“My way of dealing with doom-mongers is to let the person talk for a while and then I ask, gently: “Does feeling this way make you more effective?” – Amory Lovins
Mark Trexler, “Pushing Climate Boulders Uphill Since the 1980s,” posted on social media:
Our biggest climate risk failure hasn’t been inadequate technology or funding. It’s been our reliance for 40 years on predictable models in a chaotic climate system!
Welcome to Deep Ecology, the belief that Nature is optimal and fragile and any human perturbation is bad, even catastrophic. Trexler then lists his examples:
Back in 1987, Wallace Broecker warned in Nature about “unpleasant surprises in the greenhouse” – arguing that Earth’s climate wasn’t a gentle dial, but a roulette wheel capable of sudden, dramatic shifts.
That was almost 40 years ago. He hasn’t been alone in raising this concern, as this curated list of 18 reports from 1987 to 2024 makes clear:
– 1987 Broecker_Unpleasant surprises in the greenhouse?
– 2007 Campbell_The Age of Consequences – The Foreign Policy Implications
– 2008 PIRC Climate Safety Report – In case of emergency
– 2008 Spratt_Climate Code Red The Case for a Sustainability Emergency
– 2011 Mabey_Degrees of Risk — Defining a Risk Management Framework for Climate Security
– 2017 Dunlop_Disaster Alley Climate Change Conflict and Risk
– 2018 Spratt_What Lies Beneath – The Understatement of Existential Climate Risk
– 2020 Spratt_Fatal Calculations – How Economics Has Underestimated Climate Damage
– 2021 Backus_Climate Risk and Response Too much and too little
– 2021 CCAG_Extreme Events in the Arctic and Beyond A Global State of Emergency
– 2021 CCAG_The Final Warning Bell
– 2021 Spratt_Degrees of Risk: Can the banking system survive climate change
– 2023 Trust_The Emperor’s New Climate Scenarios
– 2023 University of Exeter_No Time to Lose New Scenario Narratives for Action on Climate Change
– 2024 Spratt_Collision Course_3-Degrees of Warming and Humanity’s Future
– 2024 Stainforth_Predicting Our Climate Future: What We Know, What We Don’t Know, and What We Can’t Know
– 2024 Trust_Climate Scorpion – The sting is in the tail
“It’s an impressive and alarming list,” Trexler continues,
𝗯𝘂𝘁 𝘄𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗰𝗮𝗻 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗱𝗼 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗶𝘁? 𝗔 𝗹𝗼𝘁𝗅 You can read the reports. You can read a summary of each report! You can listen to a podcast version of each report! You can read a “story” or listen to a podcast based on all 18 reports! Whatever is most valuable to you, and all in our “𝗬𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗖𝗹𝗶𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗧𝗼𝗼𝗹𝗯𝗼𝘅” knowledge solution. Link below in the comments.
Does this pattern of underestimated risk change how you view climate action, policy, or planning? If not, what would? For more curated climate content, please like, comment on, or repost! LinkedIn pushes content you interact with. Follow me on LinkedIn: Mark Trexler
I responded:
Can you compare these alarming reports with the litany of failure of doomist predictions?
No response.
I tried again some time later in response to Trexler’s adulation for “Wallace Broeker’s seminal paper in Nature” depicting the human influence on climate as playing “climate routlette.”
And [Wallace Broeker] and so many other alleged Malthusian experts have been proven wrong decade after decade. Again, check out the much more extensive list at WUWT, the world’s most viewed website.
The list compiled at WUWT, the world’s most viewed website, is a monument to exaggeration and expert failure (a term popularized by Roger Koppl in his book by the same title). Once again, the realists are beating the alarmists on climate change, but as has been the case with other issues related to human population on a ‘finite’ earth. Julian Simon lives!