NY Magazine: The Earth Will Soon Be Too Hot For Humans Or Something

There’s climate alarmist scaremongering, and then there’s climate alarmist SCAREMONGERING OMG WE’RE ALL DOOOOOOOOOMED!

Don’t you just love that graphic? The bones of a human hand made to look like preserved dinosaur bones. They have several more in the screed, like

From the doomry (doom story)

It is, I promise, worse than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today. And yet the swelling seas — and the cities they will drown — have so dominated the picture of global warming, and so overwhelmed our capacity for climate panic, that they have occluded our perception of other threats, many much closer at hand. Rising oceans are bad, in fact very bad; but fleeing the coastline will not be enough.

Indeed, absent a significant adjustment to how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century.

That’s so bad, so utterly preposterous and unhinged, that it is beyond what a typical facepalm gif could accomplish.

Even when we train our eyes on climate change, we are unable to comprehend its scope. This past winter, a string of days 60 and 70 degrees warmer than normal baked the North Pole, melting the permafrost that encased Norway’s Svalbard seed vault — a global food bank nicknamed “Doomsday,” designed to ensure that our agriculture survives any catastrophe, and which appeared to have been flooded by climate change less than ten years after being built.

That again? What scaremongering fable writer David Wallace-Wells failed to mention is that the seeds were never in danger, and that it is entirely normal for there to be some leaking into the end of the tunnel.

The Doomsday vault is fine, for now: The structure has been secured and the seeds are safe. But treating the episode as a parable of impending flooding missed the more important news. Until recently, permafrost was not a major concern of climate scientists, because, as the name suggests, it was soil that stayed permanently frozen. But Arctic permafrost contains 1.8 trillion tons of carbon, more than twice as much as is currently suspended in the Earth’s atmosphere. When it thaws and is released, that carbon may evaporate as methane, which is 34 times as powerful a greenhouse-gas warming blanket as carbon dioxide when judged on the timescale of a century; when judged on the timescale of two decades, it is 86 times as powerful. In other words, we have, trapped in Arctic permafrost, twice as much carbon as is currently wrecking the atmosphere of the planet, all of it scheduled to be released at a date that keeps getting moved up, partially in the form of a gas that multiplies its warming power 86 times over.

Using it as a parable is good. The proper one would be “the Doomsday Vault was built in an area that tends to get some flooding from meltwater in a manner that doesn’t let it avoid the meltwater. So, it’s a manufactured issue. Just like anthropogenic climate change.”

Maybe you know that already — there are alarming stories every day, like last month’s satellite data showing the globe warming, since 1998, more than twice as fast as scientists had thought. Or the news from Antarctica this past May, when a crack in an ice shelf grew 11 miles in six days, then kept going; the break now has just three miles to go — by the time you read this, it may already have met the open water, where it will drop into the sea one of the biggest icebergs ever, a process known poetically as “calving.”

The first is based on “adjusting” the data and models, typical for the non-science Warmists. The Antarctica thing is due to warming underneath, which science shows mostly to be from volcanic activity. And, it hasn’t met open water.

In between scientific reticence and science fiction is science itself. This article is the result of dozens of interviews and exchanges with climatologists and researchers in related fields and reflects hundreds of scientific papers on the subject of climate change. What follows is not a series of predictions of what will happen — that will be determined in large part by the much-less-certain science of human response. Instead, it is a portrait of our best understanding of where the planet is heading absent aggressive action. It is unlikely that all of these warming scenarios will be fully realized, largely because the devastation along the way will shake our complacency. But those scenarios, and not the present climate, are the baseline. In fact, they are our schedule.

Did the writer talk to any scientists who do not buy into the utter doom and gloom? Reading through the long, tedious, we’re (maybe might could possibly weasel words are used throughout) doomed screed, it’s doubtful. We have sections and mentions of the coming 6th mass extinction, massive numbers of heat deaths (because, apparently, Warmists can’t take a tiny increase in temperature), The End Of Food (the header for one section), climate plagues, unbreathable air, perpetual war, permanent economic collapse, poisoned oceans, and so forth.

But, hey, if you’re willing to give up your money, your modern lifestyle, and your freedom to Centralized Government, everything will be alright. Maybe.

Crossed at Right Wing News.

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4 Responses to “NY Magazine: The Earth Will Soon Be Too Hot For Humans Or Something”

  1. Jeffery says:

    Thanks for citing the article. I’ll share it widely.

    The talented author stated upfront that he was describing the worst that could happen at the upper end of the temperature ranges. In planning, it is always wise to consider the worst possible outcome, even if it is only a 10% probability.

    And of course he ended on a notes of optimism, stating that climate scientists were optimistic that we could solve the problems, because we have no choice.

    But TEACH will be pleased to know that a “Warmist” brahman agrees with him:

    Michael E. Mann
    2 hours ago

    Since this New York Magazine article (“The Uninhabitable Earth”) is getting so much play this morning, I figured I should comment on it, especially as I was interviewed by the author (though not quoted or mentioned).

    I have to say that I am not a fan of this sort of doomist framing. It is important to be up front about the risks of unmitigated climate change, and I frequently criticize those who understate the risks. But there is also a danger in overstating the science in a way that presents the problem as unsolvable, and feeds a sense of doom, inevitability and hopelessness.

    The article argues that climate change will render the Earth uninhabitable by the end of this century. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The article fails to produce it.
    The article paints an overly bleak picture by overstating some of the science. It exaggerates for example, the near-term threat of climate “feedbacks” involving the release of frozen methane (the science on this is much more nuanced and doesn’t support the notion of a game-changing, planet-melting methane bomb. It is unclear that much of this frozen methane can be readily mobilized by projected warming: http://www.realclimate.org/…/2012/01/much-ado-about-methane/).

    Also, I was struck by erroneous statements like this one referencing “satellite data showing the globe warming, since 1998, more than twice as fast as scientists had thought.”
    That’ just not true. The study in question simply showed that one particular satellite temperature dataset that had tended to show *less* warming that the other datasets, has now been brought in line with the other temperature data after some problems with that dataset were dealt with.

    Ironically, I am a co-author of a recent article in the journal Nature Geoscience (see e.g. this piece in The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/…/climate-scientists-just-debun…), using that very same new, corrected, satellite dataset, that shows that past climate model simulations slightly **over-predicted** the actual warming during the first decade of the 21st century, likely because of a mis-specification of natural factors like solar variations and volcanic eruptions. Once these are accounted for, the models and observations are pretty much in line–the warming of the globe is pretty much progressing AS models predicted…which is bad enough.
    The evidence that climate change is a serious problem that we must contend with now, is overwhelming on its own. There is no need to overstate the evidence, particularly when it feeds a paralyzing narrative of doom and hopelessness.

    I’m afraid this latest article does that. That’s too bad. The journalist is clearly a talented one, and this is somewhat of a lost opportunity to objectively inform the discourse over human-caused climate change.

    • drowningpuppies says:

      Michael Mann in contempt of court.
      Please keep citing this fraud.

      • Zachriel says:

        As Ball’s defense is based on having made the slur in jest, scientific evidence is irrelevant, and therefore cannot be the basis of a contempt citation.

  2. Jl says:

    Dr. Fraudpants as Steyn calls him. Did he mentione the Nobel Prize he won, but really didn’t? Have to wonder about the intelligence of someone who would do that. It’s not like it’s very hard to corroborate. But, we’re dealing with alarmists…

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