Guest smack-down by David Middleton
There was a time that I had a fair bit of respect for Dr. Novella.
Climate Change Is Accelerating
Published by Steven Novella under General ScienceHave you ever traveled with a large group of friends? When a group gets beyond a certain “critical mass” it becomes geometrically more difficult to make decisions. Even going to a restaurant or a movie become laborious. Decision making seems to break down in large groups, especially if there isn’t an established hierarchy or process in place. That’s why the “by committee” cliche exists – group decision making can be a highly flawed and problematic process.
I can’t escape the nagging sensation that the world is having this problem. We seem to be politically frozen and unable to take decisive timely action. We are metaphorically driving toward a cliff, and we can’t even take our foot off the accelerator, let alone apply the brakes.
I am talking, of course, about climate change. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) compiled data in preparation for a UN summit on climate change in New York (which the US will not, ironically, be attending). They found:
*2014-2019 are the hottest 5 years on record*Global temperature have risen by 1.1 C since 1850, but 0.2 C between 2011-2015.
*CO2 release between 2014-2019 was 20% higher than the previous 5 years
*Sea level rise has been 3.2 mm per year on average since 1993, but is 5mm per year averaged over the last five years.
*Ice loss is accelerating. For example – “The amount of ice lost annually from the Antarctic ice sheet increased at least six-fold, from 40 Gt per year in 1979-1990 to 252 Gt per year in 2009-2017.”
*Heatwaves, wild fires, and extreme weather events are increasing and causing increasing damage and costs.
[…]
NeuroLogica Blog
“2014-2019 are the hottest 5 years on record”
“Sea level rise has been 3.2 mm per year on average since 1993, but is 5mm per year averaged over the last five years”
More like 3.0 and 3.4 mm/yr.
A couple of degrees warmer than the coldest climate of the entire Holocene Epoch (The Little Ice Age) is a good thing. If not for the warming allegedly caused by CO2, it would be colder than “The Ice Age Cometh“…
“CO2 release between 2014-2019 was 20% higher than the previous 5 years”
There are no data for 2019, the year isn’t over yet. And 2014-2019 would be 6 years. According to the 2019 BP Statistical Review of World Energy carbon dioxide emissions for the five year period (2014-2018) were 5% greater than the prior five year period (2009-2013):
- 2009-2013 157,872 million tonnes
- 2014-2018 165,696 million tonnes
- 165,696/157,872 = 1.04956
Furthermore…
Red China is not an OECD nation. Dr. Novella needs to learn how to speak Mandarin, so he can hector the source of the problem.
“Ice loss is accelerating. For example – “The amount of ice lost annually from the Antarctic ice sheet increased at least six-fold, from 40 Gt per year in 1979-1990 to 252 Gt per year in 2009-2017”
The asserted ice loss over the satellite era works out to about 3 trillion tonnes. The total mass of the Antarctic Ice Sheet is about 27,601,654 BILLION metric tons… 27,602 TRILLION metric tons… 3 is 0.011% of 27,602. Zero-point-zero-one-one percent is indistinguishable from Mr. Blutarski’s grade point average…
99.989% of the Antarctic Ice Sheet didn’t melt. If ice loss is accelerating, why don’t we see it in the sea level data? The missing sea level rise is the primary reason they tack 0.2 mm/yr onto SLR and call it a glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA).
Sea level is not doing anything that is wasn’t already doing.
Are Warmunists allergic to context?
Let’s look at the much more “vulnerable” Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS). According to Kjeldsen et al., 2015, the GrIS lost over 9,900 km3 of ice from 1900-2010 and an article in The Economist asserted that the GrIS lost 375 Gt/yr (409 km3/yr) from 2011-2014.
Is that a lot of ice? According to U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper 1386–A (2012), the volume of the GrIS is 2,600,000 km3. The USGS cites a 1954 reference for this number and also cites Bamber et al., 2011, which puts the volume at 2,900,000 km3. Bamber has subsequently upped his estimate to 2,960,000 km3. This is funny. Either the GrIS added 360,000 km3 of ice from 1954-2013 at a time when NASA said the GrIS was losing 4,089 km3 or the uncertainty of the volume of the GrIS is about 1,000 times the annual ice loss that is asserted with such precision by Amazing GRACE.
Here’s a graphical depiction of this projected up to 2017:
For a little more perspective, let’s convert this to ice cubes.
If you were to spread that Lake Superior-sized ice cube across the surface of the GrIS, it would only be about 2 meters thick.
2 meters is basically a Dean Wormer thickness. Vinther et al., 2009 reconstructed the elevations of four ice core sites over the Holocene. There has been very little change in elevation of the two interior ice core sites (NGRIP and GRIP), while the two outboard sites (Camp Century and DYE3) have lost 546 and 342 m of ice respectively.
Here are elevation profiles for the end of the Pleistocene and 2000 AD.
Dr. Novella’s solutions
Even if everyone agrees we should do something, there is disagreement over what the best something is. Some people want to see an action movie, while others want to see a drama. Unfortunately for the global warming controversy – there is only one planet. We have to watch this same movie together no matter what. But this is not the main limiting factor. There are some obvious steps we all know we should take. Stop building coal-fired plants. Invest in zero-carbon energy. Stop subsidizing fossil fuel, and instead subsidize renewable energy. Improve the mileage of cars, and start switching to hybrids and electric vehicles. Prioritize energy efficiency. Plant trees.
NeuroLogica Blog
“Stop subsidizing fossil fuel, and instead subsidize renewable energy”???
The U.S. government spent next to nothing on fossil fuel subsidies in FY2016 (the most recent report).
The expenses involved in extracting a depleting resource have to be written off as the resource is produced (depletion allowance). Some capital expenditures are allowed to be written off as expenses, rather than capitalized over time. When we drill wells, tangible drilling expenditures (items with salvage value) have to be capitalized. Intangible drilling expenditures (services and materials with no salvage value) can written off as expenses. According to the most recent EIA analysis of energy subsidies, fossil fuels received almost no net subsidies…
The FY2016 numbers actually reflect a negative subsidy for natural gas and petroleum liquids. They also indicate that the solar subsidy has “fallen” to $4.19/mmBtu. The subsidy for solar power is about 1/3 higher than the wellhead price for natural gas.
Dr. Novella earns a Geico Caveman Award
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The entire benefit from battery vehicles is that the local air pollution is relocated to somewhere that is (hopefully) in compliance with the air quality standards, like the Four Corners. For global climate change and global emissions, it doesn’t matter where the ele tricity is generated, just how. 40% or so in the US is still coal.
Dr. Novella’s remediation plan would cause significant economic effects BUT global average temperatures by 2100 would not be altered by a measurable amount. He has no clue what he’s talking about. It’s 4th grade arithmetic no rocket science.
The Climate Problem invented by the Warmunustic Alarmists IS TOO BIG A PROBLEM TO FIX…without creating a bigger catastrophe.
A Centralized International Totalitarian Global Authority could not pull it off. Unless that Authority started building 2 – 3 Gigawatt Nuclear Power plants every day until 2050…
OR
Unless the Totalitarian Authority was willing to allow around half the world’s population to parish….perishing not from Climate Events…perishing from the execution of Carbon Emission Reduction Actions.
They are telling us that global emissions must draw down to zero by 2050 or human extinction is assured. That cannot be done. They need to change their story to be believable.
I too once respected Novella, and was a regular listener of Skeptics Guide to the Universe. Then a few years back he dropped his objection to “denier” and gave his podcast over to the SJW agenda.
I think what’s happened is that he started to look at himself as a “science communicator”, which is different in an essential way than being a skeptic. Now he just cites the “consensus” very unskeptically and cites fossil fuel companies and politics as the cause of “denialism”. If you point out any problems with the science he just says those are uncertainties already subsumed into the consensus.
He talks a lot about publication bias and the problems with the current culture of science, but never connects that to the billions of dollars going yearly to climate change research as a possible cause of secondary gain issues with the science.
That’s about when I gave up on Novella’s podcast too (“there are none so blind as those who will not see”); somewhere along the line he drank the CAGW kool-aid, and seems incapable of applying his critical skills to observational data. He would do better if he just followed the money that supports the CAGW fantasy. Now we have large fleets of working and aspiring scientists (grad students and post-docs) drawn into the margins (eg. biology, marine sciences) of climate science by the ready availability of vast amounts of $$ that go to feed the grants, salaries, and mortgages of these people. It becomes a positive feedback loop that at some point will become unsustainable.
The problem is that even if they were all true (they aren’t), he fails to show the evidence that the increase in CO2 is responsible for all that. There is no evidence, just a shaky line of reasoning and computer models that have been programmed to give that answer. Most people are convinced without evidence, I won’t.
It is unreasonable to demand steep sacrifices when there is no evidence that they will produce a noticeable effect. It is akin to sacrifice people to appease angry gods. If it rains the gods are pleased. If it doesn’t the gods are still angry, bring more people to sacrifice.
Technically, depletion allowance and tax breaks aren’t subsidies anyway. Subsidies are “money given by a government….“. No one is “giving” you a thing with a tax break-it was yours to begin with. Renewables receive subsidies, fossil fuels mostly do not. The media erroneously combines tax breaks and subsidies under the banner of “subsidies”, so they can say “look, fossil fuels receive subsidies, too.”
Many observations demonstrate that CO2 does not now, never has, and never will have a significant effect on climate. (Section 2, of my blog/analysis at http://globalclimatedrivers2.blogspot.com)
Since it has been fairly accurately measured worldwide, Jan, 1988, water vapor has increased about 4.3% or about 1.54% per decade. (Section 8, Figure 3)
The water vapor increase is about twice expected from temperature increase alone. (Section 8)
Most (about 86%) of the extra water vapor increase is from irrigation increase. (Section 9)
Both CO2 and water vapor have been fairly accurately measured worldwide since 1988. Over that period, about 5 water vapor molecules have been added for each added CO2 molecule. (Section 2, #9 of my b/a)
Hitran, using Quantum Mechanics, demonstrates that a water vapor molecule is about 5 times more effective than a CO2 molecule at absorb/emit of electromagnetic radiation in the wavelength range associated with earth temperatures. (Section 2, #8 of my b/a)
The increased number of CO2 molecules above the tropopause provides more radiation to space which apparently compensates for the slight increase in absorbers at ground level. http://diyclimateanalysis.blogspot.com (2nd paragraph after Figure 1)
The human contribution to Global Warming is from water vapor increase, not CO2 increase. Water vapor increase is self-limiting; therefore, Global Warming is self-limiting.
And how did these so-called scary temperatures affect this writers’s life negatively in on observable way? NONE! He’s a foolish, dangerous mass hysteria inciter.
The quantity of ‘news’ articles recently, scaring the bejeebers out of children and other logic-challenged members of the public, reminds me of the way that naval artillery softens up beach heads before an amphibious assault.
Has anyone besides me noticed that the Yahoo US news section is dominated by British news sources such as the Guardian and Reuters? House representatives and American liberal Media have been making an issue of Russia supposedly trying to influence the 2016 election. Yet, the British Media sources are openly spinning the news with liberal viewpoints, including stories about impending climate catastrophes. It seems that there are two journalistic ‘standards;” one for those who support Trump, and another for those who hate Trump.
Of course Steven Novella would get this wrong. He’s a science cheerleader, more than he is a scientist. I thought he was an actual skeptic.
To put things into an even greater perspective: How much ice was lost at the end of the last glacial, leading into the Holocene?
About 360 Gt of melted glacier ice +1 mm SLR.
At the end of the Pleistocene, sea level rose by about 100 m… 100,000 mm. This works out to 36,000,000 Gt… 36 million billion tons… More than all of the combined total of Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets.
” If ice loss is accelerating, why don’t we see it in the sea level data?”
I keep saying the same thing and no-one gets it yet. You won’t necessarily see sea level rise in direct proportion to increasing volume because of increasing surface area. Tide gages will not reflect this.
How do you get increased area without rising?
The Ocean basin does not have straight sides. Think of adding a little water to a glass – the level rises. It must. Add the same amount of water to a puddle of the same volume. It doesn’t rise in level, it spreads out. Greater surface area without level rise. There you have it. That’s how we can see inundation of low lying areas with a very gradual slope and almost no difference after 100 years at other sites like Sydney harbour.
Put the link to this page on Novella’s site. See what his response is. He’s an MD so he is out of his element commenting on climate science.
Our beloved contributor Willis Eschenbach taught me something awhile ago.
1 gallon of Gas has a lower value of $5000 / gallon at a labor rate of $15/hour.
1 kWh of Electricity is worth $150.
Those subsidies that total $0 out of the pocket of the US Government (and you and I) comes back to me EVERY TIME I pump my car full of gas. $4997 / gallon. I put 17 gallons in my minivan yesterday. I was given an $85000 subsidy to drive my car around.
I waste my subsidy on getting my kids to soccer, picking them up from baseball practice, getting them to guitar lessons, getting groceries.
Other people take that subsidy and turn it into more money. The landscapers put it in their lawn blowers and get people to pay them $40/hour to clean up their yards. Line workers use the energy to get buckets up to the power lines to fix them so I can pay $0.10 / kWh so I can watch LOST for the 5th time.
Think I am full of it for thinking a gallon of gas is worth $5000. Empty your vehicle of gasoline. Put 1 gallon in it. Drive away from your house until you run out. PUSH YOUR CAR BACK TO YOUR HOUSE. How long does it take you to get it there. My minivan will go about 19 miles on 1 gallon. To get that car back to my house having driven 19 miles would border on impossible without lots of extra help. Anyone who has every tried to push their car up any sort of incline knows why. Got 10 people, maybe you have a chance, but you are now incurring 10x the expense. That $5000/gallon is not an unreasonable estimate of its lower value.
Thank You Willis for teaching me that.
Opinion of Dr. Novella,
I admire his work at NESS mostly. He slips sideways on a couple of subjects. Climate Change is one of them. Even Brian Dunning slipped the same way. The skeptics have a consensus challenge. They believe in science. Sometimes that belief starts to slip into religious fervor. A lot of skeptics are also atheists. There is a god hole. Scientism sometimes slips into that hole. That god hole (a bucket that someone made up that is completely wrong, but does a reasonable job of describing a behavior) can only be addressed by the individual themselves. They either recognize the behavior or they don’t. You cannot tell someone that they are showing the behavior.
Brian Dunning, Dr. Robert Muller (of UC Berkeley and BEST), Phil Plait, and Dr Novella have all demonstrated when poked on this subject triggered behavior. Phil Plait gave his “Don’t be a dick speech” and then a couple weeks later starts calling Roy Spencer names. Novella, Dunning and Muller have all snapped back at me when I point at information that is counter to their claims. Push people in the wrong part of their model and they push back hard. I admire all of these people. I am just careful about being direct when it comes to many many subjects.
https://tamino.wordpress.com/2019/09/27/climate-deniers-deny-temperature-itself/
What a tool. Maybe Foster Grant could explain why it’s better to take the temperature of the atmosphere at airports rather than in the atmosphere.
Here’s a real-world question, and before anyone answers it, give your response a very real-world thought.
Erta Ale is an active volcano that sits right on a rift zone in Ethiopia, in the Afar region. When I first ran across references to this volcano, it had a 60 to 70 foot drop to the lava pool at the bottom of the caldera. The area in which it sits will, some day, split because that area is a triple plate boundary and it is pulling apart. Now the Erta Ale caldera is full to the brim – took less than 9 years to get there – and the entire Afar region is nearly uninhabitable. It is below sea level, so when the Earth does split open there (off in the future), there is no going back. It is also one of the most poisonous place on Earth, because the outgassing volume has increased exponentially over that last nine years to extremely dangerous levels. It sits at the very head of the split that will eventually separate Eastern Africa from the rest of that continent.
So when this split starts, the Red Sea will try to fill it and the changes will be violent. It’s unlikely that the extreme splitting will occur in our lifetimes, but it will occur, and the entire world will change. So, does anyone want to guess which way the climate will go on this?
Just asking, because Mt. Erebus and its line of volcanoes also sit on a rift zone, buried under the Antarctic ice.
The opening of a new seaway will have more long-term effects on the climate than the outgassing. The direction of the climate change is unpredictable.
The East African Rift System does have the potential for flood basalt eruptions; something never witnessed by humans.
https://geology.com/articles/east-africa-rift.shtml
‘Climate Change Is Accelerating’
In what units is ‘climate change’ measured?
“The direction of the climate change is unpredictable.”
What is climate change? And how can it have an attribute of “direction?”