The truth will set you free - 3

Climate change and the war on green things

The private jets are lined up at a regional airport yet again and this time it is in Davos, Switzerland. The world’s elites have come together to consider, sort, and pronounce upon the grave “poly-crises” facing the world. A topic that has created more wrinkles on the face of the lugubrious Klaus Schwab, is the mental health of those who are anxiety ridden by climate change. Fortunately for them, like him, there is the metaverse - soma for the climate warrior.

I am not an expert in the field of climatology. I believe in climate change because the climate is a complex system of ever-changing parameters.  By definition then, it is always changing. The issues are what are the key climate parameters, what causes them to change, by how much do they change, and can man outshine the sun and the volcanoes in setting the climate agenda for the next million years?  The science to answer these questions is complicated and the consequences of being wrong could be significant therefore it is important to get it right - the Precautionary Principle and all that.

For the record, my “go to”experts include Bjorn Lomborg (“The Skeptical Environmentalist”), Michael Schellenburger (“Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All”), and Patrick Moore (“Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom”). None of these writers comes to their climate position from the right side of the political spectrum, all are self-proclaimed environmentalists, and each has done the hard work of trying to understand the science and the issues. For these reasons I think they are least likely to confuse the science with their ideology.  But they could be wrong.  There are other well credentialed scientists who take the position that the world is warming up, the source of that warming is carbon dioxide largely from human sources and the modeled result of this warming indicates a catastrophic outcome to the natural and human world. Let’s take some of the important elements of the debate in turn.

First, what is CO2 and why is it a pollutant? I could just as easily ask why we hate plants. If levels of CO2 went to zero, then there would be nothing green on the planet but I guess we wouldn’t die of high temperatures. Is this what we want? Well maybe we want a bit of CO2 but not as much as now but if so, what is the magic amount? No one says.

My academic and technical career was in the natural resource sciences and so I am attracted to Dr. Moore’s charts showing temperature and CO2 concentrations going back millions of years. What these charts reveal is that the earth has had periods of higher CO2 concentrations and warmer temperatures. Strangely the two don’t show a significant correlation. In fact, there is data to suggest that CO2 concentrations lag temperature rather then determine temperature which doesn’t fit the current climate models very well.

Is this chart correct? Other charts indicate much less fluctuation in both temperature and CO2 concentration.  Given what we know of repeated ice ages, that lack of variability seems strange.  If Dr. Moore is using the correct chart, then high levels of CO2 have not destroyed the earth and the earth has rarely been colder than it is today. One might argue from this chart that we are entering Ice Age territory. This, in fact, was the dominant climate concern before Al Gore figured out how to monetize global warming.

As CO2 levels increase in the world, there are reports that the Sahara Desert is receding (1994 - 2004) after a period of expansion (1984 - 1993). Is this a good thing or a bad thing? There are lots of experiments demonstrating the nutritive effects of CO2 on plant growth and every grower that has an economic supply of CO2 will gladly pump it into their green houses. Does this make CO2 a toxic substance?

What about the climate models? I will not go into how consistently most models have over estimated average temperatures since they were developed in the 1990s nor will I comment on the fact that the United Nations (IPCC) reports typically misrepresent the model results to make political rather than scientific statements.

What are models anyway? Do models generate scientifically useful data based on direct measurement or do they use data and assumptions to predict future real-world variation based on an unproven hypothesis? When has anyone developed a model that is accurately predictive? Is there a model for accurately predicting the stock market? Wouldn’t that be the first model you would want to perfect? Is the movement of the stock market more complex than world climate? Does the Dow Jones Industrial Average move under the influence of a single variable?

Think of the epidemiological models used to predict the results of the covid pandemic. The important parameters of viral impact and its spread are relatively well known and, in the case of covid, there was excellent data from an almost perfectly controlled experiment - the cruise ship Diamond Princess. But still the epidemiological models grossly overestimated the numbers of hospitalizations and deaths. Some think these models overestimated to scare us into lockdown compliance. Alternatively, I think that building accurate models is very difficult.  So, if the relatively easy-to-build epidemiological model for covid did not accurately predict hospital and health outcomes, how much more difficult is it for a climate model to predict temperatures when the physics is not well understood, and the boundary condition data is so hard to collect?

Is global warming a real thing? Is the world heating up at an uncontrolled rate as suggested by John Kerry? Will “Money, money, money, money, money…” solve the issue as he stated this week? An internet search of world temperatures since the year 1000 AD will often give a graph showing relatively stable long term average temperatures with a significant upward deviation around 1880.  Since then, temperatures have risen close to one degree. This is the so-called “hockey stick” curve developed by Michael Mann of the University of Pennsylvania. What is more difficult to find is the McIntyre and McKittrick paper which famously refuted the mathematics that Mann used to “smooth” the data to create the visual “hockey stick” effect. Unfortunately, the Climategate email controversy from the East Anglia Climate Research Unit of about the same time was also embarrassing to the scientific ethics of those involved.

First order graphs using the actual or proxy temperature data (rather than processed data) demonstrate that there were significant temperature changes in the past 1000 years. For example, Europe experienced temperatures perhaps higher than those of today during the Medieval Warm Period from roughly 900 AD until 1300 AD. Similarly, the much cooler temperatures of the Little Ice Age ended around 1880.  For all of its controversy, I think the “hockey stick” issue demonstrated the scientific method at work in a free society. It was a good thing.

If we are to listen to the breathless accusations and finger wagging of people like the “newly incarcerated by obviously staged methods” Greta Thunberg, the greatest threats to human existence are now extreme weather events. Is that true? My answer is, “We don’t know”. About ten years ago scientists predicted an increase in death and destruction due to increased storms and other statistically improbable climate events. This was followed by almost ten years of much fewer storms and statistically improbable climate events.  What happened? Were the models wrong?  Part of the problem is definitional. How do you measure such events? By how often they occur?  Is it wind speed, financial damage to property, or numbers of deaths that move such events into and out of the “extreme events” bin? Does the fact that we are getting better at hardening our infrastructure against weather events and preventing death through early warning and mitigation impact the definition of extreme weather events?

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The reason that this Substack includes the word “Manichean” is to highlight that we must remember that the world is complex and there are rarely simple solutions.  The issues of climate science attest to this fact. The same data generates radically different views of what the data means. And this is how it should be because that is the nature of science. However, when political influences are brought to bear to force an ideology and shush scientists not in step with that ideology, then science grinds to a halt.

And scientists can be a merciless bunch as demonstrated by Israeli Professor Daniel Schechtman who won the 2011 Nobel prize in chemistry for his discovery of aperiodic crystalline structures. From his discovery in 1982 until into the 1990s, he was vilified and lost his research position. American Nobel laureate, Linus Pauling, said of him,

“There are no quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists.”

Attempting to shut up scientists is an age-old practice as described by Thomas Kuhn in “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”. I call it the Galileo effect.

Galileo is said to have pitted science against the church and so the church tried to crush him. The truth is that most of the scientists at the time were also clerics in the church and were not anti-science. However, like Professor Schechtman, Galileo’s proposition pushed against the dominant Aristotelian interpretation of the universe and damaged the reputation of Thomas Aquinas. The Dominicans, supporting Aquinas, vilified Galileo. The Jesuits, with no allegiance to Aquinas, supported Galileo. The Pope, a friend of Galileo, asked him to tone down the rhetoric and Galileo responded by writing a funny but bitingly sarcastic story identifying the Pope with the character, Simplicio. Not cool, Galileo. An embarrassed and angry Pope restricted Galileo’s future publications and prevented him from traveling to promote his views. Galileo didn’t suffer the censure of the church but rather a censure like that suffered by Dr. Schechtman and many other scientists whose discoveries do not support the prevailing scientific dogma. It is a science thing.

Is the world going to heat up and cause untold death? I don’t know but the more pertinent question for me is, “Are scientists, who do not follow the political dogma of climate change, suffering for their differences of view?” The list of such scientists is growing and that is not good for science. Maybe this is the year to change that.