According to John Nolte at Breitbart on Friday, in 2004 the Department of Defense predicted that “climate change would destroy all of us by the year 2020.” Though Nolte doesn’t reference it, his story cribs from denier blog Fabius Maximus, which was picked up at WUWT. (Maximus was also not cited by PJMedia’s version of the story.)
The story even broke out of the blogosphere and joined the big denier leagues--it made it all the way up to a repost in the Wall Street Journal’s Opinion section.
The collection of pieces are referencing a 2004 Observer story hosted by the Guardian about a leaked national security report that “warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020.”
The grave predictions failed to materialize, deniers say, therefore we shouldn’t trust climate scientists who are currently warning climate change will have devastating consequences.
So what’s going on here? As usual, deniers are banking on their audiences being too lazy or stupid to bother going to the source material, the report itself. Although they link to it, they apparently didn’t read it.
The very first words of the report (after the title, authors, and October 2003 date) are “Imagining the Unthinkable.” That’s the purpose of the report, the first sentence reads, “to push the boundaries of current research” to “better understand the potential implications” of, per the title of the report “an abrupt climate change scenario.” The report makes itself perfectly clear that “the scenario depicted is extreme in two fundamental ways,” that impacts “would most likely happen in a few regions, rather than on globally” and that “the magnitude of the event may be considerably smaller.”
The final paragraph of the introductory text even says that the scenario depicted is “not the most likely,” (though is still “plausible.”)
The summary goes on to explain, quite clearly, that the report looks at the national security implications of what is theoretically possible if gradual warming led to “a relatively abrupt slowing of the ocean’s thermohaline conveyor,” like what paleoclimatology has shown happened eight to ten thousand years ago.
One only has to read the first page of the report, then, to see that deniers are deliberately misrepresenting a hypothetical worse-case-scenario as though it were a solid prediction. Notle, for example, pulled an excerpt from the report and described it as “The Weather Report: 2010-2020,” without mentioning that it’s the hypothetical weather report if famously terrible science fiction movie The Day After Tomorrow were actually a documentary.
Now, in their defence, the original 2004 Observer coverage was similarly misleading, portraying the report as a prediction of calamity instead of an exploration of an admittedly low-likelihood, worst-case scenario. But Maximus even linked to two other contemporaneous stories about it, misrepresenting them as being “uncritical” when both Fortune and Grist made it absolutely clear what the report was (a thought experiment) and what it wasn’t (a weather report.)
Fabious Maximus also linked to a story on it by Andy Revkin in the NYTimes in a sentence where he writes that “climate scientists were MIA,” despite Revkin’s story concluding with a quote from climate scientist Stefan Rahmstorf. Rahmstorf compared two different stories on the report, the “highly dramatic” Observer article, and another that “wrote there is nothing to worry about, because [he told the reporter that] this is unlikely to happen.” So even at the time, climate scientists were downplaying the likelihood of the scenario the report imagined.
Or, as George W. Bush’s Press Secretary Dana Perino told Grist, the report is “a ‘what-if’ scenario -- not a diagnosis, not a prophecy.”
Let that sink in for a moment. Compared to deniers, the current Fox News personality and former George W. Bush Press Secretary has the honest, intelligent, and accurate take that dismantles bad-faith spin.
Talk about imagining the unthinkable!