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.
Does Bloomberg actually believe all the hogwash they publish or are they so ideologically blinded by their fixation on what they believe is correct and all other views wrong?
Living the low carbon lifestyle is for the little people.
I was hoping to find out what “smart people,” like most of the visitors to this site, get wrong. The Bloomberg article did not answer that. It seemed that their main point is if we do not understand something, like a change in weather patterns, we must fear it. That does not strike me as something “smart people” should do?
That reminds me of an article I’ve been meaning to write called: “What Smart People Get Wrong About Space Aliens, Zombies, and Demons”. For starters, you never really know which is which because of their shapeshifting abilities. It’s much, much worse than we thought.
What rubbish, Bruce!
Everyone knows that zombies are not shape-shifters. That’s primary school material.
And not all aliens shift shape, either. In fact, only 56.712% of alien species are mutamorphological, according to the latest poll of ancient alien theorists as reported on the History channel. So that’s like almost half. Don’t you believe in The Science ™?
It’s the demons we really need to worry about of course. They are invisible most of the time and models prove that there may be more demons today than at any time in the last 22 million years.
Shhesh, do you just throw things out without any evidence? If we want nonsense pulled out of hind quarters we have griff and Loydo for that.
So devastating that nobody can find any evidence of it.
Leftists have no use for education, police and the military.
The only people who disappear in the forest are the incredibly intelligent and the incredibly unintelligent. The rest of us have nothing to fear.
Same with global warming.
This reminds me of the classic Indonesian Wayang puppet shows which are local religious, superstitious / spiritual in nature. The puppet shows were performed to ward off unsuspecting intrusion or invasion of the spirit people… watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivNTjE53VsI
So one might conclude that the climate tree huggers are acting out spiritual shadow plays and in a sense that might be getting close … climate tree huggers lack the intellectual competence and ability to differentiate between what seems like it could be from what is scientifically verifiable in the sense of Popper, or Feinman i.e., following the Scientific Method of drawing conclusions vs. reacting on your feelings of risk avoidance. But also misrepresenting data to support one’s feelings about risk avoidance when one cannot draw conclusion is also known as scientific dishonesty and simply chasing a “cause” because it gives a sense of satisfaction or accomplishment … that’s not science and it is better called b**l s**l.
“New” weather patterns? That you don’t understand?
This is starting to sound like, the crystal ball says you will be in a car accident tomorrow, which will destroy your car. So you should trade in your old clunker today on a brand new car today to replace it. …? But wait, if the crystal ball is right, won’t I still be in a wreck tomorrow? So it will be my new car that gets destroyed, not my old clunker? Science Denier! Science Denier!!!
Alarmists would have us believe that in the last 150 years we have dangerously shifted the climate away from 10,000 years of relatively stable climate. The reality is the last 150 years have been one of the more stable climatic periods of the Holocene, because of less colder periods.
Earth-based climates are extreme, with irregular intervals of calm detachment. Let us bray (sic) that Gaia doesn’t plan (pun intended) to change her choice (pun intended) and deem life, human life, to be a “burden”, and in a depraved state of mind, pass summary judgment on the colorful clumps of cells that occupy Her.
What humans at all education levels get wrong frequently is straight-line thinking, but that is fundamentally wrong on a planet with cyclic climate.