Andrew Forrest speaks of the deaths of millions coming soon…
The cult doomer prophesy upgrades to Billionaire Class. Put this man out of his misery.
Andrew Forrest, Executive Chairman of a $60 billion company made a bizarre speech a few days ago. This is a business presentation with the words like “vomit”, “stampede” and “seizures”, and pictures of skeletons in the desert. The big secret threat, he said, that scientists are not saying “is lethal humidity”. He really believes it. Here’s a man in command of the tenth largest company in Australia with a $33 billion dollar bank account, but not the judgment to get an advisor who can explain the difference between specific and relative humidity. He doesn’t realize that trends are rising in one, but falling in the other, and the modelers were wrong (again). He just had to pick up the phone and call the Met Office, or the CSIRO. They would have loved to talk to him. Even the IPCC experts could have saved him from this embarrassment.
“Lethal Humidity will be the next global pandemic” he prophecies.
“It is business that will kill your children,” he says blaming and demonizing the corporate world that made him rich. “It is the beginning of the end”.
The message for Fortescue shareholders, is run, don’t walk. He is setting up your company to “lead the way” on a sacred mission to save humanity. He hasn’t done his homework, and worse, must have surrounded himself with people telling him what he wants to hear.
Look at the slides to see how far over the waterfall this is — they’re laid out like a book of one liner horrors for eight year olds:
“You’re going to cook pretty quickly”.
“At just 35C with high humidity you can die in six hours”
“We do not have the human evolution to survive it”
There’s no cure.
Forrest runs away with stories of acute emergency care for hyperthermia, labeled with “Harvard Medical School” because, science, yeah…
We may have to drain the blood…
But he’s panicking about relative humidity and it’s not rising, it’s falling…
The fatalistic 35 degree death rate that Forrest is so afraid of, happens only “with 100 percent humidity” — it refers to relative humidity, not specific humidity which is measured in grams per kilogram, not percentages, and relative humidity is falling. So “climate change” such as it is, might reduce the rate of lethal humidity.
The Humidity Paradox
Forrest claims that for every degree the world gets warmer we will get a 7% rise in humidity. This is standard bucket chemistry — like a SciFi novel written by a precocious 12 year old. It comes from the Clausius-Clapeyron equation, which works well in the lab but is cruelly being thwarted by slowing wind speeds or ocean currents leaving modelers scratching their heads. Even the IPCC agrees. Surface relative humidity is falling. Perplexed modelers call this “the humidity paradox” which sounds so much better than “we were wrong”, but that’s what it means. Temperature is important for evaporation, but as anyone who has hung washing on the line knows — wind speed will make or break your day and ultimately the models can’t predict future wind speeds. The dreaded “Global Stilling” was a thing right up until “Global windiness” suddenly became a great opportunity for wind farms. At one point, modelers split their bets saying the northern hemisphere winds would slow while the southern hemisphere would speed up. Confused? Join the IPCC.
Dr Kate Willett explains how the models were wrong and they don’t know why:
In theory, if there are no limiting factors, then this [7% per degree] is the rate of increase we would expect to see. However, … this new dataset shows that relative humidity has actually decreased over many regions of the oceans. … This decrease is difficult to explain given our current physical understanding of humidity and evaporation. For example, the expectation from climate models is that ocean relative humidity should remain fairly constant or increase slightly.
The decrease in relative humidity over land is really interesting. We do not see the same decrease in historical reconstructions from climate models…
Specific humidity is rising as the world warms (compared to 1981). A warmer world is a “wetter world.”
Specific Humidity Trend UK Met Office
But relative humidity is falling, which the models didn’t expect. Warmer air can hold more water vapor, and apparently the air is warming faster than the extra water vapor is leaping into the sky. With lower relative humidity the air has a little more capacity to cool mammals than it did 40 years ago.
Relative Humidity Trend UK Met Office
Andrew Forrest must have surrounded himself with people who only agree with him. There would be scores of people at Fortescue Metals who could explain the flaws to him, save him from wasting billions of dollars, and from great public embarrassment, but presumably they are all too afraid to say anything. He does keep sacking top executives, after all.
His beliefs are launched on a list of something like 60 peer reviewed papers. He quotes these papers like a kid with a chemistry set. The key words are there, but he doesn’t understand what they mean.
….
Most other chairmen talk about the climate but they don’t believe it.
Fortescue Metals Group is worth $60 Billion AUD. This ought to scare any investor.
h/t Raven, and Turtle.