MUST READ : On Behalf Of Environmentalists, I Apologize For The Climate Scare

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The author (second from right) in Maranhão, Brazil, 1995
MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER


“REMEMBER when we paved the world with electronic waste
that chopped eagles and condors and made bats extinct
because we thought wind was natural and uranium evil?
– man that was a dark age!”
– Michael Shellenberger

“MUCH that passes as idealism is disguised
hatred or disguised love of power.”

Bertrand Russell

•••

TIME Magazine “Hero of the Environment,” and U.N. IPCC expert reviewer Michael Shellenberger drops another inconvenient truth-bomb in the fight against the dangerous and costly politicisation of science.

“But mostly I was scared. I remained quiet about the climate disinformation campaign because I was afraid of losing friends and funding. The few times I summoned the courage to defend climate science from those who misrepresent it I suffered harsh consequences. And so I mostly stood by and did next to nothing as my fellow environmentalists terrified the public.”

REGARDLESS of your position on the magnitude of anthropogenic carbon dioxide as the supposed “climate control knob“, this is a timely and important read. Especially in the dangerous new age of postmodernism that we currently inhabit where truth, reason, honesty and integrity within government, academia and the sciences is in such short supply.

Ergo, props to Michael Shellenberger. Questioning dogma objectively, in the quest to restore scientific integrity, is risky business, these days.

*

Via FORBES :

On Behalf Of Environmentalists, I Apologize For The Climate Scare

Michael Shellenberger

On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologize for the climate scare we created over the last 30 years. Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem.

I may seem like a strange person to be saying all of this. I have been a climate activist for 20 years and an environmentalist for 30.

But as an energy expert asked by Congress to provide objective expert testimony, and invited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to serve as Expert Reviewer of its next Assessment Report, I feel an obligation to apologize for how badly we environmentalists have misled the public.

Here are some facts few people know:

  • Humans are not causing a “sixth mass extinction”
  • The Amazon is not “the lungs of the world”
  • Climate change is not making natural disasters worse
  • Fires have declined 25% around the world since 2003
  • The amount of land we use for meat — humankind’s biggest use of land — has declined by an area nearly as large as Alaska
  • The build-up of wood fuel and more houses near forests, notclimate change, explain why there are more, and more dangerous, fires in Australia and California
  • Carbon emissions have been declining in rich nations including Britain, Germany and France since the mid-seventies
  • Adapting to life below sea level made the Netherlands rich not poor
  • We produce 25% more food than we need and food surpluses will continue to rise as the world gets hotter
  • Habitat loss and the direct killing of wild animals are bigger threats to species than climate change
  • Wood fuel is far worse for people and wildlife than fossil fuels
  • Preventing future pandemics requires more not less “industrial” agriculture

I know that the above facts will sound like “climate denialism” to many people. But that just shows the power of climate alarmism.

In reality, the above facts come from the best-available scientific studies, including those conducted by or accepted by the IPCC, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and other leading scientific bodies.

Some people will, when they read this imagine that I’m some right-wing anti-environmentalist. I’m not. At 17, I lived in Nicaragua to show solidarity with the Sandinista socialist revolution. At 23 I raised money for Guatemalan women’s cooperatives. In my early 20s I lived in the semi-Amazon doing research with small farmers fighting land invasions. At 26 I helped expose poor conditions at Nike factories in Asia.

I became an environmentalist at 16 when I threw a fundraiser for Rainforest Action Network. At 27 I helped save the last unprotected ancient redwoods in California.960x0 In my 30s I advocated renewables and successfully helped persuade the Obama administration to invest $90 billion into them. Over the last few years I helped save enough nuclear plants from being replaced by fossil fuels to prevent a sharp increase in emissions

Until last year, I mostly avoided speaking out against the climate scare. Partly that’s because I was embarrassed. After all, I am as guilty of alarmism as any other environmentalist. For years, I referred to climate change as an “existential” threat to human civilization, and called it a “crisis.”

But mostly I was scared. I remained quiet about the climate disinformation campaign because I was afraid of losing friends and funding. The few times I summoned the courage to defend climate science from those who misrepresent it I suffered harsh consequences. And so I mostly stood by and did next to nothing as my fellow environmentalists terrified the public.

I even stood by as people in the White House and many in the news media tried to destroy the reputation and career of an outstanding scientist, good man, and friend of mine, Roger Pielke, Jr., a lifelong progressive Democrat and environmentalist who testified in favor of carbon regulations. Why did they do that? Because his research proves natural disasters aren’t getting worse.

But then, last year, things spiraled out of control.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said “The world is going to end in twelve years if we don’t address climate change.” Britain’s most high-profile environmental group claimed “Climate Change Kills Children.”

The world’s most influential green journalist, Bill McKibben, called climate change the “greatest challenge humans have ever faced” and said it would “wipe out civilizations.”

Mainstream journalists reported, repeatedly, that the Amazon was “the lungs of the world,” and that deforestation was like a nuclear bomb going off.

As a result, half of the people surveyed around the world last year said they thought climate change would make humanity extinct. And in January, one out of five British children told pollsters they were having nightmares about climate change.

Whether or not you have children you must see how wrong this is. I admit I may be sensitive because I have a teenage daughter. After we talked about the science she was reassured. But her friends are deeply misinformed and thus, understandably, frightened.

I thus decided I had to speak out. I knew that writing a few articles wouldn’t be enough. I needed a book to properly lay out all of the evidence.

And so my formal apology for our fear-mongering comes in the form of my new book, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All.

It is based on two decades of research and three decades of environmental activism. At 400 pages, with 100 of them endnotes, Apocalypse Never covers climate change, deforestation, plastic waste, species extinction, industrialization, meat, nuclear energy, and renewables.

Some highlights from the book:

  • Factories and modern farming are the keys to human liberation and environmental progress
  • The most important thing for saving the environment is producing more food, particularly meat, on less land
  • The most important thing for reducing air pollution and carbon emissions is moving from wood to coal to petroleum to natural gas to uranium
  • 100% renewables would require increasing the land used for energy from today’s 0.5% to 50%
  • We should want cities, farms, and power plants to have higher, not lower, power densities
  • Vegetarianism reduces one’s emissions by less than 4%
  • Greenpeace didn’t save the whales, switching from whale oil to petroleum and palm oil did
  • “Free-range” beef would require 20 times more land and produce 300% more emissions
  • Greenpeace dogmatism worsened forest fragmentation of the Amazon
  • The colonialist approach to gorilla conservation in the Congo produced a backlash that may have resulted in the killing of 250 elephants

Why were we all so misled?

In the final three chapters of Apocalypse Never I expose the financial, political, and ideological motivations. Environmental groups have accepted hundreds of millions of dollars from fossil fuel interests. Groups motivated by anti-humanist beliefs forced the World Bank to stop trying to end poverty and instead make poverty “sustainable.” And status anxiety, depression, and hostility to modern civilization are behind much of the alarmism

Once you realize just how badly misinformed we have been, often by people with plainly unsavory or unhealthy motivations, it is hard not to feel duped.

Will Apocalypse Never make any difference? There are certainly reasons to doubt it.

The news media have been making apocalyptic pronouncements about climate change since the late 1980s, and do not seem disposed to stop.

The ideology behind environmental alarmsim — Malthusianism — has been repeatedly debunked for 200 years and yet is more powerful than ever.

But there are also reasons to believe that environmental alarmism will, if not come to an end, have diminishing cultural power.

The coronavirus pandemic is an actual crisis that puts the climate “crisis” into perspective. Even if you think we have overreacted, Covid-19 has killed nearly 500,000 people and shattered economies around the globe.

Scientific institutions including WHO and IPCC have undermined their credibility through the repeated politicization of science. Their future existence and relevance depends on new leadership and serious reform.

Facts still matter, and social media is allowing for a wider range of new and independent voices to outcompete alarmist environmental journalists at legacy publications.

Nations are reorienting toward the national interest and away from Malthusianism and neoliberalism, which is good for nuclear and bad for renewables.

The evidence is overwhelming that our high-energy civilization is better for people and nature than the low-energy civilization that climate alarmists would return us to.

And the invitations I received from IPCC and Congress late last year, after I published a series of criticisms of climate alarmism, are signs of a growing openness to new thinking about climate change and the environment.

Another sign is the response to my book from climate scientists, conservationists, and environmental scholars. “Apocalypse Never is an extremely important book,” writes Richard Rhodes, the Pulitzer-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb. “This may be the most important book on the environment ever written,” says one of the fathers of modern climate science Tom Wigley.

“We environmentalists condemn those with antithetical views of being ignorant of science and susceptible to confirmation bias,” wrote the former head of The Nature Conservancy, Steve McCormick. “But too often we are guilty of the same.  Shellenberger offers ‘tough love:’ a challenge to entrenched orthodoxies and rigid, self-defeating mindsets.  Apocalypse Never serves up occasionally stinging, but always well-crafted, evidence-based points of view that will help develop the ‘mental muscle’ we need to envision and design not only a hopeful, but an attainable, future.”

That is all I that I had hoped for in writing it. If you’ve made it this far, I hope you’ll agree that it’s perhaps not as strange as it seems that a lifelong environmentalist, progressive, and climate activist felt the need to speak out against the alarmism.

I further hope that you’ll accept my apology.

Follow me on Twitter. Check out my website or some of my other work here

Michael Shellenberger

Michael Shellenberger

Michael Shellenberger is a Time Magazine “Hero of the Environment,” Green Book Award Winner, and author of Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All (Harper Collins, June 30, 2020). He is a frequent contributor to The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, and other publications. His TED talks have been viewed over five million times.

On Behalf Of Environmentalists, I Apologize For The Climate Scare | FORBES

•••

UPDATE

FORBES ‘cancels’ Shellenberger!

THE book-burners have been busy again. This time it’s a TIME Magazine “Hero of the Environment,” and U.N. IPCC expert reviewer, Michael Shellenberger.

HIS crime, apologising “for how badly we environmentalists have misled the public.”

Here are some facts few people know:

  • Humans are not causing a “sixth mass extinction”
  • The Amazon is not “the lungs of the world”
  • Climate change is not making natural disasters worse
  • Fires have declined 25% around the world since 2003

THE use of hard facts to back up his apology didn’t please the deep-green authoritarians at Forbes, keen to protect their “climate crisis” narrative, at all costs.

Screen Shot 2020-06-30 at 06.57.04

On Behalf Of Environmentalists, I Apologize For The Climate Scare | Forbes

FROM twitter account of Shellenberger :

*

George Orwell

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

George Orwell, 1984

•••

MORE Must Read Shellenberger :

SHELLENBERGER Related :

  • Environmentalist Tells Tucker Carlson: Renewables Can’t Save The Planet | The Daily Caller

MUST Watch :

RELATED :

•••

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•••


12 Comments on “MUST READ : On Behalf Of Environmentalists, I Apologize For The Climate Scare”

  1. uwe.roland.gross says:

    Reblogged this on uwerolandgross.

    Liked by 1 person

  2. songhees says:

    Dr Tim Ball – Historical Climatologist
    http://www.drtimball.net

    Book ‘The Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science’.

    Book “Human Caused Global Warming”, ‘The Biggest Deception in History’.

    https://www.technocracy.news/dr-tim-ball-on-climate-lies-wrapped-in-deception-smothered-with-delusion/

    BREAKING – Dr.Tim Ball wins against Dr Michael Mann lawsuit
    https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/08/22/breaking-dr-tim-ball-wins-michaelemann-lawsuit-mann-has-to-pay/

    There is no political will to develop our oil and resources in Canada.

    Like

    • Robert says:

      This is probably the most dubious commentary I have ever read.

      To be clear, the court has, according to Mann, dismissed the lawsuit or stopped the trial now because the matter has been dragging on for years – and because Timothy Ball has submitted a kind of petition for clemency, in which he claims his old age, his poor health, his low credibility and scientific irrelevance.
      Ball’s self-stated wish for the end of the lawsuit (“that the lawsuit be terminated”) is thus practically justified by him himself by stating that his accusations against man could be recognized as untrustworthy by even a reasonable average reader:

      “Basically, this is tatamount to saying that Ball’s accusations against you [Mann] have been given no credibility by the average, reasonable reader.”

      The court in turn found that certain…

      “… published comments [Balls] were not defamatory because they were so ridiculous and outrageous that they were unbelievable and therefore not able to diminish the reputation of the plaintiff [Mann] among righteous people.

      You can read the statement of claim for yourself: https://www.desmogblog.com/sites/beta.desmogblog.com/files/Mann-Ball%20Libel%20Claim.pdf

      Like

      • Jamie Spry says:

        That was 2011. Here’s 2019 : https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/08/22/breaking-dr-tim-ball-wins-michaelemann-lawsuit-mann-has-to-pay/

        Like

      • Robert says:

        Jamie Spry, i prefer more serious sites. https://www.nationalobserver.com/2019/06/13/news/michael-e-mann-took-climate-change-deniers-court-they-apologized

        Like

      • Jamie Spry says:

        “Hi Anthony

        Michael Mann’s case against me was dismissed this morning by the BC Supreme Court and they awarded me [court] costs.

        Tim Ball”

        Liked by 1 person

      • Jamie Spry says:

        “Hi Anthony

        Michael Mann’s case against me was dismissed this morning by the BC Supreme Court and they awarded me [court] costs.

        Tim Ball”

        https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/08/22/breaking-dr-tim-ball-wins-michaelemann-lawsuit-mann-has-to-pay/

        Liked by 1 person

      • Alan Vaughn says:

        😂 Wow.. the desmogblog eh? Fancy trolling us, then trying to debunk what we say with such low level fictional, unscientific and even puerile agitprop, to try in vain to justify your pro-socialist propaganda dressed as ‘science’, that you all expect everyone to believe without question; despite overwhelming real-world evidence which totally contradicts all of your cult’s ridiculous claims and predictions!
        But like all the deluded trolls who actually believe there’s a ‘climate emergency’ in progress and that the covid-19 hoax is real also: you’re here because you’re triggered by cold hard scientific facts, which you hate; because they are real and of course you cannot tell us why: “This is probably the most dubious commentary I have ever read”
        All you have is puerile abuse and ad-hominem. No actual counter-argument pointing out exactly what’s incorrect and why, let alone a real argument based on indisputable peer reviewed scientific evidence.
        Go back to desmogblog Robert and catch up on the latest junk science and doom & gloom porn, then pray to Saint Greta – the most informed, intelligent 17 yr old high school dropout in the universe, for even more bizarre reasons why we must follow her and ‘follow the science’ and therefore, destroy our great industrialized Western civilization, which has given everyone the opportunity to enjoy a lifestyle that nobody would ever have dreamed possible, even 50 years ago.
        Yeah let’s just wreck ‘dismantle’ it all and dismantle all of those ‘evil, oppressive institutions’, which the Great St Greta has demonized, in order to ‘save the planet’ from free-market capitalism, the Patriarchy and ‘white supremacists’, who she vehemently accuses of destroying it.

        Liked by 1 person

  3. Louis Deaux says:

    it’s working. Was a refreshing read. In reality, climate will change in time, most likely colder. We may be nearing the end of the current interglacial in terms of the Milankovic Cyclical Maximum. The little Dryas cold spell was likely caused by a catastrophic astronomical event unrelated to the cycles. So if the current interglacial is actually 18,000 years old, then cooler will soon prevail. I believe activist science is pursuing the wrong type of long term climate crises.

    As for CO2, any physicist or true paleoclimatologist can and should discount the absence notion that a 100 ppm change in CO2 could have an impact on climate. Based on the IPCC’s own admissions from studies in RFeK Physics, CO2 only stores at saturation about 2.011 x the eK that H2O does. That is what the famous statement that CO2 is twice as dangerous as H2O actually means. Since that is the case, it’s easy to measure the RFeK effect of human introduced CO2 on climate over the last 100 years. The algorithm is simple. Facts:

    Current Climate (wwT) = 288.8°k
    Ambiant or Black Body Climate is = 256.4°k
    Convective eK gain = 16.1°k ~ (This is the atmospheric movement takes energy stored at the surface and transfers it by friction evaporation to the Atmosphere. You feel this heat transfer when you get out of a swimming pool).
    Greenhouse Gas Effect (GHG) = 16.3°k

    Thus, GHG accounts for 16.3°K/288.8°k. It is the Delta between snowball earth and a temperate climate like we enjoy today.

    Now let’s look at the CO2 Component per RFeK values:

    H2O value of 25,000 ppm x 1.0 = RFeK value of 25,000.

    CO2 value of 400 ppm x 2.011 = RFeK value of 804.4.
    Water at saturation above 40,000 ppm rains out. CO2 takes longer to dissolve or become absorbed, but activist attempts to call CO2 a problem because of its longer cyclical absorption rates do not make mathematical sense as the “bank account” values of each GHG determines its effect on climate and so the RFeK bank is as stated above.

    So of GHGs that matter, a total of about 26,000 RFeK units of GHG energy exist in A on average for million parts of atmosphere. Of that, 25,000 units are from H2O (water). CO2 and CH4 account for most of the other 1000 RFeK units if GHG.

    If humans contributed 80% of the change in GHG’s (80 ppm) then we can now calculate the human impact on climate through GHG emissions.

    GHG:H = 80/400 × 804.4/26,000 × 16.3°k/288.8°k
    GHG:H = .000345°k

    Proof human CO2 caused a 100 year global climate change, but it is a change so minute, its immeasurable by most instruments.

    More CO2 has however been measured by the botanical world. At 280 ppm many plant species begin to suffocate from a lack of CO2. At 400 ppm the are coming back.

    Liked by 2 people

  4. Peter says:

    “Greenpeace didn’t save the whales, switching from whale oil to petroleum and palm oil did”. I’m not too sure of the context here. Whaling had ceased way before Greedpiece arrived; switch to petroleum was ages ago.
    Palm Oil usage went up a lot due to wanting natural fibre products in shampoos and other personal care items; and believing bio-fuels were better for the environment than oil products. Increased use of palm oil has been an environmental disaster. Foods are highly likely to retain its use; it’s not clear how much reduction there would be if reverted to tallow (animal [abattoir] waste product) and if deleted bio-fuels

    Liked by 1 person

  5. Climate Change is overblown says:

    […] When you’re wrong. Admit it. Not so easy if you’ve been an lifelong environmentalist and you’ve come to the realization you’ve been played.Michael Schellenberger also found out it made him a target when he switch sides. His column was even taken down from Forbes.com when the Climate Cultists complained.Read His Confession […]

    Like


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