The world faces ‘untold suffering due to the climate crisis’, 11,000 scientists have warned in a statement published by the journal BioScience.
“We declare clearly and unequivocally that planet Earth is facing a climate emergency”
Unfortunately for the statement’s credibility, among the signatories is one “Mouse, Micky [sic], Professor, at the Micky Mouse Institute for the Blind, Namibia.”
In the statement published by the journal BioScience, the scientists claim:
“We declare clearly and unequivocally that planet Earth is facing a climate emergency…An immense increase of scale in endeavors to conserve our biosphere is needed to avoid untold suffering due to the climate crisis….The climate crisis is closely linked to excessive consumption of the wealthy lifestyle…To secure a sustainable future, we must change how we live…”
But while the statement has received generous coverage from the usual gullible hysterics at CBS, ABC News, CNN and the Guardian others have responded with scepticism and mockery.
Some have noted that very few of those 11,000 signatories are directly involved in climate science. They work in fields ranging from ‘family physician’, ‘vertebrate palaeontology’, ‘nano optics’ ‘economics’ to ‘civil engineering’ and ‘retired science teacher, inspector and adviser, Warwickshire County Council’. The impression given is of a vast parasite industry – the Climate Industrial Complex – with a strong vested interest in promoting the “climate emergency” but with little personal understanding of the field themselves.
Others have criticised its unscientific scaremongering whereby every chart with a diagonal line – even ones showing growing per capita meat production and another showing air transport (signs, surely, of prosperity not disaster) – is chucked into the mix as evidence of impending doom.
As Jo Nova reports:
Pack up your tea-leaves, here are the 21st century signs of the 6th mass extinction. Who knew — per capita meat production is a new signal of doom. And air transport is not an engineering feat but inherently extinct-ifying. Here’s their introduction to this graph:
Since 1992, with the exception of stabilizing the stratospheric ozone layer, humanity has failed to make sufficient progress in generally solving these foreseen environmental challenges, and alarmingly, most of them are getting far worse (figure 1, file S1).Especially troubling is the current trajectory of potentially catastrophic climate change due to rising GHGs from burning fossil fuels (Hansen et al. 2013), deforestation (Keenan et al. 2015), and agricultural production—particularly from farming ruminants for meat consumption (Ripple et al. 2014). Moreover, we have unleashed a mass extinction event, the sixth in roughly 540 million years, wherein many current life forms could be annihilated or at least committed to extinction by the end of this century.
The statement has also been attacked from the left for its eco-imperialist arrogance in demanding that, in order to save the planet, people in the developing world must be prevented from breeding.
But perhaps the most tragic thing about the statement is that as Jo Nova points out it is basically a rehash of a climate declaration published by the same group of scientists, led by the same lead author – Prof William Ripple of Oregon State University – in 2017.
Back then though, the declaration attracted 15,000 signatories. Now they’re down to just 11,000. Presumably, this time, Professors Donald Duck, Minnie Mouse, Pluto, the Little Mermaid, the Seven Dwarfs and the 101 Dalmatians just weren’t available.