He ‘could’ be worth reading
— by Owen Jennings
Member, NZ Climate Science Coalition
Someone called James Renwick, described as a “climate scientist”, managed to get himself on the front page of Granny Herald. I’m not sure what a climate scientist is. We never used to have such a term – we just had geologists, physicists, biologists, chemists, etc.
But now I stop to think, we might have had a climate scientist down the West Coast when I was a kid. Old Harry Watson was the local guru on all things climate. He knew if it was going to be a wet summer or a cold winter. He could tell you which week to cut the hay or castrate the lambs. He was always crystal clear, very definite and stuck to his guns. Mind you, predicting a wet summer on the Coast was a pretty sure bet.
But this guy Renwick doesn’t know his job. He’s all “coulds”: it “could get hotter”, it “could get wetter”, the sea level “could rise”, the Pacific Islands “could become uninhabitable”, New Zealand “could become a haven for refugees.” What a wimp! The Herald calls him a professor. Old Harry leaves Renwick for dead on climate predictions and Harry isn’t a “professor” of anything much although he does know when the whitebait are running.
What’s the use of “could” happen? All things “could” happen and all things “could” not happen. It’s about as useless as it gets. If he’s a professor he should give references to back up his “coulds”. That’s what real scientists do.
Coulda shoulda woulda
Come to think of it, maybe he got warned off by that guy Hansen – he is another professor of climate predictions and he said back in 1998 that New York would be half under water by the year 2000. He should have said “could be under water” — coulda been safer.
Or maybe it was a warning from that other great professor – Albert Gore. He made a movie about the nasty things that were going to happen – no arctic, no polar bears, no snow on Kilimanjaro, no food, no future. Professor James should have told him about “could”. But, come to think of it, James will probably never get a Nobel Prize and a $300 million bank account.
He “could” get a job advising TIME magazine though. TIME magazine’s January 31, 1977, cover featured a story, “How to Survive the Coming Ice Age.” It included “facts” such as scientists predicting that Earth’s so-called average temperature could drop by 20 degrees Fahrenheit due to man-made global cooling. Dr Murray Mitchell of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration warned readers that “the drop in temperature between 1945 and 1968 had taken us one sixth of the way to the next Ice Age temperature.”
Now TIME have come out with a totally opposite version — we’re all going to a hot hell in a handbasket. They have dropped the “could”. They must be right this time, for sure. They would have been better to follow James’s lead and add a “could” or two again.
Mind you, Professor James might be on to something with his “could be hotter, could be wetter” meme. The IPCC, a group set up by the UN to inflict global warming on us, get all antsy about predictions and they’re a bit more sophisticated than Kiwi James. They use lofty terms like “low confidence” and “high confidence”. In other words they haven’t got a clue and their pride won’t let them be simple and clear-cut, like my old mate from down the Coast.
Old Harry Watson
One thing for sure, old Harry doesn’t have any “models” to go by — although he did have a Model T years ago. It was a darn side more reliable than the models Professor James reviews. Harry would have told James to “get real” had he seen the models James relies on. He would have pointed out that when their predictions are a degree out, it’s time to give up. “You’d be better off coming down the Coast and catching some eels while I teach you a few facts about what the climate does,” would be Harry’s advice.
“As for ‘catastrophes’, the only catastrophe we have had down here is when we elected that O’Connor guy to Parliament. Another Irishman preaching what ‘could’ happen. And ’emergencies’, yep, we have one of them — the cockies are getting chased out by trees. And what happens when the local shuts down and I can’t get a beer? That’s a real emergency.”
“Send that professor down here — I’ll sort out his coulds.”
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