OPINION2 - Climate Change Crisis: Real or Fake News

On December 26, 2018 I posted a blog article titled “Earth’s Climate:  The First 4.54 Billion years,” my interpretation of the history of the Earth’s climate up to today, as a basis for discussing the current and future climate and Man’s role in it.  For continuity and context, I include my conclusions from the earlier article:

The Earth’s climate has changed dramatically and often turbulently over its 4.54-billion year history.  The many influences on environmental change include the planet’s fiery birth, destructive asteroid impacts, violent volcanic action, reversals of Earth’s magnet field polarity, relentless movement of continents, surface and sea-level deforming ice ages, earth-warming greenhouse gases, depletion of the protective ozone layer, and extinction events. Earth has managed to not only survive these climate influences and the resulting climate changes, but has seen the birth and evolution of extensive plant and animal life, including Man. 

There are many unknowns or uncertainties in the historic climate change process.  The multiple critical climate influences are complicated individually and are often interrelated in even more complex ways that we do not yet fully understand, as we study them on a slow-paced multi-hundreds-of-million-year geologic time scale.

Scientific “Consensus”

To get started, let me try to summarize the so-called “scientific consensus” of the current state and direction of Earth’s climate change.

For over three decades, there has been growing concern about unnatural global warming and climate change.  The chart below captures this concern, showing “rapid warming” of the earth in the industrial era, tracking atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases that “are the highest in history.”

Gases that trap heat in the atmosphere are called greenhouse gases, the most important of which is carbon dioxide because of its dominant proportion and persistence in the atmosphere.  It is believed that the primary driver of increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is due to humans burning fossil fuels (coal, natural gas, and oil), solid waste, trees, and wood products.

Climatologists have used this data to spur concern about global warming and climate change.  Temperature increases are shown in degrees Centigrade above the average temperature in the 20th century of 13.7 degrees Celsius (56.7 degrees Fahrenheit).  (Courtesy of NASA)

A huge government and academic infrastructure has blossomed to analyze the Earth’s climate and identify means to mitigate negative effects.  Thousands of studies published in journals imply that 97 percent or more of actively publishing climate scientists agree that “climate-warming trends over the past century are extremely likely due to human activities.”  Two hundred world-wide organizations have issued public statements agreeing.

The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded in their fifth assessment report in 2014:

“Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia.  The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, and sea level has risen.”

“Human influence on the climate system is clear, and recent anthropogenic [human-caused] emissions of greenhouse gases are the highest in history.  Recent climate changes have had widespread impacts on human and natural systems.”

“Increasing magnitudes of [global] warming increase the likelihood of severe, pervasive, and irreversible impacts.”

The U.S. Global Change Research Program, in its Fourth National Climate Assessment in 2017, reported:

“It is extremely likely that human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse gases, are the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20^th century.”

“Thousands of studies conducted by researchers around the world have documented changes in surface, atmospheric, and ocean temperature; melting glaciers; diminishing snow cover; shrinking sea ice; rising sea levels; ocean acidification; and increasing atmospheric water vapor.”

The predicted effects (some already evident today) of continued rising greenhouse gas levels include melting of the polar icecaps, dramatically rising sea levels,  massive coastal flooding, ocean acidification, reduced snowpack affecting water resources, heavier rainfalls, stronger and more intense storms including hurricanes and tornadoes, more droughts and heat waves, more large forest fires, spread of deserts, wasted agricultural land affecting the world’s food supply, compromised food safety due to evolving bacteria in warmer environments, and increased susceptibility of animals to disease from stronger bacteria and molds and thus increasing the likelihood of humans contracting diseases from animals.

Efforts are recommended to mitigate climate change effects in areas such as alternative energy production; increased energy efficiency and regulation in industry and municipalities; increased energy efficiency transportation; green building standards; reduced energy consumption infrastructure and spatial planning; and increased agriculture land management, and reduced deforestation. Associated with these efforts would be changes in individual consumption patterns:  driving less, switching to higher efficiency cars, using mass transit, buying longer-lasting products, and reducing food waste.  It is generally accepted that all levels of national and local government would have to be involved in such an ambitious and costly program.

Climate Alarmist Predictions Have Been Consistently Wrong

Climate alarmists have seriously damaged their climate-crisis case with scary, totally inaccurate prognostications.  Glacial melting and rising sea levels are one example:  In the late 1980s, the UN claimed that if global warming were not checked by 2000, rising sea levels would wash entire countries away. In 2006, politician Al Gore, backed by well-known climate scientist, James Hansen, famously predicted in his book, An Inconvenient Truth, that sea levels could rise twenty feet in the near term.  About the same time, Peter Wadhams, a professor of Ocean Physics at the University of Cambridge, predicted a global disaster from the demise of Artic sea ice in four years. … In fact, in the last few decades, the Arctic ice sheet has been only modestly shrinking, while the Antarctic ice sheet has actually been growing.  The pace of sea level rise has remained relatively constant and modest as the global earth temperature gradually rises.

As to predictions of severe economic consequences from increasing severe storms and floods and agricultural losses, the facts are that severe storms, especially hurricanes and tornadoes, are becoming less frequent and severe, with no increase in flooding events in rivers and streams, and with U.S. and global agriculture reaching crop production records.

Over the last couple of decades, various scientists, politicians, and organizations have predicted that we are reaching “a point of no return” in climate management, and that once passed, it would be too late to save the planet.  All of these “no return” points have been passed with no apparent consequences.

Ignoring Geological History

In none of the “consensus” data that I’ve reviewed so far is there any mention of Earth’s climate history, except to find the last time period that matches today’s atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.  These climate scientists seem to believe that the Earth was born one day before the Industrial Revolution.

Here are a few facts to help establish a climate change time perspective: 

The Earth is 4.54 billion years old.

The figure below shows the last 600 million years of Earth’s climate history and that for the last 250 million years (while plants, animals, and Man were developing and flourishing), atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have ranged between 2,000 ppm (160 million years ago) and 195 ppm (20,000 years ago).  During the same period, average global temperature varied between 50-75 degrees Fahrenheit, with no apparent cause and effect relationship.  In fact, there are geological periods with rising carbon dioxide levels and global cooling, and periods of low levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide and global warming.

For the last 65 million years, Earth has been drying and cooling, culminating in the last ice age beginning about three million years ago and continuing today.  Within this ice age, we are currently in the middle of the fifth cyclic warming period (alternating with cooler glacial periods) that began about 11,000 years ago.

Carbon dioxide concentration in the Earth's atmosphere and the average global temperature over the last 600 million years.  (Courtesy of Paul Macrae)

Significant additions of carbon dioxide to the Earth’s atmosphere from Man’s activities began in about 1880, only 139 years ago.  How can we pretend to know how a 139-year “blip” in greenhouse gas additions will affect the Earth’s climate that has been undergoing turbulent climate change for hundreds of millions of years?

Climate alarmists point to recent global warming.  But, isn’t the Earth supposed to be warming these days, in the middle of a natural warming period between glacial periods?  Aren’t glaciers (polar ice sheets) supposed to be melting and sea levels supposed to be rising due to additional ocean water from melting ice?  

Climate change alarmists are asking us to ignore hundreds of millions of years of Earth’s climate history and the long-term natural dynamics that affect climate change.

Climate Science is Not Settled

Because of the constant barrage of confident prognostications from climate change alarmists, many people think that “climate science is settled.”  That’s absurd; nothing could be further from the truth.

Science is never settled.  In one of its own documents, the IPCC cautions that:

“Technically, a “consensus” is a general agreement of opinion, but the scientific method steers us away from this to an objective framework.”

But as Dr. Judith Curry, prominent climatologist, who switched from climate warming advocate to skeptic in 2009, told the U.S. Congress in 2015: 

“In their efforts to promote their cause, the scientific establishment behind the global warming issue has been drawn into the trap of seriously misunderstanding the uncertainties associated with the climate problem.  This behavior risks destroying science’s reputation for honesty.  It is this objectivity and honesty which gives science a privileged seat at the table.  Without this objectivity and honesty, scientists become regarded as another lobbyist group.”

Dr. Curry has characterized Earth’s climate system as a highly complex dynamic system, with no simple cause and effect, where the climate shifts naturally in unexpected ways.  She cautions against rampant overconfidence in an overly simplistic theory of climate change and establishment attempts to stifle scientific and policy debates.

Over 31,000 scientists have signed on to a petition saying humans aren't causing global warming.  There are tens of thousands of well-educated, mainstream scientists who do not agree that global warming is occurring at all and people who share their opinion are taking a position grounded in science.

As a reminder of past instances of spectacularly wrong scientific theories, I offer the following:

Geocentric Universe:  The concept that the Earth was at the center of the universe, with the Sun, Moon and other heavenly bodies orbiting Earth, dates from at least 600 BC.  Disproven in 1543 by Nicolas Copernicus.

Miasmatic Theory of Disease:  The concept that diseases were caused by a noxious form of “bad air.”  Disproven in the late 1800s with the germ theory of disease.

Luminiferous Ether:  The theory that a medium of ether pervaded the universe through which light could propagate.  Disproved by the Michelson-Morley experiment in 1887.

Global Cooling:  In the 1970s a significant proportion of climatologists predicted near term global cooling with dire threats of a new ice age.

Flawed Climate Models

Stanford’s Hoover Institution Think Tank Fellows, David R. Henderson and Charles L. Hooper, writing on “Flawed Climate Models” in 2017, reported that in order to bolster their climate-changing case, climatologists have turned to building “elaborate computer models that use physics to calculate how energy flows into, through, and out of our planet’s land, water, and atmosphere.”  The Hoover authors assessed that “these models have serious limitations that drastically limit their value in making predictions and in guiding policy.”  The problems have to do with measurement errors (e.g. temperatures from weather stations) used as inputs to the models, the Sun’s prodigious energy “swamping” the relatively small estimated energy from excess carbon dioxide, and inadequate modeling of climate-important clouds and their effects.  Confirming modeler focus on only the short time period of global warming involving humans, the writers point out the common practice of “parameter adjustment or tuning … until climate models match a known 20^th century temperature or precipitation record,” thereby raising issues of objectivity.  Finally, the authors point out the long track record of inaccurate climate model predictions and the caution that we may not understand the Earth’s climate system well enough yet to make accurate forecasts for the future.

Other writers have assessed climate change computer models in even stronger terms.  Borrowing from Townhall columnist John Hawkins, “5 Scientific Reason That Global Warming Isn’t Happening,”

“There's an old saying in programming that goes, ‘Garbage in, garbage out.’ In other words, if the assumptions and data you put into the models are faulty, then the results will be worthless. If the climate models that show a dire impact because of global warming aren't reliable - and they're not - then the long term projections they make are meaningless.”

The Hoover Institution makes another critical observation that he relationship between atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and average global temperature across geological periods (see above) is complicated and not well understood. 

Why the obsession with modeling the only last 139 years, with no attention paid to the much broader geological problem that may be driving climate change today?

Politics is Polluting Reason

The politics of climate change dates back to several conferences in the late 1960s and the first World Climate Conference in 1979.  Here are a few other significant milestones:  1987 saw the signing of the international Montreal Protocol for protection of the Earth’s ozone layer.  The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was formed in 1988 to assess the risk of climate change.  In 1990 the U.S. Global Change Research Program was implemented to coordinate and integrate federal research on changes in the global environment and their implications for society.  In 1997 the Kyoto Protocol international treaty was implemented that committed signing states to reduce greenhouse gases. 

Even religious leaders tried to support the climate change movement.  In May 2015, in his second encyclical, Pope Francis lamented environmental degradation and global warming, and called all the people of the world to take “swift and unified global action.”

Even religious leaders added to the politics of climate change.

In December 2015 the international Paris Agreement was negotiated by 196 state parties to deal with greenhouse-gas-emissions mitigation.  But this Agreement, under which the nations of the world are supposed to operate into the future, is “toothless.”  As recently deceased Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote in a 2014 piece on “The Climate Pact Swindle,”

“What’s the structure to sustain and verify the agreement?  Where are the benchmarks?  What are the enforcement mechanisms?  This is just a verbal promise.  Nothing more.”

Note:  In 2001 U.S. President George W. Bush withdrew from Kyoto negotiations because the agreement would "harm our economy and hurt our workers."   He also objected to the fact that the Protocol - which had been ratified by only one of the countries necessary before it could go into effect - still "exempts 80 percent of the world...from compliance."  In 2017 President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Agreement saying it “imposed wildly unfair environmental standards on American businesses and workers.”

As the climate establishment struggles to implement meaningful greenhouse gas emission mitigations, it also is actively stifling research into “if,” “why,” and “how” global warming occurs.  President Barack Obama, in his 2014 State of the Union address, talking about new sources of energy, said,

“The shift to a cleaner energy won’t happen overnight, and it will require tough choices along the way.  But the [science of global warming] debate is settled.  Climate change is real.” 

But as Charles Krauthammer, in another 2014 column, pointed out about this emphatic statement from our political leader, “Anyone who disagrees is then branded ‘anti-science.’  And better still, a ‘denier.’”  Climatologist Judith Curry agrees with Krauthammer and goes further saying, that what we have today is “enforcement of a politically-motivated, manufactured ‘consensus’ and “activism and advocacy for their [climate scientists] preferred politics and policy,” with “public attacks on other scientists that do not support the ‘consensus.’”  This situation, according to Curry, leads to establishment climate scientists “self-promotion and ‘cashing in.’” 

Many activist groups have added to the “noise” around climate change alarm, supporting the climate change establishment, and lobbying for climate change mitigation action.  These groups include 350.org, 1Sky, Focus the Nation, The Climate Project, Alliance for Climate Protection, and StopGlobalWarming.org.  Coalitions of these groups have formed to strengthen their efforts and some have even mounted climate campaigns to increase their influence. 

The mainstream media, always eager to cover and spread alarmist stories, has amplified climate change problems beyond reason.

It seems to me that these political issues make fertile ground for non-objectivity, including exaggerations, fudged data, computer model tuning to get the desired result, fake news, and outright fraud.

Conclusions

I wrote this article as much for myself as for anyone else.  I wanted to assess the climate change crisis for myself and come to my own conclusions.

Here’s what I think I learned:  The scientific “consensus,” though certainly intimidating, has been reached in haste - much more research and analysis is required - and the bandwagon of supporters are like sheep heading for the proverbial “cliff.”  The climate establishment’s infrastructure is overblown, pretentious, and self-serving.  Climate alarmist predictions have been arrogant and generally wrong.  Climatologists are blindly ignoring hundreds of millions of years of geological dynamic climate change history, probably containing insights of drivers for today’s climate, and while focusing only on the Man’s contribution to greenhouse gases in the industrial age; therefore climate science is not settled - far from it.  There are many complex climate change issues, interrelationships, and uncertainties to get a handle on.  Today’s computer models and their climate-descriptor inputs are inadequately understood and introduce too many obscuring measurement errors to provide meaningful predictions of long range climate change.  And finally, political pressure from scientists, politicians, and religious leaders threatens to bury critical issues and cause the countries of the world to spend trillions of dollars and limit personal freedoms in pursuit of solutions to an ill-defined problem.

Once again, I find myself agreeing with Charles Krauthammer, who, referencing the recent additions of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, summed it all up with the following:

“We don’t know nearly enough about the planet’s homeostatic [stabilizing] mechanisms for dealing with it, but prudence would dictate reducing CO2 emissions when and where we can.”

One final thought:  It may be that the “problem” from recent and continuing higher greenhouse gas emissions, from humans burning fossil fuels, is self-limiting.  The figure below is physicist L. David Roper’s estimate of fossil fuel use and depletion over the next few centuries, showing that in about 300 years, all fossil fuels will be fully depleted and thus carbon dioxide emissions from that source will essentially cease, requiring of course that the Earth needs to develop alternative sources of energy by then.

Fossil Fuels may be depleted in 300 years, easing greenhouse gas effects in Earth's atmosphere.  (Courtesy of L. David Roper)