My view, as I have mentioned before, is that climate change is real and probably in large part due to humans but that it will have both positive and negative effects of uncertain size, making both the size and the sign of the net effect uncertain.
I don't think anyone has yet disputed the point of the post, which was that the Dessler book is so bad that the fact it is used as an elementary textbook, now in its third edition, implies that the field it is in is in bad shape and its claims about climate change should not be relied on.
Another problem with the cost calculations for sea level rise is 100 years is a very long time in practical terms. Nearly every building in the flooded areas will have been replaced in that period, and since a gradual sea level rise will be obvious the entire time it is happening, entire cities can easily shift to higher ground in a gradual way, or even be lifted up as Chicago once was.
I was planning to get in on the climate change debate by first learning about climate science in an actual textbook for college students. I figured it was the best place to start to get a good grasp of what climate science is and what it actually says about the global warming, all without the biases you usually see in the media. There goes my plan…
I think my post should help by suggesting things to look out for in evaluating a textbook, most obviously the omission of positive effects. Also, the sort of analysis I did with the Florida claim, depending only on webbed information, is both fun and a useful exercise — see if you can find errors in the textbook.
When I was studying for my physics prelims, I largely did it by going through a draft textbook on the stuff covered by a physics prelim finding mistakes.
If the book lists positive as well as negative effects and doesn't have any false statements you can find, that's evidence that you can trust it. For some balancing information, you can look at my webbed chapters on climate (http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Ideas%20I/Ideas%20I_%20A%20Book%20from%20Blogs.html) or Bjorn Lomborg's work.
I'd still start there. No source is 100% reliable. But you need the basics, and you need them in mathematical form, starting with being able to do a back-of-the-envelop calculation of the net effect of a given level of each of the greenhouse gasses, along with how long they stay in the atmosphere. From there you can easily get to the effects of a given level of emissions.
This won't give you even simple second order effects, like effects of carbon dioxide levels on plant growth, let alone possible feedback effects, like melting of icecaps. With luck, a halfway decent textbook will have those too. (Make sure it's a textbook for potential majors in relevant STEM fields, not for the climate change equivalent of "computers for poets", which is likely to avoid even the simplest arithmetic.)
You still won't have the knowledge to understand current arguments among specialists, including whatever model a given group of scientists used to produce their latest published paper. Your guesstimates should have gigantic error bars. But that's still the only really useful place to start.
If you want to go beyond this (I gave up), it's time to start reading specialist papers, and everything that cites them. You'll probably need a lot of math, and a fair understanding of computer modeling. Be aware that unpopular results are less likely to be published - but at the same time, the best way for an academic to succeed (e.g. get tenure) is by finding holes in prior work.
If my experience is any sample, don't bother with MOOCs (online courses). They seem to pretty much all be "climate change for partisans", or at least for "poets", even when they claim otherwise. They are unlikely to be mathematical enough to be worth your time.
If you want to calculate how much longer it takes in the presence of greenhouse gases for an infrared photon emitted at sea level to reach the edge of space, your integral calculus had better be good, otherwise multiplication and division are all you need. There is so much data that you can have endless fun with sophisticated statistics, but they don't seem to prove anything. To test yourself, from the atomic weights of nitrogen, oxygen and argon calculate how many molecules there are, ignoring CO2 and water vapor, in a cubic centimetre of atmospheric gas at standard temperature and pressure. As I said, simple multiplication and division.
In writing "A Brief History of Time" Hawking was warned that every equals sign in the book would reduce sales by, I think, a half. He managed to keep it down to one. Although math is my highest specific IQ, I read Pop Science and enjoy it, The Whole Shebang, Consciousness Explained and How the Mind Works being at the limit of my comprehension. I became a climate skeptic after reading a story about David Evans, who produced incontrovertible evidence of falsification of the temperature record. I became aware that CAGW is a religion where everything is made up and the facts don't matter. But I'm a skeptic's skeptic and I don't believe many of the climate skeptic claims either. For example it's easy to calculate that a single cubic centimetre of atmospheric gas at STP contains 1E+15 CO2 molecules, which is quite a lot, and CO2 is far from the most abundant GHG. I can pick holes in most of the articles at WUWT. I'm waiting for further evidence of catastrophic warming, which is taking its sweet time to materialize.
Not all climatologists are inclined towards alarmism. Rather the contrary. I have not been involved in the world of climatology for 15 years but back then it was quiet common for climatologists to be what would today be called climate sceptics while at the same time doing research that indirectly benefited an alarmist narrative because that was the kind of research that the paymasters wanted.
I did write a Substack post about my (very limited) experiences as a climatologist last year:
In the beginning (1970's or so) there was Global Cooling. The earth would be getting cooler and then colder. Great Men (this was pre Woman's Lib) espoused plans to paint the Arctic black to increase heat absorption and help melt the ice. As well as other idiotic schemes.
Alas and alack the earth began to warm up. The good news was none of the idiotic schemes were put into practice.
Thus Global Cooling became Global Warming. The Arctic would melt. London would be underwater, NYC would be underwater, or most of it. There would be an end of skiing and snow would be a thing of the past.
Alas and alack none of this happened.
Soooo the Grand Poobah's decided too rebrand. What had been Global Cooling and then Global Warming became Climate Change and thus the reason for, well, everything.
A very hot summer? Climate Change. A very cool summer? Climate Change. A warm winter? Climate Change, A very cool summer? Climate change? Floods? Climate Change. Droughts? Climate Change. A lot of hurricanes? Climate Change. Fewer hurricanes? Climate Change. More tornadoes? Climate Change. Fewer tornadoes? Climate Change. Earthquakes? Probably Climate Change.
Normal weather and\or rainfall patterns? Climate Change, just not quite yet.
Old expression is that proof is in the pudding and so far none of the dire predictions have even remotely come true.
The National Park Service put up signs at Glacier National Park 20 years ago warning that the glaciers would be gone in 20 years. They had to take them down because the advancing glaciers were knocking them down. Mt. Everest would be barren in 30 years. Oops a slight miscalculation. Make that 300 years. Maybe. There is still snow. Turns out Global Warming (i.e. Climate Change) can lead to more snow as well as less snow. Sort of, maybe, it depends...
None of the major or minor predictions have come remotely close to happening. Just like all of the population predictions.
Oopsey.
What is most interesting is that no one has confronted Algore(one word) or Greta about failed predictions and pushed them on it.
The motto for Climate Change should be: Any day now, any day...it's a commin any day now, any day.
Dessler lives in Texas. Texas is hot. I would wager he has never been cold in his life, not *really* cold. Born in Houston, educated at Rice, M.A. Ph.D at Harvard (okay, it gets cold there, but not terribly so), worked on Wall Street (same for NYC), two years at NASA, 9 years at U of Maryland, now he teaches at TAMU.
People write about what they know, and what he knows is heat.
I agree with you that the climate change "debate" is well past the point where most of the contributions are reliable. Of course that's been true for a long time, and the bad faith contributions *probably* started with those paid by the oil industry. In any case, there's plenty of mud on all sides of this debate.
On the other hand, I think you need to stop narrowing your focus to direct effects on human beings living in the United States. Also, I see little point in beating a drum that says "(some) people who want to reduce climate change effects are mistaken or lying". We know that. Or at least, those of us who care about truth know that; the rest of us "know" that spokespeople for their own tribe are 100% accurate, just as the other tribe's spokespeople are 100% selfish liars. :(
I'd love to see what your formidable intellect came up with if you tried to evaluate all the evidence. You might well get farther than I have. (I've pretty much given up, since knowing the truth seems unlikely to have any effect on political decisions.)
If doing that, I'd pay attention to all the effects. Ocean acidification seems to be the effect most commonly ignored, both in estimates of likely consequences and in proposals for mitigation. If it merely (sic) reduces human-useful marine food production to zero, or by some lesser but still significant amount, then it should be considered with your computations of potential crop yields. If it also significantly impacts the amount of atmospheric oxygen - that's a rather different calculation. (And no, I don't mean just *statistical* significance.)
I don't know of any way of estimating the size of the effect of reductions in the pH of the ocean. If you or anyone else does, please tell me. I would be very surprised if they wiped out oceanic life, both because pH has varied in the past and because the relevant species mostly have short generations so can adapt pretty fast by evolution. But obviously I could be wrong.
My claim on the climate issue, like my claim about population growth fifty years ago, is a negative one — that we don't know if the net effects are bad or good. My positive claim is that if they are bad they are unlikely to be catastrophically bad (also unlikely to be eucatastrophically good). We know that global temperature has been much higher than it now is and that CO2 concentrations have been much higher, so I don't think any of the stories where climate change makes Earth unlivable should be taken seriously.
I not only think we don't know, my guess is that we can't and I am pretty sure I can't. As with my lab leak post, I am reluctant to trust any information that is second-hand and complicated enough so I have no way of checking it, given how much that I could check turned out to be bogus. So I am again limited to the sort of calculations that can be done with information generally agreed on or by treating as an upper bound an estimate by someone who would prefer a higher estimate. Thus I think it unlikely that Nordhaus or the IPCC are underestimating the scale of the effect due to bias, although they could just be making a mistake, because it's pretty clear that they are trying to make effects sound worse than their numbers imply, not better. That tells me which direction their bias is in.
Even if I didn't have the constraint of limited time, expertise, and sources of information, a lot of the costs are in the distant future and depend on technological change which we have no way of predicting. In _Future Imperfect_ I mostly limited myself to 30 years, on the grounds that beyond that things became too uncertain. If we wipe ourselves out with AI, biotech or nanotech in the next century, costs beyond that don't matter much. Also if we all upload. Much more moderate changes, accumulated over a century or more, can reduce costs or benefits by orders of magnitude.
I don't limit my analysis to people in the U.S. The increased land I discussed in a previous post is largely in Russia. My basis for concluding that heat was not by itself a barrier to land use was looking at parts of the world not in the US that are very hot — average or maximum — and densely populated. The increased yields due to CO2 fertilization are much more important to poor countries than to us. The one part of the world I found where SLR would be a serious issue was the Nile Delta.
"I don't know of any way of estimating the size of the effect of reductions in the pH of the ocean. If you or anyone else does, please tell me. I would be very surprised if they wiped out oceanic life, both because pH has varied inn the past and because the relevant species mostly have short generations so can adapt pretty fast by evolution. But obviously I could be wrong."
I don't know either - and as a marine biologist, I make a really good software engineer ;(
What I understand, very much at second hand, is that the problems involve things with shells, and things that eat them.
"The one part of the world I found where SLR would be a serious issue was the Nile Delta."
Island nations? Particularly in the Pacific around Australia?
" In _Future Imperfect_ I mostly limited myself to 30 years, on the grounds that beyond that things became too uncertain."
I think that's a problem for cases like this. The effects take too long to manifest, and equally long to dissipate. But also our temperaments are different; I tend to have little confidence in the human ability to invent ourselves out of trouble. (I'd class that with "maybe the horse will learn to sing".)
There is a lot of talk about island nations, but I keep seeing stories where someone has actually looked at areas over time and they are not going down. Of course, those stories might be bogus, but I haven't seen the debunking or stories offering similar data that goes the other way.
Also, the Maldive islands claim to be at imminent risk, but they are expanding their airport and building a terminal with a capacity of 1.3 million passenters a year, which suggests that maybe they don't believe it.
I wouldn't be surprised if some smaller islands get flooded. I certainly haven't looked everywhere.
Wouldn't overestimating the effects of global warming be a good thing to accelerate action? Sure, temperature and water levels rising might actually take 200 years instead of 100 years as currently predicted (not real numbers, just illustrative), but the risks of underestimating the effects seem much worse (potential global catastrophe) than overestimating them (moving to carbon neutrality/energy independence faster). These are pretty complex systems and I would expect that humans won't do an amazing job understanding and quantifying, just like we are pretty bad at modelling and understanding complex macroeconomics systems. There is also the argument that underestimating the effects can fuel a quite dangerous narrative that politicians and media groups can use to push an oil-industry agenda, hampering even more the speed at which we transition.
If the net effect is positive, overestimating the costs results in pushing the wrong direction. If it is negative but small, which is my reading of Nordhaus' numbers and the IPCC reports minus the rhetoric, estimating it as negative and large results in our doing expensive things that are not worth doing.
As best I can tell, there simply isn't any basis for global catastrophe — that's hyperbolic rhetoric, not science. And the scientific publications already tend to overestimate things. I don't know if you followed the earlier link to my piece on Rennert et. al. 2022, but this is a piece being taken seriously which calculates cost on the implicit assumption of technological stasis — no progress in medicine, biotech, home temperature control — for the next three centuries.
Current temperatures are high relative to the past few thousand years, low relative to the past hundred million.
Underestimating the value of fossil fuel use is a bad thing to accelerate action. 80% of the world's energy comes from fossil fuels, yet idiots like NY's Hocul thinks we're not going to be allowed to buy a fossil fuel auto in NY in just 7 years. Idiots.
Your belief is that increasing CO2 will inevitably raise the global temperature. The CO2 has been increasing, but the temperature has not.
No, well, nothing in climate science can be debated, so you should have known that from the start. If you disagree with the narrative, you're a denier. And a white supremacist. And a Nazi.
Second statement is a complete non-sequiter. Yes, 80% of the world's energy comes from fossil fuels. This is no evidence whatsoever either way concerning a discussion of whether banning fossil fuel cars is or is not a good idea.
> The CO2 has been increasing, but the temperature has not.
I really don't think this is up for debate- global temperatures are definitely rising and it is definitely due at least partly to anthrogenic CO2.
The problem is the lack of reliable alternatives. Solar and wind are intermittent and perform poorly in areas with lower sunlight/wind (which applies to much of the populated world). Nuclear would be a good baseload option, but we've spent the last 50 years making it harder to build instead of ramping it up.
With the increase in the cost of electricity in the last few years, switching a significant subset of the 80% fossil fuels will put a dramatic strain on the electrical grid and our ability to afford to power the world. This would have the obvious effect of significantly reducing the standard of living for most of the people in the entire world.
Until or unless we can create an alternative power structure, banning fossil fuel cars in the near term sounds like a poorly thought out plan, likely to cause significantly more issues than it corrects.
I have a distinct memory of pictures in a grade school textbook from the late ‘80s showing Florida progressively disappearing. I can’t remember the years given for the various pictures, but I’m pretty sure much of Florida was supposed to be underwater by now. Would love for someone to dig up these older models that were sold to impressionable children like myself as fact. Climate science is above my head, but it’s become pretty clear it’s above the heads of the climate experts as well, especially when they’re presenting their models and predictions.
I think a lot of the media stuff was wildly exaggerated, the serious climate stuff less so. The first IPCC report badly overestimated future warming, but of the next three two were high, one low, all within the projected range.
3. This kind of post is great and important except for when you say things like a meter of sea level rise is not an issue. I read your and others comments, and you seem to have this bizarre idea that people have built along the coasts with the idea that storm surges could be a full meter worse. Have you ever been to the coast? Did you not watch what Sandy did to NYC? Your arguments would be so much stronger if you didn't act like things are are clearly severe consequences are negligible. I love to promote your general thinking, but I'm embarrassed by that sea-level-rise dismissal. (Not that we can't do adaptation - see The Netherlands - but you're not calling for adaptation -- just calling it no big dea.) https://www.mattball.org/2023/03/a-note-to-my-friends-also-wo-tribe.html
4. Ocean acidification, as noted. I expect you'll come up with some reason that doesn't matter.
6. Also as noted, many if not most of the people who take the "other side" of the climate change discussion are paid shills. Many of the others just fall into the right-wing ecosystem and just sit around bitching about "the left." I'm a fan of Bjorn Lomborg but for a while, he was the darling of the right, which kept him from being taken seriously, which was really a tragedy.
Ocean acidification is one of the reason I think the net effect might be negative. As best I can tell, nobody has a reasonable estimate of whether it is a large effect. I object, however, to the term "acidification," since although technically correct it makes it sound as though the ocean is becoming more corrosive, that being what people associate with acid. "Neutralization" is also a correct and less misleading description of moving the pH towards neutral.
A meter of SLR in a year would be a serious problem. In the rest of the century I think not. It moves coastlines in by about a hundred meters — more some places, less others. Neither diking against that nor shifting land use a little inland is a major problem over that much time.
But the point of the post is not to push my guesstimate of the net effect of climate change, it is to offer evidence that the purported science of the field is badly corrupt, hence that the current scientific orthodoxy does not deserve much confidence. Do you agree? Have I shown that an elementary textbook now in its third edition says things easily shown to be false and neglects important things easily shown to be true?
I don't know if they are. Is your point that viral infections will become less of a problem with medical progress? If so, that applies to deaths in summer too.
Is your point that it isn't the temperature in winter but people living indoors? Warming reduces that.
Hmm, warming reduces people living indoors only up to a point - the point being when they start to prefer air conditioning to outdoor temperatures. (Or perhaps a little bit sooner - a house with shaded windows and good thermal mass can stay comfortable indoors on days when the outside is miserably hot.) I already experience days when I avoid going outside because of heat - and I'm in the same warm (not hot) part of the US as you are.
It seems plausible that warmer winters could have a larger effect than hotter summers, especially if DF is correct in say8ng that climate change has a larger effect in cold climes.
The IPCC agrees. They have graphs and tables showing the projected effect on minimum and maximum temperatures in various regions, and the pattern is clear.
No, or I don’t know. I’m just talking about that graph that shows more deaths in the winter months right now, some of which must be the increase in viruses and flus, which are seasonal. Anyway I broadly agree with the post and i totally believe in anthropogenic climate change.
(after he did a post on: indeed heat seems to kill less than cold does) tl;dr: 1. read it all, it is a Scott-post after all! And a good one.
2. You are kinda right. It is those seasonal flus and stuff. There are some reasons why winter is their season, but those should not have big effects. They seem to "nudge" the viruses to reliably have their highs in winter though - by the dynamics of virus-infections (more, then less, then more again) some form of diseasonality is to be expected.
-- When calculating the impact of climate-change on mortality in the last decades, the net effect (pre-covid) seems: fine, ie. a bit more in summer, significantly less in the winter-season. - I think that was a Lancet study. - Anthropogenic climate change is a fact, indeed. Is it net-positive or negative: Till now, net positive. What will the future bring? Not clear. But authors who do not get the facts rights of what happened? I shall trust their speculation less. (Analogously: speculations of authors who deny warming - I ignore them.) Thus, one ends up with Lomborg, Matt Ridley, Judith Curry and a few others. Not a bad place.
I don't think anyone has yet disputed the point of the post, which was that the Dessler book is so bad that the fact it is used as an elementary textbook, now in its third edition, implies that the field it is in is in bad shape and its claims about climate change should not be relied on.
Another problem with the cost calculations for sea level rise is 100 years is a very long time in practical terms. Nearly every building in the flooded areas will have been replaced in that period, and since a gradual sea level rise will be obvious the entire time it is happening, entire cities can easily shift to higher ground in a gradual way, or even be lifted up as Chicago once was.
I was planning to get in on the climate change debate by first learning about climate science in an actual textbook for college students. I figured it was the best place to start to get a good grasp of what climate science is and what it actually says about the global warming, all without the biases you usually see in the media. There goes my plan…
I am not sure where I should start now.
I think my post should help by suggesting things to look out for in evaluating a textbook, most obviously the omission of positive effects. Also, the sort of analysis I did with the Florida claim, depending only on webbed information, is both fun and a useful exercise — see if you can find errors in the textbook.
When I was studying for my physics prelims, I largely did it by going through a draft textbook on the stuff covered by a physics prelim finding mistakes.
If the book lists positive as well as negative effects and doesn't have any false statements you can find, that's evidence that you can trust it. For some balancing information, you can look at my webbed chapters on climate (http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Ideas%20I/Ideas%20I_%20A%20Book%20from%20Blogs.html) or Bjorn Lomborg's work.
Thanks!
I'd still start there. No source is 100% reliable. But you need the basics, and you need them in mathematical form, starting with being able to do a back-of-the-envelop calculation of the net effect of a given level of each of the greenhouse gasses, along with how long they stay in the atmosphere. From there you can easily get to the effects of a given level of emissions.
This won't give you even simple second order effects, like effects of carbon dioxide levels on plant growth, let alone possible feedback effects, like melting of icecaps. With luck, a halfway decent textbook will have those too. (Make sure it's a textbook for potential majors in relevant STEM fields, not for the climate change equivalent of "computers for poets", which is likely to avoid even the simplest arithmetic.)
You still won't have the knowledge to understand current arguments among specialists, including whatever model a given group of scientists used to produce their latest published paper. Your guesstimates should have gigantic error bars. But that's still the only really useful place to start.
If you want to go beyond this (I gave up), it's time to start reading specialist papers, and everything that cites them. You'll probably need a lot of math, and a fair understanding of computer modeling. Be aware that unpopular results are less likely to be published - but at the same time, the best way for an academic to succeed (e.g. get tenure) is by finding holes in prior work.
If my experience is any sample, don't bother with MOOCs (online courses). They seem to pretty much all be "climate change for partisans", or at least for "poets", even when they claim otherwise. They are unlikely to be mathematical enough to be worth your time.
Thanks. What level of math is required here?
If you want to calculate how much longer it takes in the presence of greenhouse gases for an infrared photon emitted at sea level to reach the edge of space, your integral calculus had better be good, otherwise multiplication and division are all you need. There is so much data that you can have endless fun with sophisticated statistics, but they don't seem to prove anything. To test yourself, from the atomic weights of nitrogen, oxygen and argon calculate how many molecules there are, ignoring CO2 and water vapor, in a cubic centimetre of atmospheric gas at standard temperature and pressure. As I said, simple multiplication and division.
In writing "A Brief History of Time" Hawking was warned that every equals sign in the book would reduce sales by, I think, a half. He managed to keep it down to one. Although math is my highest specific IQ, I read Pop Science and enjoy it, The Whole Shebang, Consciousness Explained and How the Mind Works being at the limit of my comprehension. I became a climate skeptic after reading a story about David Evans, who produced incontrovertible evidence of falsification of the temperature record. I became aware that CAGW is a religion where everything is made up and the facts don't matter. But I'm a skeptic's skeptic and I don't believe many of the climate skeptic claims either. For example it's easy to calculate that a single cubic centimetre of atmospheric gas at STP contains 1E+15 CO2 molecules, which is quite a lot, and CO2 is far from the most abundant GHG. I can pick holes in most of the articles at WUWT. I'm waiting for further evidence of catastrophic warming, which is taking its sweet time to materialize.
Not all climatologists are inclined towards alarmism. Rather the contrary. I have not been involved in the world of climatology for 15 years but back then it was quiet common for climatologists to be what would today be called climate sceptics while at the same time doing research that indirectly benefited an alarmist narrative because that was the kind of research that the paymasters wanted.
I did write a Substack post about my (very limited) experiences as a climatologist last year:
https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/a-climatologists-view-of-climate
Once upon a time....
A short history of Climate Change:
In the beginning (1970's or so) there was Global Cooling. The earth would be getting cooler and then colder. Great Men (this was pre Woman's Lib) espoused plans to paint the Arctic black to increase heat absorption and help melt the ice. As well as other idiotic schemes.
Alas and alack the earth began to warm up. The good news was none of the idiotic schemes were put into practice.
Thus Global Cooling became Global Warming. The Arctic would melt. London would be underwater, NYC would be underwater, or most of it. There would be an end of skiing and snow would be a thing of the past.
Alas and alack none of this happened.
Soooo the Grand Poobah's decided too rebrand. What had been Global Cooling and then Global Warming became Climate Change and thus the reason for, well, everything.
A very hot summer? Climate Change. A very cool summer? Climate Change. A warm winter? Climate Change, A very cool summer? Climate change? Floods? Climate Change. Droughts? Climate Change. A lot of hurricanes? Climate Change. Fewer hurricanes? Climate Change. More tornadoes? Climate Change. Fewer tornadoes? Climate Change. Earthquakes? Probably Climate Change.
Normal weather and\or rainfall patterns? Climate Change, just not quite yet.
Old expression is that proof is in the pudding and so far none of the dire predictions have even remotely come true.
The National Park Service put up signs at Glacier National Park 20 years ago warning that the glaciers would be gone in 20 years. They had to take them down because the advancing glaciers were knocking them down. Mt. Everest would be barren in 30 years. Oops a slight miscalculation. Make that 300 years. Maybe. There is still snow. Turns out Global Warming (i.e. Climate Change) can lead to more snow as well as less snow. Sort of, maybe, it depends...
None of the major or minor predictions have come remotely close to happening. Just like all of the population predictions.
Oopsey.
What is most interesting is that no one has confronted Algore(one word) or Greta about failed predictions and pushed them on it.
The motto for Climate Change should be: Any day now, any day...it's a commin any day now, any day.
Do you know Judith Curry's work? Worth to examine, I think: https://judithcurry.com/2023/03/11/climate-uncertainty-and-risk-table-of-contents/
Dessler lives in Texas. Texas is hot. I would wager he has never been cold in his life, not *really* cold. Born in Houston, educated at Rice, M.A. Ph.D at Harvard (okay, it gets cold there, but not terribly so), worked on Wall Street (same for NYC), two years at NASA, 9 years at U of Maryland, now he teaches at TAMU.
People write about what they know, and what he knows is heat.
I agree with you that the climate change "debate" is well past the point where most of the contributions are reliable. Of course that's been true for a long time, and the bad faith contributions *probably* started with those paid by the oil industry. In any case, there's plenty of mud on all sides of this debate.
On the other hand, I think you need to stop narrowing your focus to direct effects on human beings living in the United States. Also, I see little point in beating a drum that says "(some) people who want to reduce climate change effects are mistaken or lying". We know that. Or at least, those of us who care about truth know that; the rest of us "know" that spokespeople for their own tribe are 100% accurate, just as the other tribe's spokespeople are 100% selfish liars. :(
I'd love to see what your formidable intellect came up with if you tried to evaluate all the evidence. You might well get farther than I have. (I've pretty much given up, since knowing the truth seems unlikely to have any effect on political decisions.)
If doing that, I'd pay attention to all the effects. Ocean acidification seems to be the effect most commonly ignored, both in estimates of likely consequences and in proposals for mitigation. If it merely (sic) reduces human-useful marine food production to zero, or by some lesser but still significant amount, then it should be considered with your computations of potential crop yields. If it also significantly impacts the amount of atmospheric oxygen - that's a rather different calculation. (And no, I don't mean just *statistical* significance.)
I don't know of any way of estimating the size of the effect of reductions in the pH of the ocean. If you or anyone else does, please tell me. I would be very surprised if they wiped out oceanic life, both because pH has varied in the past and because the relevant species mostly have short generations so can adapt pretty fast by evolution. But obviously I could be wrong.
My claim on the climate issue, like my claim about population growth fifty years ago, is a negative one — that we don't know if the net effects are bad or good. My positive claim is that if they are bad they are unlikely to be catastrophically bad (also unlikely to be eucatastrophically good). We know that global temperature has been much higher than it now is and that CO2 concentrations have been much higher, so I don't think any of the stories where climate change makes Earth unlivable should be taken seriously.
I not only think we don't know, my guess is that we can't and I am pretty sure I can't. As with my lab leak post, I am reluctant to trust any information that is second-hand and complicated enough so I have no way of checking it, given how much that I could check turned out to be bogus. So I am again limited to the sort of calculations that can be done with information generally agreed on or by treating as an upper bound an estimate by someone who would prefer a higher estimate. Thus I think it unlikely that Nordhaus or the IPCC are underestimating the scale of the effect due to bias, although they could just be making a mistake, because it's pretty clear that they are trying to make effects sound worse than their numbers imply, not better. That tells me which direction their bias is in.
Even if I didn't have the constraint of limited time, expertise, and sources of information, a lot of the costs are in the distant future and depend on technological change which we have no way of predicting. In _Future Imperfect_ I mostly limited myself to 30 years, on the grounds that beyond that things became too uncertain. If we wipe ourselves out with AI, biotech or nanotech in the next century, costs beyond that don't matter much. Also if we all upload. Much more moderate changes, accumulated over a century or more, can reduce costs or benefits by orders of magnitude.
I don't limit my analysis to people in the U.S. The increased land I discussed in a previous post is largely in Russia. My basis for concluding that heat was not by itself a barrier to land use was looking at parts of the world not in the US that are very hot — average or maximum — and densely populated. The increased yields due to CO2 fertilization are much more important to poor countries than to us. The one part of the world I found where SLR would be a serious issue was the Nile Delta.
"I don't know of any way of estimating the size of the effect of reductions in the pH of the ocean. If you or anyone else does, please tell me. I would be very surprised if they wiped out oceanic life, both because pH has varied inn the past and because the relevant species mostly have short generations so can adapt pretty fast by evolution. But obviously I could be wrong."
I don't know either - and as a marine biologist, I make a really good software engineer ;(
What I understand, very much at second hand, is that the problems involve things with shells, and things that eat them.
"The one part of the world I found where SLR would be a serious issue was the Nile Delta."
Island nations? Particularly in the Pacific around Australia?
" In _Future Imperfect_ I mostly limited myself to 30 years, on the grounds that beyond that things became too uncertain."
I think that's a problem for cases like this. The effects take too long to manifest, and equally long to dissipate. But also our temperaments are different; I tend to have little confidence in the human ability to invent ourselves out of trouble. (I'd class that with "maybe the horse will learn to sing".)
There is a lot of talk about island nations, but I keep seeing stories where someone has actually looked at areas over time and they are not going down. Of course, those stories might be bogus, but I haven't seen the debunking or stories offering similar data that goes the other way.
Also, the Maldive islands claim to be at imminent risk, but they are expanding their airport and building a terminal with a capacity of 1.3 million passenters a year, which suggests that maybe they don't believe it.
I wouldn't be surprised if some smaller islands get flooded. I certainly haven't looked everywhere.
But experts agree that going with the group is good.
Wouldn't overestimating the effects of global warming be a good thing to accelerate action? Sure, temperature and water levels rising might actually take 200 years instead of 100 years as currently predicted (not real numbers, just illustrative), but the risks of underestimating the effects seem much worse (potential global catastrophe) than overestimating them (moving to carbon neutrality/energy independence faster). These are pretty complex systems and I would expect that humans won't do an amazing job understanding and quantifying, just like we are pretty bad at modelling and understanding complex macroeconomics systems. There is also the argument that underestimating the effects can fuel a quite dangerous narrative that politicians and media groups can use to push an oil-industry agenda, hampering even more the speed at which we transition.
If the net effect is positive, overestimating the costs results in pushing the wrong direction. If it is negative but small, which is my reading of Nordhaus' numbers and the IPCC reports minus the rhetoric, estimating it as negative and large results in our doing expensive things that are not worth doing.
As best I can tell, there simply isn't any basis for global catastrophe — that's hyperbolic rhetoric, not science. And the scientific publications already tend to overestimate things. I don't know if you followed the earlier link to my piece on Rennert et. al. 2022, but this is a piece being taken seriously which calculates cost on the implicit assumption of technological stasis — no progress in medicine, biotech, home temperature control — for the next three centuries.
Current temperatures are high relative to the past few thousand years, low relative to the past hundred million.
But in the last 500 million years we had 5 mass extinction events.
I don't think climate change attracts asteroids, so that one doesn't count. I don't know enough about the others.
But only one every hundred million years is pretty good.
Underestimating the value of fossil fuel use is a bad thing to accelerate action. 80% of the world's energy comes from fossil fuels, yet idiots like NY's Hocul thinks we're not going to be allowed to buy a fossil fuel auto in NY in just 7 years. Idiots.
Your belief is that increasing CO2 will inevitably raise the global temperature. The CO2 has been increasing, but the temperature has not.
Ha! Started reading this thinking it would be a reasonable debate, then got to the end and quickly realized it wouldn’t.
No, well, nothing in climate science can be debated, so you should have known that from the start. If you disagree with the narrative, you're a denier. And a white supremacist. And a Nazi.
First statement is fine- I agree.
Second statement is a complete non-sequiter. Yes, 80% of the world's energy comes from fossil fuels. This is no evidence whatsoever either way concerning a discussion of whether banning fossil fuel cars is or is not a good idea.
> The CO2 has been increasing, but the temperature has not.
I really don't think this is up for debate- global temperatures are definitely rising and it is definitely due at least partly to anthrogenic CO2.
The problem is the lack of reliable alternatives. Solar and wind are intermittent and perform poorly in areas with lower sunlight/wind (which applies to much of the populated world). Nuclear would be a good baseload option, but we've spent the last 50 years making it harder to build instead of ramping it up.
With the increase in the cost of electricity in the last few years, switching a significant subset of the 80% fossil fuels will put a dramatic strain on the electrical grid and our ability to afford to power the world. This would have the obvious effect of significantly reducing the standard of living for most of the people in the entire world.
Until or unless we can create an alternative power structure, banning fossil fuel cars in the near term sounds like a poorly thought out plan, likely to cause significantly more issues than it corrects.
Where are you going to get the energy sourced from to replace fossil fuels as they are currently used?
Then don't debate it.
I have a distinct memory of pictures in a grade school textbook from the late ‘80s showing Florida progressively disappearing. I can’t remember the years given for the various pictures, but I’m pretty sure much of Florida was supposed to be underwater by now. Would love for someone to dig up these older models that were sold to impressionable children like myself as fact. Climate science is above my head, but it’s become pretty clear it’s above the heads of the climate experts as well, especially when they’re presenting their models and predictions.
I think a lot of the media stuff was wildly exaggerated, the serious climate stuff less so. The first IPCC report badly overestimated future warming, but of the next three two were high, one low, all within the projected range.
1. I was a DOE Global Change Fellow in the 90s.
2. >That analysis that obviously
You are missing an "is" there.
3. This kind of post is great and important except for when you say things like a meter of sea level rise is not an issue. I read your and others comments, and you seem to have this bizarre idea that people have built along the coasts with the idea that storm surges could be a full meter worse. Have you ever been to the coast? Did you not watch what Sandy did to NYC? Your arguments would be so much stronger if you didn't act like things are are clearly severe consequences are negligible. I love to promote your general thinking, but I'm embarrassed by that sea-level-rise dismissal. (Not that we can't do adaptation - see The Netherlands - but you're not calling for adaptation -- just calling it no big dea.) https://www.mattball.org/2023/03/a-note-to-my-friends-also-wo-tribe.html
4. Ocean acidification, as noted. I expect you'll come up with some reason that doesn't matter.
5. We can really do without Florida. Let's be honest. https://www.mattball.org/2021/11/the-world-of-tomorrow.html
6. Also as noted, many if not most of the people who take the "other side" of the climate change discussion are paid shills. Many of the others just fall into the right-wing ecosystem and just sit around bitching about "the left." I'm a fan of Bjorn Lomborg but for a while, he was the darling of the right, which kept him from being taken seriously, which was really a tragedy.
Ocean acidification is one of the reason I think the net effect might be negative. As best I can tell, nobody has a reasonable estimate of whether it is a large effect. I object, however, to the term "acidification," since although technically correct it makes it sound as though the ocean is becoming more corrosive, that being what people associate with acid. "Neutralization" is also a correct and less misleading description of moving the pH towards neutral.
A meter of SLR in a year would be a serious problem. In the rest of the century I think not. It moves coastlines in by about a hundred meters — more some places, less others. Neither diking against that nor shifting land use a little inland is a major problem over that much time.
But the point of the post is not to push my guesstimate of the net effect of climate change, it is to offer evidence that the purported science of the field is badly corrupt, hence that the current scientific orthodoxy does not deserve much confidence. Do you agree? Have I shown that an elementary textbook now in its third edition says things easily shown to be false and neglects important things easily shown to be true?
Good post. However aren’t increased deaths in winter primarily associated with viral infections?
I don't know if they are. Is your point that viral infections will become less of a problem with medical progress? If so, that applies to deaths in summer too.
Is your point that it isn't the temperature in winter but people living indoors? Warming reduces that.
Hmm, warming reduces people living indoors only up to a point - the point being when they start to prefer air conditioning to outdoor temperatures. (Or perhaps a little bit sooner - a house with shaded windows and good thermal mass can stay comfortable indoors on days when the outside is miserably hot.) I already experience days when I avoid going outside because of heat - and I'm in the same warm (not hot) part of the US as you are.
It seems plausible that warmer winters could have a larger effect than hotter summers, especially if DF is correct in say8ng that climate change has a larger effect in cold climes.
The IPCC agrees. They have graphs and tables showing the projected effect on minimum and maximum temperatures in various regions, and the pattern is clear.
No, or I don’t know. I’m just talking about that graph that shows more deaths in the winter months right now, some of which must be the increase in viruses and flus, which are seasonal. Anyway I broadly agree with the post and i totally believe in anthropogenic climate change.
Scott Alexander has a good take on this https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/diseasonality
(after he did a post on: indeed heat seems to kill less than cold does) tl;dr: 1. read it all, it is a Scott-post after all! And a good one.
2. You are kinda right. It is those seasonal flus and stuff. There are some reasons why winter is their season, but those should not have big effects. They seem to "nudge" the viruses to reliably have their highs in winter though - by the dynamics of virus-infections (more, then less, then more again) some form of diseasonality is to be expected.
-- When calculating the impact of climate-change on mortality in the last decades, the net effect (pre-covid) seems: fine, ie. a bit more in summer, significantly less in the winter-season. - I think that was a Lancet study. - Anthropogenic climate change is a fact, indeed. Is it net-positive or negative: Till now, net positive. What will the future bring? Not clear. But authors who do not get the facts rights of what happened? I shall trust their speculation less. (Analogously: speculations of authors who deny warming - I ignore them.) Thus, one ends up with Lomborg, Matt Ridley, Judith Curry and a few others. Not a bad place.