists.

Suddenly, your mom's best friend's cousin's coworker is an expert on climate change, and you are left wondering how you ended up in this alternate universe of unverified facts.

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As the years have gone by Lake Powell has continued to silt up, losing more than 100,000 acre-feet per year at last count, and hydrologists believe—as Abbey did—that silting will eventually lead to a pool of mud, not water. Michael Kellett is the program director of the Glen Canyon Institute, which was founded in 1996 with the help of David Brower with the goal of one day witnessing the Colorado flowing freely through the old Glen Canyon. At a time when western dams are actually being decommissioned so that rivers can flow, experts are wondering whether it is really viable to have two enormous evaporative and silting reservoirs, Powell and Mead. Kellett wrote in the summer of 2012: The trends of the last decade have dramatically changed the situation. Rising public water demand, relentless drought, and climate change have significantly reduced the flow of the Colorado River from that of the past century. Scientific studies have predicted that this situation will continue. Lake Powell reservoir, and Lake Mead reservoir downstream, are half empty. Most scientists believe that there will never again be enough water to fill both reservoirs. Which had led to proposals like the Fill Lake Mead First project, the idea being to keep the downstream reservoir, Mead, full while releasing the upstream Glen Canyon. In other words, for the first time Abbey’s wild fantasies are being considered as serious policy.

What makes it reasonable to accept anthropogenic climate change is not the fact that 95% of all climate scientists agree. It’s why they agree. Even non-experts can figure out that the experts agree: a survey of all peer-reviewed abstracts on the subject ‘global climate change’ published between 1993 and 2003 showed that not a single paper rejected the position that global warming is largely caused by human behavior. Climate scientists are not arguing about whether global warming is happening. They’re not arguing about whether humans are largely responsible for global warming. They may be arguing about what action to take. In that case, they should be considered as advisors by those who make policy. Unfortunately, many of those who make policy seem to be ignoring the climate scientists in favor of beliefs pushed by gas, oil, and other corporate interests. Those interests should be considered, but not to the exclusion of the science experts. A

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address climate change. The Guardian newspaper described it as “a kind of super-U.N. to deal with the world’s economic problems and injustices.” US Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., has criticized President Obama for pushing global trade pacts

Paris climate-change agreement, wealthy globalists are involved in an international political and economic takeover—what one former United States official calls a “global financial coup d’ etat.”[187]

It's already happening. After falling for years, California's greenhouse gas emissions rose 1.7 percent in 2012, pushed up by the drought and the closure of the San Onofre nuclear plant in San Diego County. The state has not yet released emissions data for 2013. Experts say a sustained drought wouldn't prevent California from reaching its climate change goals. Instead, years of dry weather would force energy providers to find new strategies - ones that would likely cost more. In addition to being clean, hydropower tends to be cheap. "It makes things harder," said Victor Niemeyer, program manager for greenhouse gas reductions at the Electric Power Research Institute. "If there's less hydro, the power has to come from somewhere. You have to burn more gas, and that costs more money, all things considered.

Having spent the better part of my life for the past several decades trying to learn from experts on the climate crisis and working with technology and policy innovators to develop solutions for the unprecedented challenge humanity faces, I have never been more hopeful. At this point in the fight to solve the climate crisis, there are only three questions remaining: Must we change? Can we change? Will we change? In the pages that follow, you will find the best available evidence supporting the overwhelming conclusion that the answer to the first two of these three questions is a resounding “Yes.” I am convinced that the answer to the third question—“Will we change?”—is also “Yes,” but that conclusion, unlike the answer to the first two questions, is in the nature of a prediction. And in order for that prediction to come true, there must be a continued strengthening of the global consensus embodied in the Paris Agreement of December 2015, in which virtually every nation on Earth agreed to take concerted action to reduce net greenhouse gas emissions to zero as early in the second half of this century as possible.

the world of 10 billion, water experts project, the demand for water could be 50 percent higher than it is now. Where will it all come from? New supplies will not be easy to find. Few lakes and rivers are unexploited, and aquifers are being depleted. Equally difficult would be stretching existing water supplies by reducing waste and encouraging thrifty use. Adding to the pressure, climate change is shrinking glaciers and drying streams.

Many contemporary attacks on scientific expertise share certain elements of Hobbes’s suspicion of the Royal Society. The sense that experts are a privileged “elite” who then instruct the rest of us what to believe is prevalent in many reactionary and populist movements such as the Tea Party and the alt-right. Dominic Cummings, campaign director of Vote Leave which campaigned for Britain to leave the European Union, is routinely dismissive of “cargo-cult science,” a charge that compares established scientific circles to religious cults, impervious to the critiques of outsiders. Climate-change denialism depends on the idea that climate scientists are an inward-looking community, who only seek evidence that reinforces what they’ve already declared true. And yet when climate scientists don’t offer consensus, they are attacked on the opposite grounds, that their facts are fraught with politics and nothing is agreed. These attacks cast doubt on the ability of scientists to separate their opinions and tastes from their observations, and treat disciplines merely as private clubs.

Finally, expert witnesses, academics, and inhabitants of think tanks would be required to disclose any and all sources of outside funding for testimony, books, papers, or studies that are put in the public domain. That way, if an “expert” funded by Koch Industries asserts that humans have no part in climate change, for example, or a professor funded by the National Retail Federation finds that raising the minimum wage leads to less employment, the public would have a means of evaluating the neutrality of such claims.

when you speak to generals, when you speak to senior members of the intelligence community and experts on international conflicts, you will find that they look at climate change as a national security threat—a “threat multiplier” that will exacerbate poverty and political instability, creating conditions that enable violence, despair, even terrorism. An unstable, erratic climate will beget an unstable, erratic world.