Time to Ditch the IPCC's Models

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is back in the news once again, and John Robson of the Climate Discussion Nexus has a good post which looks back at whether the work they've produced over the years has withstood the test of time. The post -- entitled Can we finally toss the hot models? -- discusses a new paper by the Italian physicist Nicola Scaffeta which details which of the IPCC's climate models have most accurately predicted real world climatological activity over the past 40 years. First, on the models themselves:

[Scaffeta] begins by noting that the IPCC currently uses 41 climate models with the rise in absolute temperature due to doubling atmospheric CO2 (known in the trade as “Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity” or ECS) ranging from 1.8 to 5.7 °C. So let’s just pause right there and reflect that in the “settled science” of climate change the models currently being used by the IPCC differ in their projected warming response to CO2 emissions by more than a factor of three. Which seems like a lot.

At the high end, if atmospheric CO2 doubles it could cause almost 6°C of warming, which would be a big problem for the world. At the low end it would cause 1.8°C, which would barely even be noticeable. So the IPCC models say CO2 emissions pose either no problem or a big problem or somewhere in between. If that’s settled science, what would the unsettled kind look like?

But which of those 41 models has been the most accurate?

The answer is, the ones with the lowest ECS values. And if we say the projections for the future should come from the models that have done the best over the past, the global warming picture suddenly looks a lot less heated.

Unsurprisingly, the most accurate models -- those which have predicted the least warming over the past four decades -- also predict the least warming going forward. Robson's conclusion: "Chill out, we will adapt and cope with the small warming predicted by the best models. The real threat isn’t climate change, it’s climate policy."

WaPo Wonders: Is 'Climate Change' Good?

One of our mantras at The Pipeline has always been "Climate changes. Always has, always will." Which is to say, we've never denied that modern-day weather patterns are different—even significantly different—than those in ages past. In fact, we've written quite a bit about the Roman and Medieval warming periods, as well as the Little Ice Age, of the 16th through 19th centuries. We've looked into the benefits of warming (the expansion of the Roman Empire and the building of the great cathedrals of Europe coincide with the Roman and Medieval warming periods) and even of an elevated concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (which have contributed to record-setting crop yields throughout the world). Which is to say, in general we don't dispute the underlying scientific data, just the questionable conclusions drawn from it.

So it is nice to see the mainstream media acknowledging, however begrudgingly, that we have a point. For instance, the Washington Post recently published an article by Harry Stevens entitled, "Will global warming make temperature less deadly?" The piece begins by mentioning a 2021 study which found that between the years "1991 and 2018... more than one-third of deaths from heat exposure were linked to global warming." Stevens notes that this study received a great deal of attention at the time: "hundreds of news outlets covered the findings." But a follow-up paper got a lot less coverage:

A month later, the same research group... released another peer-reviewed study that told a fuller, more complex story about the link between climate change, temperature, and human mortality. The two papers’ authors were mostly the same, and they used similar data and statistical methods. Published in Lancet Planetary Health, the second paper reported that between 2000 and 2019, annual deaths from heat exposure increased. But deaths from cold exposure, which were far more common, fell by an even larger amount. All told, during those two decades the world warmed by about 0.9 degrees Fahrenheit, and some 650,000 fewer people died from temperature exposure.

While the findings aren't necessarily conclusive—he points to the relatively short time horizon of twenty years—Stevens notes the finding that "on every continent, cold deaths surpassed heat deaths," and finds the authors' conclusion plausible: “The results indicate that global warming might slightly reduce net temperature-related deaths in the short term.” The conclusion itself contains a certain amount of hedging, perhaps because they're concerned about providing aid and comfort to "climate deniers," as they like to call us.

Gaia's just fine, thanks.

Stevens, too, is concerned about the way this result will be interpreted on right-wing Twitter, which is why he pivots to an economic study about the disproportionate impact of global warming on the world's poorest nations. According to that study, "Niger, one of the poorest and hottest countries in the world, is projected to suffer the largest increase in temperature-linked mortality, while cold, wealthy Finland sees the largest decrease."

But this is a non-sequitur. As Hot Air's David Strom points out in his discussion of this study, "Niger is facing this possible future not primarily because it will get a bit hotter, but because it is so poor." (It is also located in Africa instead of near the Barents Sea.) To avert that country's (projected) fate, it makes much more sense to help stabilize its governance and improve its economy than to, say, ban gasoline engines and natural gas heating everywhere else in the world.

Still, a win is a win. The leftists at the Washington Post are willing to grant us that there are some serious benefits to the climate's inevitable changes. This is something for our side to celebrate.

Where did the '97 Percent' Claim Come From?

John Robson, the Canadian historian and journalist who runs the Climate Discussion Nexus, has put out an updated version of CDN's most popular video. The video, which has more than 1 million views on YouTube, debunks the dishonest claim that, in the words of Barack Obama, "Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: climate change is real, man-made, and dangerous." Virtually none of that statement is accurate, but it continues to be parroted by the Thunbergian activist class, and by journalists of all stripes, even those who should know better. Here's an excerpt, which examines the sleight of hand at the heart of the "97 percent" claim:

In 2009, a pair of researchers at the University of Illinois sent an online survey to over 10,000 Earth scientists asking two simple questions: Do you agree that global temperatures have generally risen since the pre-1800s? and Do you think that human activity is a significant contributing factor? They asked some other questions too, but didn’t report the questions or results in the publication. They didn’t single out greenhouse gases, they didn’t explain what the term “significant” meant, and they didn't refer to danger or crisis.

So what was the result? Of the 3,146 responses they received, 90 percent said yes to the first question, that global temperatures had risen since the Little Ice Age, and only 82 percent said yes to the second, that human activity was a significant contributing factor. Interestingly, among meteorologists only 64 percent said yes to the second, meaning a third of the experts in the study of weather patterns who replied didn’t think humans play a significant role in global warming, let alone a dominant one. What got the most media attention was that among the 77 respondents who described themselves as climate experts, 75 said yes to the second question. 75 out of 77 is 97 percent.

OK, it didn’t get any media attention that they took 77 out of 3,146 responses. But that’s the key statistical trick. They found a 97 percent consensus among 2 percent of the survey respondents. And even so it was only that there’d been some warming since the 1800s, which virtually nobody denies, and that humans are partly responsible. These experts didn’t say it was dangerous or urgent, because they weren’t asked.

Furthermore:

Another survey appeared in 2013, by Australian researcher John Cook and his coauthors, in which they claimed to have examined about 12,000 scientific papers related to climate change, and found that 97 percent endorsed the consensus view that greenhouse gases were at least partly responsible for global warming. This study generated headlines around the world, and it was the one to which Obama’s tweet was referring. But here again, appearances were deceiving.

Two-thirds of the papers that Cook and his colleagues examined expressed no view at all on the consensus. Of the remaining 34 percent, the authors claimed that 33 percent endorsed the consensus. Divide 33 by 34 and you get 97 percent. But this result is essentially meaningless, because they set the bar so low. The survey authors didn’t ask if climate change was dangerous or “manmade.” They only asked if a given paper accepted that humans have some effect on the climate, which as already noted is uncontroversial....

So a far better question would be: How many of the studies claimed that humans have caused most of the observed global warming? And oddly, we do know. Because buried in the authors’ data was the answer: A mere 64 out of nearly 12,000 papers! That’s not 97 percent, it’s one half of one percent. It’s one in 200.

Be sure to watch the whole thing and share it with your non-insane friends:

The Late, Great Planet Earth?

Jason Riley had a good piece recently in the Wall Street Journal reminding us of the environmentalist movement's continual predictions of impending doom over the past half century, catastrophes which never seem to come to pass.

The modern green movement dates to the 1960s and apocalyptic predictions have long been the coin of this realm. In 1967, brothers William and Paul Paddock wrote “Famine 1975!” In 1968, Paul Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb” declared that “the battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death despite any crash programs embarked upon now.”

These works shocked our ruling class on both sides of the aisle. Riley mentions in particular President Nixon's convocation of the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future, chaired by John D. Rockefeller III, grandson of the founder of Standard Oil, father of the former Democratic senator. The commission found that as the U.S. population grew, "More droughts, famines and pollution were in store. Energy shortages, mineral depletion and deforestation were inevitable. Higher poverty rates and fewer job opportunities were unavoidable."

Of course, Riley goes on, the commission got it exactly wrong:

The U.S. population now numbers more than 330 million, up from around 200 million in 1970. Yet Americans breathe cleaner air and drink cleaner water than they did 50 years ago. Poverty rates are lower, obesity is a bigger problem than hunger, and the current unemployment rate if anything reflects a labor shortage.

He goes on to point to the contemporary environmentalist movement's usage of language which is almost indistinguishable from their 1960's script, but deployed against their present-day enemies such as CO2 emissions. These include predictions of famines and droughts, despite the fact that, according to Riley,

Since the 1960s the global production of food calories has risen dramatically and can easily satisfy the nutritional needs of everyone on the planet. And since 1980 the world-wide number of annual deaths from famine has been 90 percent to 95 percent lower than the first half of the 20th century.

He might have mentioned the fact that this increase might not be in spite of, but because of, carbon emissions. Dr. Caleb Rossiter of the CO2 Coalition has argued convincingly that increased concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere has significantly increased crop yields over the course the past century.

In any event, pointing out the unrealized predictions of their movement is unlikely to win over any actual environmental activists. That's because, says Riley, "ideological environmentalism isn’t about following the data and the science." What it is about is "frightening others into accepting [their] way of thinking," giving them the power of "curtailing the freedom of other people to make decisions for themselves and live their lives as they see fit." But hopefully pointing out their failures will be enough to make normal people wary of signing on to their program. After all, you can only cry wolf so many times before people stop believing you.

Supply and Demand Will Undo the Great (Climate) Reset

He was up to page six. Please don’t make me read any more, Australia’s Minister for Energy and Emissions Reduction, Angus Taylor, pleaded with his senior advisers. Laying ahead, another twenty-nine pages of the turgid thirty-five-page Summary for Policymakers, heading the latest IPCC assessment report.

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Pity the policymakers to which the summary is aimed.  Even green activists in the backroom might be rendered comatose after half a dozen pages. “Non-climatic human-induced factors exacerbate current eco-system vulnerability to climate change,” is just a taste of the verbiage. On and on it goes, full of stodge and fugue, signifying nothing but a fiery end lest we mend our ways.

Issued on 28 February, this latest report on the ‘impacts of and adaption and vulnerability to climate change’ emerged from Working Group 2. This follows a report on the ‘physical science’ from WG 1 in August last year. WG 3 will report on ‘mitigation’ in early April. A ‘synthesis’ report will issue in September.

We are in the midst of an intermittent IPCC torrent of climate-change hysteria. Only war, or resurgent Covid or other Chinese plague, or rampant inflation and recession, or Joe handing the baton to Kamala, has the potential of taking it off the front pages in the months ahead.  Any possibility of good news? Sorry folks, wrong epoch.

Turn out the lights, the party's over.

Still, be not too despondent, a super hero in the guise of economics might yet save the day. You don’t say. How so?  A segue.

I’m treasurer of my local church and banked the cash offertories the other day. You’re $21 short, the teller said. Sure enough, I’d forgotten the loose change in my pocket which added up to exactly $21. Arithmetic can’t be fooled around with. Indigenous, feminist, transgender arithmetic. You name it, two plus two is still four. Those of the green Left must hate it. Science, on the other hand, is embraceable. It is manipulable.

Whether it’s Covid or "climate change," the science can be exactly what they choose it to be. Their science becomes the science. Everything else is unscientific; the province of cranks.

Debauchment of the methodology of science? Sure. But the contestability of science makes it hard to disprove their science. In other words, unlike arithmetic, while there might be a right answer, it’s darned hard to pin it down.

Thus, perhaps man-made CO2 will result in uncomfortable temperature increases. It’s a theory. And, so far as the green Left is concerned, the central question is whether a theory, however tenuous, fits the narrative; truth be damned. If it does fit, and like a glove, it’s converted from theory into axiomatic truth. Deniers of the science (of “the truth”) are summarily marginalised and cancelled. End of story.

Works every time it's tried.

Thankfully, it’s not the end of the story. Enter economics. Economics is termed one of the soft sciences compared with the hard sciences of physics and chemistry and the like.  It’s not so soft. At least one of its central underpinnings isn’t. To wit, supply and demand. Let’s put aside the so-called science of "climate change." Economics has nothing to say about it. However, it has everything to say about the supposed solutions. And it has the exactitude of arithmetic; and applies universally under whatever political regime you care to envisage.

Supply and demand govern the practical world. We experienced that in the supply-chain issues which saw prices rising and supermarket shelves emptied. And we see it when obstacles are put in the way of developing the West’s oil and gas supply; when Russian oil and gas is cut off or, these days, when the wind doesn’t blow.

In the capitalist world prices brings supply and demand into balance.  In the communist world corruption, special favours, rationing and the black market do the job; though much less beneficially. But the job is done. It’s part of human nature to abhor unrequited demand and junk excess supply. To more IPCC blather:

Energy generation diversification, including with renewal energy resources and generation that can be diversified depending on the context (e.g., wind, solar, small scale hydroelectric) and demand side management (e.g., storage and energy efficiency improvements) can reduce vulnerabilities to climate change, especially in rural populations (high confidence).

Look hard, and you can detect the need to match demand with supply in there somewhere. But it rests on a hope and a prayer. Whether pumped hydro, and/or green hydrogen, and/or some other yet undiscovered technological solution, can ever fill the gaping gaps when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine is entirely speculative, at best.

Origin Energy one of Australia’s major power companies recently announced it was closing Australia’s largest coal power plant (Eraring in New South Wales) seven years ahead of schedule; by August 2025. “We have a belief in decarbonisation,” CEO Frank Calabria pronounced. And its reported (fanciful) replacement: large-scale batteries, virtual powerplants, buying in renewable power and gas peaking plants. Meanwhile modern life and its demand for affordable and reliable electricity goes on unabated. There’s gonna be a reckoning.

The Great Reset guys would like to change the nature of men and women to square the circle. Make us (not them, mind you) more satisfied with less, in the cause of the “common good.” Listen in on their ideal post-Great-Reset conversation:

“Have to freeze tonight, Edith,” her husband explained resignedly, “the wind’s dropped again.”

“It’s all for the common good Archie, Herr Schwab says so,” Edith replied submissively, as she shivered under layers of blankets.

Good luck bringing that about. My conclusion. Supply and demand will undo the Great (climate) Reset.  If not a return to coal, oil and gas, then the door will be open wide to nuclear. As for electrifying transport, there’s been rapid growth but from a nothing base.

Various numbers abound. The biggest number I could find is that electric cars make up one percent of cars on the road. One in 250 was another estimate. Whatever is the small percentage, the percentage of miles travelled by electric vehicles will be far smaller. Multiply it all up to meet the dreams of the Climateers, and the practicalities of supplying vast quantities of electricity and exotic materials kick in. Finis fabula.

U.N. Climate Report: Cloudy, with No Chance of Silver Linings

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has come forth with a new sixth Assessment Report: Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. In it the IPCC pretends science can predict what is impossible to predict: the variables in something as complex as climate. (If something is impossible to predict it is not based on science).

The IPCC's solutions are no better than its science. Given the IPCC’s leftist political orientation it ignores the data which show that increases in available energy sources and capitalism demonstrably lift more boats and improve the environment faster and more substantially than handing over money to government agencies and restricting conventional energy production.

The proposals the IPCC advances require a lot of fast and fancy footwork to obscure the fact that they can’t withstand close scrutiny:

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Wildfires

The section on the effect of climate change on wildfires begins with an assertion that in the Amazon, Australia, North America and Siberia wildfires are burning wider areas than in the past and human-caused climate change has driven the increases in the forests of western North America but, that “elsewhere, deforestation, fire suppression agricultural burning, and short-term cycles like el-Nino can exert a stronger influence than climate change.” It’s of a piece with claims made earlier by others, including NASA, and just as false.

In fact, bad land-management policies in western North America are a more significant driver of wildfires than anthropogenic climate change.  Depending on moisture content, most fuels must reach ignition temperatures between 644°F (340°C) and 795°F (440°C) to start a fire. The IPCC report makes the same mistake that NASA earlier made:

Stronger winds are more dangerous in part, because they transport larger embers. Small embers lack adequate energy to raise fuels from ambient temperatures of 70°F or 90°F to an ignition temperature of 644°F and higher. More so, the 2°F increase in global air temperatures since the Little Ice Age, increases the fuel’s temperature insignificantly and thus highly unlikely to increase 'the likelihood of a fire starting, or increasing the speed at which it spreads' as NASA claimed.

Reduction in both fire -uppression policies and the creation of fire breaks are a more likely driver of western wildfires. The warmer dry periods in these areas cannot be sufficient to reduce the humidity inside trees so as to affect wildfires: “From a global warming perspective, if relative humidity is kept constant during California’s rainless summers, for every 2 °F increase in temperature anomalies, calculations estimate that moisture content will only decrease by a rather insignificant 0.056% .” In any event the drier air is more closely related to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), the el Nino and la Nina events over which man has no role. Historically, wildfires increased in the southwest when “let it burn” policies were instituted; and ice cores reveal that “maximum fire activity in boreal forests occurred during the Little Ice Age between 1500-1700 AD and was attributed to the failure of Asian monsoons about which, again, man has no control and as to which he had no impact.

Dr. Jon Keeley, a U.S. Geological Survey scientist who researched the topic for four decades was clear: “We’ve looked at the history of climate and fire throughout the whole state [of California] and through much of the state, particularly the western half of the state, we don’t see any relationship between past climates and the amount of area burned in any given year.”

 Every politician, every environmental group and every scientist trying to scare up more funding by uncritically blaming wildfires on CO2- induced climate change are not only ignoring good published science, but they’re also pushing wrong remedies and downplaying the correct remedies needed to benefit society and our environment. Better managed landscapes that control fuel supplies, and the re-introduction of fires via prescribed burns, will create more effective firebreaks and more healthy open habitat that coincidentally also increases wildlife diversity.

I cannot fathom the motives of the IPCC authors of this section but if one were to suggest it was to cover the rear end of California governor Newsom and his blinkered forest management policies, you’d be hard pressed to refute that. Of course, given the overall tenor of the report one might as well suspect the idea is to enrich Third World countries at our expense under the guise of preventing a disastrous climate change.

Trust us.

Plastics

As if there weren’t enough U.N. generated, we’re-all- going- to- die scenarios, it has added plastic pollution to its doomsday tallies. Representatives of 175 nations at the U.N. committed to creation of a plastic treaty that would not only deal with recycling, but as well to the production of plastics. They hope to get it written by 2024, which I suppose gives us some breathing room in which legislative virtue-signalers can further beset us with limitations on useful products.

 “We are making history today,” said Espen Barth Eide, Norway’s climate and the environment minister and president of the United Nations Environment Assembly, which took place for the past week in Nairobi, Kenya. In an earlier interview, he said that, given Russia’s war in Ukraine, it was particularly significant that “this divided world can still agree on something, based on science.”

Based on science? The effort seems, like much in the IPCC report, short on the concepts of human ingenuity and mitigation. Locality after locality in the United States has jumped on the band wagon, banning plastic straws, and banning or taxing shopping bags. For what end, besides virtue signaling and grift? (As in the District of Columbia where the tax on plastic grocery bags supposedly to clean up the Anacostia River went to fund a project by the council member who proposed it and when, having left the council, now heads the non-profit which has nothing to do with cleaning up the river?)

Ninety percent of the plastics in the ocean come from ten rivers, and those rivers are all in Asia. In descending order, the waterways are the Citarum River in Indonesia, the Yangtze River (China), the Indus River (Pakistan), The Yellow River (China), the Hai River (China) the Ganges River (India), the Pearl River(China) the Amur River (China and Russia) , the Niger River( 5 African countries), the Mekong River (China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam).

Most of these countries have several things in common: They are poor or have substantial numbers of poor citizens and are generally poor managers of their public spaces and community hygiene. You can bet that, just like China and India’s exemption from international carbon emissions controls, they will angle for and receive exemption in this yet-to-be devised treaty . Claims that richer nations have fobbed off the environmental degradation caused by plastics by shipping off plastic trash to such countries, ignores the benefit to them and the environment of recycling this material.

Import of plastic waste in lower-income countries like these also has been associated with growth in gross domestic product. It seems a great deal of the plastic waste shipped there from places like the United States and Britain are recycled and used instead of virgin materials to make useful products. That  process results in fewer carbon emissions and  ocean pollution. It’s an economical practice which uses less fossil fuels, the climate-change advocates' bogeyman. For a time, the used plastics from the U.S. and Britain were sent to China, but because of scandals involving mixing toxic waste into these plastics and dumping instead of reprocessing them, China stopped allowing their importation. Naturally, the doomsters believed this would only add to ocean pollution. Instead, it went to even poorer Asian countries where recycling it has been evolving into big business. There people such as Seah Kian Hoe, who as a kid used to collect scrap door-to-door for reuse now employs 350 people to run Heng Hiap Industries one of the top five plastic recycling businesses in his country which processed tons of waste per year.

There's gold in them thar bottles.

It's labor-intensive work and like clothing manufacturing takes less skilled workers and less capital. It’s a normal national economic progression. Such work is done in poorer countries and as they get richer they can hire more skilled workers, invest in more advanced technologies, and they can use those technologies to simplify and increase production, improve workers health and safety, and reduce pollution.

Heng Hiap Industries works with over 28,000 domestic plastic recyclers to buy and convert plastic scraps into high performance resin before selling it to clients that include top South Korean appliance manufacturers and Japanese automotive companies… By digitally transforming its plastic recycling operations, Heng Hiap aims to collect more and better-quality plastic by extending its collection infrastructure beyond informal collectors and grassroots recyclers, all the way to the household level, through a simplified and user-friendly collection process. In the long term, the plastic recycling company envisions creating a truly circular economy for plastics by helping its business-to-business (B2B) customers address the growing pressure from eco-conscious consumers for greater transparency and traceability.

This is not a new phenomenon. We’ve seen over and again how capitalism, ingenuity, and adaptability all combine to lift poor nations up. And higher GDP correlates with better environmental practices. In other places, we’ve seen poor countries go from labor-intensive but capital-short clothing manufacturing to such things as chip manufacturing in a very short time. As the process of recycling plastic has gone from low-level Chinese recycling to countries like Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand, we are seeing improved infrastructure, products,  returns for  both the manufacturers and the customers of the end products, and the environment.

The 'Science' of Climate Hysteria

There are two sorts of societies that embrace mass civil hysteria: those that are stable and secure, and those that inherently unstable. In the first case, mass hysteria can be employed as a political tool because the institutions of a stable society are strong enough to endure the exercise. In the second, mass hysteria doesn’t matter because the wheels have already come off.

Lately, we've been treated to a modern version of the former phenomenon, as leftist politicians and their minions in the legacy media described the January 6, 2021 protests in Washington as “an insurrection” and equated the importance of January 6, 2021 to December 7, 1941 and September 11, 2001. Personally, I found the actual attack on the Capitol that occurred on March 1, 1971 more troubling than the protesters who showed up a couple of months short of thirty years later, but that’s probably just me. Some people are obviously as frightened by fake Viking caps as they are by actual explosives.

That theme is such a feature of American society today and there is no better example of how important the tool of hysteria has become among the ruling class than their continuing, unrelenting efforts to normalize the idea that we’re suffering a “climate crisis.”

Sidebar before we move on. The chances are that I know a great deal more about how atmospheric science works than 99 percent (or more) of the people who will read this piece. I’m quite certain that is true if you compare my personal understanding of the physics, the thermodynamics, the chemistry and a whole bunch more the complex interactions that define atmospheric science than, say, Al Gore, or Bill Nye, or Greta Thunberg, or Joe Biden, et al.

On the other hand, I freely admit that I’m not an actual climatologist like alarmists Michael Mann and Phil Jones, nor like skeptics Roy Spencer and Judith Curry. However, I do believe that my generally more-informed opinion is worth a lot more in the scheme of things than that of clueless politicians, naïve kids, and mechanical engineers who exercise their Constitutional right to offer opinions about issues they don’t actually understand.

The basic problem here is that some guys fall in love with their research. It’s a common disease in the scientific community, one that “consensus” breakers from Copernicus, through Einstein, through George Lemaître have battled (look up the last my friends, he’s a modern day hero who transcends the supposed barrier between science and faith). For the alarmist to even consider, much less address, the idea that their predictions may be even slightly off equates, in many (if not most) cases to admitting they might have screwed up, invalidating much of what they said and wrote over the past years.

How many of us can deal with the concept of admitting the last couple of decades of our work is useless, or at best questionable? Not many. Sure as hell I don’t want to think about my forty-some year career as an exercise in futility. But everybody – me included – has to come to grips with the idea that there are certain intellectual paths that are worth exploring, but are ultimately dead ends, and that’s a good thing.

Edison: try, try again.

To paraphrase Edison, he didn’t spend years failing to figure out how an electrically powered lightbulb could work. He rather spent those years defining how an electrically powered lightbulb can’t work. The same should be true, but sadly is not, when we consider the populist “climate-crisis” message more than thirty years after it was first proposed as a clear and immediate danger.

Many conservatives and libertarians consider the “climate crisis” in solely political terms. This view holds that the leftists and their mainstream media allies are pushing an agenda they know to be untrue, for malicious political ends. I disagree. I don’t argue with the idea that the left’s agenda is largely untrue and largely motivated by malicious political ends. But I do believe there is a significant portion of sincerity in the fear of the future expressed by many who believe there is a “climate crisis.” I don’t demonize such people, I simply believe they are wrong.

Here's an example. Next time somebody tells you that “scientists agree” that carbon dioxide is creating catastrophic changes in earth’s climate, ask them a simple question: why isn’t December 21 the coldest day of the year in the northern hemisphere? The winter solstice occurs every December 21. During that day the northern hemisphere receives less sunlight than any day of the year. If carbon dioxide acted as a blanket, as countless You Tubers have tried to demonstrate using heat lamps and carboys filled with carbon dioxide, wouldn’t it make sense that the day with the least sunlight should be the coldest?

As anyone who grew up in a northern climate knows, the coldest months are January and February, when the days are longer and the amount of solar energy received is greater than on December 21. What does this tell us?

It tells us the climate science is a whole lot more complicated than two inputs. There’s a bunch of factors that come into play which make the months following the winter solstice the coldest each year. I’m not using this simple logic experiment to claim that carbon dioxide has no effect on the climate, but to point out that it's but one of many variables that the climate models wrestle to properly represent.

You cannot, in other words, draw a direct correlation between carbon dioxide concentrations and heat retention in the atmosphere, no matter how much the alarmist’s PR folks want to push that message down our throats. It’s a helluva lot more complicated than that, which is something all scientists can actually agree on.

Science Ain't What it Used to Be

The year 1905 is referred to as Albert Einstein's Annus Mirabilis. In that twelve-month span Einstein published four papers which revolutionized our understanding of the laws of physics. The titles of those papers are as follows: First, "On a Heuristic Viewpoint Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light;" Second, "On the Motion of Small Particles Suspended in a Stationary Liquid, as Required by the Molecular Kinetic Theory of Heat;" Third, "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies;" and last of all, "Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?"

Don't worry -- I will not attempt a gloss of any of these essays, nor any discussion of "special relativity" or that most famous of equations (first proposed in the final paper) E = mc2. I mention them only to point out that, once upon a time, scientific papers were generally about science. Nowadays, well, not so much.

This is the thought that occurred to me as I read through a new paper out of Cornell University by Mark Lynas, Benjamin Houlton, and Simon Perry, entitled "Greater than 99 percent consensus on human caused climate change in the peer-reviewed scientific literature." As the title suggests, the object of the paper is to demonstrate the tired old talking point that 99 percent of scientists accept the supposed scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change.

Everybody agrees!

According to the abstract, "questions over the scientific consensus of the role of human activities in modern climate change continue to arise in public settings," (might this have something to do with the fact that one side of the debate cites it constantly?) the authors have decided to demonstrate said consensus "by searching the recent literature for papers [skeptical] of anthropogenic-caused global warming." They compiled 88,125 "climate-related papers" published since 2012, "examine[d] a randomized subset of 3000" of those papers, and searched them for keywords which would suggest that they are, in fact, skeptical of the standard environmentalist argument. As fewer than one percent met the criteria, the authors concluded,

[W]ith high statistical confidence that the scientific consensus on human-caused contemporary climate change—expressed as a proportion of the total publications—exceeds 99 percent in the peer reviewed scientific literature.

This, it needs hardly be said, is not science. Science is, in the words of Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, a method for testing "empirical theories through controlled investigation." "Scientific knowledge," he goes on, "is always, at least in theory, subject to further disproof by further experiment." This is why appeals to "consensus" ring so hollow --the sheer number of scientists doesn't matter at all. What matters are their arguments, and an engagement with the actual arguments of skeptics is notably lacking here. So notably in fact that the authors feel compelled to point it out: "An in-depth evaluation of [the] merits [of the skeptical papers] is outside the scope of this paper." To which one must reply, 'then what does your paper contribute to this discussion?' Almost nothing, except that it enables gullible journalists to claim that, according to a new paper, 99 percent of scientists agree. This whole project was in the service of future headlines.

The science is settled, Albert.

There's more to be said on this topic -- we could cite the work of Princeton physicist and self-described climate "heretic," Freeman Dyson, who passed away last year, or the more recent work of Michael Shellenberger and Bjørn Lomborg (the latter of whom once had a pie thrown at him by the lead author of this paper for his climate skepticism), who've done yeoman's work pushing back on the scientists who thoughtlessly accept environmentalist readings of the data at hand. We might even mention the gobs of money pumped into climate science every year with the implicit understanding that it will go towards demonstrating that we're doomed.

But it will suffice to say that Albert Einstein's papers were, in fact, a major deviation from the consensus of his day. We're all richer for his having dared to disagree.

Well, It Certainly Does Suck

Boondoggles on top of boondoggles. That's all I could think while reading this piece at The Daily Mail, with the following headline: "World’s biggest 'carbon-sucking' machine is switched on in Iceland: $15 million device will capture 4,000 tons  of CO2 per year and could help 'reverse climate change.'"

The world's biggest carbon-sucking machine, billed as a tool to reduce climate change, has been switched on in Iceland. The $15 million (£10.8 million) 'direct air capture' (DAC) machine, created by Zurich-based company Climeworks, launched on Wednesday at the Hellisheiði Power Station, Iceland. Called Orca, it will capture 4,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) per year as part of efforts to reduce levels of the greenhouse gas in the atmosphere – equivalent to the annual emissions from about 790 cars.

Seven hundred and ninety cars, eh? So we just need to build about 400,000 of these things to cover the roughly 300 million cars we have in the United States! And at $15 million a pop, we'd only have to double our national debt, more or less, to pay for them.

But how can we get bogged down with dollars and cents like this when the fate of the planet is on the line?! Just hand over the check book and let the experts go to work. It's an emergency, dammit! That's certainly the position of the guys who sell these things. "The cost per ton of Orca is perhaps less important than what we will learn," said Climeworks CEO, Jan Wurzbacher.

The company stressed the importance of climate capture following 'unprecedented extreme weather events' that have dominated the news headlines this year. It referred to the recent UN climate panel report – dubbed 'a code red for humanity' – which said global warming had caused an unparalleled melting of glaciers and was close to spiralling out of control. 'The report further confirms that it is crucial to reduce our emissions drastically and remove unavoidable and historic carbon dioxide emissions from the air permanently,' said Climeworks.

Of course, it doesn't take much effort to refute the claims Wurzbacher and others are making. For one thing, as we covered at the time, the IPCC report, despite some heated rhetoric (for which they're famous) was rather less dire than the frenzied headlines would have you believe. For another, the "unprecedented extreme weather events" aren't so unprecedented, and they only seem more frequent and extreme because of the twenty-four hour news cycle and the ubiquity of social media.

So, while I do sort of admire the chutzpah of Mr. Wurzbacher & Co., I think we'd all be better off if they moved on to new scam.

Of Coin Flips and 'Climate Change'

Heads I win, tails you lose. That might as well be the motto of the left these days, and not least of its Green flank.

For instance, it has become a commonplace that whenever anyone anywhere jokes during winter that global warming sounds nice right about now, for leftist condemnation to come in hot and heavy. As Eric Felton reminds us, when Donald Trump tossed off a one-liner to that effect during a speech on a frigid day in 2019, he was bitterly mocked by environmentalists. Anthony Leiserowitz of Yale's project on climate change communication (yes, such a thing does exist) said that the then-president's comment was "scientifically ridiculous and demonstrably false," adding,

There is a fundamental difference in scale between what weather is and what climate is. What's going on in one small corner of the world at a given moment does not reflect what's going on with the planet.

Good to know. But its hard not to notice that whenever it suits their purposes Greens will unreflectively sling bowls of hot, steamy, anecdata with the best of them. Have you noticed that you hear more about hurricanes during hurricane season these days? Climate change! Still wearing shortsleeves on Halloween? Climate change! Catch the news about that big tornado down south? Climate change!

As noted college drop-out and rich guy Derek Jeter said at Davos a few years ago, "[W]e’re seeing more and more natural disasters each year... Something has to be causing it.” Something other than the 24 hour news cycle and the rise of social media, I think he means.

Felton has a helpful evaluation of this summer's hottest example of this observation bias, the heat wave that hit the Pacific Northwest which saw temperatures consistently exceeding 100ºF. In a piece for RealClear Investigations, he discusses an organization called World Weather Attribution, "a group organized not just to attribute extreme weather events to climate change, but to do so quickly." While the heatwave was still ongoing, WWA put out a statement claiming that they'd analyzed the data and that the extreme weather would have been “virtually impossible without human-caused climate change.”

Considering their mission statement, it's hard to label this conclusion a shocker. But their claim of scientific objectivity gave cover to virtually every mainstream media outlet to confidently report that the heat was attributable to climate change. So saith the science!

Science!

Or saidth -- until a climatologist named Cliff Mass took the time to actually look through the data himself and came to an entirely different conclusion. Mass happens to be an expert in the weather of the Pacific Northwest -- he has actually written a book entitled 'The Weather of the Pacific Northwest' -- and his own weather models accurately predicted the heatwave.

According to Felton, Mass's modeling suggested that "global warming might have been responsible for two degrees of the near 40-degree anomaly. With or without climate change, Mass wrote, the region 'still would have experienced the most severe heat wave of the past century'." In short, the true culprit was the environmentalist movement's least favorite -- “natural variability.”

Mass made it a point to call out the shoddiness of World Weather Attribution's analysis, and they responded to his critique, saying that his report was "misleading and incorrect." But Felton notes that, after the release of Mass's study, WWA's statements on the topic were much more cautious and equivocating.

Let us all be inspired by their belated humility. Caution is king, at least where climate science is concerned. Better to be cautious than embarrassed when someone comes along and checks your work.