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What Would You Need to Know to Worry About Climate Change?
I’m neither a climate alarmist nor a skeptic, and I’m unqualified to be either. I reckon that somewhere between Proposition A (life as we know it on Earth is coming to an end and we’re all going to boil to death) and Proposition B (an entire scientific field, along with the media, is engaged in a massive conspiracy to perpetuate a hoax, for reasons no one can explain) there’s a huge, very complicated scientific literature I haven’t read, comprising many specialist disciplines about which I know nearly nothing.
Right now, if you asked me clearly to explain to you what a Milankovitch cycle is, why pacific decadal oscillation matters, or my opinion about the influence of past ice volume change on modern sea levels — well, you just heard the totality of my opinions. If you told me to assume carbon dioxide levels will double in the coming century, that I have a month to model the effect this will have on the climate, that I have to do it unaided, and that if I fail to do it in a way that suggests passing familiarity with the state-of-the-art research, I’ll die? I’m dead.
I have no strong and defensible views on climate science, save the certainty that to arrive at strong and defensible views, I’d have to learn quite a bit. I find it impressive that many people who clearly haven’t got more reason than I do to have a strong view have one nonetheless.
With issues like this, I suspect, the position one takes is more a matter of accidental association than of any underlying or consistent ideology. There’s no special reason, for example, for American socialists to like granola. But they love the stuff, so American conservatives are instinctively suspicious of granola. In truth, the relationship between granola and any meaningful understanding of “right” and “left” is incidental.
I do have a friend, though, whose views about this are genuinely well-informed. If I wanted to outsource my opinions about this to someone else, I’d choose him. He’s a physicist I’ve known since he and I were undergraduates; he went on to have a distinguished career in sea-ice modeling. He’s current with every aspect of this debate. I know his character to be honest and modest: I just can’t imagine him claiming to know something he doesn’t, participating in a hoax, or having no clue what he’s talking about.
Recently, I sent him an e-mail asking him what he’d concluded after studying this problem for 30-odd years. How useful, I asked, are computer simulations of the Earth’s past, present, and future climate states? What really happens when you couple components of the climate system without resorting to flux adjustments?
I thought I’d share his reply. (I’ve lightly edited the exchange for his privacy and so that the chronology makes sense).
Here’s what really bothers me: reading about climate change in, say, a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece. What a predictable load of nonsense, year after year. In contrast, here’s a well-informed, closely reasoned piece of semi-technical science writing. There are no equations, but it helps to know some science (for instance, what the Coriolis effect is), and it takes some effort to keep causes and effects straight.
I’m curious: When you read this article (taking you as an examplar of a bright, well-educated, but scientifically untrained layperson), does it make sense to you? It’s a good example of a puzzling observation (expanding Antarctic sea ice) that scientists hammer away at from different directions for a decade or so, until they have a more-or-less satisfying explanation, while the big picture (dumping billions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere each year is a bad idea) remains unchanged.
But start with the fact that Antarctic sea ice is expanding and hand it to the editors of the Wall Street Journal. You’ll get something like this: “Climate scientists would have you forget that, while Arctic sea ice area is declining, the area of Antarctic sea ice is actually increasing! And the scientists have no explanation! The models are wrong! Climate has changed in the past, it’s changing now, it’s all part of a natural cycle, and there’s nothing to worry about!”
The Wall Street Journal doesn’t indulge in exclamation points, but this is always the structure of the argument. Good luck finding in the popular media a detailed exposition of the science. I think science writers have decided that the details are simply too complicated for most people, so they try to emphasize that the core science (that which one needs to know to make rational policy decisions) is settled, while scientists are still quibbling (as they should) about the finer details.
In other words, he firmly believes the core science is, indeed, settled, basically in favor of Proposition A.
Goodness, I replied. That’s dreary. What policies seemed to him genuinely merited by the science? And whatever they were, how would he propose convincing China and India to adopt them?
His reply:
I agree that most liberals who hold strong views about climate change would have as much trouble rigorously defending their views as most conservatives. But since we can’t all be experts on all aspects of science (for instance, I’m clueless about medicine and biology), I think it’s legitimate to defer to the science consensus, where there is one. The burden of rigor should rest on those who deny what really is an overwhelming consensus.
I don’t think it’s a historical accident that liberals trust climate science and conservatives don’t. Since dealing with climate change requires some degree of international government action, it makes sense that those on the right would be less welcoming of the science. My naive hope at one time was that most people would accept the science (to the extent that there are clear and compelling reasons to believe it), and then we’d have a vigorous debate over the appropriate policy responses (taxes versus carbon markets versus top-down regulation). No such luck.
Among people I know at the lab, there’s a generational split. Nearly all the climate skeptics I know are over 60. One of my friends thinks this is because people born before about 1960 grew up with assumptions of unchecked material progress, whereas those born later find it easier to accept the idea of limits to growth (the big blue marble, the End of Nature, and all that).
Which policies would I like to see adopted? In the US, I’d like to see a carbon tax, levied at the point of entry (ports, pipelines, etc.), starting low (say, $25/ton of carbon) and increasing gradually and predictably over time. I’d refund the proceeds to everyone on a per capita basis, so that anyone who uses less than the per capita mean amount of energy comes out ahead. (This would be the majority, since median energy use is well below the mean.) In this way I’d try to build a constituency of energy-conserving right-leaning voters: “Keep your big-government hands off my carbon refund!”
I’d supplement this tax with gradually tightening efficiency standards for vehicles, home appliances, building insulation and so on. I’d avoid cap and trade.
I’m out of my depth when it comes to diplomacy. But I suppose that for India and China, I’d try to make broad deals like the agreement announced a few weeks ago. Also, the carbon tax would apply to imports from any country that didn’t have an equivalent internal tax, so there wouldn’t be a free ride for countries that lack adopt similar policies.
Overall, I think of myself as a raging moderate.
There we go. I don’t know enough to have my own opinion, but when I outsource the question to the most qualified and trustworthy person I know, that’s what I get.
So, my questions for everyone here would be:
1) What kind of scientific evidence would persuade you, personally, that the alarmists are basically correct?
2) If you don’t think you could hope to master the relevant literature to the degree required to assess that evidence, would you be willing to outsource your opinion about it to someone else? If so, who? And why?
3) Assuming the alarmists’ most extreme predictions are correct, what policies do you think would have any hope of mitigating the damage? (I don’t have an informed view of the science, but I do have an informed view of diplomacy, and I agree with my friend that he’s out of his depth. The Paris climate accord is no more enforceable than the Kellogg-Briand Pact. It won’t work.)
Assuming his views about the science are correct, can anyone here imagine a policy strategy that might save the planet?
Published in General, Science & Technology
I guess the underlying issue is that in questions about global climate, our sample size is one.
Simple. When CO2 concentration reaches 1% of the atmosphere, I will consider the idea that this molecule, which is absolutely essential for the existence of life on Earth, is a threat to…well, life on Earth.
(According to a NASA website, CO2 is almost 400 ppm. Convert that to a percentage.)
I am a physician who did a lot of work in basic science laboratories as a student, so I think I have a feel for how science is done and the climate science press releases do not feel like science to me. It is simply not modest at all. In that way, it feels much more like Michelle Obama’s scientific pronouncements on the school lunch program. That is to say, it is based on policy goals, not science per se.
So, what would it take for me to accept the scientific pronouncements?
As a minimum, I would need to see an acknowledgement that global warming would not be uniformly negative. There have to be areas of the world that would become more amenable to agriculture or housing or human health if the global temperature increased a bit or precipitation increased a bit (or decreased a bit). If glaciers melted and land was lost due to rising sea levels, what happens to the land exposed by the melting? I know I have land that is partially too dry and partially too wet. We live in an area with a short growing season. Would I really be harmed by climate change?
This planet’s atmosphere used to contain all of the CO2 that is now stored as fossil fuel underground. Those conditions allowed plant and animal flourishing, yet we hear that increased CO2 would only harm plant and animal life. A realistic portrayal would acknowledge some benefits.
I like your posts Dan Hansen. It reminds me of Michael Crichton’s explanation of complexity theory.
The climate gate emails showed us that there was a conspiracy among top climate scientists to marginalize skeptical scientists and to keep their research out of scientific journals. That is a fact.
In a world where money is being shoveled at alarmists scientists while skeptics are routinely attacked and their entire careers jeopardized, I am not surprised that natural selection has produced and preponderance of believers.
Why are skeptics over 60? Because no young scientist is foolish enough to go against the grain.
Graph from John Christy presentation on Youtube.
If we were to assume that the models are correct, and the U.S. committed green seppuku (we just ceased to exist), the green line is where we’d be. Makes you wonder. I think we adapt, and get ready to switch to nuclear real fast, if the doomsday scenarios begin to look realistic.
Glad someone got the reference! Although Delingpole’s book was published in 2011, and I first heard the term decades ago, in National Review, if memory serves.
“Paging James Delingpole.”
Lets hear from a man on the front lines about what ‘scientific’ justification looks like.
BTW- there is a lot of ‘funny’ science here… when CO2, which is essential to life, our life, is called a ‘poison’?
Ya’ know we’d die in an environment of pure oxygen so that must be a poisonous gas also?
I trust that there is anthropogenic global warming. For that reason and for others, I would be willing to have a non-zero carbon tax, either in the form recommended by your friend, or in some other, more easily administered form. I have been advocating net-zero or minus-zero carbon taxes for at least 20 years, not just on grounds of climate mitigation.
But giving more money to the governing class, and giving them more power to abuse our lives? Nothing would be worse than that. It would be better to fry to death on this planet than to have more of what they have been giving us.
What I don’t understand is why for other conservatives, that isn’t the hill to fight and die on. Instead so many of them want to fight on the hill that says global warming is a hoax. Which doesn’t give me any confidence that when that hill is overrun, that they will stand and fight with us on the issue of money and power.
Consider water molecules. They are absolutely essential to life, and they can kill you.
Hi Claire. Your physics friend’s acceptance of Proposition A seems to stem from his gut belief that dumping tons of carbon into the atmosphere seems like a bad idea.
Is it?
At best I think we can agree that humans dumping tons of carbon into the atmosphere adds another shuffle to an already well-shuffled deck of cards. That is to say, we don’t have much of an idea about what future climate would otherwise have been. So human activity probably makes the future climate different than it otherwise would have been. But how different? And different than what? I don’t think we know. We could easily be preventing an Ice Age.
Regardless. The fact that the preferred solutions all involve lowering economic growth tells me lots. If the alarmists are correct, why does no one propose a simple fix to cool the greenhouse warming without impacting growth? What simple fix? The controlled injection of sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere to mimic the natural cooling of a big volcanic eruption like Mt Pinatubo. So, even if it turns out that the alarmists are absolutely correct … We have a technological fix at hand.
But the alarmists’ dire claims are being used to promote an attack on economic growth and the greatest source of economic growth – capitalism. It is important, I believe, to look into the connections between climate alarmists and the European Degrowth movement. Degrowthers advocate a reduction in production and consumption arguing that overconsumption and overproduction are the root cause of all manner of environmental and social ills. Climate change is tailor made for their purposes.
So an environment containing an H2O concentration level of 400 parts per million would kill me?
Not relevant to the point. Some people are having trouble understanding how something that’s essential to life can kill you. But there are many essential substances that can do that. The dose at which they can kill you, and the means by which they kill you, are probably different for each one.
There is an old saying, “The dose makes the poison,” which applies in part.
If climate skeptics want to be taken seriously, they shouldn’t be making silly statements that show they don’t understand something as simple and obvious as this.
It depends on the substance. There are many that are beneficial, or at least harmless, at one concentration but harmful at higher concentrations, that are still less than 1%, if you are exposed to them.
So are you now arguing that CO2 is a poison?
Claire, this whole thread is silly. We deserve better, and you should know better. It is nothing more than trolling.
CO2 is plant food. Plant growth has soared with more CO2. It is all good.
There has been no net warming (measured by the satellites) in 18+ years, despite soaring CO2.
The oceans are rising so slowly that it would take hundreds of years to rise a single meter.
No: it is not a hoax. It is a perfect example of confirmation bias when the money follows the confirmation. The reputation of Science will never recover in our lifetimes.
It’s more than just the climate science for me.
Since the changes would happen over maybe a century, one very important thing I’d need to know, which is outside the science, is why mankind could not deal with the consequences over that time as they came. It spans generations — not even the same people.
Another thing I think is fair to ask is predictions — just as detailed as the climate science — of what happens if the world’s economy and liberty are squelched, and then climate science’s predictions fail to come true.
Just so. There’s an underlying philosophy in the green movement that identifies anything created by mankind as “artificial,” and insists that “natural” is always better. Anything we do has the effect of “contaminating” the otherwise “pure” and “pristine” environment. This is a 180 degree reversal of the views of our ancestors who saw draining swamps, clearing land, and digging irrigation channels to turn untamed wild lands into civilized farms and towns as “progress” and “improvement.”
The truth is probably somewhere between the extremes. I believe we need to take a humane approach that puts the welfare of mankind first, and evaluate changes to the environment in terms of their net costs and benefits to the human beings affected by them. In the case of climate change, they have failed to persuade me that an increase of a few degrees in average temperatures would be bad for mankind overall, much less a catastrophe.
When Sheryl Crow proves to me that she only uses one turd ticket per BM, I’ll join the Sierra Club.
Claire
A couple of additional points. I agree with you that the Paris Climate Accord is no more enforceable than the Kellogg-Briand Pact. You friend is, indeed, out of his depth on the policy front.
I also looked at the link embedded in his response to you re the science and it highlights another reason my natural skepticism has been reinforced. I’ve been involved in some high profile environmental controversies and this increasingly doesn’t pass the smell test with me.
His link is to the website Real Climate, which is home base for some of the greatest scientific advocates of CAGW. Back when Real Climate started up in 2003 or 2004 I’d read extensively the Steve McIntyre/Ross McKittrick examinations of the famous Hockey Stick and McIntyre had just started up the Climate Audit site so I looked forward to a healthy back and forth that might be informative for someone like me who was undecided.
Initially when reading Real Climate it seemed to effectively defang McIntyre’s questioning of the Hockey Stick but as I read more deeply I realized I was being misled. When McIntyre took on the Hockey Stick he would always quote in full what a proponent said, provided a link and was temperate in his response. I realized that Real Climate never quoted skeptics or referred directly to them; rather it “characterized” the questions they raised and then responded to them, often adding in ad hominem attacks. (to be continued)
Claire:
Your friend’s example inclines me to question his neutrality. He criticizes the WSJ for editorials pointing out that Antarctic sea ice is expanding. But the only reason that the WSJ points this out is the never-ending hysteria from virtually every other media outlet about Arctic sea ice contracting, and how this is proof of catastrophic global warming. For crying out loud, every minor heat wave is trumpeted as proof of the coming apocalypse.
Here’s a quick exercise. Google “carbon dioxide level graph” and look at the “Images” page. My screen shows 24 results on the first page. All but one of these 24 use the misleading trick of drawing a graph with the x-axis crossing somewhere other than zero. This trick is done to exaggerate an increase (or decrease) in something. Here is an example:
See how they have the x-axis cross at a concentration of 310 PPM? This vastly exaggerates the amount of the CO2 increase. The graph suggests about a
4219-fold increase (42001900%, from 5 to 95). The actual increase is from about 315 to 395, or about 26%.When the evidence presented for an idea is so regularly presented in a misleading way, my skepticism becomes almost impenetrable.
Upon closer examination I found that the Real Climate characterizations usually mischaracterized the questions raised by skeptics in such a way as to be easier to refute. Often the mischaracterizations were very subtle and took repeated readings to tease out, but in science small differences in characterization can make a huge difference in the substance.
On top of that, Real Climate banned McIntyre and other skeptics from posting questions and responses to Real Climate posts. McIntyre’s banned comments were not trolling or offensive, they were polite attempts to discuss the science. I eventually stopped reading Real Climate due to its intellectual dishonesty and intolerance.
I highly recommend McIntyre’s Climate Audit site though he does not post as much as he used to as well as Judith Curry’s Climate Etc site. Curry is a climatologist who’s been subject to a smear campaign since she started to raise questions about the “consensus”.
I tend to be a “lukewarmer”…the science at its most basic level is clear. All else equal, more CO2 in the atmosphere, the higher the temperature. The issue is that all else is not equal for many of the reasons others have pointed out here…feedbacks (both positive and negative play a significant role), no one fully understands the role of cloud formation, etc. Further, the assumptions in the GCMs are at some level, simply WAGs…not all but some important ones such has how much CO2 will be spewed out 50 years from now. Therefore, I can’t be remotely in the alarmist camp.
All that said, a few things that could bring me around a little bit:
(cont’d)
(cont’d)
2. If the loudest voices in the “alarmist” camp (leftist politicians, politically leftists scientists, leftist media), suggest one…just one…potential policy response that is something that they wouldn’t want to do anyway. Everything they suggest are things they have been dreaming about doing for decades. Leads me to believe that they are not as serious about it as they claim. Suppose Hansen’s “evolution” on nuclear power would be one but that is about it.
3. In regards to the proposed solutions from the progressive camp, I would like to hear someone (Obama, Kerry, Markey, etc) actually discuss the tradeoffs involved. They all talk about how great it will be for the economy and jobs (ie. solar, wind, etc). If the problem is as serious as they claim and humanity’s ultimate survival is truly at risk, then the tradeoffs are worth it (ie. lower economic growth or wealth in order to just survive). However, they regularly suggest that raising the cost of energy will be good for the economy, which makes no sense.
Claire, I would be interested if you could ask you friend what he thinks of some of the crazy alarmist stuff written in the WaPo or NYT. They quite often deviate from the science.
There is more reason for skepticism.
From what I’ve read of the science, we are currently in an ice age, specifically the Quaternary glaciation, which began about 2.58 million years ago. We are living in a short-term interglacial period of this ice age, called the Holocene, which began about 11,000 years ago.
Here is a graph for the past 450,000 years (from Wikipedia)
Note that temperatures were higher than today about 400k, 325k, 230k, and 125k years ago. The polar bears didn’t die out, the coral reefs didn’t disappear, and the ecosystem of the planet did not collapse.
Here’s a graph on of the past 5 million years:
Notice anything? Like a steady down trend? Yet life on earth did not come to an end.
These records do show a type of climate catastrophe. They’re called ice ages.
Frankly, the studies that I’ve seen suggest that global warming, even if it occurs, may well be beneficial in its net effect. It is certainly less dangerous to humanity than cooling.
I don’t think that explanation works. If you are in your 60s (like me) you grew up with Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth, the explosive growth of the new environmental movement all of which received plaudits at the time and were adored in academia. If anything, the passing years have provided substantial evidence to debunk Ehrlich and the Club of Rome. Heck, Ehrlich’s acolyte, John Holdren (who is in his 60s), is Obama’s science advisor.
Another point. About a year ago, as I recall, I became interested in this subject, and actually tried to decipher the temperature predictions in the various IPCC reports. I found an interesting omission.
Remember that the IPCC reports are proposing drastic economic changes on the basis of computer models predicting rising temperature. So the very first thing that I would expect to find would be a table of these temperature projections, say in annual or five-year increments, stating what the projected global temperature would be, and the confidence intervals connected with those projections.
In other words, there ought to be a table telling us something like: “We project that by 2015, global average temperature will have increased by 0.5 deg C, with a 95% confidence interval of 0.35-0.65 deg C.”
Then when 2015 arrives — which it has — we’d be able to check predicted temperature against actual. This is science, of course, so a temperature conforming to the prediction would not prove the model correct, but a temperature not conforming to the prediction would prove the model incorrect (at least at the stated level of statistical confidence).
Guess what I could not find in the IPCC reports?
That’s right, they omitted the most obvious information that could be used to prove that their models are wrong.
Deliberate obfuscation of the facts and ongoing use of misleading data and graphics makes me wholly skeptical.
To answer the OP question:
To become concerned about anthropogenic global warming, I would need to see a specific, testable prediction of what temperature would be in, say, 15-20 years, and then wait to see if that prediction came true. The predictions made about 15-20 years ago, at the start of the hysteria, have not come true.
I would also need to see an explanation of why a higher global temperature would be a catastrophe today, when it appears that much higher temperatures in the distant past did not have catastrophic effects.