Guest essay by Robert Bradley Jr. — March 27, 2017
“[T]here is growing evidence of much smaller climate sensitivity to CO2; and even if these drastic emissions reductions occurred, we see little impact on the climate in the 21st century (even if you believe the climate models).”
“It seems rather futile to make token emissions reductions at substantial cost. Deciding that all this is impractical or infeasible seems like a rational response to me.”
– Judith Curry, “A Roadmap for Meeting Paris Emissions Reduction Goals.” Climate Etc., March 25, 2017.
Numerous posts at MasterResource have summarized the thinking of climate scientist and straight shooter Judith Curry. Bravely, and with intellectual vigor, she has personified the adage: “One plus the truth equals a majority.”
Curry has not only documented the fact that estimations of climate sensitivity to the enhanced greenhouse effect have been coming down, and tie-in’s of climate forcing and extreme weather events remain unproven. She has also explained why the large majority of climate scientists have cut intellectual corners to be activists in a cause that is futile politically and economically unattractive (these two are tied).
Stark Math
Curry’s evolution away from the alarmist side (another story) took another step, in my view, with her latest commentary on what would be required for the climate goals of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change to be met. Her views (see below) regard a new paper in Science, “A Roadmap for Rapid Decarbonization” (by Johann Rockstrom, Owen Gaffney et al.). The Abstract of that paper states:
Although the Paris Agreement’s goals are aligned with science and can, in principle, be technically and economically achieved, alarming inconsistencies remain between science-based targets and national commitments.
Forced energy transformation, the authors state, would require a carbon tax that begins at $50 per metric ton–worldwide–that would increase past $400 per ton by 2050. Government R&D would increase by “an order of magnitude between now and 2030,” and so on. (Also see the Vox summary of the proposal that Curry references.)
For more than a decade, climate scientist/activist James Hansen has been clear on the daunting math of CO2 reduction. He first stated that the world had ten years to reverse course on fossil-fuel reliance, a prediction made in 2006 in The New York Review of Books.
When that prediction came due, Hansen floated the need to go emissions-negative. Wow! Then, just a couple of months later, he recanted to say that we still have time to turn things around. (“The ponderous response of the climate system also means that we don’t need to instantaneously reduce GHG amounts.”) Lots of confusion, to say the least, from the father of climate alarmism.
Curry’s Latest
Back to the new Science article, Curry goes over the mitigation math. She then ties the implications of the paper with the latest climate science to reach these profound conclusions.
Apart from the issues raised in this paper, there are several other elephants in this room: there is growing evidence of much smaller climate sensitivity to CO2; and even if these drastic emissions reductions occurred, we see little impact on the climate in the 21st century (even if you believe the climate models).
I think that what this paper has done is important: laying out what it would actually take to make such drastic emissions reductions. Even if we solve the electric power problem, there is still the problem of transportation, not to mention land use. Even if all this was technically possible, the cost would almost certainly be infeasible.
As Oliver Geden states, its time to ask policy makers whether they are going to attempt do this or not. It seems rather futile to make token emissions reductions at substantial cost. [1]
Deciding that all this is impractical or infeasible seems like a rational response to me. The feasible responses are going with nuclear power or undertaking a massive R&D effort to develop new emission free energy technologies. Independent of all this, we an reduce vulnerability from extreme weather events (whether or not they are exacerbated by AGW) and the slow creep of sea level rise.
The implications of the Bad Mitigation Math (BMM: let this become an acronym in the debate) go further.
What is very bad today for mitigation is becoming worse by the day as fossil fuels continue their dominance in the energy sphere. Total demand is growing, and renewable-energy subsidies are under increasing assault around the world; it is quite possible that the market share of natural gas, coal, and oil will expand in the next decades from today’s 80 percent (+) market share.
Profoundly, the US’s about-face on climate activism, and a weakening of the paper promises of countries worldwide, could permanently ruin the math of mitigation from the activists own viewpoint. There might still be activism, but it will be increasingly seen as token and futile. Adaptation will be the only game, which points to a free market strategy of global freedom of movement for goods, services, and people.
“It’s all over but the shouting” may be the case for climate alarmists/mitigationists, but the public policy imperative is to end government taxing-and-spending in the name of climate change, and pressure private foundations/civil society to stop funding climate activism and address here-and-now human needs.
That job awaits a lot of us.
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[1] Curry begins her post with this quotation from Oliver Geden: “I think this should be the way forward, translating [overarching climate goals] into ‘policy portfolios’ and then asking policymakers if they are going to do it or not.”
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You can’t manage, what you can’t measure.
We simply do not understand our climate system well enough to define it in control terms, make changes, and observe the results. The whole scheme, beyond the base errors in the CO2 armeggedon theory, was never feasible.
That’s where data tampering comes in.
The real truth is that it’s easy to control the climate – we were told this unequivocally in the 1970s when eco-activists warmed of a “nuclear winter”.
The problem with controlling the climate is not the problem of controlling the climate … it’s how to get money to research controlling the climate without letting on to ignorant politicians the truth – that we don’t need to research how to control the climate as it’s easy to control it.
Capitalistic Efficiency Strikes Again
CAN WE SLOW GLOBAL WARMING AND STILL GROW? J. B. MacKinnon March 27, 2017 The New Yorker
This bastion of liberal thought makes the remarkable capitalistic observation:
The decline in US emissions would be twice as great if Holdren hadn’t persuaded Obama to push electric cars instead of cars (and trucks) powered by natural gas.
For those who have not yet seen the very important Christopher Monckton explanation of the IPPC’s math error, here it is. The talk begins at about 10 minutes into the video
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_3S1JcFWUA&w=640&h=360%5D
Very interesting reading. We have the answer to reducing emissions without making electricity more expensive and/or less reliable. It’s called ‘nuclear power’. If the greenies want reliable, inexpensive electricity for the masses without fossil fuels, they know where to look. But they won’t. And if I end up paying for their hubris … well, UP THE REVOLUTION!
The initial calculations of the Planck (without feedbacks) climate sensivity of CO2 yield 1.2 degrees C for a doubling of CO2. To make the number seem to be of greater importance, the IPCC likes to multiply that number typcallly by 3 to account for a positive H2O feedback. The IPCC is so unsure of this feedback number that they have published a wide range of guesses as the the climate sensivity of CO2 and have sponsored a plethora of different climate models. Over the years their climate models have all been wrong in terms as to what has actually happened to the global temperature and after more than 20 years of effort they have published the same range of guesses for the climate sensivity of CO2. So after more than two decades of effort they have learned nothing that would allow them to narrow the range of their guesses as to the climate sensivity of CO2 one iota.
One researcher found that the initial calculations neglected to account for that fact that a doubling of CO2 will cause a slight lowering of the dry lapse rate in the troposphere, enough to decrease the Planck climate sensivity of CO2 by more than a factor of 20. So rather than 1.2 degrees we should have .06 degrees C. The AGW conjecture neglects that H2O is in total a major coolant in the Earth’s atmosphere as exemplified by the fact that the wet lapse rate is significantly less than the dry lapse rate, which is a cooling effect. So the H2O feedback is really negative and really attenuates any possible warming effect of CO2 by lets say a factor of .3 yielding a climate sensivity of CO2 of .02 degrees C for a doubling of CO2. This signifies that if we could cut the amount of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere in half we could reduce the average global temperature by .02 degrees C.. an amount too small to really measire because of the noise involved.
A real greenhouse does not stay warm because of a greenhouse effect caused by the heat trapping effect of LWIR absorbing gasses. A real greenhouse stays warm because the glass limits cooling by convection.
There is no radiant greenhouse effect that keeps a greenhouse warm instead it is all a convective greenhouse effect. So too on Earth. As derived from first principals, it is gravity and the atmosphere that keeps the surface of the Earth on average 33 degrees C warmer because of a convective greenhouse effect. There is no additinal radiant greenhouse effect. The convective greenhouse effect has been observed on all planets in the solar system with thick atmospheres, The radiant greenhouse effect has not been observed anywhere in the solar system, It does not exist so the climate sensivity of CO2 is really much less than .02 degrees C. It is 0.0 degrees C. The idea that adding CO2 to the Earth’s atmosphere causes warming is really science fiction.
If climate activism is futile, why did Curry abandon science to indulge in it?
And we already see nations on track to make substantial reductions in CO2, not token ones (major industrial nations at that).
You’re dreaming.
He can’t possibly be stupid enough to think he’s just made a valid argument, there. Phoning it in and phoneying it in.
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Try, G, to understand ‘active for’ and ‘active against’. Jeez. How did you pass your Gorebot final, anyway?
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kim: Yes he can.
What she is driving at is that if the sensitivity of the atmosphere to increased CO2 is in fact quite low,whatever we do about CO2 emissions won’t make much difference, or a dangerous difference, to the atmosphere.
This then frees us to keep on producing electricity and driving cars using the cheapest sources of energy, like we do now.
Like the big energy producers are still doing, like China, India,Russia and Japan.
We are getting to the point where if you want to produce electricity with solar cells on the roof or drive a Prius, go for it.
However don’t ask me to pay you to do it.
Griff:
You say,
No we don’t see that because it is not possible.
As the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said in Chapter 2 from Working Group 3 in the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report (2001)
In plain English, that means it cannot be known what if any effect altering the emission of CO2 from human activities will have on the future atmospheric CO2 concentration.
Importantly, there is still no published systematic analysis on the relationship between mitigation and baseline scenarios because no such analysis is possible.
The reason there is no such analysis is because it is not possible to determine what if any effect altering the emission of CO2 from human activities will have on the future atmospheric CO2 concentration as we reported in one of our 2005 papers,
ref. Rorsch A, Courtney RS & Thoenes D, ‘The Interaction of Climate Change and the Carbon Dioxide Cycle’ E&E v16no2 (2005).
The analyses of that paper indicate the atmospheric CO2 concentration would probably be the same if the CO2 emission from human emissions were absent: n.b. it would probably be the same.
Those analyses show the short term sequestration processes can easily adapt to sequester the CO2 emission from human activities (i.e. the anthropogenic emission) in a year. But, according to each of our six different models, the total emission of a year affects the equilibrium state of the entire carbon cycle system. Some processes of the system are very slow with rate constants of years and decades. Hence, the system takes decades to fully adjust to a new equilibrium. So, the atmospheric CO2 concentration slowly changes in response to any change in the equilibrium condition.
Importantly, each of our models demonstrates that the observed recent rise of atmospheric CO2 concentration may be solely a consequence of e.g. altered equilibrium of the carbon cycle system caused by, for example, the anthropogenic emission or may be solely e.g. a result of desorption from the oceans induced by the temperature rise that preceded it.
The most likely explanation for the continuing rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration is adjustment towards the altered equilibrium of the carbon cycle system provided by the temperature rise in previous decades during the centuries of recovery from the Little Ice Age.
This slow rise in response to the changing equilibrium condition also provides an explanation of why the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere continued when in two subsequent years the flux into the atmosphere decreased (the years 1973-1974, 1987-1988, and 1998-1999).
Richard
Interesting how you decide that giving up your position at a major university is the equivalent to giving up on science.
As always Griff puts politics ahead of science.
“And we already see nations on track to make substantial reductions in CO2, not token ones (major industrial nations at that).”
You’re fantasizing
You might want to check out this site http://climateactiontracker.org/countries/eu.html which is green as they come I didn’t read the whole site, but I did check out some major CO2 emitters — China, the US, the EU, Japan. My take away — If you believe in high CO2 sensitivity and that a warmer world is bad, the promises made by the major CO2 emitters are inadequate to avoid disaster. And even those promises almost certainly will not be kept.
You better start hoping that Curry is right lad. Because the practical alternatives would seem to be a (hypothesized) climate disaster or, as James Hansen — father of global warming urges — a massive roll out of nuclear power.
Name a few Griff and I’ll pick them apart for you on the back story behind each one.
All your fundings are belong to me.
The evidence does show humans have substantially affected the climate and that as such we should be careful how we treat the environment.
However, that evidence does not point to CO2! Instead it points to the introduction of the clean air acts in the 1970s being the dominant cause of warming between 1970-2000. (The main evidence is the hotspots shown downwind from areas that had the biggest change in pollution with the introduced the 1970s clean air acts).
Understanding Global Temperature VIII – It was the greens wot warmed us!!
This explains why calculations of feedback sensitivity based predominantly on the 1970-2000 Environmental Action Induced Warming (EAIW) have been falling steadily as the reduction in air pollution has slowed.
Why do people not want nicer weather? 40% of the world is uninhabitabley cold, except by a few eskimos and hardy whites. Here’s an idea, bring back cheap Freon and enjoy the warmth.
More than one halving would be truly disastrous, cooling gratification or not.
Even a single halving is bodeful. With less atmospheric CO2, food production would decrease so much, that only substantial increase of arable land could feed the world. Now, nothing is more detrimental to the natural environment, than agriculture, so it would be an environmental disaster.
For that matter, global food production is increasing much faster, than world population, so extent of arable land should have started to decrease two decades ago. Except for the biofuel craziness, which prevents us from giving land back to wildlife, which is the only sensible course of action from an environmental point of view.
Widespread famine does not promote environmental consciousness. Hungry people only care for their kids, loved ones and themselves, nothing else.
I’d like to propose an alternative acronym to BMM (Bad Mitigation Math) — HAMM (Half-Assed Mitigation Math).
Bjorn Lomberg has already shown that it is much more cost effective to mitigate actual damage when it occurs. The money spent on CO2 reduction could be put to much better use.
The Climate Change alarmists hate this argument.
And that was assuming that the damage caused by more CO2 actually would be as bad as predicted.
11 years ago I calculated to my satisfaction using CO2 and H2O absorption correlations developed by Hoyt C Hottel in the 1930s that CO2 would have a negligible effect on agw or climate change and that no correlation could be found. I applaud the new EPA chief for saying that man-made CO2 does not effect global warming. The media have to be re-educated in this respect and if told often enough that CO2 has negligible effect and cannot possibly cause global warming they will change their left leaning political stance.
I agree that realisation of the sheer futility of climate action should lead to politicians demanding that all policies to meet climate commitments are overturned. But in Australia even the less crazy Liberal coalition government pays expensive lip service to the global warming God. The sheer and obvious futility of climate action means that the whole thing is either a religion or a scam and is probably a combination of both. Its time for the Australian politicians who are skeptics to come out of the closet and demand immediate inaction be taken.
“There is growing evidence of much smaller climate sensitivity to CO2 …”
My comment:
That sentence is nonsense.
There is no evidence of ANY sensitivity to CO2.
Since the era of “man made CO2” began in 1940 we have had three different correlations of CO2 and average temperature — negative, positive, and no correlation … all in just 75 years!
Evidence that CO2 causes warming would require something abnormal about the climate today, because a lot of CO2 has been added to the atmosphere in the past 150 years.
But there is nothing abnormal about the climate in 2017.
And the average temperature of Earth, based on VERY rough measurements, has stayed in a narrow 1 degree C. range since 1880 — how is that tight range “abnormal”, except perhaps abnormally stable?
If you think CO2 causes warming in a laboratory, that’s a long way from proving its effect in real life including feedbacks that are probably negative.
Where is ANY evidence that CO2 was ever a climate controller in the past 4.5 billion years?
Oh, I know — both manmade CO2 levels and average temperature went up at the same time from the early 1990s to the early 2000s — one decade of strong positive correlation in 4.5 billion years — it seems that’s all the “proof” the warmunists need!
Actually, that’s proof of nothing.
Climate blog for non-scientists:
http://www.elOnionBloggle.Blogspot.com
“The climate sensitivity” is a crock.
A huge problem is trying to relate a T change to a change in atmospheric absorption directly for co2. We can determine the absorption in the atmosphere for a particular concentration of co2 but that is in the form of Watts/Meter Squared. It is a gradually diminishing contribution – roughly logarithmic. One can come up with very simple ideas of just how much absorption exists and that can be used to get an idea of how much temperature sensitivity there is per W/m^2 but there are other factors too. Albedo enters in – the amount of incoming radiation reflected away instead of absorbed. The presence of clouds reflecting the energy away and radiating energy away at their temperature and also blocking surface radiation.
Perusing Brad Plumer’s summary quoted above it is clear that people who take it seriously are seriously insane. If they really act on this it will bring about Maurice Strong’s fondest wish, which is to bring about the total collapse of the Western Civilization. He said that openly but I don’t see any reaction to it from “climate” scientists. I guess they stand in such an aw of the originator and fiurst leader of IPCC that they do not know what to say or do. Just do what consensus tells you to do and be quiet is all they arerequired to dokeep their jobs. Or else. And all these ap[ocalyptic demands of the Parisians are for nothing because carbon dioxide is not warming up the world now and it never has. A glance at the geological history graph should make it clear to any person who knows what geologic history is. In case you are actually curios how it works, we start CO2 history in the Cambrioan and work our way down to the Holocene. Carbon dioxide was very high in Cambrian (7000 ppm) but since then it has suffered a steady reduction so that by the Holocene it was only 280 ppm. That is a 25 fold reduction in 500 million years. And at no time during thjs period was there any sign of that imaginary runaway warming that these Paris dopes say they are fighting.