Some Thoughts on Our DOE Report Regarding CO2 Impacts on the U.S. Climate

…we are the “Red Team”; the “Blue Team” has had their say since the late 1980s.

From Dr Roy Spencer’s Global Warming Blog

Roy Spencer

PREFACE: What follows are my own opinions, not seen by my four co-authors of the Dept. of Energy report just released, entitled A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate. Starting sometime tomorrow, the comment docket at DOE will be open for anyone to post comments regarding the contents of that report. We authors will read all comments, and for those which are substantiative and serious, we will respond in a serious manner. Where we have made mistakes in the report, we will correct them. That is the formal process for adjudicating these issues. Regarding the informal process, tomorrow I expect we will agree on how to handle media requests to respond to objections from the few “climate alarmist” scientists that journalists usually turn to for such comments. To those journalists I would say: read our report, as journalists used to do; you might be surprised to learn a lot of the published science does not support what the public has been led (by you) to believe.

Yes, Increasing CO2 Causes a Warming Tendency in the Climate System… So What?

In my experience, much of the public has splintered into tribal positions on climate change: We either believe increasing CO2 (mainly from fossil fuel burning) has no effect, or we believe it is causing an existential crisis. There are a smaller number of individuals somewhere in the center (climate independents?)

But there is a lot of room between those two extremes for the truth to reside. Among other things, our report presents the evidence supporting the view that (1) long-term warming has been weaker than expected; (2) it’s not even known how much of that warming is due to human greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions; (3) there are good reasons to believe the warming and increasing CO2 effects on agriculture have so far been more beneficial than harmful to humanity; (4) there have been no long-term changes in severe weather events than can be tied to human GHG emissions; and (5) the few dozen climate models now being used to inform policymakers regarding energy policy are not fit for purpose.

Those models, even after decades of improvement, still produce up to a factor of 3 disagreement between those with the least warming and with the most warming (and ALL produce more summertime warming in the critically-important U.S. Corn Belt than has been observed). How can models that are advertised to be based upon “basic physical principles” cause such a wide range of responses to increasing CO2?

And there are many more than those 5 elements contained in our report; those are just my favorites as I sit here thinking at 4:30 a.m.

One of the things we did not delve into was costs versus benefits of energy policies. Clearly, the politically popular switch to energy sources from only wind and solar involves large tradeoffs. If it were not so, there would already be a rapid transition underway from fossil fuels to wind and solar. Yes, those “renewable” sources are growing, and becoming less expensive. Yet, global energy demand is growing apace. But there are practical problems which make ideas such as “Net Zero emissions” essentially impossible to achieve. Maybe that will change in the distant future, who knows? I personally don’t really care where our energy comes from as long as it is abundant, available where it is needed, and is cost-effective. But I won’t buy an EV until it can transport me 920 miles in 14 hours during winter.

But I digress. Yes, recent warming is likely mostly due to increasing CO2 in the atmosphere. But is this necessarily a bad thing, in the net? Cold weather kills far more people than hot weather. Increasing CO2 is causing global greening and contributing to increased agricultural yields. These are things that need to be part of the national conversation, and things our Report begins to address.

Virtually everyone on Earth endures huge changes in weather throughout the year, with as much as 130 deg. F swings in temperature. Can we really not adapt to 2 or 3 degrees more in the yearly average?

Sure, if we can “fix” the “problem” without sending us back to the Stone Age, then do it. But the public has been grossly misled about what that would entail in terms of human suffering (energy is required for literally everything we do), and they have been grossly misled about how much climate change has actually occurred. Read the report.

Why Would Climate Science Be Biased Toward a Specific Outcome?

I’m old enough to remember when climate change meant the global cooling resulting from particulate pollution in the atmosphere. And there was a lot of that pollution as late as the 1970s. In the 1960s during my family’s car trips between Iowa and Pennsylvania, every pass through Gary, Indiana was dreaded. You could see maybe one or two blocks away, because there was so much industrial pollution. I could not understand how anyone could live in those conditions.

Then the EPA was formed in 1970. Messes were cleaned up, on land, in the air, and in our waterways. We came to believe any environmental problem we created could be fixed.

Then we had the ozone depletion scare. With the Montreal Protocol signed in 1987 the countries of the world agreed to gradually phase out production of chlorinated compounds that are believed to cause destruction of the protective ozone layer in the stratosphere.

Finally came the Big Kahuna of manmade pollution: Carbon Dioxide, and fears of global warming. By the late 1980s the U.N. formed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to evaluate the science of greenhouse gases and how they affect the climate system. Large amounts of federal funds went into this new area of science.

In the early 1990s I visited Robert (Bob) Watson at the White House who was Al Gore’s science advisor on environmental matters. Bob, a stratospheric chemist, was instrumental in getting the 1987 Montreal Protocol established. In that meeting, Bob remarked on the formation of the IPCC something to the effect of, “We are now regulating ozone-depleting chemicals, and carbon dioxide is next”.

I was astounded that the policy goal had already been decided, and now all we needed to do was to fund enough science to support that goal. That was how I interpreted his statement.

In the early years the IPCC was relatively unbiased in its assessments, and conclusions were tentative. All scientists, whether climate alarmists or skeptics, were allowed to participate. But as the years went by, those with skeptical viewpoints (e.g. John Christy) were no longer invited to participate as lead authors of IPCC report chapters.

Other scientists simply chose to stop participating because their science was being misrepresented (e.g. Chris Landsea from the National Hurricane Center, who thought the hurricane data did not support any human influences.)

Today, global warming is big business. According to Grok, since 1990 the U.S. Government has spent $120-$160 Billion on climate change research. As one of the NASA instrument lead scientists on “Mission to Planet Earth”, I was also a beneficiary of that funding, and most of my funding over the years has come from climate-related appropriations.

So, why is climate science biased? First, when we decided that essentially 100% of research funding would come from the government, we put politicians (and thus policy goals) either directly or indirectly in charge of that funding.

Second, Congress only funds problems to be studied… not non-problems. As President Eisenhower warned us in his 1961 farewell address, these forces could lead to a situation where “public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite”.

That has now happened. We now have a marching army of scientists (myself included) whose careers depend upon that climate funding, and possibly trillions of dollars in renewable energy infrastructure in the private sector dependent upon the whims of government regulation and mandates. If the climate change threat were to disappear, so would the government grants and regulations and private investments.

As they say, follow the money.

I used to say there are two kinds of scientists in the world: male and female. (Now I’m probably not even allowed to say that). My point was that scientists are regular people. They have their own opinions and worldviews. I went into a science field because I thought science had answers. How naive of me. I should have been an engineer, instead. In the field of climate science (and many other sciences) two researchers can look at the same data and come to totally opposite conclusions. Your data can be perfect, but what the data mean in terms of cause and effect is often not obvious. With engineering, either it works or it doesn’t.

We proved this cause-vs-effect conundrum in the context of climate feedbacks (positive feedbacks amplify climate warming, negative feedbacks reduce it) back in 2011 in this paper. We showed that natural variations in clouds, if not accounted for, can make the climate system seem very sensitive (lots of warming) when in fact it is insensitive (little warming).

The morning that (peer-reviewed) paper appeared in the journal Remote Sensing, the journal editor publicly apologized for letting it be published and was (we believe) forced to resign. Who forced him? Well, from the Climategate emails we get a hint: as it was revealed by one of the “gatekeepers” of climate publications, “[name redacted by me] and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”

That same morning I was called by a particle physicist who heard all of this news and said something to the effect of, “What’s wrong with you climate guys? We have people who believe in string theory and those who don’t, but we still work together”. We both laughed over the divisive nature of climate science compared to other sciences.

Which tells you there is more than science — and even more than money — involved in the disagreement. Every environmental scientist I have ever met believes Nature is fragile. That is not a scientific view, but it is a view that colors how they interpret data, and then what they tell environmental news reporters as it is passed on to the public.

Finally, wouldn’t everyone like to work on something that can make a difference in the world? And what higher calling could there be than to Save the Earth™?