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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
IF the most extreme predictions are correct than nothing will mitigate the damage, at least that is my understanding of the predictions. Hence the worry people have over them.
As a Lukewarmer, I don’t doubt the science, or the process by which it came about. I doubt the future predictions. Basically we only have a problem if things go up by more than 2 or 3 degrees. If they go up by 4-6 we have a big problem, more we are screwed. Right now we seem on pace for shooting under 2. The models all predict different things based on those inputs, all basically predict an increase the question is how much. The models so far seem be over estimating in their predictions. Though last time I saw a graph of this temperature changes still fall within the spread of model predictions it is just that they are under the mean.
This is what I would ask your friend. How confident is he in the models. What kind of error bars does he think those predictions will have? Something we can calculate to a T, like shooting a rocket to Mars. Other things have some large error ranges. You can propose a general relationship describing a phenomenon, but that isn’t quite the same thing as having a formula to predict what will happen.
Good agreement between climate models and the observations would be persuasive. Contrariwise, the divergence between the models and the observations creates skepticism. Proposition A relies heavily on climate models (GCMs). There is no strong case for Prop. A without them since Prop. A is a prediction about climate many decades from now. As of this moment, there is significant divergence between models and observations.
As an aside, the statement of Proposition A is far more alarmist than the IPCC assessments or any responsible party. A reasoned discussion of the alarmist (for lack of a better word) position necessitates that the position should be stated more accurately. The IPCC has a number of scenarios, some more alarmist than others, and none as alarmist as Al Gore’s. In short, no one believes that “…life as we know it on Earth is coming to an end and we’re all going to boil to death.”
The observational evidence already rules out “something we can calculate to a T” level of accuracy. No one knows what the error bars are, but we know they are not small.
No matter what, time, energy, all resources spent on adaptation.
There’s a Paul Ehrlich born every minute.
The other thing to note about this debate is a philosophical question. What policies does the science recommend? Can science actually recommend a policy? The answer is no. Since a policy in this case requires a value judgement, something science is incapable of obtaining. Thus the matter of the scientific consensus can not answer the question of what is best to be done. It can only add one set of facts to a list of facts on which value judgement must be made according to various philosophical constructions.
If you are starving would you turn down a slice of bred today for a loaf two days from now? If you are a low energy country would you turn down coal, and oil today for fear of more bad weather tomorrow? Especially if the energy today might make you well off enough to weather any future storm?
I don’t think that’s a reasonable demand: We accept many judgement as scientifically valid even though the error bar is a standard deviation or more; we would certainly accept it in medicine, if our lives were at stake (and that’s a field in which experiments can be replicated, too).
I studied ecology in grad school. I can’t believe that global warming is a hoax. It’s too big to be a hoax. But that doesn’t mean I have to agree with every, or any, conclusion leftists make about what to expect and what policies we need to follow. I’ve heard that the IPCC report predicts that the economic impact of global warming will be something like 1% of global GDP in 2100. That’s serious, but leftists wildly underestimate the benefits of fossil fuels for human welfare (e.g. transporting food from farms to people is enormously important), while at the same time wildly overestimating the efficacy of solar and other alternative energy sources.
I taught environmental science in 2002, and at the time I fully believed in global warming as a problem. Studying the textbook to prepare for the class made me realize how muddy the evidence for catastrophic global warming is.
That said, I’m a bit more worried about global warming now than I was a few weeks ago. In past comments here at Ricochet, I have said that I don’t believe that Al Gore, etc. really believe in a carbon doomsday because if they did, they would be thinking seriously about nuclear power, by far the most practical non-carbon emitting energy source we have. However, James Hansen has recently come out in favor of developing nuclear power to reduce carbon emissions. So, I take him more seriously now.
ManBearPig is amused.
Fair enough. Let’s restate it as, “The science in favor of alarm is sufficiently settled that anyone rational would view this as a policy priority.” And we’ll all accept that we’re necessarily talking about probabilities, not certainties, but that’s also true when we discuss the risks of nuclear proliferation — and no one would argue that we need not have a policy about this because we can’t estimate with precision the date and likelihood of a nuclear exchange.
Let’s also take that as a given. Anyone who isn’t strongly in favor of nuclear power isn’t serious about this, but wallowing in a morbid funk. But many climate researchers have long since argued that opposing nuclear power is completely insane:
And people like Monbiot have been saying this since forever. (Back-of-the-envelope time estimate.)
Continuing from my earlier post, if it is indeed true that anthropogenic, catastrophic global warming is real, and if it is true that nuclear power can save the world from it (by producing copious amounts of energy without carbon emissions), then one must conclude that the radical environmental movement has been a major cause of global warming, since they were the ones that persuaded the public that nuclear power is deadly and evil.
My point is, global warming is a real concern, but this in no way means you need to concede anything to progressives and Democrats. They have no realistic plans to do anything about global warming, to the extent that the problem is real.
I also have an economic question to pose to your friend. If you tax energy, but give people the money, what keeps them from being able to afford more energy consumption? Isn’t his plan like saying I will help you to diet by making apples 100 dollars, but give you 100 dollars to spend on food.
I guess the idea is that the majority of people will get more money then they spend on energy, so over all energy companies lose some money? But if people are flush with cash they will spend it on goods, and services, which all consume energy. Economically it would seem to me that the end result is people will buy as much energy as they can afford if you give the majority of people more money they will consume more energy.
What you need to do is to tax the energy and have the government use that money to pay for natural disasters prevention and clean up, rather than give it to consumers. But, disaster clean up and prevention also takes energy…Maybe just burn it then, but that would release CO2.
Seriously though how does shifting the money from one pocket to the other help? I guess he figures this will make renewables more competitive, but considering the energy discrepancy between carbon and wind/solar you would need to make that tax way higher. That will hurt too many people to be politically possible.
I didn’t realize that Hansen (and others) were saying this in 2013. I don’t think it got publicized very much.
Oh my wording is poor. I don’t think climate scientists need to give me that level of accuracy, but the level of accuracy makes a difference in determining how much stock I put in their prediction. A big error bar makes me hesitant to commit vast resources to the problem. They can have the trend and relationship right, but be off on the particulars. Yet, the particulars is what drives their point.
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Okay, so what is to be done if we think this is as likely as nuclear proliferation.
One must take into account in both cases human nature and need. The idea is that that human consumption of carbon energy leads to CO2 increasing at faster rates leading through various means to increased temperatures and therefore alterations in climate.
What alterations? how sever?
It seems to me the proper response is to handle each change locally through direct means. Land dries up we build irrigation and create aquifers to store water and aqueducts to move it to where we need to.
Sea levels begin to climb. Now they wont do this in a day. We build seawalls, drainage, and elevate our coastal cities.
Climate alters the growing season, food yield drop. We begin to farm more land (in America we are actually using less farm land now than we used to and producing more food we have room to grow).
Really nothing is much of a problem for wealthy nations. We may have to pay for more disaster relief until the market adjusts and people adapt. We have the means to do it. I guess the issue is the Third world, but their answer is to become rich. Which will mean using more energy, and instituting better political systems.
That is a wildly different proposition and not alarmist. However, this is emphatically not the position adopted by many climate activists. Categorizing something as a policy priority leaves plenty of latitude concerning the placement compared to other priorities, the kinds of policies that should be adopted (mitigation vs. carbon controls), and the urgency for action.
I notice there is frequently a kind of bait-and-switch, whereby a very reasonable general position is put forth followed by draconian and/or expensive policies are demanded.
That’s very true. Still, it’s common sense to say that people will exhibit different preferences depending upon their beliefs about the future, and those beliefs may be well- or poorly-founded.
Perhaps we could think of it this way: Sure, if I’m starving (literally) the value of a loaf of bread to me, now, will be higher than the value of that loaf five years from now. Among people who aren’t starving, however, there are a range of beliefs about the value of a loaf of bread — some sensible, some not. If I claimed my loaf of bread was unusually valuable because it can feed a multitude, you’d be correct to say, “No, that would be a miracle.”
But if I said that I’m making good money by assessing the future value of bread to others — i.e., investing in grain commodity futures — you’d be correct to say, “That’s wholly plausible.”
Fair enough; I was simplifying the position to keep everyone amused.
Also fair enough, but let’s not use the positions of the most extreme activists for the purpose of this discussion.
Let’s say we accept that the risk to humanity is 1. real, 2. grave, and 3. near. We don’t know how grave or how near, but we accept predictions, say, in the middle-range of the IPCC’s. For the sake of argument. What next?
Exactly. But, what are we anticipating? If we are starving it is death. For certain. But is death what your friend expects? Now alarmist seem to imply that is what will happen. I doubt the science implies that with any level of credibility. After all we aren’t worried about large asteroids though we know they exist and surely some could eventually come for us.
To me it seems what the science is predicting is that things will become somewhat more hectic, and we should take caution. Now what should we as cautions people do? We try to change the climate back? Or adapt to it? Summers get hotter. But I have air conditioning. What is my problem, a higher electric bill? Certainly nothing to scoff at, but world ending?
So what are we contemplating exactly. Avoiding extinction? Or something that is several steps short of it but still in the same direction? In other words, are we going to get shot with a pistol or is someone going to punch us? Both hurt, but one is more of a problem than the other and warrants more protection. The science tells us that the most likely thing to happen is to be punched and even that isn’t 100%. How big are the odds of being shot? How much does that bulletproof vest cost? Is it worth a broken leg? A punch certainly isn’t. Yet the solutions most advocated seems like a broken leg to me.
First, I don’t think we need to assign blame: If we accept the threat is real, we have bigger things to worry about. Second, I doubt the radical environmentalists have had much of an effect. Treating the EU as a single country, 10 countries produce about 70 percent of global GHG emissions. The environmental movement has probably affected nuclear power policy (to some degree) in the US and the EU, although not necessarily that much — it certainly didn’t persuade the French public to abandon nuclear energy. I doubt it had much effect at all on China, Russia, Indonesia, or India. Perhaps it had some effect on Brazil; I doubt they had much effect on Japan until the Fukushima meltdown (and there the impetus to changed policy wasn’t their activism, but a nuclear disaster; and I have no idea what effect they had on Canada and Mexico. Probably some in the former.
Not saying we need to concede anything. Assume we’re talking about the policy we believe makes sense.
Claire, I think you misunderstand standard deviations and how they relate to uncertainty. The standard deviation is a measure of the scatter of data. If the standard deviation is bigger, the error bars are bigger. Depending on the situation, people choose their error bars to be a certain number of times the standard deviation of the data, usually more than one. Frequently, uncertainty is expressed in terms of confidence intervals. For example, if the true value is believed to be in a certain interval with 95% probability, that’s the 95% confidence interval, or loosely, the error bar.
Making your confidence interval several times the standard deviation of the data just means you’re being conservative in your claims, not necessarily that your uncertainty is large. If your data has little scatter, the uncertainty is still small.
One trouble with climate models is that no one has a clue what the uncertainty is. What we can say is that the temperature data from the last 15 or 20 years diverge from the models outside 90 or 95% of their stated confidence intervals. Sorry, I can’t find the reference now. Attempts have been made to explain this divergence and tune the models. One should always be suspicious of models that need repeated tuning to fit the data; it speaks poorly of their predictive value.
Your friend is obviously so far to the left he can’t even see the right. All of his suggested solutions involve more government and trying to stop global warming.
The question is, what policies are more likely to enable the human race to best adjust to whatever happens. And my answer to that is more freedom, elimination of regulations that are holding back inventors and entrepreneurs. It seems to me that the economic science is settled on this. In the Communist Soviet Union and her satellites, there was more pollution and more cover-ups of pollution, because that’s what government does, and since government has the guns, who is to say them nay? In the Capitalist West, when something came to light, there were clean-ups.
The problem is that we in the US have fallen into the type of croneyism that led to the inaction in Bhopal. We need to get back to small, limited government and capitalism to address this.
Yep, that’s where he started to lose me, but he doesn’t pretend that policy side of it is his area of expertise. That’s the part people like us are supposed to figure out.
Grave? What does that mean. Exactly. I can picture nuclear war (at least I think I can). I can certainly picture the level of destruction Iran launching one nuke at Israel will cause. So I can judge how much I am willing to spend and do to prevent that based on my certainty of it occurring. Would I advocate first strike on Iran because it is possible sometime in the future this will happen? No, I need more than that to make that call.
I think conceding grave is what I am very skeptical about. How many steps removed from the theory governing the initial prediction is grave derived from? It one thing to predict X CO2 will lead to 1-6 degrees temperature increase with a 95% probability and still claim your theory is scientifically sound. But, then you have to take that number plug it into whole new models to predict “grave”. That process I don’t trust that much.
And if true capitalism fails, just remember:
Nuclear Winter Trumps Global Warming
Put a few thermonukes down into the super-volcanoes and nobody will be worrying about global warming for a few thousand years.
But, that is the thing. People claim the science demands a solution like the one he proposes. And, that is the real problem in all of this. It gets back to the philosophy of science, point I made. The science doesn’t demand anything. If people start telling us the science demands an action they aren’t doing science, they are using science to do something else. And that something else is what you have to worry about the most not the science.
What is it that advocates for carbon regulation are using science for? It isn’t to save the Earth. The Earth needs no saving. They are trying to save society from the sins of consumerism and affluence. The climate is just an excuse. They would find another. So that is what we have to debate. The nature and consequence of our sins and redemption.
And now I’m going to bed. But I expect you all to keep debating this so I can read it all when I wake up.
One of the fundamental problems with the ‘science is settled’ argument is this fundamental question: “Whose science?” Climatologists like to think that they have the last word (or the only word) on the subject because they are the ‘experts’. But climatologists know nothing about marine biology, and perhaps marine ecosystems are key to understanding the problem. And marine biologists are not geologists, and perhaps there are geological factors involved. And geologists are not economists, and you need economists to build models of future CO2 output, the costs of various forms of mitigation, to understand how the market will respond to carbon prices, etc.
And so it goes. Climate science is a huge, multi-disciplinary field, and what they are studying is a massive, slow-acting complex system that is sensitive to initial inputs and chaotic in behaviour in both the short and long term. Each one of these specialities is like someone peering into this massive system of billions of connections and interactions through a tiny straw. Thousands of people looking at tiny bits of the system at a time, but never being able to see the whole.
What does the climate have in common with the market, the immune system, an ecosystem, or a brain? They are all examples of complex systems. Such systems are very hard to understand, messing with them tends to cause unintended consequences as the system computes the changes and modifies itself by its own internal logic, they can undergo massive change in output with tiny changes in input, and they are utterly unpredictable in terms of their future specific behavior.
The biggest problem facing scientists studying these things is that they treat them like a machine – if they can just figure out all the pieces using scientific reductionism to break it all down to its lowest elements, they can understand how it works. This is what macroeconomists have been doing for over a century, and to this day their predictions about the future economy are no better than darts thrown at a dartboard.
Still… You don’t have to be able to predict the exact price of a stock in the future to guess that the stock market as a whole will probably be higher 5o years from now. You don’t have to be able to predict the future size and shape of an anthill to know that if you take away all the food it will die. But what you can’t do is examine how the anthill or market behaved in the past and use that information to predict the future.
Your physicist friend may not know any economics, but he has a very good understanding of how CO2 traps heat, and it makes perfect sense then that if you add CO2 to the atmosphere, it will warm up. For the rest of the puzzle, he probably relies on other experts just as we do.
This point is absolutely key. Climate activists, and environmental activists generally, make a static assumption about human technology. They assume that we will have the same tools to deal with the world in 100 years that we have now. Reflecting on how things were 100 years ago should disabuse a person of such thoughts.
It’s hard to predict the innovations that we will make in the next century. Who would have predicted ubiquitous air transportation, powerful and cheap personal computing, and virtually instant global communication 100 or 150 years ago? It’s hard to imagine enjoying the comforts and wealth we do, and coping with the problems we encounter, with the tools from 1900. Futurists make predictions but they are usually wrong.