February 1, 2022
Dear Friends and Family,
Welcome to the first epilogue of the Climate Change additional learning. This epilogue, as do the next four, builds on the
original Climate Change series of 2018.
Climate Science is not an easy subject to understand, as it is complex with multiple affecting aspects, many of which are changing over time. One of the authors, whose book was utilized for most of the excerpts of this epilogue, is an eminently qualified scientist and the second author is a lifelong environmental activist and journalist who has won awards for his scientific writing and an expert reviewer for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Their qualifications are contained below. The excerpts which follow provides the conclusions of each of the researchers on climate science. The PDF which can be accessed at the end of the epilogue contains not only the conclusions, but also the technical work which supports the conclusions.
My Takeaways:
In a nutshell, the scientist concludes there is science which supports some human induced climate change effects via fossil fuel burning but the true effect is unsettled, counter to all the media and political hype that concludes the science is decidedly settled. Further both authors conclude the potential of the human effect on the climate is way overblown as this epilogue, as well as epilogues 2 and 3, will address. Interestingly, solutions exist to mitigate such potential impacts other than reducing the human creation of such emissions, i.e., reduced fossil fuel burning. These will be contained in epilogue 5. Epilogue 4 presents the Climate Change Advocates position as articulated by the framers of the Paris Climate Accord.
Next: Epilogue 2 is titled “Apocalypses?” which focuses on the realism of climate change creating extreme weather conditions.
Happy Learning,
Harley
Dear Friends and Family,
Welcome to the first epilogue of the Climate Change additional learning. This epilogue, as do the next four, builds on the
original Climate Change series of 2018.
Climate Science is not an easy subject to understand, as it is complex with multiple affecting aspects, many of which are changing over time. One of the authors, whose book was utilized for most of the excerpts of this epilogue, is an eminently qualified scientist and the second author is a lifelong environmental activist and journalist who has won awards for his scientific writing and an expert reviewer for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Their qualifications are contained below. The excerpts which follow provides the conclusions of each of the researchers on climate science. The PDF which can be accessed at the end of the epilogue contains not only the conclusions, but also the technical work which supports the conclusions.
My Takeaways:
In a nutshell, the scientist concludes there is science which supports some human induced climate change effects via fossil fuel burning but the true effect is unsettled, counter to all the media and political hype that concludes the science is decidedly settled. Further both authors conclude the potential of the human effect on the climate is way overblown as this epilogue, as well as epilogues 2 and 3, will address. Interestingly, solutions exist to mitigate such potential impacts other than reducing the human creation of such emissions, i.e., reduced fossil fuel burning. These will be contained in epilogue 5. Epilogue 4 presents the Climate Change Advocates position as articulated by the framers of the Paris Climate Accord.
Next: Epilogue 2 is titled “Apocalypses?” which focuses on the realism of climate change creating extreme weather conditions.
Happy Learning,
Harley
CLIMATE CHANGE 2 - SEGMENT 1
STAGING THE DEBATE - EXCERPTS
INTRODUCTION:
From: Unsettled by Steven E. Koonin (2021)
I am a scientist – I work to understand the world through measurements and observations, and then to communicate clearly both the excitement and the implications of that understanding. Beginning in 2004, I spent about a decade turning those methods to the subject of climate and its implications for energy technologies. I did this first as chief scientist for the oil company BP and then as undersecretary for science in the Obama administration’s Department of Energy, where I helped guide the government’s investments in energy technologies and climate science.
Policy makers and the public may wish for the comfort of certainty in their climate science. But I fear that rigidly promulgating the idea that climate science is “settled” demeans and chills the scientific enterprise, retarding its progress in these important matters. Uncertainty is a prime mover and motivator of science and must be faced head-on.
I am increasingly dismayed at the public discussion of climate and energy. Climate alarmism has come to dominate United States politics, especially among Democrats, where I have otherwise long felt most comfortable politically. The 2020 Democratic presidential primary saw each candidate trying to outdo the other with over-the-top statements about “climate emergency” and “climate crisis” increasingly divorced from science. Not surprisingly, the Biden administration has made climate and energy a major priority, with the appointment of former secretary of state John Kerry as climate envoy and proposed spending of almost two trillion dollars to fight this “existential threat to humanity.” Trillion-dollar decisions about reducing human influences on the climate are, in the end, about values: risk tolerance, intergenerational and geographical equities, and a balance among economic development, environmental impact, and energy cost, availability and reliability. But they must be informed by an accurate understanding of scientific certainties and uncertainties. This book is an attempt to set us on the road to that understanding.
Much of the public portrayal of climate science suffers from an effort to persuade rather than inform. Based on my familiarity with assessment reports and literature I would offer this statement.
STAGING THE DEBATE - EXCERPTS
INTRODUCTION:
From: Unsettled by Steven E. Koonin (2021)
I am a scientist – I work to understand the world through measurements and observations, and then to communicate clearly both the excitement and the implications of that understanding. Beginning in 2004, I spent about a decade turning those methods to the subject of climate and its implications for energy technologies. I did this first as chief scientist for the oil company BP and then as undersecretary for science in the Obama administration’s Department of Energy, where I helped guide the government’s investments in energy technologies and climate science.
Policy makers and the public may wish for the comfort of certainty in their climate science. But I fear that rigidly promulgating the idea that climate science is “settled” demeans and chills the scientific enterprise, retarding its progress in these important matters. Uncertainty is a prime mover and motivator of science and must be faced head-on.
I am increasingly dismayed at the public discussion of climate and energy. Climate alarmism has come to dominate United States politics, especially among Democrats, where I have otherwise long felt most comfortable politically. The 2020 Democratic presidential primary saw each candidate trying to outdo the other with over-the-top statements about “climate emergency” and “climate crisis” increasingly divorced from science. Not surprisingly, the Biden administration has made climate and energy a major priority, with the appointment of former secretary of state John Kerry as climate envoy and proposed spending of almost two trillion dollars to fight this “existential threat to humanity.” Trillion-dollar decisions about reducing human influences on the climate are, in the end, about values: risk tolerance, intergenerational and geographical equities, and a balance among economic development, environmental impact, and energy cost, availability and reliability. But they must be informed by an accurate understanding of scientific certainties and uncertainties. This book is an attempt to set us on the road to that understanding.
Much of the public portrayal of climate science suffers from an effort to persuade rather than inform. Based on my familiarity with assessment reports and literature I would offer this statement.
The earth has warmed during the past century, partly because of natural phenomena and partly in response to growing human influences. These human influences (most importantly the accumulation of CO2 from burning fossil fuels) exert a physically small effect on the complex climate system. Unfortunately, our limited observations and understanding are insufficient to usefully quantify either how the climate will respond to human influences or how it varies naturally. However, even as human influences have increased almost fivefold since 1950 and the globe has warmed modestly, most severe weather phenomena remain within past variability. Projections of future climate and weather events rely on models demonstrably unfit for the purpose.
Source: Unsettled by Steven E. Koonin (2021)
From: Apocalypse Never by Michael Schellenberger (2020)
I have been an environmental activist for 30 years and researched and written on environmental issues, including climate change, for 20 of them. I do this work because I care deeply about my mission to not only protect the natural environment but also to achieve the goal of universal prosperity for all people. I care about getting the facts and science right. I decided to write Apocalypse Never after getting fed up with the exaggeration, alarmism, and extremism that are the enemy of a positive, humanistic, and rational environmentalism.
In November and December 2019, I published two long articles criticizing climate alarmism. I did so in part because I wanted to give scientists and activists, including those whom I criticized, a chance to respond or correct any errors I might have made in my reporting before I published this book. Both articles were widely read, and I made sure the scientists and activists I mentioned saw my article. Not a single person requested a correction. Instead, I received many emails from scientists and activists alike, thanking me for clarifying the science. One of the main questions I received was whether some alarmism was justified in order to achieve changes to policy. The question implied that the news media aren’t already exaggerating. Consider a June Associated Press article one of many apocalyptic articles that summer about climate change.
Source: Apocalypse Never by Michael Schellenberger (2020)
From: Unsettled by Steve E. Koonin (2021)
“CLIMATE CHANGE” vs. A CHANGING CLIMATE
Human influences remained quite small as late as 1950, when they were less than one-quarter of what they are today. Variations in the climate before 1950, then, show that other phenomena must have been at play, if not dominant, since the earth actually cooled a bit between 1940 and 1980 even as warming human influences grew. And since those natural variations are presumably still present, it is vitally important to understand them if we’re to have confidence in attributing even part of the recent warming to human influences, much less project how the climate will change in the future.
Past variations of surface temperature and ocean heat content do not at all disprove that the 1.0 degree C rise in the global average surface temperature anomaly since 1880 is due to humans, but they do show that there are powerful natural forces driving the climate as well, and they illuminate the scientific challenge of understanding those natural influences well enough to confidently identify the climate’s response to human ones. In other words, the real question is not whether the globe has warmed recently, but rather to what extent this warming is being caused by humans.
Human-emitted CO2 is a relatively small add-on to a vast natural cycle of carbon moving among the earth’s crust, oceans, plants, and atmosphere. Our addition to that cycle will increase for decades under any scenario. But despite the precision claimed by climate models, the impact of this on the climate is highly uncertain. Let’s start at the beginning. The earth formed 4.5 billion years ago with a fixed endowment of carbon. The largest reservoir by far is the earth’s crust (about 1.9 billion gigatons - Gt). The next largest amount is in the oceans (40,000 Gt), almost all of that far below the surface. Then that stored on land in soils and living things (about 2,100 Gt) and 5,000 – 10,000 Gt in fossil fuels underground.
Powerful natural processes move the earth’s carbon among those reservoirs, often by changing its chemical form. The most important of these processes is the seasonal flow of about one-quarter of the atmosphere’s carbon to the surface as plants grow using photosynthesis to turn atmospheric CO2 into organic matter – then return that carbon back to the atmosphere through animal respiration and as their organic matter decays. Other, much slower, processes move carbon from the oceans’ surfaces into their depths and then ultimately into rock, such as the limestone and marble that form from the shells of marine creatures.
The CO2 emitted by burning fossil fuels disrupts the balance of this great annual cycle, since that carbon has been pulled out of the deep underground, where it was isolated from these natural processes. The amount of carbon that fossil fuel adds to the cycle is currently about 4.5% of what flows each year. About half of that increase is taken up annually by the surface (the rising CO2 has increased vegetation over much of the planet), and the remainder stays in the atmosphere increasing its CO2 concentration. I don’t know of any expert who disputes that the rise in CO2 concentrations over the past 150 years is almost entirely due to human activities since there are five independent lines of evidence supporting that conclusion.
IPCC SCENARIOS
Because of the great uncertainties about the decades to come, instead of making precise predictions of future concentrations, the IPCC created a set of scenarios. These scenarios are not meant to be predictions, but rather are schematic descriptions of distinct, but plausible, future worlds. Computer modeling is central to climate science. The models help us understand how the climate system works, why it has changed in the past, and – most importantly – how it might change in the future. These models underpin the reports of the other UN working groups that assess the impacts of a changing climate on ecosystems and society. So … how good are our climate models?
Scientific computers are machines for doing arithmetic – they can store many, many numbers and can manipulate them at blinding speed. Since we have a very solid understanding of the physical laws that govern matter and energy, it’s easy to be seduced by the notion that we can just feed the present state of the atmosphere and oceans into a computer, make some assumptions about future human and natural influences, and so accurately predict the climate decades into the future. Unfortunately, that’s just a fantasy, as you might infer from weather forecasts, which can be accurate only out to two weeks or so. So, no matter how precisely we might specify current conditions, the uncertainty in our predictions grows exponentially as they extend into the future. More computer power cannot overcome this basic uncertainty.
Since the results generally don’t much look like the climate system we observe, modelers then adjust (‘tune”) these parameters to get a better match with some features of the real climate system. Although “tuning” sounds like a minor detail, as in “fine-tuning,” there isn’t anything “fine” or minor about it. It’s the process of adjusting the model to deal with troublesome inconsistencies or paper over some irksome uncertainties. And sometimes modelers are tuning sub-grid parameters in ways that aren’t based on the “knowledge” of the parameter, but rather are aimed at producing a desired result. In any event, it is impossible – for both practical and fundamental reasons – to tune the dozens of parameters so that the models match the far more numerous observed properties of the climate system. Not only does this cast doubt on whether the conclusions of the model can be trusted, it makes it clear that we don’t understand the features of the climate to anywhere near the level of specificity required given the smallness of human influences. So tuning is a necessary, but perilous, part of modeling the climate. An ill-tuned model will be a poor description of the real world, while over-tuning risks cooking the books – that is, predetermining the answer.
CONCLUSION
Today, TV weather presenters have morphed into climate and weather presenters, blaming a “broken climate” for many of the severe weather events that they cover. But the science tells a different story. Observations extending back over a century indicate that most types of extreme weather events don’t show any significant change – and some such events have actually become less common or severe – even as human influences on the climate grow. In general, there are high levels of uncertainty involved in detecting trends in extreme weather.
So, there is a lot to fret about in the climate modeling business. Apart from the computational challenge of simulations that can take months to run on even the world’s fastest computers, there’s the ambiguity in tuning, ill-quantified natural variability, and intricacies like the trade-off between greenhouse gas warming and aerosol cooling to contend with. No wonder we’ve got a poor understanding of how the climate will respond to rising greenhouse gas concentrations. The more we learn about the climate system, the more we realize how complicated it is.
Source: Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What it Doesn’t, and Why it Matters by Steven E. Koonin (2001)
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
From: Apocalypse Never by Michael Schellenberger (2020)
I have been an environmental activist for 30 years and researched and written on environmental issues, including climate change, for 20 of them. I do this work because I care deeply about my mission to not only protect the natural environment but also to achieve the goal of universal prosperity for all people. I care about getting the facts and science right. I decided to write Apocalypse Never after getting fed up with the exaggeration, alarmism, and extremism that are the enemy of a positive, humanistic, and rational environmentalism.
In November and December 2019, I published two long articles criticizing climate alarmism. I did so in part because I wanted to give scientists and activists, including those whom I criticized, a chance to respond or correct any errors I might have made in my reporting before I published this book. Both articles were widely read, and I made sure the scientists and activists I mentioned saw my article. Not a single person requested a correction. Instead, I received many emails from scientists and activists alike, thanking me for clarifying the science. One of the main questions I received was whether some alarmism was justified in order to achieve changes to policy. The question implied that the news media aren’t already exaggerating. Consider a June Associated Press article one of many apocalyptic articles that summer about climate change.
- Headline “UN Predicts Disaster if Global Warming Not Checked.”
- “Senior UN environmental official claims that if global warming isn’t reversed, then the sea levels could wipe entire nations … of the face of the Earth.”
- Crop failures coupled with coastal flooding could provoke and exodus of ‘eco-refugees’ whose movements could wreak political chaos the world over.”
- “Unabated the ice caps will melt away, the rainforests will burn, and the world will warm to unbearable temperatures.”
- “Governments have a ten-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before is goes beyond human control.”
Source: Apocalypse Never by Michael Schellenberger (2020)
From: Unsettled by Steve E. Koonin (2021)
“CLIMATE CHANGE” vs. A CHANGING CLIMATE
Human influences remained quite small as late as 1950, when they were less than one-quarter of what they are today. Variations in the climate before 1950, then, show that other phenomena must have been at play, if not dominant, since the earth actually cooled a bit between 1940 and 1980 even as warming human influences grew. And since those natural variations are presumably still present, it is vitally important to understand them if we’re to have confidence in attributing even part of the recent warming to human influences, much less project how the climate will change in the future.
Past variations of surface temperature and ocean heat content do not at all disprove that the 1.0 degree C rise in the global average surface temperature anomaly since 1880 is due to humans, but they do show that there are powerful natural forces driving the climate as well, and they illuminate the scientific challenge of understanding those natural influences well enough to confidently identify the climate’s response to human ones. In other words, the real question is not whether the globe has warmed recently, but rather to what extent this warming is being caused by humans.
Human-emitted CO2 is a relatively small add-on to a vast natural cycle of carbon moving among the earth’s crust, oceans, plants, and atmosphere. Our addition to that cycle will increase for decades under any scenario. But despite the precision claimed by climate models, the impact of this on the climate is highly uncertain. Let’s start at the beginning. The earth formed 4.5 billion years ago with a fixed endowment of carbon. The largest reservoir by far is the earth’s crust (about 1.9 billion gigatons - Gt). The next largest amount is in the oceans (40,000 Gt), almost all of that far below the surface. Then that stored on land in soils and living things (about 2,100 Gt) and 5,000 – 10,000 Gt in fossil fuels underground.
Powerful natural processes move the earth’s carbon among those reservoirs, often by changing its chemical form. The most important of these processes is the seasonal flow of about one-quarter of the atmosphere’s carbon to the surface as plants grow using photosynthesis to turn atmospheric CO2 into organic matter – then return that carbon back to the atmosphere through animal respiration and as their organic matter decays. Other, much slower, processes move carbon from the oceans’ surfaces into their depths and then ultimately into rock, such as the limestone and marble that form from the shells of marine creatures.
The CO2 emitted by burning fossil fuels disrupts the balance of this great annual cycle, since that carbon has been pulled out of the deep underground, where it was isolated from these natural processes. The amount of carbon that fossil fuel adds to the cycle is currently about 4.5% of what flows each year. About half of that increase is taken up annually by the surface (the rising CO2 has increased vegetation over much of the planet), and the remainder stays in the atmosphere increasing its CO2 concentration. I don’t know of any expert who disputes that the rise in CO2 concentrations over the past 150 years is almost entirely due to human activities since there are five independent lines of evidence supporting that conclusion.
IPCC SCENARIOS
Because of the great uncertainties about the decades to come, instead of making precise predictions of future concentrations, the IPCC created a set of scenarios. These scenarios are not meant to be predictions, but rather are schematic descriptions of distinct, but plausible, future worlds. Computer modeling is central to climate science. The models help us understand how the climate system works, why it has changed in the past, and – most importantly – how it might change in the future. These models underpin the reports of the other UN working groups that assess the impacts of a changing climate on ecosystems and society. So … how good are our climate models?
Scientific computers are machines for doing arithmetic – they can store many, many numbers and can manipulate them at blinding speed. Since we have a very solid understanding of the physical laws that govern matter and energy, it’s easy to be seduced by the notion that we can just feed the present state of the atmosphere and oceans into a computer, make some assumptions about future human and natural influences, and so accurately predict the climate decades into the future. Unfortunately, that’s just a fantasy, as you might infer from weather forecasts, which can be accurate only out to two weeks or so. So, no matter how precisely we might specify current conditions, the uncertainty in our predictions grows exponentially as they extend into the future. More computer power cannot overcome this basic uncertainty.
Since the results generally don’t much look like the climate system we observe, modelers then adjust (‘tune”) these parameters to get a better match with some features of the real climate system. Although “tuning” sounds like a minor detail, as in “fine-tuning,” there isn’t anything “fine” or minor about it. It’s the process of adjusting the model to deal with troublesome inconsistencies or paper over some irksome uncertainties. And sometimes modelers are tuning sub-grid parameters in ways that aren’t based on the “knowledge” of the parameter, but rather are aimed at producing a desired result. In any event, it is impossible – for both practical and fundamental reasons – to tune the dozens of parameters so that the models match the far more numerous observed properties of the climate system. Not only does this cast doubt on whether the conclusions of the model can be trusted, it makes it clear that we don’t understand the features of the climate to anywhere near the level of specificity required given the smallness of human influences. So tuning is a necessary, but perilous, part of modeling the climate. An ill-tuned model will be a poor description of the real world, while over-tuning risks cooking the books – that is, predetermining the answer.
CONCLUSION
Today, TV weather presenters have morphed into climate and weather presenters, blaming a “broken climate” for many of the severe weather events that they cover. But the science tells a different story. Observations extending back over a century indicate that most types of extreme weather events don’t show any significant change – and some such events have actually become less common or severe – even as human influences on the climate grow. In general, there are high levels of uncertainty involved in detecting trends in extreme weather.
So, there is a lot to fret about in the climate modeling business. Apart from the computational challenge of simulations that can take months to run on even the world’s fastest computers, there’s the ambiguity in tuning, ill-quantified natural variability, and intricacies like the trade-off between greenhouse gas warming and aerosol cooling to contend with. No wonder we’ve got a poor understanding of how the climate will respond to rising greenhouse gas concentrations. The more we learn about the climate system, the more we realize how complicated it is.
Source: Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What it Doesn’t, and Why it Matters by Steven E. Koonin (2001)
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
| cc_ep1l_long_climate_science.pdf |