Guest Essay by Kip Hansen — 13 July 2021
Dr. Judith Curry has treated the world to a marvelous 5-minute synopsis of climate science on her blog Climate Etc. It is absolutely brilliant and makes a great bit to share with friends, family, neighbors and colleagues who would benefit from a more pragmatic view of the Climate Science field.
With her permission, I share it here — just the synopsis without her introduction.
“Let me start with a quick summary of what is referred to as the ‘climate crisis:’
Its warming. The warming is caused by us. Warming is dangerous. We need to urgently transition to renewable energy to stop the warming. Once we do that, sea level rise will stop and the weather won’t be so extreme.
So what’s wrong with this narrative? In a nutshell, we’ve vastly oversimplified both the problem and its solutions. The complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity of the existing knowledge about climate change is being kept away from the policy and public debate. The solutions that have been proposed are technologically and politically infeasible on a global scale.
Specifically with regards to climate science. The sensitivity of the climate to a doubling of carbon dioxide has a factor of three uncertainty. Climate model predictions of alarming impacts for the 21st century are driven by an emissions scenario, RCP8.5, that is highly implausible. Climate model predictions neglect scenarios of natural climate variability, which dominate regional climate variability on interannual to multidecadal time scales. And finally, emissions reductions will do little to improve the climate of the 21st century; if you believe the climate models, most of the impacts of emissions reductions will be felt in the 22nd century and beyond.
Whether or not warming is ‘dangerous‘ is an issue of values, about which science has nothing to say. According to the IPCC, there is not yet evidence of changes in the global frequency or intensity of hurricanes, droughts, floods or wildfires. In the U.S., the states with by far the largest population growth are Florida and Texas, which are warm, southern states. Property along the coast is skyrocketing in value. Personal preference and market value do not yet regard global warming as ‘dangerous.’
Climate change is a grand narrative in which manmade climate change has become the dominant cause of societal problems. Everything that goes wrong reinforces the conviction that that there is only one thing we can do prevent societal problems – stop burning fossil fuels. This grand narrative misleads us to think that if we solve the problem of manmade climate change, then these other problems would also be solved. This belief leads us away from a deeper investigation of the true causes of these problems. The end result is narrowing of the viewpoints and policy options that we are willing to consider in dealing with complex issues such as public health, water resources, weather disasters and national security.
Does all this mean we should do nothing about climate change? No. We should work to minimize our impact on the planet, which isn’t simple for a planet with 7 billion inhabitants. We should work to minimize air and water pollution. From time immemorial, humans have adapted to climate change. Whether or not we manage to drastically curtail our carbon dioxide emissions in the coming decades, we need to reduce our vulnerability to extreme weather and climate events.
With regards to energy. All other things being equal, everyone would prefer clean over dirty energy. However, all other things are not equal. We need secure, reliable, and economic energy systems for all countries in the world. This includes Africa, which is currently lacking grid electricity in many countries. We need a 21st century infrastructure for our electricity and transportation systems, to support continued and growing prosperity. The urgency of rushing to implement 20th century renewable technologies risks wasting resources on an inadequate energy infrastructure and increasing our vulnerability to weather and climate extremes.
How the climate of the 21st century will play out is a topic of deep uncertainty. Once natural climate variability is accounted for, it may turn out to be relatively benign. Or we may be faced with unanticipated surprises. We need to increase our resiliency to whatever the future climate presents us with. We are shooting ourselves in the foot if we sacrifice economic prosperity and overall societal resilience on the altar of urgently transitioning to 20th century renewable energy technologies.
We need to remind ourselves that addressing climate change isn’t an end in itself, and that climate change is not the only problem that the world is facing. The objective should be to improve human well being in the 21st century, while protecting the environment as much as we can.”
I couldn’t agree more. I might adjust a few details but would share this with anyone who wanted a straight shooting from the hip version of the climate situation.
Thank you, Dr. Curry.
# # # # #
Not her best. For example, her implication is that renewables are “clean”. This is the “out of sight out of mind” fallacy. The truth is, they are dirty – utterly filthy and environmentally destructive on a scale that is at least an order of magnitude worse than fossil fuels. She also treats climate change as if it is “a thing” by which I mean man made, but some discussion of the natural cycle would have been useful to put that notion into perspective.
That is nonsense, isn’t it?
How is mining for their raw materials more destructive than open cast coal mining? Or the particulates from coal burning and diesel?
and the major driver of climate is now a new, additional driver on top of historical forces -human CO2
Griff, you really don’t get the point, do you? Renewable energy will require additional mining on top of the existing mining. Even some greens are admitting that there will be a “temporary” increase in mining around the world in the next few decades for the “clean energy transition”.
Extraction rates are a complete mystery to griff – just like most of life really.
Except of course the increase won’t just be temporary because the wind and solar will need replacing in 25 years or less and then you have to factor in all the mining required for EVs. Sure there will be improvements in the recycling of materials but a huge increase in mining will be a permanent feature.
The International Energy Agency recently noted that “the average amount of minerals needed for a new unit of power generation capacity has increased by 50% as the share of renewables has risen.”
(The Role of Critical Minerals in Clean Energy Transitions. IEA May 2021)
If CO2 is on top of natural forces, why are changes now slower than they were 100 years ago?
We need secure, reliable, and economic energy systems for all countries in the world. This includes Africa, which is currently lacking grid electricity in many countries.
And there is no evidence that fossil fuel ever would supply Africa with that grid, with that power.
It hasn’t over the last 75 years – why would it in the future?
I remind all of the sheer physical size of Africa. I remind all that poor countries with no local coal/oil/gas can’t afford to import it.
Griff, the same argument was made about Asia 50 years ago. Asian countries have shown Africa the way forward and it entails massive increases in energy production principally from fossil fuels.
Bill, let me compliment you on your patient, rational responses to Griff’s tired claims about the dangerous state of the climate and the virtues of renewables. No personal attacks or snark, just short explanations of where he is clearly wrong. It’s helpful for anyone visiting the site for the first time to see he’s more to be pitied than censured.
When griff is given a new lie, he runs it into the dirt.
In griff’s world, the fact that Africa has been too poor to afford a modern energy infrastructure is proof that Africa couldn’t possibly benefit from a modern energy infrastructure.
Africa has around 36 billion tonnes of proven coal reserves, 90% of which are in South Africa. But Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Botswana have an estimated 46 billion tonnes.
Tanzania has huge reserves of natural gas.
As regards oil Libya has the 8th largest proven reserves in the world. Nigeria is ranked 11th, Algeria 16th, Sudan 23rd, South Sudan 24th, Uganda 33rd, Congo 38th, Chad 39th,Equatorial Guinea 41st, Kenya 42nd and Ghana 43rd.
In total the continent has 10% of the world’s oil reserves and 8% of natural gas reserves.
So, many countries in Africa do have considerable coal/oil/gas resources. Why shouldn’t they be allowed to exploit them?
There are some people that keep turning up on this site like a bad penny that sadly do not engage in a carefully reasoned discussion with the contributors. Climate alarmism is being used to perpetrate massive fraud and often simply for political gain. It is quite shocking how naïve even educated people can be. I may not agree with all Dr Curry writes but I have found her particularly careful and logical in her reasoning – not something I usually find among emotional alarmists.
The fact of the matter is that this has nothing to do with changing climate. Its a red herring; an excuse to impose totalitarianism. That the debate revolves around man-made CO2 and climate is useless, irrelevant, and doesn’t address the real problem: the desire for egoless dictator wannabes to rule over as many as possible.
I think you meant egocentric?
I meant egoless.
I would only quibble with the reference to ’20th century renewable technologies’ given that windmills have been around for centuries and were replaced as soon as something better came along.
That’s being generous
Yes, RCP8.5 is getting more unrealistic every day. Vietnam, for example, is not going to build a new coal-fired powerplant, instead they are going to build a natural gas-powered powerplant, something not foreseen in RCP8.5.
The United States has reduced its CO2 emissions greatly by replacing coal-fired powerplants with natural gas-powered powerplants. This is the wave of the future. This, and nuclear powerplants.
Until they ban fracking, which of course they also want to do. Then I guess we can just start building coal fired plants again, if they succeed in driving up natural gas prices by curtailing the plentiful supply.
LED lights are reducing energy usage by a few percentage points.
That’s a lot. Citation?
My quick and dirty research suggests that lighting is about 8% of total electricity. Electricity is about 37% of total energy consumption, so lighting itself is only 3% of total energy consumed. By definition, LED use can only reduce this by some fraction of 3% which doesn’t qualify as “a few percentage points”. I’m a big supporter of LED lights, and have installed many, but I don’t think they are as significant as you suggest.
She has been a voice of reason for a long time, and I appreciate her work very much. Unfortunately the younger generation is being indoctrinated by the alarmists who now control the schools, most of the news media, and the political left.
It will be a tough struggle to return sanity to the masses.
Keep telling the truth. Keep the faith!!
I think the increase in cooling will eventually overcome the propaganda and we will be left with masses of disillusioned people hopefully searching for truth. Unfortunately, I don’t think I will live long enough to see it. I am making sure that my immediate circle understands there is no truth in AGW.
a quick summary of what is referred to as the ‘climate crisis:’
Its cooling. The Cooling is caused by us. Cooling is deadly. We need to urgently transition to renewable energy to stop the warming. Once we do that, we can increase the price of energy through the roof to make lots of money for us.
From the article: “According to the IPCC, there is not yet evidence of [human-caused] changes in the global frequency or intensity of hurricanes, droughts, floods or wildfires.”
This can’t be repeated often enough.
Alarmists attribute every severe weather event to human-caused CO2, but as can been seen, the official UN agency assigned to find human causes of climate change cannot find any so far, and say so publicly.
So alarmists who claim extreme weather events are caused by human-derived CO2 have nothing on which to base their claims. They are blowing smoke, according to the IPCC.
Dr. Curry presents a nice synopsis of the “climate crisis.” However, my read of that summary is that climate crisis/climate change is asserted to be fundamentally associated with global warming . . . from whatever root cause, man-made or not.
I seriously question that assertion. Hey, it’s not like the Earth has never gone through interglacial warming periods in past, is it?
Does that mean a “climate crises” could not be caused by an interval of global cooling, such as the previous Little Ice Age, that could lead to widespread famine?
What about all the past worries about loss of the ozone layer (i.e., the size of the ozone hole over the Earth’s polar regions) that would in turn lead to flooding a large portion of Earth’s surface with greatly increased levels of UV radiation . . . that’s not associated with global warming, so would it thusly not constitute an imminent climate crisis?
What about an astroid/meteor impact event, such at the one at Earth’s K-T boundary that wiped out the dinosaurs . . . wouldn’t that caused a climate crisis?
What about a flip (i.e., reversal) in Earth’s magnetic poles which we know has happened over the last 10 million years at a periodicity of once every 200,000 to 250,000 years . . . think there won’t be any climate crisis as Earth temporarily loses its magnetosphere that protects the atmosphere and surface from direct impact of particulate radiation from the Sun as well as cosmic radiation?
I could go on and on, but need I?
Climate crisis can originate from a variety of causes other than just “global warming”.
Moreover, humanity has absolutely no means to control, let alone eliminate, climate change, despite the hubris of so many “leaders” (aka talking heads) that imagine such is possible.
Dressler ==> There are hundreds of details and speculations, many quite valid, but they don’t fit into a 5 minute statement.
KIp, I fully understand.
But then again, neither does neatly wrapping the nice bow of “global warming” around “climate crisis” just to satisfy a 5 minute statement. To paraphrase Richard Feynman, if it disagrees with observation it is WRONG.
The flipping of the magnetic field has been going on for way more than the last 10 million years.
None of the previous magnetic field reversals caused any noticeable problems with anything.
MarkW posted: “None of the previous magnetic field reversals caused any noticeable problems with anything.”
And we know this from what scientific research? . . . that is, please provide a referenced scientific paper or URL link establishing your assertion.
P.S., please re-read my post to see that I never stated or implied that magnetic pole reversals started about 10 millions years ago . . . only that my stated periodicity of such was averaged over that time period.
We didn’t have electronic devices during any of the previous reversals. I don’t think we have any way to know what impact it will have on such things. ANYTHING, from “nothing will happen” to “everything will be destroyed” is pure speculation.
It is unfortunate that many of the skeptical climate scientists still don’t understand how energy flows in the atmosphere and still consider CO2 to provide a warming influence.
Radiative gases (or anything that absorbs/emits radiation such as dust) do allow energy to be radiated to space from the atmosphere. This allows the expansion the atmosphere to its highest level as allowed by the energy available. The only way to increase the expansion is to add energy or reduce certain cooling factors (such as convection of latent heat).
The adiabatic lapse rate already tells us all we need to know. There is nothing about it that is significantly affected by CO2 levels. The ALR is based on gravity and the heat capacity of the air. Doubling CO2 would LOWER the heat capacity slightly which would reduce the lapse rate and cool the atmosphere.
Not only that, if additional water vapor were a feedback of CO2, you would also increase convective heat transfer which would reduce the ALR.
To emphasize this point just think what would happen if you kept the energy level the same and started to reduce water vapor. The planet would warm up considerably. That’s right, reducing the most significant “greenhouse gas” leads to warming. With no water vapor the planet surface would be ~28 C warmer.
But what about the “trapped heat”? Sorry, for practical purposes, it’s all already trapped. You can’t trap any more. All that energy is already being moved around in the atmosphere by kinetic energy transfers and a photon cloud of radiation transfers. The surface skin already participates in this thermodynamic system. Adding additional CO2 simply increases the photon cloud slightly but does not add any energy. Without more energy you can’t increase the temperature.
That is, when you replace an O2 molecule with a CO2 molecule by burning fossil fuels, you simply increase the size of the photon cloud and make it more efficient at moving the same amount of energy through the atmosphere. The reason the cloud moves upward is because of the reduced density as you move upward. Without a change in the volumetric structure of the atmosphere you won’t change the movement of the energy.
I greatly admire Judith Curry and the way she handled the challenging task of breaking down a mind-numbingly complex set of issues into a five-minute statement. I have tried, and failed, to do the same in the past. The one significant issue that she did not touch on or allude to concerns the premise that emissions reductions of unprecedented size and cost will be achieved through international agreements that have so far utterly failed (i.e. global emissions rose by almost 60% from 1990 to 2020). The central geopolitical reality of climate change is that all of the emissions growth is occurring in countries that require affordable, reliable and secure fossil fuels for their economic development, and nothing that the OECD countries do can suppress those trends.
“This belief leads us away from a deeper investigation of the true causes of these problems. The end result is narrowing of the viewpoints and policy options that we are willing to consider in dealing with complex issues such as public health, water resources, weather disasters and national security.”
I don’t think that is unintentional. It’s much easier for politicians and other “leaders” to pontificate about how we need to “fix” things by addressing “climate change” than to actually fix anything by addressing it with the appropriate policy. (See CA fires and blackouts) And it gives them something to campaign on next time.
I see one gigantic problem with this synopsis. She doesn’t define warming. Are we talking Joules or are we talking Celsius? These two things are different. If you look at data points for when we have enough data to calculate Joules for atmosphere it is much to short to draw conclusions. Celsius for the variation amounts we are talking about depends on which way the wind is blowing(jet stream) this year.
Its pretty good on the failure of the basic argument: CO2 emissions > disastrous warming > renewable energy saves planet.
But I would like to have seen it refute the most noxious argument of all. This is usually made in the UK, US and Australia, and its simple, it just says do this here to lower emissions because global warming.
You can always tell this argument is being used because of a shift in the meaning of ‘we’. ‘We’ have to reduce emissions (we in this case being the world). Therefore ‘we’, in this case the US, UK or Australia, must phase out coal or go to electric cars or whatever.
And what always needs pointing out, time and time again, is that ‘we’ locally doing any of this will have no effect on global emissions, because its China etc that are the leading emitters and are increasing theirs. So the argument, do GND because warming, or phase out coal generation because warming, is completely fallacious, it will have zero effect on warming even if there is a link between CO2 and warming.
Its not local ‘we’ that need to reduce, its local ‘them’!
The we that has to reduce, in the argument, is not the we that is being asked to reduce. There are 37.5 billion tons that the general ‘we’ have to reduce. But the ‘we’ that are being asked to make reductions are something like 10 billion of those 37.5 and falling, whereas the 27.5 billion are increasing as fast as they can. Say ‘we’ cut it to 5. Meanwhile the other ‘we will have raised it by 10.
I have never seen a valid argument for local action in the UK, US or Australia that actually showed that the action demanded would have any effect on reducing global emissions. We (readers) always need to ask of any proposed policy, by how much will it lower global emissions and temperature? And the answer is usually not at all.
A pity this could not have been pointed out as well as the excellent and succinct points that were made.
5 minutes is in my opinion still far too long. Both in my consulting and then corporate careers we practiced what was known as the ‘elevator speech’—full (simplistic) explanation while on the elevator with CEO to C suite—30 seconds, max. And the followup memo was the front of one sheet of paper, double spaced, 12 point font. To insure it got read.
Even full more complicated Board level stuff was limited to 15 minutes and max 15 slides, leaving another 15 minutes for Q&A.
Or, to paraphrase a famous Mark Twain saying: “I apologize for the length of this letter. I did not have the time to make it shorter.”
A major, major problem with the proposed solutions to “climate change” is an increasing reliance on technologies dominated by the Chinese. If reliance on Middle Eastern oil was bad, it’s arguably far worse to rely on technologies where China holds a commanding lead (solar panels and batteries). My fear is we will all wake up 20 years from now to find the Chinese have us in a box. Terrifying thought.
20 years?
Five sides of that box are already complete and we’re helping build the sixth.
I love Judy Curry to death, but her answer to “does this mean we do nothing?” is wrong.
The correct answer is YES. We need to do NOTHING, we MUST DO NOTHING. Doing anything that has the level of uncertainty associated with modern climate science is wasting money, wasting resources, especially when CO2 is assisting the natural world in non-ambiguous ways, helping human agriculture, helping wild lands and species that like to eat plants which can thrive due to our CO2 emissions.
Buy a huge 4×4 SUV and go for a drive and celebrate..
No, we need to do sensible things that have real quality of life benefits and there are quite a lot of them.
This includes cheap reliable electricity supplies (ie not wind or solar). It means fitting conventional plants with scrubbers, and preferring natural gas fired ones to coal fired or (the latest insanity) wood fired.
But it also includes getting ICE and particularly diesel engines out of areas where we live work and play. Cities need to be freed from current dominance of ICE cars and we need to be able to walk or bike around substantial areas in peace, quiet, clean air and safety. No-one in their right minds would vote for the present system of transport, with its toll in accidental death and injury in addition to the pollution and destruction of outdoor living space. Does anyone really think that the balance of benefit would justify the current use of cars when reckoned against the death and injury rates? Does anyone seriously think the death and injury rates are acceptable side effects?
In the country cars are essential and their toll limited, and there are usually plenty of ways to walk or bike to many destinations on relatively car-free routes. In the city they are a disaster, rapid through traffic simply destroys neighborhoods.
We need to do all this without regard to CO2 emissions. What we should be worried about and seek to improve is not CO2 emissions but noise, accidents, particulates and NO2. In fact, if what it takes to improve the immediate living environment involves raising CO2 emissions, we should just do it.
Humans, by nature, seem to need an answer, we seem to need to attribute an event or situation to something. The correct answer is optional. Before science we looked to the gods. Before our awareness of static electricity, heat convection and water vapor behavior the Norse had Thor. Bad lightning and wind storm was bad news for a seafaring people, so “Thor must be angry”. Good enough, check the box, we’ve got an answer. Now appease the god, sacrifice something, or someone.
Today we have climate change, global warming, whatever. Hot spell, cold spell, tornado, collapsed building, earthquake, social unrest, whatever, it must be man-caused climate change. Good enough, check the box we got an answer, now que up the human sacrifice.
“Climate Change s a Grand Narrative… ” Says it all.
our moral panic will be quite amusing to the trillions of functionally immortal citizens frolicking in 2221’s newest luxurious living spaces tunneled miles deep into Earth’s bedrock, endlessly debating how much people should be paid for breathing out scarce, valuable carbon dioxide to be pumped into the vast underground farms
This is better :-). It highlights problems with the way in which honest scientists address, and are evn able to address, the clear structural fraud of consensual science for profit that now infects academe. A Campaign for Real Science is needed, with a different approach, because the enemy does not play by the rules of deterministic science.
I have despaired of the “communications skills”, or rather the lack of them, in the principled but ultimately ineffectual academic science challenge to the pseudo climate science with observational and physical reality. By debating the detail evidence most people clearly cannot follow. Pointless.
It is necessary to tell lay people the conclusions, and the inferences. Such as that people are being lied to by politicians for their own profit from subsidy rent rolls at public energy poverty. etc. THis is a fact that is easy to prove across the WEstern World. People will understand that. It’s the Nazis but this time the Jews and Slave are AGW. Same basic approach, imposed by the governing regime to gain power and justify the extreme solution to a non problem, destruction of our hard won economies in this case.
The lobby fodder politicians don’t understand this at all, just drink the cool aid and march through the lobbies at their party’s call. Nor do hopelessly innumerate arts graduate journalists from the darkest delusional left corners of Universities, who never had a real job adding value to materials or learning the basics of rational thinking or able to question authority on the facts.
The purist deterministic academic science approach fails utterly to counter the assertions of activists who simply make it up, or read the simplistic and unsupportable assertions from a bible they have been given, which the audience is unqualified to choose between, while attacking the credibility of real expert scientists they these inadequates can never aspire to. Wong forum and wrong argument. Especially when this is supported by the knowing deceit of the prostitutes for profit academics like Michael Mann. HIs fate is telling. His deceit was clearly exposed, but has never been censured, rather rewarded by the corrupted academic establishment for the grant income it brings.
O suggest these people must also be called out and accused of lying and betraying the fundamental principles of deterministic science for their positions. Over and over. Yes, I know Tim Ball did. It needs repetition.
PS I do suggest that It IS important that lay people understand the difference between deterministic science you can prove, and models which you cannot, that all this deceit is built upon.
Models are computer games the programmers decide which variables to include and their effects on each other, Made up by the guesses of humans, not following proven laws of nature, so cannot prove any laws, and have now been comprehensively disproven by observation.
Climate Science has hi-jacked what lay people believe science is, to create easy academic careers for incompetents making up consensual science to support the agendas of politicians and activists.
It’s not about science as we imagine it to be it, principled deterministic science. THis is science fiction. Sociology, epidemiology, may be right, may be wrong, can’t be proven.
Illogical, but very rewarding for its dishonest practitioners and their University managements, at the expense of those paying for it. A “pay to prove” service for rich benefactors and government. Never mind the science follow the money, and make sure the peer review process is corrupted with the same cash flow.
The people should be told the reality of how these cynical liars for their grants, that we pay for, such as Michael Mann, Phil Jones, et al, control our Universities, and fabricate the science they publish to support the agendas they are paid to by government and the very rich.
If real scientists don’t say this, who will? It is well past time for the Campaign for Real Science to begin. Aux Barricades! But tool up with MG 3s, A-10s , RPGs and plenty of ammo and body armour, not nice green bows and Arrows and pitchforks as now. This opposition has to be destroyed, it cannot be reasoned with, the climate change zealot academics and their money driven honours seeking administrators are the SS, Gestapo and Einsatzgruppen of science. Evil people, whose response to challenge is to remove the person responsible from their post, work, and any possibility of publication in the now captive “scientific” media. To silence them for ever. Reasoned debate is not their plan. IMO
I meant Slavs, not slaves. Wrong not Wong, etc. I never manage to getosts typo free. But hopefully the points are clearly made.
Brian ==> My fingers are getting older, type what they want, and my eyes don’t catch them at it.