Diary date

Crispin Tickell is speaking in St Andrews on Thursday on the subject of  "Vulnerable Earth, Hits From Space and Other Disasters". Details here.

Unfortunately, I can't attend, but if anyone wants to write a report, I'd be interested.

Comments

[tomo]

ah...

An international authority on climate change and environmental issues and holder of over twenty honorary doctorates, his expertise ranges from Global Warming to Potentially Hazardous Near-Earth Objects.

I think he qualifies as a hazardous on earth object myself. The doom meister.

[Owen Morgan]

I suspect I could write a review in advance, but I shan't. I'll just say that the arrogance of civil servants takes some believing.

[Radical Rodent]

Just to brag (and somewhat off-topic) – have been totally blocked off the blog of a supposedly respected scientist (oddly, not of the climate, but rabidly AGWist). If a lightweight such as I can cause such fear as that, one has to question their faith in their own arguments.

Let me at the Big Boys, now….

[David S]

Interesting to see that, having been instrumental in causing massive economic damage by his climate hysteria, he has now moved on to try to scare us all with planet collision. Wonder if he'll try to persuade us all that, invoking the precautionary principle, we should knock down our houses and live in burrows and caves.

[Rick Bradford]

... invoking the precautionary principle, we should knock down our houses and live in burrows and caves.

That's the preferred global warming solution, as well as the planetary collision solution.

[BernieL]

This is the broader career path cut by Ehrlich that Lord Rees is also now marching down after pushing the climate scare at the Royal Society.

[John Shade]

I hope someone can get along and report back here.

It is not clear to me how much more harm Tickell is capable of, but it would useful to get more insight into how he had much influence in the past.

I suspect when the People's Encyclopedia of the Global Warming Scare is compiled, he will be quite prominent in it as a focus of attention

[tty]

Bolide impact is rather superior to AGW as scare object, since there is proof that it has actually occurred in the real world.

[Messenger]

I went to the Crispin Tickell talk on Vulnerable Earth in St Andrews tonight and was somewhat underwhelmed. There were about 65 people in the room, including a row of unknown people in suits.

His degree was a First in Modern History apparently, way back, and the list of his past posts given by the Principal by way of introduction took 5 minutes. The first 20 minutes of the talk was taken up with what sounded rather like chunks of Wikipedia, listing and briefly describing a rather tedious catalogue of past and recent impacts on the earth in three categories: from outside (asteroids); from within (earthquakes, volcanos, tsunamis); manmade (population, extinctions and guess what.... ) and the fourth section, what to do about these things.

CC, or has Tickell prefers it, "climate destabilisation", appeared fairly often as a mention in every category but with no depth or analysis at all. His solution to CC is GLOBAL GOVERNANCE, radical changes in our value system, and the formation of a World Environment Organisiation, cf the World Trade Organisation, and he also cited the IPCC in passing.

When during the three questions at the end he was asked whether local solutions might not be better than global governance, he said, well the word "global" might put people off, but there should be plurality of agreement between countries, [?] Someone else who was very enthusiastic about the talk and sounded green, stated that there must be strong leadership in the coming catastrophes that he had suggested were on the way. Greens had been trying to get action, why was nothing much happening? Tickell answered that politicans tended to take a short-term view and we need some justification for action- disasters might occur as soon as 5-10 years and that we have to believe they will happen. Tickell cited Hurricane Sandy and then hastily said, but of course any attribtuion must be a safe one, and HS wasn't necessarily caused by CC. Mexico has taken strong action because it is so vulnerable to CC, and California has seen the light too - it has banned plastic bags.

He mentioned Mrs Thatcher's commitment to CC, but declared that her recantation had only occurred about two years ago, and hinted strongly that this was because she had dementia.

The last question was on measures to curb population growth because of the unpopularity and subsequent failure of measures taken in India and China. Tickell casually said that the Pope's attitude was absurd, and while the Chinese one child policy was totalitarian, it was the right way at the time.

The talk ended 10 minutes before time, with Tickell describing humans as microbes on the face of the earth. I felt it the whole thing was rather a damp squib from a speaker who had nothing new or important or indeed interesting to say. Perhaps they could get a scientist next time.

[John Shade]

Many thanks for your report, Messenger. The silver-tongued catastrophists like Tickell, like Strong, like Ehrlich, have become silver-haired and may have done their worst by now. They picked up on climate and carbon dioxide because of the traction it promised and delivered, but the main focus for their contempt seems always to have been humanity itself. I do hope that they are studied in detail to help us get a better understanding and thereby improved defences against their like. They have been very successful indeed, but the loss they have brought to society is immense.

[John Shade]

Just stumbled on this (hat-tip Tom Nelson, http://tomnelson.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/the-five-circles-of-carbon-tax-hell.html#links)
"Belief in biblical end-times stifling climate change action in U.S.: study" (http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/05/01/belief-in-end-times-stifling-climate-change-action-in-u-s-study/)

It seems that pre-existing catastrophists of a religious bent, albeit from that most compassionate of the big religions, Christianity, have been flagged by two academics as a force that resists doing anything to 'curb' climate change. They also factor in a dig at the Republican Party, and that I suspect is their real motivation.

The United States has failed to take action to mitigate climate change thanks in part to the large number of religious Americans who believe the world has a set expiration date.

Research by David C. Barker of the University of Pittsburgh and David H. Bearce of the University of Colorado uncovered that belief in the biblical end-times was a motivating factor behind resistance to curbing climate change.

“[T]he fact that such an overwhelming percentage of Republican citizens profess a belief in the Second Coming (76 percent in 2006, according to our sample) suggests that governmental attempts to curb greenhouse emissions would encounter stiff resistance even if every Democrat in the country wanted to curb them,” Barker and Bearce wrote in their study, which will be published in the June issue of Political Science Quarterly.