Guest essay by Larry Kummer. From the Fabius Maximus website.
Summary: Like all of Krugman’s work, we can learn much from his latest column about climate change. See this annotated version to see how he shows why 30 years of climate crusading has produced so little policy action in the US.
“The Axis of Climate Evil“
“Bad faith may destroy civilization”
Paul Krugman’s op-ed
in the New York Times, 11 August 2017.
Krugman is a brilliant economist, with a knack for explaining technical details to the general public. He is also an insightful political analyst, albeit of the left-wing hack kind. In yesterday’s column, he shows us the latter in action — and why three decades of climate activism has accomplished so little.
“It’s Not Your Imagination: Summers Are Getting Hotter.” So read a recent headline in The Times, highlighting a decade-by-decade statistical analysis by climate expert James Hansen. “Most summers,” the analysis concluded, “are now either hot or extremely hot compared with the mid-20th century.”
Krugman starts with a look at the past. Hansen’s graphs in the New York Times are what Edward Tufte calls “chart junk” in his classic work about graphics
For a wider perspective see this graph from the Executive Summary of the Third Draft of the Climate Science Special Report, part of the Fourth National Climate Assessment. (CCSR of NCA4). Oddly, it is not in the current Fifth Draft. It shows the hottest day in the 48 contiguous US States by year. The line has been rising since the 1960s, but remains below the levels during the long Dust Bowl. The real message here is that individual graphs can look spectacular, but no one graphic — no matter how animated — can capture the complexity of climate change.
“Extreme Hot Days Dominated by 1930s Dust Bowl.”
A still wider context shows another picture. America and Europe have been warming for two centuries, since the Little Ice Age ended. The IPCC’s AR5 Working Group I describes the anthropogenic part of that long warming: “It is extremely likely (95 – 100% certain) that human activities caused more than half of the observed increase in global mean surface temperature from 1951 to 2010 {link}.”
So what else is new? At this point the evidence for human-caused global warming just keeps getting more overwhelming, and the plausible scenarios for the future — extreme weather events, rising sea levels, drought, and more — just keep getting scarier. …
It’s fun to see climate activists make menacingly vague statements and support them by pointing to a voluminous reports, as Krugman does here — pointing to the 673 page-long draft CCSR. Let’s see if we can do better. The key relevant section is “4: Climate Models, Scenarios, and Projections.”
“Over the next two decades, global temperature increase is projected to be between 0.5°F and 1.3°F (0.3°–0.7°C) (medium confidence). This range is primarily due to uncertainties in natural sources of variability that affect short-term trends. In some regions, this means that the trend may not be distinguishable from natural variability (high confidence).
“Beyond the next few decades, the magnitude of climate change depends primarily on cumulative emissions of greenhouse gases and aerosols and the sensitivity of the climate system to those emissions (high confidence). Projected changes range from 4.7°–8.6°F (2.6°–4.8°C) under the higher RCP8.5 scenario to 0.5°–1.3°F (0.3° 1.7°C) under the lower RCP2.6 scenario, for 2081–2100 relative to 1986–2005 (medium confidence).”
So the report does not prophesize doom with the certainty Krugman implies. In fact, it does what activists seldom do — explicitly state the certainty of its conclusions (the IPCC’s reports also do this). We might get tolerable rise of 0.5°–1.3°F under RCP2.6 — the most favorable of the four scenarios in the IPCC’s AR5 report (it might be easy to do; see these details). On the other extreme, their worst-case RCP8.5 scenario is nightmarish but unlikely.
What becomes clear to anyone following the climate debate, however, is that hardly any climate skeptics are in fact trying to get at the truth. I’m not a climate scientist, but I do know what bogus arguments look like — and I can’t think of a single prominent climate skeptic who isn’t obviously arguing in bad faith.
A sensible person would stop reading with this pitiful attempt to delegitimize scientists who disagree with him. Only hard-core hacks write like this. Climate activists describe prominent climate scientists like Roger Pielke Sr. and Judith Curry as “skeptics”. Krugman’s description is quite mad applied to them.
Take, for example, all the people who seized on the fact that 1998 was an unusually warm year to claim that global warming stopped 20 years ago — as if one unseasonably hot day in May proves that summer is a myth.
With this science denial Krugman shows the brotherhood of the far-right and far-left. Here he vaguely refers to what climate scientists call the “pause” or “hiatus”. Hundreds of papers in peer-reviewed journals and reports have discussed this since the early ones in 2009. Scores discussed evidence showing the pause. After that was well-established, scores discussed possible causes of the pause (a debate still not resolved). Some discuss when the pause will end (with the 2015 El Nino either making a pause in the pause, or more likely ending it). Those links go to posts with citations, abstracts, and links to a sample of 150 papers about the pause.
Or all the people who cited out-of-context quotes from climate researchers as evidence of a vast scientific conspiracy.
I agree with Krugman on this, and have written several posts about it (for example, here).
Or for that matter, think of anyone who cites “uncertainty” as a reason to do nothing — when it should be obvious that the risks of faster-than-expected climate change if we do too little dwarf the risks of doing too much if change is slower than expected.
This is a creative use by Krugman of the false dilemma logical fallacy to mischaracterize his opponents. The alternatives are not a binary do nothing or something. The world faces many serious threats in addition to climate change (details here and here). We have limited resources and must allocate them wisely among these threats. Krugman does the usual climate activist trick of focusing on the fringe that denies the reality of global warming — and ignoring the serious debate about how much warming, when, with what effects. Understanding those is necessary for effective policy action.
Conclusions
This is propaganda, characteristic of how activists have conducted their campaign to build support for massive public policy action to fight climate change. They’ve been at it since Hansen’s 1988 Senate testimony. It has not worked.
- Why the campaign to warn people about climate change fail: incompetence.
- Focusing on worst case climate futures doesn’t work. It shouldn’t work.
- Manichean paranoia has poisoned the climate debate.
It is not too late. Climate scientists can restart the climate change debate – & win. For more information about this see putting this proposal in a wider context of science norms and the climate science literature.
For More Information
Hat tip to Michael Bastasch at the Daily Caller for locating the Third Draft of Climate Science Special Report at Internet Archive.
For more information about these matters see the keys to understanding climate change, my posts about climate change, posts about the insights of Paul Krugman, and especially these with good news about the climate…
- Good news! Coal bankruptcies point to a better future for our climate.
- Good news from America about climate change, leading the way to success.
- Ignoring science to convince the public that we’re doomed by climate change.
- Paul Krugman explains how to break the climate policy deadlock.
- “Good news for the New Year! Salon explains that the global climate emergency is over.“
- Stratfor gives us good news, showing when renewables will replace fossil fuels.
- The IPCC gives us good news about climate change, but we don’t listen.
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> Krugman is a brilliant economist
Is he?
No. Search for ‘paul krugman failed predictions’. There are many hits for articles and opinion pieces detailing his many failures. Then search for ‘paul krugman successful predictions’ and note you still get a lot, even most of the hits where he failed! The search algorithm must just ignore that it does not find ‘successful’ in conjunction with ‘paul krugman’…
The only part of the description of Krugman that is accurate is the part about him being a partisan hack.
The rest is not even wrong.
I’ve been writing an economics / finance newsletter since 1977.
I have never found anything Krugman said to be useful
to include in my newsletter, for my subscribers.
I didn’t think his New Trade Theory was worthy of a Nobel Prize.
Of course I didn’t think Obama should have received a Nobel Peace Prize,
so what do I know? (Obama later proved that he did not deserve the prize
by having our nation at war EVERY DAY of his eight years,
which was even worse than G. Bush ! )
Krugman is a brilliant economist? How much credit does he deserve for our $20 trillion National Debt?
Quite a bit. He was one of Obama’s loudest cheerleaders.
Obama had help in spending all that money: The quivering Republican Congress. They were so afraid of being called racist by the MSM if they opposed Obama, that they gave him just about every dollar he asked for. A pathetic performance.
Well actually that’s a lot of credit. All $20 trillion in fact was credit. I’m waiting for the guy who will tell us how to pay it all back.
National debt does not get paid back.
It gets “inflated away”, or defaulted upon,
or rolled over (old bonds/notes/bills are paid off
with borrowed money from selling new bonds/notes/bills).
The interest is paid until the nation can’t afford to pay it.
Paul Krugman: “I am wise, all my friends tell me so. You are not. JUST SHUT UP!”
In 1900 US temp max was 79.25 F and in 2012 it was 80.1 F and based on that we get “hot to extremely hot” relative to the mid 20th century? Some very sensitive people out there!
They adjusted 1 degree……it’s exactly the same temp if you don’t adjust it
What do you call a smart man totally lacking common sense? Paul Krugman. It’s not your imagination, it’s his.
I suspect that what Krugman really shows here is that he is simply too important to actually read anything anymore. That’s what interns and graduate research assistants are for. Then they write what he has to say on the matter. Then he picks up a check for for it.
If a competent science journalist (yes, I know) ever gets the opportunity to actually ask them a penetrating question that tests their technical knowledge about sources of data then, like David Suzuki, they will likely fall flat on their face. And that journalist had better watch out for their career.
Craaaazy Dave isn’t a one trick climatology pony. He has at least a hundred different horrible ends for life as we know it. He can’t seem to fathom that life always ends horribly, it is the nature of nature. Perhaps now that he is an elder, he can stop living his life in fear (not likely).
“That’s what interns and graduate research assistants are for. Then they write what he has to say on the matter.”
I’ve read accusations that his wife has a lot of input to some of his Op Eds.
Some of these indexes are designed so that a small fraction of a degree warmer looks extreme. Eg. Take the 90 percentile value for the base period as a cut off. Slightly higher temperatures mean 11% of recent max and min recordings are above it due to a fraction of a degree of warming (real or measurement error). Have an index that is min and max for three days above this and the 10% greater frequency looks like 60%.
Take off his glasses and to me he looks like Robert E. Lee.
I seem to recall at least one of the ladies here finds him to be a hunk. (Was that you, Pamela?)
Maybe she took of her glasses.
A hunk of what?
Are you sure she did not say he was a piece?
Climate change hysteria has eaten all the low hanging fruit, it took the easy money, but now the curve steepens and it gets too hard to go further for many reasons. I think CAGW has been successful (trillions of $) but now is feeling some push back. I would love to drain the swamp of alarmism.
Paul Krugman & Linus Pauling ave a lot in common:
1) Each won a Nobel prize (Pauling won 2): Pauling – Chemistry; Krugman – Economics
2) Each assumed this certified them as geniuses on subjects outside their narrow specialty: Pauling – medical science; Krugman – politics
3) Each chose to fritter away their Nobel credibility by blathering about stuff in which they were not trained
You can add William Shockley to the list.
That falsely implies that skeptics have used 1998 as a starting point for calculating the Pause, which isn’t so. We’ve calculated backward from the preent (Monckton), or used some other year than 1998 as a start.
It also ignores that it was the alarmists who seized first on 1998 as indicating that the world was about to become a steaming cauldron of sulfuric acid.
“Krugman is a brilliant economist“…
No he isn’t, he’s an idiotic keynesian with bent left view…
“Krugman is a brilliant economist …”
Good. God.
Krugman is a blithering idiot. Unbeknownst to most, the Great Depression was in fact a bull market in bonds. Decades later and no wiser, we are now 37 years into the most run-away bond bull ever — that is, we are in the Greatest Depression, with no end in sight. Falling interest rates, the flip-side of rising bond prices, are surreptitiously siphoning capital off of balance sheets, leaving insolvent banks, pensions, insurance companies, and governments in their wake.
And there is pudgy Mr. Smug, cheerleading our descent into the maw of hyper-deflation.
While he might be a good soul (who knows), I despise what he stands for.
At least the banks, the “good” ones, are too big to fail.
Is the /sarc really necessary here? 🙂
Yes but it has made a few people very wealthy.
There is a definite, unvoiced tendency to assume that all observed climate warming is attributable to mankind’s actions. To state this is to reveal its ridiculousness, but there is the expectation that we are supposed to take steps to reverse this trend.
Exactly how much has the globe warmed over the last 150 years? What proportion of this rise is reasonably attributable to human activities? How is it distinguished from natural variation? What is the error margin? Why is a scientific opinion poll (97% … ?) relevant to any conclusions to be drawn from the preceding questions?
It’s my opinion that the science is now virtually irrelevant as the issue has become thoroughly politicised. You may quote all the proofs you like, but they will not affect the beliefs of the faithful one whit. I expect that if the sceptics put their heads down for 20 years until a cooling trend is undeniable, it would be wise to not then say: “I told you so!” It will transpire that no-one ever actually believed in that rubbish, anyway. In any case, it is likely that CO2, the miracle molecule, will be responsible for CAGC and we’ll still have to stop burning fossil fuels.
USA
http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=2dlm053&s=9#.WZEDJFGQzIU
Greenland
Capetown South Africa
Paraguay – You used to be able to get a copyable record of unadjusted for the longest record at Asuncion, Paraguay which showed the 1930s the highest temperature, too, but Paul Homewood dug up this record and the world’s climate scientists from Cowtan to Hausfather to GISS wrote rationalizations, but I guess the best method is to get rid of the links.
Anyway, there is no real statistician that wouldn’t credit such worldwide similarity of records – flawed or not- as corroboratory. We better get a big file of worldwide raw temperature records before they are all deep-sixed if its not to late already. For the US record, because it is so good and complete and each state has its own records, the fiddlers state, yeah but its only 3% of the world. These other records show that the real US record is a good sample for world records pointing to 30s-40s as the hottest so far. Someone with good skills at rounding this up should do a post with raw records from all over to show this for what it is.
Mod, I’m only comparing scattered long temperature records that show the same thing as the US unadjustesd: the 1930s were the hottest, no ad homs or whatever.
Just another of Krugman’s failed predictions following the election of Trump.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/opinion/election-night-2016/paul-krugman-the-economic-fallout
By PAUL KRUGMAN
2016-11-09
It really does now look like President Donald J. Trump, and markets are plunging. When might we expect them to recover? Frankly, I find it hard to care much, even though this is my specialty. The disaster for America and the world has so many aspects that the economic ramifications are way down my list of things to fear. Still, I guess people want an answer: If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never.
In fact, by the time the markets opened a few hours after he wrote this piece, the markets had already recovered…and never looked back.
Exhibit 1 in the Krugman is a dumb ass hack museum.
Motivated solely by my dislike of people like Klugman whose aim in life appears to be to make billionaires of socialist politicians and , it being a zero sum game, paupers of the rest of us I looked at the Dow Jones historical record on macrotrends.net .
Strangely it seems that immediately after Obama’s 2 election victories the index dropped 500 points before recovering , whilst immediately after the Trump victory it gained 500 points.(If I read the charts accurately).
On that website , as most US readers are probably fully aware I am sure, you can see how the Index fared during recent presidencies . Trump appears to be following in Clinton’s (Bill that is ) footsteps . Interestingly Obama and Reagan ended their presidencies with exactly the same percentage gain – perhaps forces other than Presidents dominate the stock market to an extent that Klugman surely knows but refuses to publicly acknowledge.
And what happened in Sep 2015 and Jan/ Feb 2016?
To be fair, Krugman has no interest in ‘predictions’ – these are ‘sales pitches’, ‘campaigning’, ‘messaging’.
Or you could just throw it all under the umbrella heading of ‘propaganda’. There’s really nothing else there.
Krugman is not a brilliant economist. He has never even done anything in macroeconomics.
From the lead-in to this thread –
“It’s Not Your Imagination: Summers Are Getting Hotter.” So read a recent headline in The Times, highlighting a decade-by-decade statistical analysis by climate expert James Hansen. “Most summers,” the analysis concluded, “are now either hot or extremely hot compared with the mid-20th century.”
Here in Australia, we are being told a similar story.
So I looked at the raw data from 6 capital cities that house most of the Australian population that is supposed to be scared of the looming or present threat.
It is not true.
http://www.geoffstuff.com/are_heatwaves_more_severe_version2.pdf
http://www.geoffstuff.com/SummaryGraphHeatwaveWord.pdf
http://www.geoffstuff.com/century_days_sydmelb.jpg
http://www.geoffstuff.com/highest_sydmelb.jpg
More evidence for Australia being hotter in the 1930’s than it is now.
The high temperature extremes of the 1930’s looks to be worldwide.
I read in the June, 2017, Astronomy magazine where Jupiter’s Great Red Spot has been “steadily shrinking and growing more circular since the 1930’s, a trend that continues today”. The Great Red Spot used to be about 25,000 miles in diameter in the 1800’s and it is down to about 10,000 miles in diameter now.
I’m not saying there is any correlation with Earth’s 1930’s weather, whose severity seems to also have diminished over the same time period, but it’s something to think about. 🙂
The US EPA keeps a “heat wave” index made up of annual high-low temps. There’s nothing alarming in it, as far as I can tell:
No, you can’t say “hotter and hotter” and “hottest year evah!” looking at that EPA chart. It demonstrates that all this alarming rhetoric from the alarmists is just that, rhetoric. Reality is totally different from the doom and gloom scenarios they paint. Reality is much more benign, and doesn’t need fixing.
You can see from that chart why alarmists would want to compare to 1951-1980.
Orson,
The only things that look really anomalous is the 1930s and 1958 to 1979. It does look like there has been a slight upward trend since about 1990.
There is a shirt pithy 4 letter Anglo Saxon word that describes Krugman.
Sadly I do not want to get banned by using it.
Krugman “believes” in Monopoly Money and AGW. nuff said.
“Krugman is a brilliant economist . . .”
++++
Say what?
Why would anybody take Krugman or Miley Cyrus seriously on climate change? At least Miley can twerk. Krugman’s pathetic rant is not even amusing
http://i.huffpost.com/gen/3360070/images/o-MILEY-CYRUS-TWERK-facebook.jpg
Economists are a joke. If they understood the subject so well, they would all be rich from their investments. They wouldn’t have to write editorials. They can’t even predict interest rates.
Same for weather forecasters. If they could really predict the weather 6 months in advance, they would all be wealthy from their investments in commodity futures.