How Do We Scare Them About Climate Change Now?

Question:

What are the committed political science community, the consensed climate science community and the complicit media science community to do if the tens of millions of dollars spent on the creation of climate model based “scary scenarios” is not enough to scare the voting public into demanding drastic measures to save the planet from the projected “climategeddon”?

Answer:

Commit additional millions to fund additional studies to produce additional, even scarier scenarios to be broadcast with even greater feigned certainty of future devastation. What else?

The following is a mere sampling of the most recent “even scarier scenarios” intended to free us from our malaise and spur us into demanding action.

• Rising Seas: Florida is about to be wiped off the map.
• Gulfstream weakest in 1699 years
• Impending human extinction
• Impending European tree extinction
• Massive climate related depopulation
• Massive climate-driven migration
• Climate change the greatest threat we’ve ever faced.

The consensed climate science community and their funders and cheerleaders apparently do not understand, or simply choose to ignore, that the voting public in the US has reached climate crisis saturation. Previous disaster predictions have failed to materialize, no matter how often and how hysterically the “Chicken Littles” have announced that “the sky is falling”.

Meanwhile, weather persists. Winter is cold, with snow. Summer is hot, with thunder storms. Floods and droughts occur. Hurricanes, tropical storms and tornadoes continue to form. Some climate scientists claim that anthropogenic climate change makes all of these weather events more frequent, more intense, more damaging and more life threatening. However, the data do not support such claims.

Of course, the creation of the “even scarier scenarios” has not stopped the creation of silly “scary scenarios”, such as those listed below.

• Shrinking market for British pies
• Hockey in the desert contributes to climate change
• Rising developing country debt payments
• White rabbits imperiled by climate change
• CO2 causes extreme weather
• Global warming causes wildfires
• Neurobiology of denialism

Meanwhile, what we should be doing now remains undone. Climate data are still suspect, as the result of installation issues, “adjustment” and “infilling”. Climate models remain unverified and continue to “run hot”. Climate sensitivity is still undetermined. Cloud forcings are still uncertain. The differences between surface-based and satellite-based sea level rise measurements remain unresolved, as do the differences between near-surface and satellite temperature measurements.

These unresolved scientific issues are far more important that the “scary scenarios”, which are built on the unresolved scientific issues.

The current situation is reminiscent of the approach demanded by the Queen of Hearts in the trial scene from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll”:

                                    “Sentence first – verdict afterward”

It seems hardly scientific and equally silly to demand “verdict first – evidence afterward”, as appears to be the case with current climate science, at least from the perspective of the political science community and their cheerleaders in the media.

However, when all else fails, there always remains the old trial lawyers’approach:

“When the facts are on your side, pound the facts. When the law is on

your side, pound the law. When neither is on your side, pound the table.”