Guest essay by Dr. Matt Ridley
Phil Plait, who goes by the name of the “bad astronomer”, has now written three articles in Slate attacking two of my columns in the Wall Street Journal on the topic of climate change. My columns, and responses to critics are here and here. I have no problem with Mr Plait disagreeing with me, but I am a little taken aback by his name calling and sheer nastiness.
I asked for a right to reply in Slate, encouraged by the editor. But when the editor read my polite reply, he refused, on the grounds that “we publish such responses when critics have new or compelling arguments or evidence that call into question what we have published. You have differences with Phil, but we don’t believe your response offers such evidence.” I disagree. You be the judge.
The latest attack is strangely self-contradictory. Without citing a single study to back up his claims, Mr Plait accuses me, wrongly, of not citing a single study to back my claims. He writes:
“He just states it like it’s true. However, we know that’s not the case.”
Was there ever a better shooting of one’s own foot? (Something he accused me of.)
Let’s leave the invective on one side and examine the argument without ad-hominems.
The argument I made was that climate change has benefits as well as costs and that the benefits are likely to be greater than the costs until almost the end of the current century. I maintain that the balance of evidence supports the conclusion that up to a certain level of warming — about 2 degrees Celsius — the benefits of climate change will probably outweigh the costs. Plait admits that there will be benefits, but he assumes that they are smaller than the harm however small the warming and that I am somehow foolish for not sharing his assumption. He gives no source for this claim, which flies in the face of peer-reviewed sources.
I’d like to direct him to this 2004 survey of many studies, and this 2013 study, which confirm that climate change of 1 or 2 degrees Celsius will probably, in aggregate, do net economic and humanitarian good to mankind. It will do so by lengthening northern growing seasons, reducing winter deaths (which greatly exceed summer deaths even in countries with hot summers) and increasing precipitation, but without raising sea levels sufficiently to do serious harm.
It’s worth noting that the IPCC used to claim in its early reports that a great increase in malaria as a result of global warming would bring early and large net harm to humankind. Professor Paul Reiter of the Pasteur Institute, one the world’s experts on malaria, disagreed and spent many years trying to change the IPCC’s view. His point was that malaria was not now limited by climate, but by human intervention: it had been banished from Europe, North America, much of Asia and much of Latin America by the draining of swamps, the use of insecticides, the use of glass windows and screens, and many other measures. Warming up the world would not reverse these trends and would create only tiny expansions in malarial range at high altitudes in Africa. Malaria mortality has dropped by 25% since 2000. Reiter was ignored for years, but now the IPCC agrees with him and has largely dropped the claim. This is just one example of where the climate establishment eventually had to admit that the likely harm was being exaggerated.
It is not just human benefit that mild warming will probably bring. Please note that the papers cited in the 2004 paper I mention also discuss how such mild warming will raise biodiversity, ecosystem productivity and net primary production, so the net benefits are ecological as well as economic. Again, this is not a minority view. Most ecologists accept that if you warm up the world slowly, and consequently increase precipitation, you will increase the energy flow through ecosystems, which will support more creatures and species of creatures – all other things being equal.
As well as the warming, there’s the effect of carbon dioxide itself. Plants need CO2 and they struggle to get enough without losing water from their leaves. More CO2 in the air means faster growth rates and more drought tolerance. That’s why commercial growers pump CO2 into their greenhouses. I would ask Mr Plait to consult this study by Randal Donohue, which confirms that there has been net greening of arid areas of the planet as a result of rising carbon dioxide levels. This is something that has been confirmed by both ground and satellite data. Here’s what the American Geophysical Union had to say about the Donohue paper:
“Scientists have long suspected that a flourishing of green foliage around the globe, observed since the early 1980s in satellite data, springs at least in part from the increasing concentration of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere. Now, a study of arid regions around the globe finds that a carbon dioxide “fertilization effect” has, indeed, caused a gradual greening from 1982 to 2010.”
Nor is Donohue alone in this. A fascinating talk by Dr Ranga Myneni of Boston University confirms that between 1982 and 2011,
“31% of the global vegetated area greened…This greening translates to a 14% increase in gross productivity [and] The greening is seen in all vegetation types”
He finds that most of this was down to relaxation of climate constraints (ie, warming and wetting) or other anthropogenic factors — ie, chiefly rising carbon dioxide levels.
Mr Plait is welcome to disagree with me that the crossover from net benefits to net harm from climate change will occur at about 2 degrees Celsius of warming (it might well be higher, or lower, and it will depend on how fast it happens – I don’t claim to know the answer). But he is simply wrong to assert that the harm certainly outweighs the benefits whatever the warming, let alone that this is the current consensus view.
Mr Plait then claims to know that weather is getting more extreme with horrible consequences, and that the deaths of trees from pine beetles is caused by climate change. In the first instance he is simply wrong. The IPCC itself has issued a report on extremes, which refutes the suggestion that we are seeing extreme weather as a result of climate change. As Professor Roger Pielke Jr of the University of Colorado put it in recent testimony to Congress: “It is misleading, and just plain incorrect, to claim that disasters associated with hurricanes, tornadoes, floods or droughts have increased on climate timescales either in the United States or globally. It is further incorrect to associate the increasing costs of disasters with the emission of greenhouse gases.”
In any case, there has been no net change in global temperature for 15 years to drive an increase in extreme weather. Meanwhile, the global death rate from droughts, floods or storms has fallen by 98% since the 1920s. Not because weather got less dangerous but because people got richer and better equipped to cope. See here.
Mr Plait then claims that beetles are killing pine forests because of climate change. I don’t doubt it has played a role, although I note that the main reason most sources give for the increase in beetle infestation is the growth of even-age lodgepole pine stands. None the less, suppose that he’s right. This is one relatively minor (in global terms) ecological change, which is unlikely to result in much change to the productivity of an ecosystem in the long run (indeed it may accelerate plant growth by clearing the shade of trees) or biodiversity (again, these pine stands tend to be monocultures so diversity may rise). Yet he asks us to take this one small change in one small corner of the world as evidence that climate change is harmful even at low levels.
Why does all this matter? Because we now know that action against climate change has severe costs. Cutting carbon dioxide emissions means rolling out land-hungry, expensive renewable technologies that raise food prices or energy costs driving poor people to death in measurable numbers. See Indur Goklany’s careful and cautious calculation about biofuels here. And see any number of sources on the health costs of indoor air pollution caused by cooking over wood fires where cheap electricity has not ben made available because of political objections to the use of coal. Is that a price worth paying? Maybe if it prevents a catastrophe; but not if it averts a beneficial change in the climate. I may be wrong in thinking the latter is more likely than the former, but I am not wrong – factually or morally – for raising the possibility.
And I think it is very relevant indeed that if you consult the probability density functions of most recent studies of climate sensitivity, conducted by senior IPCC-affiliated scientists, you will find that there is a significantly higher than 50-50 probability of warming of less than 2 degrees Celsius during the next 70 years.
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Col Mosby says: “When someone allows a photo such as his to see the light of day, you have to wonder just how dumb this guy really is. Incredibly unattractive jerk.”
Please, leave the argumentem ad homelynym to the warmists.
CO2 climate sensitivity <0.1K. Easy to prove once you fix the 13 mistakes in Climate Alchemy some of which the practitioners haven't yet realised.
There has been AGW – asian aerosols reducing cloud albedo, but it has saturated. This explains the rise of OHC.
@PGH. You hit the nail on the head with the beetle issue. I have this issue wher eI live, and its rather obvious what the cause is. Ive been in spots at very high elevations (with colder winters and shorter summers with cool nights) where the beetles devastated the trees, as well as spots at much lower elevations that are warmer that are perfectly fine. It is well known that many of these forests have many more trees per area then they did before various influences by humans, and when you see areas in trouble and those doing fine its pretty obvious that the struggling trees are to close together.
When you have the beetles able to THRIVE at such different elevations (and thus temps) I cant fathom how a fraction of a degree would cause the insect to boom in population,. Also keep in mind these beetles ALSO attack healthy trees, but healthy trees do not die from it. The weak ones do, and also attract more of them. This is all very basic stuff. Anyone who blames this all on a part of a degree of warming is either very confused or a liar.
There has been a massive apocalyptic scare in Germany in the 1980s with bark beetle infestations that led to claims that the Black Forest would become a lifeless pile of rocks within ten years. Of course nothing of the sort happened. After two dry summers a wet one followed and the spook was over. What in fact had happened was a spell of poor forest management, a quite normal series of dry summers and a resulting upswing in beetle food. No healthy trees were harmed in the process.
Ironically, cooling is likely to increase extreme weather. For which the IPCC will prescribe yet more cooling, apparently. Fortunately its weapons don’t even amount to a damp squib.
nomad says:
September 24, 2013 at 9:32 pm
” I work in advertising, and even we don’t use studies that are over three years old no matter how many products they can sell.”
Even advertising? The epitome of truth; the last hideout of the Scientific Method? I’m so glad we have now been told by the truthkeepers of advertising that science that is 3 years old is just BOOORING. Which is even worse than inkorrekt!
BTW, the typical life expectancy of a Gulag inmate was 3 years. After which they were worked to death.
Sunsettommy says:
September 24, 2013 at 9:24 pm
“I came across his blog a few years ago to read his views on the climate only to wonder if this is the same Mr. Plait who wrote the fine book because he was the very opposite as being a nasty drip.”
Such an inexplicable change in character might be a simple consequence of a stack of Federal Reserve Notes.
And here just recently I thought Phil_dot was becoming a bit less acerbic (he occasionally posts here). Maybe he’s fresh out of a re-indoctrination camp.
Matt Ridley,
Swatting @ur momisugly midges is inefficient use of your time and intellectual resources. Do you need an administrative assistant to help you with focusing on higher priority activities?
John
The current media strategy in reporting on news they do not like is to ignore it.
Media today is demonstrating that Pravda and Izvestia were not flukes in journalism, but were rather exploring nre frontiers.
To lurker:
You wrote: “The current media strategy in reporting on news they do not like is to ignore it.”
Absolutely correct! And of course, if they don’t report it, it’s not “news”. Who
was it who said that the greatest power the news media have is the power to
ignore?
Chris R,
Thank you for the hat tip. Others have of course noticed this about media. It is not so much that members of the media choose to ignore this or that. It is when they go in lockstep, ignoring things that should not be reasonably ignored. Worse, when they are ignoring things to fulfill some political or editorial prejudice. Ignoring events one does not like is awfully close to the border of intellectual cowardice. As well as close to the border of deception. The so-called climate issue clearly shows the media crossing over both of those borders time and time again.
As I think about it, the issue is not really climate in terms of weather impacts at all. The real issue is a political class vested in the policy outcomes they want the AGW social movement to make possible: More taxes, more jobs for government workers, more money to give to those the political classes favor. In that sense this is all just same-old same-old. The politicians and bureaucrats gathering in their smoke filled rooms and illegally secret e-mails to ‘edit’ the IPCC report to make certain the story is sufficiently alarming shows this is now jsut about power. Science is, at best, a cheap coat of paint on the stage prop of this effort.
There is saying among lawyers: If the facts are not on your side, argue the law. If neither are on your side, yell and pound on the table. When I hear yelling and table pounding by the warmists, I come to the natural conclusion.
Aside from the benefit you stated here is the benefit of global warming over the last several decades – here. It has 5 abstracts showing “increased maximum foliage cover across the globe’s warm, arid environments”, “widespread increases in pasture productivity over the last 30 years.” “the increase in gross primary productivity (GPP) in response to a doubling of CO2”.
Malaria has seen a global decrease in malaria endemicity since 1900 – here
Here is Michael Mann talking about the Medieval Warm Period, a period warmer than the present. He just says it was regional when it was global. Then they say it wasn’t synchronous, how do they know.
Just how bloody warm must it have been for the following to have been observed. Wow!
***
jim Steele says:
September 24, 2013 at 6:41 pm
The productivity of the Arctic Ocean has nearly tripled benefitting the whole food chain including polar bears http://landscapesandcycles.net/less-arctic-ice-can-be-beneficial.html
***
Again, we see something that’s an important benefit (like plant CO2 enrichment) that are counter to the CAGW meme & thus ignored.
Picture fingers in ears going “la la la la la can’t hear it…..”
Ah, Phil Plait, Big Green hatchetman. With all the mud he slings, he barely notices the egg on his face.
I used to love to read his daily blogs, as he was about 98% astronomy and it was easy to ignore the other 2%, but in the past few years he’s dropped to about 50% astronomy, and so it feels like I’m navigating a minefield to read him anymore, especially when even his posts on astronomy still contain a lot of digs at those he supposes to be his enemies.
Further annoyances stem from the way how in his astronomy posts he’s quick to mention new discoveries that turn the previous consensus about various astronomical phenomena on its/their ear and how exciting it is to have to learn new ways of thinking about thing, and yet he just has this HUGE blind spot when it comes to climate science and always retreats to the “Nope, climate science is all done, nothing more to learn, no new discoveries, and you are all deniers if you don’t think so too!”
You really can’t take Slate seriously. It’s not like they’re a credible publication or anything. They are journalistically beneath you. You write for the Wall Street Journal. These people write on a web zine. It’s a popular web zine, but a web zine nonetheless.
Phil Plait is a coward and a simpleton. Go back to criticizing high school physics conspiracies – at least those are hard to get wrong.
Mark Takatz
@JSC, that is very well said. I’ve pointed out this ‘consensus’ hypocrisy on numerous occasions, only to attacked by a pack of wild animals over there in the comment sections.
Instead of a ‘teaching’ moment, he resorts to name calling and other nonsense. Its pretty clear he writes about the climate to annoy skeptics. If i were Slate’s editors I’d give him the choice to write for us or go on over to Skeptical Science and write for them. He has no idea the damage he does to science by loving the sound of his own voice.
Per the article:
“”The latest attack is strangely self-contradictory. Without citing a single study to back up his claims, Mr Plait accuses me, wrongly, of not citing a single study to back my claims. He writes:””
————————————————————————————————————
I have run into the same style argument at 3 different sites from 3 different warmists over the last week.
Excellent essay, very informative, I would also like to know more on the issue of winter deaths that others have mentioned, The UK has had a recent rise in winter fatalities directly attributed to harsher winter temperatures, even earlier this year there was a number of deaths on Mt Snowdon (the same Mt snowdon alarmists claimed would be snow free during winter by now) and in Northern Ireland there was 10s of thousands of livestock lost and up to 30 foot snowdrifts and a lot of people cut of from supplies and having to endure power-cuts not seen since the 1960’s, although, people are generally a lot wealthier today than 50 years ago so there should be less winter deaths attributed to this fact, so could it be the case that if we had the same standards of living today as people in the 60s had, then would there be a lot more winter deaths?
It doesn’t make sense to claim that a global temperature anomaly causes less winter fatalities when the anomaly does not reflect the actual conditions of a specific region where winter fatalities occur, winter weather around the UK and Ireland has had similar winter conditions and heavy snowfalls of the past and there have been record cold and wet summers.
Why is global warming not affecting Ireland and the UK? It’s not acceptable that people are saying that global warming is making it colder. The whole issue just got silly over the past 10 years of no actual rise in the global temperature anomaly. Oh, Waite… The Issue has always been silly. 🙂
Just got this little missive from my mates at futureworld.org . .
GLOBAL WARMING IS DEAD
Get ready for the next ‘little ice age’
Dateline: 23 September 2017
It’s official, the global warming scare is over. The latest report from the independent panel on climate change is warning of decreasing global temperatures, and the impact that will have on crops and food security.
If you believe the power of computer models to predict the future, then you’d better stock up on winter woollies, down duvets and triple-glazing. According to the meddling modellers, it’s about to get a whole lot colder in the great northern hemisphere, where so much of humanity has its home.
With no significant warming in 20 years, you would have thought the bureaucrats would have abandoned the global warming band wagon much sooner. But a trillion dollar international edifice takes some time to unbundle. Many red-faced academics who placed the responsibility for climate at the door of human carbon emissions have faded into obscurity or quietly taken up new fields of study.
But the hard-core officials have stridently argued that “climate anomalies” are still a major threat to world peace, and need to be managed, no matter if it’s warming or cooling that is at issue.
Optimistic realists, on the other hand, point out that the cycle turned in 2013, when sea ice made an unexpected come back in the Arctic summer, destroying all predictions of an ice-free northern sea route in the future. So preparing for an ice age in the next century may be equally alarmist.
Climate change, like so many phenomena at the geological and cosmic scale, cannot be controlled by humans, no matter how arrogant we are. Perhaps now we can get back to dealing with real environmental problems, like pollution, biodiversity and preserving natural habitats.
Published 26 September 2013
Phil Plaint is ranting about deniers from the title on.
Deniers? There is an interesting categorisation I found:
http://claesjohnson.blogspot.se/2012/03/can-greenhouse-effect-be-detected.html
The recent exhange with Roy Spencer and Fred Singer concerning the “greenhouse effect” and “backradiation” identifies three groups in the climate debate with the following standpoints:
Alarmists: There is a greenhouse effect and it threatens to overheat the globe.
Skeptics: There is a greenhouse effect, but it is so small that it cannot be detected.
Deniers: As long as no greenhouse effect has been identified, one can act as if there is no greenhouse effect.
Plait rants about ” the harm however small the warming” , but of course : “He gives no source for this claim, which flies in the face of peer-reviewed sources.”
Of course he gives no source, but he accuses Matt of not providing sources. Oh wonder! Again so typical for the alarmist to not prove anything they say but to accuse the others of doing so.
The rest is the typical alarmist ‘la la la we do not hear you’ way of dialogue:
“we publish such responses when critics have new or compelling arguments or evidence that call into question what we have published. You have differences with Phil, but we don’t believe your response offers such evidence.”
Alarmists are not interested in dialogue but only to sell their nonsense.
Then again the excuse “the ocean ate my global warming”, but adds that it will come back on us with revenge. Of course he knows this from his divine source..
An why are we doomed? Because we’ve been feeding plants with CO2 that’s why:
” but as we put more CO2 into the air, that heat has a harder time radiating away into space.” and more: “CO2 is transparent to visible light, but opaque to thermal infrared (or, more simply, heat).”
Interesting CO2 opaque to infrared?
Well, this is his science. No wonder he names himself bad astronom, at least he is honest here. Just because CO2 has a main resonance around wavenumber 667 (missed that perfect 666 number!) it does not mean it is opaque to infrared.
Claes Johnson has a series of interesting posts about the CO2 effect itself:
http://claesjohnson.blogspot.se/2013/03/the-fabrication-of-co2-alarmism-decoded_16.html
“Starting from the present level of 395 ppm Modtran predicts a global warming of 0.5 C from radiative forcing of 2 W/m2.
Global warming of 0.5 C is too small to be observed and thus cannot give rise to alarm.”