Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Bloomberg thinks we’re not scared enough of climate consequences we cannot predict. But a decision to jump at shadows would have its own serious consequences.
What Smart People Get Wrong About Climate Change Extremes
There isn’t enough appreciation of the risks associated with new weather patterns we don’t yet understand.
By Kate Mackenzie
10 September 2021, 20:00 GMT+10If anyone should be attuned to the real-world impacts of global warming, it’s the policy makers and business heads that have to deal with the fallout. But even the most well-intentioned can fail to grasp just how bad things could get if climate goals aren’t met.
At least that’s the impression I get. That’s why I reached out to Andy Pitman and Sonia Seneviratne, two of the world’s top experts on the most catastrophic effects of climate change. Their fields of study focus on extremes and compound events. Both worry that institutions are too focused on outcomes we can predict with high confidence. There isn’t enough appreciation of the risks associated with new weather patterns we don’t yet understand.
Warming of about 1.2 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels has already had devastating consequences. “Once we get around 2°C we are getting to a climate regime which hasn’t been seen for as long as the human species has been at work,” said Seneviratne, a professor at ETH Zurich who oversaw the chapter on extremes in the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. The document, published every six to seven years, is the pinnacle of scientific knowledge about global warming.
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The instruments are meant to estimate the effects of higher levels of warming, but “if it tells you you are resilient at 4°C, that doesn’t mean you’ll be okay. It means your analysis is crap,” he said. It’s like asking “what would happen if you jumped off a 50-meter cliff and then finding you’d land at the bottom and you’d be fine.”
Read more: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-09-10/what-smart-people-get-wrong-about-climate-change-extremes
Jumping at shadows means committing substantial resources to addressing a problem nobody is sure exists. Since there is a finite supply of resources, spending more on climate action means draining money from education, hospitals, police, military or infrastructure. If you spend all your money chasing phantoms, you won’t have anything left when a real crisis strikes.
What if the world does warm?
We know beyond doubt that a warmer world is survivable, that life thrives in such conditions. Some of the most prolific periods of abundance occurred in the distant past, when CO2 levels and temperatures were far higher than today.
What about the direct impact on people of warmer temperatures?
We don’t need a time machine to truly understand the impact of warmer temperatures, all we need to do is book a holiday to somewhere warm. Or move somewhere warm, like I did.
I have no doubt that if the world warmed 4C, a lot of cities would need to fix their drains and maybe change the grade of tarmac on their roads. But this wouldn’t happen all at once, it would happen over decades, as part of the normal maintenance cycle.
The main impact for most people would be nicer weather.
I live in a place where the daytime temperature for half the year hovers around 30C / 86F. And life is beautiful. Low heating bills, a big swimming pool to enjoy with friends, long outdoor evenings where it doesn’t get cold. I even get to save on water bills – most of the time when the swimming pool gets a little low, a tropical storm pops up to refill it for me.
Given substantial evidence that climate models are running way too hot, I doubt we are going to see a significant climate shift by the end of this century, or likely even by the end of the next century. Folks are still going to have to move if they want to enjoy good retirement weather.
But if the last 10,000 years of climate shifts can teach us anything, that lesson is that humans flourish when the world warms. Our civilisations rise during warm periods, like the Roman Warming or Medieval Warm Period, and falter during cold periods, like the Dark Ages or the Little Ice Age.
The end of the Little Ice Age was an exception – because the industrial revolution which occurred during the final years of the little ice age finally gave us the means to be prosperous in the face of climatic adversity.
The industrial revolution was an advance we should treasure, not regret.
“But if the last 10,000 years of climate shifts can teach us anything, that lesson is that humans flourish when the world warms. Our civilisations rise during warm periods, like the Roman Warming or Medieval Warm Period, and falter during cold periods, like the Dark Ages or the Little Ice Age.
The end of the Little Ice Age was an exception – because the industrial revolution which occurred during the final years of the little ice age finally gave us the means to be prosperous in the face of climatic adversity.
The industrial revolution was an advance we should treasure, not regret.”
Neatly put !
That was one fine essay, Eric. It’s hard to refute a boots-on-the-ground, money-where-your-mouth-is argument.
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Yeah, would someone please remind me why I leave my stone and stucco home in the North, where the temperature does cartwheels around the freezing mark and is often below 10 (F), and I leave the thermostat at 63(F) to keep the pipes and plants from freezing for a climate that averages about 75(F) with the odd mid-60s and mid-80s (F)?
I think I’m a Climate Refugee, but not the way the IpeeCC defines it.
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P.S. Why do I meet so many nice Canadians, Minnesotans, and Michiganders where I Winter? Somebody give me a hint; genetic, cultural, what?
We have something in common, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. 🤷♂️
😜
Supposedly, the “devastating impacts” we’ve already seen is a changing jet stream.
According to Wikipedia, we’ve only really been studying them in earnest since about WWII. So, how do we know what’s happening now isn’t perfectly typical?
As usual with climate science, we suddenly start hyper scrutinizing something, and seem surprised at what we find. The likelihood that nothing out of the ordinary is happening never seems to cross their minds. We just discovered it, therefore any variation must be BAD!
An absolutely extraordinary piece on Ars Technica, may be worth an article here, about the bill before the House to eliminate natural gas use in the US.
These people actually seem to think that reducing or eliminating natural gas use in the US will in some way reduce what they think is an increase in extreme weather events!
Completely insane. The flip side of science denial, the invention of crazed fantasies which are alleged to be scientifically justified.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/09/heres-how-the-us-will-tackle-climate-change-with-the-3-5t-reconciliation-bill/
The attitude of our political and climate science establishment is exactly the same as my attitude at the age of 5 years old or so when I first took an interest in weather having started to notice weather variability on a day to day basis.
I knew nothing at all about weather and so assumed that it was infinitely variable rather than constrained within quite narrow natural limits.
On seeing anything new I constantly expected something unprecedented and for a few years that seemed to happen because my experience was very limited.
After a while as familiarity grew I found that my hopes and expectations of seeing something new we’re constantly being frustrated.
On reading about past weather and natural climate variability I found that nothing unprecedented was ever happening and that my lack of knowledge and experience was the sole cause of my frequent expectation of experiencing something unusual.
We are effectively entrusting our response to weather variability to the equivalent of 5 year old children and may well destroy our civilisation as a result.
Not very smart people, surely? If they believe Warmists’ guff.
–What Smart People Get Wrong About Climate Change Extremes
There isn’t enough appreciation of the risks associated with new weather patterns we don’t yet understand.
By Kate Mackenzie
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She is dumb.
Does she expect a government to do anything about her “ new weather patterns”
Maybe she thinks politicians are smart people getting it wrong.
Politicians have always been stupid and evil. And they will continue to not represent the people voted for them.
Governor Cuomo is same creature as Bill Clinton and Obama. They all are feminists.
I worked directly for Bloomberg for several years … he should never use the words “smart people” in a sentence unless he is refering to others who actually are smart … he is of average intelligence, is an insecure, small minded petty man with very few skills … yes he’s a billionaire, but not a smart one … I doubt very much that this Bloomberg writer is any smarter than her boss …
“Warming of about 1.2 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels has already had devastating consequences …”
The purported linear global surface temperature trend for the longest thermometer record is less than 1C.
“Once we get around 2°C we are getting to a climate regime which hasn’t been seen for as long as the human species has been at work …”.
No-one can know what past global temperatures were to a necessary resolution to make that claim.
You are quite right, we know a few degrees of warming is beneficial to all life, as is more CO2. The entire CAGW story is built on the lie that climate change is bad, it isnt.
It takes a special mindset to produce nonsense such as Kate’s. Not only is it full of factual errors (devastating consequences?) it is presented in sloppy gobbledigook (levels of warming??). The key to this kind of reporting is the ‘impression’ of the second paragraph. An arts graduate lecturing on physics. Only at Bloomberg.
Take a moment and study the picture at the top of the article. Notice the caption.
“Britain’s Terrifying Global Warming Future:”
That should strike fear and terror into anybody’s heart.
That’s right – The Touristo Hoards.
They come like a plague of zombies. They get everywhere. They are on the beaches, downtown, in the shopping centers and in the restaurants and nightclubs. Horribly dressed and toting cameras galore, they come at you, implacable and unstoppable. Then come the resort hotels and the tour buses everywhere. The Touristas wave their credit cards and attack the shopping centers shouting their terrifying battle cry: Chaaarge It!
Nobody deserves this fate.
Small seacoast towns are most at risk of climate change but are not alone by any means. There a few things we can do to prepare for climate change.
1) Survey your town, categorize all ways in, including roads, rail, and sea.
2) Establish a defensible perimeter. Make the hard choices about what must be defended and what is outside the perimeter and cannot be defended.
3) Fortify the perimeter, remember “defense in depth”.
Good Luck, friends.
Carbon neutral is like jumpting off a 50ft just in case there’s tiger behind you.
Great essay, Eric!
It’s disingenuous to claim 1.5°C of temperature rise is due to human activity when the start point for that rise is a naturally occurring low temperature (little ice age).
Once that’s taken into account then the rest can safely be dismissed.
Here in Australia, we have reworked the historical temperature record by inserting the official data from Commonwealth Year Books from the 1950s. These were the best quality available at the time they were printed.
The best we can find by simple number comparison is that Australia warmed only 0.6 deg C from before 1931, compared to 2000-21, not the official current wisdom of
the BoM’s estimate of a 1.44 deg C mean increase from 1910 to 2021, based on the 104 non-urban ACORN stations as BOM define them.
It is a rather good adjustment that turns 0.6 deg C into 1.44 deg C.
Kinda turns a pleasant small change into a global apocalyptic threat, just by adjustment of measurements.
Why is this allowed to proceed?
Geoff S
“We know beyond doubt that a warmer world is survivable, that life thrives in such conditions.”
Absolutely right. I’ve already posted the link to the Austrian Institute of meteorology (ZAMG) and their “climate section”. Here it is again:
https://www.zamg.ac.at/cms/de/klima/klima-aktuell/klimamonitoring/?param=t&period=period-y-2020&ref=1
What you see is the comparison of 2020 with the temp-average of 1961-1990 and as you can see 2020 was warmer by +2,1 °C , 2019 by +2,3°C and 2018 even by +2,5°C
So clearly above the +2°C target set by the global climate policy as maximum limit to avoid catastrophic consequences. But in reality there are none. The crops since the 60/70s have doubled or trippled, there is no mass extinction of animals or plants, no increase in floods, storms or fire. Summers got hotter and winters milder, but we can still go for skiing in winter and the retreating glaciers release pieces of tree trunks. I wonder where they come from. Because actual tree survival limit is some hundred meters below and as far as I understood biology trees don’t walk some hundred meters up a mountain and jump into a glacier before they die.
Seriously. Just how bad can things get if we do nothing about something that isn’t?
“The main impact for most people would be nicer weather.”
How do you know that?
Given that a sizeable chunk of the human population lives in China and in India, and surrounding lands, do you have a particular insight into the impact of a warmer climate on those folks, for example?
Mike Bloomberg started his career as a paid liar and noisemaker (i.e., salesman) for the infamously corrupt and dishonest firm of Salomon Brothers (see Michael Lewis’ Liar’s Poker).
At Salomon, Bloomberg was immersed in a culture of deceit and intellectual dishonesty (e.g., John Meriwether, John Gutfreund).
Mike is not the sharpest knife in the drawer and I doubt that he’s ever bothered to examine the nitty, gritty details purporting to underlie the “Catastrophic/dangerous, CO2-driven anthropogenic global warming/climate change” CONJECTURE.
Knowing God is in his heaven helps alleviate irrational fears.
I know. I no longer need to buy or grow San Francisco Fog tomatoes. All that genetic selection and UC Davis research wasted.
A pity she didn’t read section 1.6.1.4, “The likelihood of reference scenarios, scenario uncertainty and storylines”, page 1-110, then :
Those “five core scenarios used most in” AR6 are, from “most catastrophic” to “most optimistic”, SSP5-8.5, SSP3-7.0, SSP2-4.5, SSP1-2.6 and SSP1-1.9.
Even the IPCC agrees with you that the “most catastrophic” emissions pathway is actually a “counterfactual” figment of the scenario producers imaginations.
Unless, of course, the “pledges” — from the original 2015/6 NDCs, not the 2020/1/2 ones for COP-26 that are supposed to be a “progression beyond [their current NDC] and reflect [their] highest possible ambition” — made by politicians about what their countries “will” do to reduce CO2 emissions “by 2050/2060” should be taken with a very large pinch of salt …
From the above article:
Who and who?
The worst part of the photo above is the large number of people enjoying the sunny beach. but I guess many people like warm sunny beaches.