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Climate Change could make humans extinct says “expert”

Time to panic. Climate Change could make humans extinct, warns the Sydney Morning Herald.

“The Earth is warming so rapidly that unless humans can arrest the trend, we risk becoming ”extinct” as a species, a leading Australian health academic has warned.”
The trend, the trend, which trend exactly? The trends have been flat on the surface for 17 years, so if that trend continues, we risk “staying the same”? That’ll be deadly. In 1997 global population was 5.8 billion. Since then, there has been no significant warming in the part of the world that humans live in, and global population plunged to 7.2 billion.  Hold off on the End-of-Humanity Party.

Helen Berry, associate dean in the faculty of health at the University of Canberra, said while the Earth has been warmer and colder at different points in the planet’s history, the rate of change has never been as fast as it is today.”

Luckily Helen Berry has seen the Neanderthal global data sets from the paleolithic era which recorded those climate changes. Otherwise how would she know the exact rate of global warming from, say, 11,900 -11,860BC or 42,040 – 42,000BC? The only records I’ve seen (like, the ice cores) suggest things were warming pretty fast sometimes. Who knows? If only they had satellites over ancient Sumeria.

Evidently Berry is talking about the rate of the last 40 years, and seems pretty much unaware of the 4 billion years before that:

”What is remarkable, and alarming, is the speed of the change since the 1970s, when we started burning a lot of fossil fuels in a massive way,” she said. ”We can’t possibly evolve to match this rate [of warming] and, unless we get control of it, it will mean our extinction eventually.”

What Helen Berry (and Peter Hannam, the SMH journalist) don’t realize is that the warming in the last 40 years was entirely “precedented” and we don’t need to go back to the last ice age to find that kind of warming rate, just to the 1930s. It’s all happened before. Indeed (as I keep saying) the peak decadal rate of the 1870s was the same was that of the 1980s.

All that CO2, and nothing happened that was new.

Source: Phil Jones BBC interview  You get the drift.


Right about now if I were a global warming troll and an Associate Dean of Health said that the rate of change was entirely precedented and probably natural, I’d be reminding everyone that she hasn’t published a single paper on the paleoclimate, and ask why the Sydney Morning Herald felt the need to provide balance from non-experts talking outside their subject areas.

But of course we skeptics wouldn’t say that, and instead we take apart the statements, not the person. My point here is not an ad hom, it’s about the hypocrisy of the trolls. Where are they now?

Helen Berry seems to have run the extrapolation straight off the last 40 year trend, without realizing the cyclical nature of the long slow rise that started 300 years ago. Akasofu compared the projections of cherry pickers to the cyclical curve back in 2009 with this beautiful graph.

The highest “projections” come from lines drawn from 1975-1999

 

Climate Change could make humans extinct warns the Sydney Morning Herald.  Will that be before or after readers of the Sydney Morning Herald become extinct?

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