Tag Archives: climate science

June 2024 in Review

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Most frightening and/or depressing story: Some self-labeled “conservatives” in the United States want to do away with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Census Bureau, the Internal Revenue Service, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Education, and possibly even the Federal Reserve. All these are needed to have a competent, stable government and society and to be prepared to respond and recover from the shocks that are coming, so I would call this nihilist and not “conservative” at all. How is it conservative to want to destroy the institutions that have underpinned the success of our nation thus far? On the other hand, they also want to double down on the unimaginative pro-big-business, pro-war consensus of the two major parties over the last 50 years or so, which has also gotten us to where we are today. And it looks like the amateurs and psychopaths have the upper hand at the moment in terms of our November election. This is certainly not “morning in America”.

Most hopeful story: Computer-controlled cars are slowly but surely attaining widespread commercial rollout. I don’t care what the cynics say – this will save land, money and lives. And combined with renewable and/or nuclear energy, it could play a big role in turning the corner on the climate crisis.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: I had a misconception that if the world reduces greenhouse gases today, the benefits will not kick in for decades. Happily, scientists’ understanding of this has been updated and I will update my own understanding along with that. The key is the ocean’s ability to absorb excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere relatively quickly. (I am not sure this is good for the ocean itself, but it is somewhat hopeful for temperatures here on land.) And it is not all or nothing – any emissions reductions will help, so the failure to act in the past is not an excuse to continue to fail to act.

today’s warming is not the result of emissions decades ago…well, it is and it isn’t

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I’ve repeated a couple times that if emissions were stabilized today, the climate would continue warming for decades. I am not a complete idiot, because this was the scientific understanding at one time, but it is time for me to update my understanding. Michael Mann explains:

The conventional wisdom was once that warming would continue on for decades even if we stopped emitting carbon into the atmosphere due to the sluggishness of the oceans, which continue to warm up even after CO2 stops increasing. This is known as committed warming. But committed warming is only half of the story, an artifact of simplistic early climate modeling experiments in which CO2 levels are kept fixed after the hypothetical cessation of emissions.

Later, more comprehensive simulations with interactive ocean carbon cycle dynamics revealed that CO2 levels actually drop after emissions cease as the oceans continue to draw carbon down from the atmosphere. That decrease in the greenhouse effect cancels out the committed warming, and the result is an essentially flat line. In other words, global temperatures stabilize quickly once net carbon emissions drop to zero.

aps.org

So today’s temperatures are the result of emissions over the past decades, but today’s rate of increase in temperature is about the current rate of emissions or at least very recent emissions. This article doesn’t explain, but I think it makes sense, that global temperatures would start to drop at some point as the oceans continued to soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. (I’m ignoring ocean acidification for the moment – perhaps this would never be reversed?) This would be encouraging if there were any serious commitment among the world’s governments and institutions to stop emissions in the near future. Nonetheless, Mann points out that the damage already done is not a logical excuse to stop doing further damage. Any action will reduce the severity of future impacts, even if the floor for those impacts has already been baked in.

rolling the DICE

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The Intercept has a long take-down of William Nordhaus’s DICE climate change economic model. Well, it’s not just this journalist, who may not have past middle school algebra for all we know, in this openly left-leaning publication taking him down, it’s Joseph Stiglitz, Nicholas Stern, and Herman Daly among others. So despite some unnecessarily inflammatory language, I found the article to be a good summary of where this debate stands.

The basic take-down is that Nordhaus’s model ignores those “fat tail” tipping point scenarios, and is basically just extrapolating recent data far into the future in a linear manner, without consideration of true system dynamics. I might agree, but I can also see the point Nordhaus himself makes that our global society is doing much less than even his somewhat conservative model would recommend. Scientists sometimes deserve to be accused of “paralysis of analysis” – because there is some controversy, politicians and corporate leaders can rationalize continuing to do nothing. When in reality, all the economists and scientists cited here, who vehemently disagree with each other, all agree that our global society is doing too little too late to avert catastrophe. If our leaders would do what Nordhaus is recommending, it would be a huge step in the right direction, and then we could have a useful debate about whether we have done enough or still need to do more. We are nowhere near that point so this is quite literally an academic debate. If the more catastrophic scenarios people are talking about were moving the politicians in the right direction, that would be one thing, but I am not convinced. I think seeing the experts argue with each other just gives the politicians excuses. And we KNOW most of them failed elementary school arithmetic.

anti-climate science propaganda techniques

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This article in BBC is about propaganda used by the fossil fuel industry in the 1990s to convince the public to doubt the emerging consensus among climate scientists. Basically, the technique was to find the tiny minority of legitimate scientists with dissenting views, and then heavily publicize those views. Reporters like dissenting views because they are interesting, and when they are being bombarded from all sides by an extremely well-funded campaign, they will tend to present those views as having equal weight to the overwhelming majority view. So the public is not exactly hearing pure lies (although there are certainly some of those, such as statements that there was “no evidence” of human contributions to global warming), but 50% of what they are hearing represents the consensus of 99% of scientists and 50% represents the views of the dissenting 1%.

This is difficult to counter, because scientists are trained to communicate the uncertainty of their work. Corporations behave amorally to maximize their profits, which is interesting because they are comprised of people who generally have some moral scruples. People will behave to maximize their own interests to some extent, but I don’t believe that is the only factor. They will also rationalize their behavior, or they will often lack information about the contribution of their individual role to the bigger picture, which may be an amoral or immoral result.

There are a couple good quotes from Al Gore in the article, including saying climate science propaganda is a crime on the level of World War II war crimes. I would agree with this – the companies that did (and are certainly doing) things like this chose to put the lives and livelihoods of billions of future humans at risk for the sake of maximizing their own wealth in the short term.