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Climate activists who poured soup on Van Gogh’s paintings believe ‘climate change will destroy human civilization unless emergency action is taken’

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1581617225735163905.html

By now everyone is aware of the two young people who spilled some soup on Van Gogh’s Sunflower’s at the UK National Gallery

I’ve seen a lot of debate over whether they should have, or not, or it’s effectiveness, or not, as advocacy

Here I explore the WHY of @JustStop_Oil

First, let me express nothing but support for young people engaging in political advocacy & trying to make the world a better place

My advice to young people about advocacy is the same as it is to scientists … know what you are doing and why

So let’s take a look at their WHY

JSO says

“Humanity is on the verge of an abyss, accelerated human induced climate change will destroy human civilisation unless emergency action is taken to rapidly reduce our Greenhouse Gas Emissions (GHG) to zero in a very short timescale”
juststopoil.org/wp-content/upl…

It’s understandable that if a group truly holds millenarian beliefs they are going to act out in radical ways

They literally believe that “Further expansion of oil and gas production globally is putting us on course for human extinction”

Where did they get such views?

From us 

I encourage you to read the @JustStop_Oil manifesto

It’s a sad statement of what we experts have done to young people

It is chock full of hyperbole from authoritative figures, references to work of the “planetary boundaries” folks & RCP8.5 studies

The below from their preamble

What literature do they cite to support their millenarian, apocalyptic views?

They cite a lot from the commentaries on “planetary boundaries”

We responded to last week to these folks pushing back against their calls for even more apocalyptic focus in research

Of course, the “tipping points” commentary cited by JSO earned an all-time correction for misleading its readers about risk
And most of their references to the scientific literature to justify their doomed outlook lead to – what else – RCP8.5 studies
The JSO manifest dismisses the IPCC report based on a Washington Post article that quotes a number of scientists dissatisfied with the IPCC and then asks, ironically enough: “What danger is there in being overly alarmist on the subject?”
washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/…

So good job everyone

Efforts to undermine the IPCC, climate science & elevate the prospects of a near-term apocalypse have borne fruit, at least w/ this group

Climate change is real, serious & vigorous policy action makes sense

I am sorry to disappoint, but the end is not nigh

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More from @RogerPielkeJr

Sep 6

🧵 New NGFS climate scenarios are out today, version 3.0 Two big takeaways
First, Version 3.0 sees another big revision downward on both emissions and future temperature increase NGFS worst case scenario is now pretty close to a “long plateau” in emissions ngfs.net/sites/default/…
Compare that to versions 1.0 and 2.0 which saw a steady increase in emissions (I’ll update this figure when the NGFS scenario explorer is available) Remarkable change in expectations in such a short time

Read 11 tweets

Sep 6

“At the time, No. 10’s strategy was to create the impression that lockdown was a scientifically created policy which only crackpots dared question.” spectator.co.uk/article/the-lo…
Sunak: “There was a failure to raise difficult questions about where all this might lead – and a tendency to use fear messaging to stifle debate, instead of encouraging discussion.” spectator.co.uk/article/the-lo…
“A cost-benefit calculation – a basic requirement for pretty much every public health intervention – was never made. ‘I wasn’t allowed to talk about the trade-off,’ says Sunak.” spectator.co.uk/article/the-lo…

Read 11 tweets

Sep 4

Quick 🧵 on what IPCC says about precip and floods in Pakistan The only mention that the IPCC AR6 Ch.12 makes about Pakistan and monsoon precipitation is to suggest a possible decrease ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1…Image
On river flooding IPCC AR6 Ch.12 says that it does not have confidence in projecting whether river floods will increase or decrease in the region of Pakistan (highlighted in IPCC figure/table below by me) ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1…Image
The IPCC provides exceedingly little (perhaps no) basis for either the detection or attribution of flooding in Pakistan to GHG forcing More on what IPCC says about floods and climate change: rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/series-what-…

Read 4 tweets

Aug 24

🧵 One of the confusing things about extreme event return periods is that they change, sometimes dramatically, when an extreme event occurs That’s because return periods beyond the period of record are based on a curve fit to observed data based on statistical assumptions
Here is a nice figure from the @ObservatoryHK showing how just a single rainfall event turns a 100mm rainfall in one our from a 1 in 50 year event to a one in 34 year eventImage
Consider Dallas this week DFW Airport record a 24-hour rainfall of 9.19 inches yaleclimateconnections.org/2022/08/wettes… Accord to NOAA Atlas 14 we can be 90% confident that prior to the event, it was somewhere between a 25-yr and 1000+ yr event hdsc.nws.noaa.gov/hdsc/pfds/pfds…ImageImage

Read 7 tweets

Aug 24

I don’t think you an point any area of knowledge where consensus assessments, peer-reviewed literature & official data are so systematically ignored as extreme weather
A decade ago Steve Rayner (RIP) wrote about the “social construction of ignorance” – about the steps we collectively take to blot out or ignore knowledge that is dissonant or uncomfortable Extreme weather is a canonical case study tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.108…
I am among the most published & cited experts on extreme weather yet . . . Perhaps due to that I have been attacked by the White House, investigated by Congress, target of a billionaire’s smear campaign & comprehensively ignored by the climate media rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/the-hounding…

Read 7 tweets

Aug 23

Many people really like the idea of the apocalypse, especially an end-of-times resulting from our own actions that can only be avoided through some repentance I welcome pointers to literature on this seemingly basic human instinct Why do we love the apocalypse?
Kellow 2020 The Lure of the Apocalypse quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/…
Lambelet 2021 “Amid the cascade of environmental crises we are living through, apocalyptic practices of renunciation of the world offer a guide and discipline for living in the end” doi.org/10.1177%2F0953…

Read 4 tweets

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