“A Critical Review of Impacts of GHG Emissions on the US Climate” (Hereafter CRI) is an account of the consequences of climate change by five critics of the current orthodoxy; its sponsorship by the Department of Energy is evidence that the Federal Government has now switched sides on the climate controversy.
"Looking at Fig 1 in the quoted article, pH rises from 7.4 nineteen thousand years ago to 7.87 eleven thousand years ago, declines to 7.76 nine thousand years ago, rises to 7.9 six thousand years ago. It is currently 8.04 and falling by about .017/decade. If it has been going up and down that routinely it is unlikely that the current gradual decrease will have drastic effects."
I don't disagree with your overall skepticism, but your logic here is sloppy. A (7.87-7.4)/(19k-11k years) pH change is 0.0007 pH per decade, orders of magnitude slower than 0.017/decade currently.
The trouble with crying "unprecedented" about rates of change is that we usually just don't know. The proxies do not often give us the fine resolution in time that modern instrumentation does.
But Occams razor applies. Given that we now know most of the other claims of climate change alarmism have not held up, and humans are likely not responsible for most of the observed changes in CO2 concentration. It's not impossible but it is highly unlikely that this rate is truly unusual.
I agree that almost by definition, most alarmist predictions haven't come true, but the earth is getting warmer pretty quickly, and i imagine there is a proposed mechanism for why higher temperatures lead to an acidifying ocean. I haven't seen anything to support your other statements that humans aren't responsible for CO2 increases.
I do think it's quite possible global warming isn't worth the drastic measures we're proposing to prevent it, and think we should carefully consider the good and bad of global warming before we hurt the global poor trying to prevent it.
But mostly I was just pointing out that damage from rapid ocean acidification cannot be discarded based on the evidence given.
Define "pretty quickly" for ocean warming. Nothing I have seen makes me think it's anything close to quickly. Water is roughly 1000 times as dense as air, and if the atmosphere has only warmed 1.5° in the last 50 or 100 years, that makes me think the ocean can only have warmed a very little.
Ocean temperatures are what we're talking about when we talk about global warming. Air fluctuates more short term, but the mean temp of both should basically change in tandem long term. The ocean temp has increased 1.5C in the last 100 or so years
Sorry if I ran ahead of you a little too fast. NASA/NOAA & IPCC now agree that human emissions account for only about 3% of annual emissions. Most of the change from earlier estimates comes from improved technology in sea floor mapping boosting our understanding of the magnitude of sea bed volcanic emissions.
Hasn't it always been known it's about that? Isn't the issue that the relatively small human emission is still a forcing function to a new, higher CO2 steady state?
There was an alternative explanation for the Great Barrier Reef's decline - phosphate runoff from agricultural fertilisers. And when the government cracked down on that, the reef recovered...
The reefs have been around for 200 million years give or take. They survived the comet which killed the dinosaurs, they survived the 500 foot sea level rise 10-15,000 years ago, they've even survived a few nuclear weapons tests. To think that puny humans can kill them off in just a few decades is the height of hubris.
"The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (GBRMPA) considers the earliest evidence of complete reef structures to have been 600,000 years ago. According to the GBRMPA, the current, living reef structure is believed to have begun growing on the older platform about 9,000 years ago. (Wikipedia)"
So the GBR hasn't been around for 200 million years, and the current living reef probably hasn't had to weather the 500-ft sea level rise (it's even plausible that it came into being as a consequence). That leaves nuke tests, none of which were near GBR (the closest I know of were at Bikini, about 1500 miles from GBR's furthest north, and on the other side of the Solomon Islands).
"Corals first appeared in the Cambrian about 535 million years ago."
If you read the rest of it, there's no backing for your "only 600,000 years old" for coral reefs in general.
You ran your victory lap too soon, even by your own narrow misdefinition. If the current living reef structure grew upon the older platform 9000 years ago, that was towards the end of that massive sea level rise. So you lose on that matter, it's the same coral reef, just higher. That's how coral reefs work.
I took your "Whoa" that way. If you say it wasn't, fine.
As for the GBR, it's made of corals, and Wikipedia says corals have been around 535 million years. Your 9000 years doesn't matter, nor your 600,000. But you should probably pick one or the other and not switch back and forth.
I didn't pick those numbers; the GBRMPA did, and presumably didn't pick them, either; it calculated them from available evidence. Those numbers matter because they apply to the GBR, which was the subject of the comment you replied to, as opposed to corals in general.
Your tone continues to sound unusually accusatory.
I am more serious than joking. If it was humanity’s explicit goal - or merely the goal of the U.S. or China’s leaders - I think it could be achieved given human ingenuity and our level of wealth.
And no I have no proof or hard evidence re: this specific thing. I can merely point to human history, and examples like going to the moon.
Grok says there are 262,000 square miles of coral reefs. A wild guess says you’d need 1000 huge bombs at a minimum to destroy one square mile; that’s 32 per linear mile, or 167 linear feet per bomb.
And most of the corals would be merely displaced, not destroyed.
Now atom bombs could actually destroy them, but you’d still need more than one per square mile, especially underwater where the heat and radiation won’t travel as far. Last I heard was something like 10-20,000 ICBMs total, and if each has 10 warheads, that’s still not even one per square mile.
The radiation could well kill all human life and a lot of other species, but kill all the corals? I don’t believe it.
A claim related to the biological impact of changing ocean acidity is the impact of the decrease in ocean salinity expected from net polar ice melt and rising sea levels. But again, the fact that we have records of what happened during recent and geologically short-lived ice ages puts the alarmist claims to rest. Ocean salinity increased quickly and significantly, especially in places with less current flows to the larger sea like the Mediterranean, with apparently no noticeable major impact on the affected ecosystems in terms of it happening faster (in both directions) than species were able to adapt to the changing conditions.
Well written, sir. Thank you. A couple of things -
First, you quoted the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report regarding the impacts of other drivers on climate. Would you be kind enough to provide a specific reference for that quote? Thank you.
Second, DOE recently disbanded the panel, citing legal concerns. The biggest loss to science of that action was to stifle the debate that would come from response to real comments (not legal challenges). I am curious if you think the committee will be resurrected, or if there perhaps will be a private response to the comments.
That quote was introduced with "Thirty years later virtually the identical point was made by the IPCC itself in the Fifth Assessment Report (Arent et al. 2014, emphasis added)"
I expect to see rebuttals to the report and responses by its authors, on the web and, more slowly, in journal articles. I don't think the debate depends on DOE sponsorship.
One interesting question is how much effect the realization that the people handing out federal money have reversed/will reverse their bias will have on the debate. That is relevant to the question of to what degree the present orthodoxy is due to the past bias in federal funding.
In my opinion the five DOE panel members are all leaders in the significant aspects of the science of climate. The panel is probably the best in many years in both coverage of major scientific areas and in knowledge of the issues in climate policy.
Q: What do you call a situation in which a small group of researchers make bold predictions but won’t share their data, try to get contradictory articles blackballed from journals, lash out at critics with lawsuits, and see most of their predictions fall by the way side?
The five are among the best scientists and not at all like the ones you criticize.
Steve Koonin's book is "Unsettled". A second edition was published in 2024. Definitely worth reading. He was appointed by President Obama to be Undersecretary for Science at the Department of Energy and had some $100 million a year in climate research in his portfolio.
John Christy and Roy Spencer of course manage the official world atmospheric temperature database for NASA and are thus the number one climate data sharers in the world. Roy Spencer provides a monthly update on the temperatures usually on the second day of the next month.
Judith Curry and Ross McKitrick are leaders in their own areas as well.
Oh, I had forgotten, so I must hasten to add, I became interested in all this stuff for the same reason I was somewhat interested in the environment, 'ya know externalities and such. Little did I fathom that global warming would become a new religion.
I met Ross McKitrick once, years ago, at a conference he organized. I attended because I had no clue how physics models worked, but I did know how data worked. I learned that even people in the climate field had a healthy respect for data, too. Good man. Judith Curry I know from her website. Good lady.
completely agree, sir. that is why I mourn the loss of their response to the comments. Roger Pielke Jr. wrote last month about the "retraction," saying it had something to do with lawfare (my words). I don't want lawfare to stop the debate.
Regarding heat/cold deaths, I think what would be interesting would be an analysis of why so many people die in winter. When eyeballing the graphs at https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps, it doesn't look like it's mostly happening in the colder countries. I'd like to think that this is because people in warmer countries generally don't have good heating and insulation, so they end up experiencing more cold than people in colder countries, particularly at night, but maybe there's some other explanation?
Take a look at my two posts on mortality and temperature. The mortality in Gasparini's _Lancet_ articles is not mostly from extreme temperatures but from temperatures above or below the temperature at which mortality is minimized. That temperature tends to be higher in warmer cities, as I point out (I am using Gasparini's data but I don't think he observes that pattern) which fits your point.
I wouldn’t call the increase in heatwave days misleading. Yes, there was a big heat anomaly in the US in the ‘30s. This was concentrated specifically in the US and from what I have seen seems to be linked to the dust bowl. (A lack of vegetation driving large but localized spike in temperatures).
Here are some papers discussing the dust bowl anomaly in the US:
At its time it was by far the biggest anomaly on the planet.
There were surely other interacting natural forcings that helped drive that event. But the big one seems to be that we stripped the land of vegetation and altered the continental climate across several decades.
Thus one takeaway from this data could be: uh oh we’re at dust bowl levels of continental warming and we didn’t even strip all the vegetation!
But to state things more carefully and in line with the scientific method: if we’re going to discard the hypothesis of multidecadal increase in heatwave days across recent decades, we need to rule it out in more regions than just the US, which exhibits this big weird anomaly that’s too confounded with land use mismanagement.
The US record isn’t the best dataset to do that with
Do you agree that to present the data starting in 1960 is dishonest? It looks like a very clear case of cherry picking. It would not be dishonest if it included the statement that heatwaves were more common in earlier decades. Also note that, according to the black line, 2020 is only back to 1915, well before the dust bowl.
The graphic criticized was specifically on US heat waves. CRI does not claim that global temperatures have not been rising, only that US temperatures have not been. And one of their points is that patterns observed over a short period may turn out to be misleading in the light of longer term data.
There are two different issues here. One is whether the graphic is dishonest. A different one is whether the conclusion it is intended to support is true. It is possible to make dishonest arguments for correct conclusions, but the more willing people are to do that the harder it gets to know what conclusions are true. I take the climate debate as illustrating that, have supported the claim that work supporting one side accepted by respectable sources is sometimes provably dishonest in multiple posts including two linked to in this post.
That is true, maybe I was too strong on that statement.
Still though, where we do have temperature records it’s shown that the 1930s warming was a US-based phenomenon, whereas the current warming we know is a global phenomenon.
The fact that the increase has been to similar levels as that known regional environmental disaster, but this time attributable to rising greenhouse gas levels, is significant.
One of the claims I have recently heard is that deaths due to temperature change are currently in decline. The argument is that because it's increasingly hard to raise temperature by the next degree than it was the last one, average temperature rise tends to skew towards raising the floor more than the ceiling, and that since too cold is generally more dangerous than too hot, the lives saved by raising the floor significantly outnumber the lives lost by raising the ceiling.
Do you have any references to a solid study on that argument, or any reason to think its anything other than a plausible conjecture?
The Lancet articles, which I cited in two posts: "Temperature, Mortality and Climate Change" and "Temperature, Income and Mortality" found mortality due to temperatures below optimal much larger, by more than an order of magnitude, than mortality due to temperatures above optimal. An article which Gasparini, the lead author of those, was a coauthor of, found that warming so far had reduced mortality.
On the other hand one of Gasparini's Lancet articles concludes that climate change will increase mortality by the end of the century. I discuss some problems with that in my two posts.
That minimum temperatures go up more than maximum is clear in the IPCC projections. The explanation offered by Freeman Dyson, which seems right to me, is that water vapor is a greenhouse gas. The more you have of one greenhouse gas the less the effect of adding another. There is more water vapor in the air when it is warm than when it is cold.
Do you have a take on the claim by Happer, Lindzen, and others that the relevant wavelengths become increasingly saturated as CO2 rises, so that each doubling has a greatly reduced effect? It seems plausible to me -- otherwise surely our atmosphere would have been much hotter when CO2 levels were far higher -- but I have nowhere near enough knowledge of the relevant physics to directly evaluate it.
Hi. I have been following the climate controversy since 1988. On the face of the controversy it was obvious that it was nuts. I followed it on WUWT. I also follow Joe Bastardi on Weatherbell. I thinK we met years ago at UCLA. Doug Shetler.
Too strong in that the idea that humans emissions of carbon and methane could possibly cause accelerating global warming (2 degrees then 3 degrees, and then continually accelerating beyond that) is not completely nuts - even if it is *far* less than 50% likely - nor is the idea of taking some steps to buy insurance against that case [not dissimilar to investing in tech to deflect an asteroid that might in the future be coming at Earth].
Too weak in that it *is* very clear that the primary reason for this topic’s prominence is for the purpose of attaining political power for leftists - leftists who are generally anti-capitalist.
And because the idea that most of the policy prescriptions proposed are “worth it” on an economic cost-benefit analysis, or that the chances that said expensive policies would be the difference in preventing catastrophic accelerated warming, is anything but vanishingly small.
I.e. there is IMO at best *far* less than 1 in 1,000 chance that the current leftist public policy prescriptions that they advocate actually making happen would be the difference between catastrophe and avoiding catastrophe. While clearly making us all poorer and less able to adapt to any possible harmful effects of future warming even if they turn out to be correct on the “catastrophe” point.
While I mostly agree with your points, the criticism of the literature I have focused on is the claim that net costs of climate change are known to be large. As best I can tell we don't even know if the net effect is negative. If it is positive, then what you refer to as insurance is spending money to make us worse off.
But the case I am really talking about is the extreme one where warming starts to accelerate, not only reaching 3 degrees but going beyond that with no sign of stabilization.
In that scenario *alone*, I am willing to take it on faith that the effects become significantly negative, and are even existential. Buying insurance against that (quite slim) possibility is the one thing that could be worthwhile.
But for anything short of that - or any plans of action that don’t address that case (e.g. the Paris Accords if fully implemented IIRC only reduce warming by 0.3 degrees, and clearly do nothing to avert the catastrophe case) - I strongly agree with all your points. Including even the seldom made point that two degrees of warming might be net beneficial.
Few advocates of climate policies are willing to make the case for the extreme measures that would be necessary to actually buy said insurance by way of emissions reductions in the present, because they know those measures would be politically unpopular everywhere, given the reduction in standard of living they would require.
But they still want the political benefits of being the ones “addressing climate change”.
Unfortunately, the average person’s intuition seems to be that this topic is like any other environmental one, where “every little bit helps”.
And so leftists make their case and implement their agenda in incremental fashion. They claim the Paris Accords are a “down payment” towards addressing the existential risk.
In fact, the odds are astronomically against those incremental measures making a material positive difference, in terms of the counterfactual of how humanity could have done with pro-growth policies, plus perhaps a relatively modest investment in “asteroid deflection” type technologies.
Most certainly if one values the well-being over the next few decades of the billions of the world’s poorest who do not have access to to low cost, reliable, highly available energy.
I find it hard to see how your accelerating warming is possible, given that average temperature has been much higher in the past — we are currently in an ice age, with temperature lower than it has been for most of the past billion years and CO2 lower than for much of it.
Also, if you are considering very low probability/high cost outcomes you have to also consider ones where preventing warming has catastrophic effects — most obviously the end of the current interglacial. As you may know there is serious work arguing that what is preventing that is anthropogenic warming, not from the industrial revolution but from the invention of agriculture about eight thousand years earlier.
I am unused to being on this side of the climate change argument. In fact I'm not sure I ever have been!
Make no mistake - not only do I *not* agree with the leftists here, I am very strongly opposed to almost all of their public policy prescriptions on the topic. The relatively few not brazenly hypocritical/political ones who are for deployment of nuclear energy I can support on that one point.
But I believe those of us opposed should *properly* steelman their case.
I am not a climate scientist and have no interest in being one. But I understand more than enough of basic economics, probability, utility and insurance to articulate a coherent view that seems lacking in almost all discussions of the topic.
For everything save "existential risk" it is ridiculously clear to me that the expected value of leftist policy prescriptions vs the alternative of not doing them is negative, and the only question is exactly how negative. I can add precious little value there, and am thrilled that people like Alex Epstein and yourself do so.
The most reasonable scientists I have seen on the left give a chance of existential risk on the order of 5%-10%.
I agree with you and Epstein that the actual risk is almost certainly *much* less than that.
What is the most proper judgement of the probability? No one knows. My personal best guess would be somewhere in the range of 0.1% - 2%.
But perhaps one in 10,000 or 1 in 100,000 (0.01% or 0.001%) is a more proper estimate. Still, it's not knowably zero, and IMO it is a weak argument for our side to claim that we should simply assume and act as if it were zero.
As I noted, the best data and arguments I have seen on this topic are from Alex Epstein and yourself. But IMO the *one* place you both are weak is in directly addressing the tail risk argument of actual existential risk.
My one contribution to the debate is that whatever semi-reasonable take one has on the probability of existential risk there is, the policies being proposed by the IPCC, every left politician and almost all notable leftist advocates are incredibly unlikely to deliver *any* material reduction to said chance of existential risk.
Which means it is incredibly stupid and self-defeating for even rich Western countries to pursue those, and grotesquely immoral to impose them on the world's poorest.
The game leftists are offering to humanity is:
Heads we lose (have made humanity notably poorer for no good reason),
Tails we 99.999% still lose (their policies did ~nothing to reduce the risk)
But I have seen almost no one do the simple multiplication of [existential risk probability] x [probability that the policies will prevent existential catastrophe] in making the argument against costly leftist policy prescriptions.
I cannot think of any direct mechanism by which either anthropogenic climate change or its prevention could destroy our species, which I take to be what existential risk means. But I can think of ways in which human action could do it, such as biological warfare or creating superintelligent AGI. And I can imagine climate change either triggering such action or preventing it from being triggered, and more easily imagine ways in which the attempt to block climate change could trigger it. That is the only way I can think of that either climate change or its prevention could pose an existential risk. And I see no reason to think that the former is more likely to do it than the latter.
Can you suggest direct ways? The problem with the obvious ones is that both global temperature and CO2 concentration have been much higher in the geologic past — for most of which there was not ice on the poles.
"the Great Barrier Reef, supposedly damaged by climate change, has at this point entirely recovered"
Am I reading the portion of the CRI correctly that indicates that it used "hard coral cover" as a measure of GBR recovery? Could this be misleading if the hard coral cover recovery was, in large part, due to Acropora coral, a particular fast-growing coral, which dominated the recovery? If Acropora coral is not as hardy, wouldn't the decrease in biodiversity and reduced resilience contradict the assertion that the GBR has entirely recovered?
My other basis for doubting a pH basis for the problem is that the pH was lower during most of the time the reef formed. As I said in the post, I am reluctant to put too much trust in claims made in the contest of the climate controversy.
"Looking at Fig 1 in the quoted article, pH rises from 7.4 nineteen thousand years ago to 7.87 eleven thousand years ago, declines to 7.76 nine thousand years ago, rises to 7.9 six thousand years ago. It is currently 8.04 and falling by about .017/decade. If it has been going up and down that routinely it is unlikely that the current gradual decrease will have drastic effects."
I don't disagree with your overall skepticism, but your logic here is sloppy. A (7.87-7.4)/(19k-11k years) pH change is 0.0007 pH per decade, orders of magnitude slower than 0.017/decade currently.
The trouble with crying "unprecedented" about rates of change is that we usually just don't know. The proxies do not often give us the fine resolution in time that modern instrumentation does.
There is ice core evidence of temperature changes much faster than the current warming, but that's for one location, not a global average.
Yes it has been so claimed. Here's another take; “‘Ice cores’, whose bubbles take decades, even centuries, to seal.” from the latest CDN weekly roundup. Here; https://climatediscussionnexus.com/2025/09/17/another-cunning-plan-fails/
It's true, i'm just pointing out that you can't use the to argue there is precedent for the current rate of change.
But Occams razor applies. Given that we now know most of the other claims of climate change alarmism have not held up, and humans are likely not responsible for most of the observed changes in CO2 concentration. It's not impossible but it is highly unlikely that this rate is truly unusual.
I agree that almost by definition, most alarmist predictions haven't come true, but the earth is getting warmer pretty quickly, and i imagine there is a proposed mechanism for why higher temperatures lead to an acidifying ocean. I haven't seen anything to support your other statements that humans aren't responsible for CO2 increases.
I do think it's quite possible global warming isn't worth the drastic measures we're proposing to prevent it, and think we should carefully consider the good and bad of global warming before we hurt the global poor trying to prevent it.
But mostly I was just pointing out that damage from rapid ocean acidification cannot be discarded based on the evidence given.
Define "pretty quickly" for ocean warming. Nothing I have seen makes me think it's anything close to quickly. Water is roughly 1000 times as dense as air, and if the atmosphere has only warmed 1.5° in the last 50 or 100 years, that makes me think the ocean can only have warmed a very little.
Ocean temperatures are what we're talking about when we talk about global warming. Air fluctuates more short term, but the mean temp of both should basically change in tandem long term. The ocean temp has increased 1.5C in the last 100 or so years
Sorry if I ran ahead of you a little too fast. NASA/NOAA & IPCC now agree that human emissions account for only about 3% of annual emissions. Most of the change from earlier estimates comes from improved technology in sea floor mapping boosting our understanding of the magnitude of sea bed volcanic emissions.
Hasn't it always been known it's about that? Isn't the issue that the relatively small human emission is still a forcing function to a new, higher CO2 steady state?
There was an alternative explanation for the Great Barrier Reef's decline - phosphate runoff from agricultural fertilisers. And when the government cracked down on that, the reef recovered...
The reefs have been around for 200 million years give or take. They survived the comet which killed the dinosaurs, they survived the 500 foot sea level rise 10-15,000 years ago, they've even survived a few nuclear weapons tests. To think that puny humans can kill them off in just a few decades is the height of hubris.
Whoa, hang on. From the OP:
"The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (GBRMPA) considers the earliest evidence of complete reef structures to have been 600,000 years ago. According to the GBRMPA, the current, living reef structure is believed to have begun growing on the older platform about 9,000 years ago. (Wikipedia)"
So the GBR hasn't been around for 200 million years, and the current living reef probably hasn't had to weather the 500-ft sea level rise (it's even plausible that it came into being as a consequence). That leaves nuke tests, none of which were near GBR (the closest I know of were at Bikini, about 1500 miles from GBR's furthest north, and on the other side of the Solomon Islands).
From Wikipedia:
"Corals first appeared in the Cambrian about 535 million years ago."
If you read the rest of it, there's no backing for your "only 600,000 years old" for coral reefs in general.
You ran your victory lap too soon, even by your own narrow misdefinition. If the current living reef structure grew upon the older platform 9000 years ago, that was towards the end of that massive sea level rise. So you lose on that matter, it's the same coral reef, just higher. That's how coral reefs work.
The comment before yours was referring to the GBR, not coral reefs in general.
I wasn't running any sort of victory lap. Since when are we keeping score?
I took your "Whoa" that way. If you say it wasn't, fine.
As for the GBR, it's made of corals, and Wikipedia says corals have been around 535 million years. Your 9000 years doesn't matter, nor your 600,000. But you should probably pick one or the other and not switch back and forth.
I didn't pick those numbers; the GBRMPA did, and presumably didn't pick them, either; it calculated them from available evidence. Those numbers matter because they apply to the GBR, which was the subject of the comment you replied to, as opposed to corals in general.
Your tone continues to sound unusually accusatory.
“To think that puny humans can kill them off in just a few decades is the height of hubris.”
Well, not sure I agree with *that*.
Even though I do essentially agree if you tack on the modifier “simply by emitting carbon and methane into the atmosphere”.
How do you propose humans could kill off all corals?
Well, bunker-busting bombs, for one.
I am more serious than joking. If it was humanity’s explicit goal - or merely the goal of the U.S. or China’s leaders - I think it could be achieved given human ingenuity and our level of wealth.
And no I have no proof or hard evidence re: this specific thing. I can merely point to human history, and examples like going to the moon.
Grok says there are 262,000 square miles of coral reefs. A wild guess says you’d need 1000 huge bombs at a minimum to destroy one square mile; that’s 32 per linear mile, or 167 linear feet per bomb.
And most of the corals would be merely displaced, not destroyed.
Now atom bombs could actually destroy them, but you’d still need more than one per square mile, especially underwater where the heat and radiation won’t travel as far. Last I heard was something like 10-20,000 ICBMs total, and if each has 10 warheads, that’s still not even one per square mile.
The radiation could well kill all human life and a lot of other species, but kill all the corals? I don’t believe it.
A claim related to the biological impact of changing ocean acidity is the impact of the decrease in ocean salinity expected from net polar ice melt and rising sea levels. But again, the fact that we have records of what happened during recent and geologically short-lived ice ages puts the alarmist claims to rest. Ocean salinity increased quickly and significantly, especially in places with less current flows to the larger sea like the Mediterranean, with apparently no noticeable major impact on the affected ecosystems in terms of it happening faster (in both directions) than species were able to adapt to the changing conditions.
Well written, sir. Thank you. A couple of things -
First, you quoted the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report regarding the impacts of other drivers on climate. Would you be kind enough to provide a specific reference for that quote? Thank you.
Second, DOE recently disbanded the panel, citing legal concerns. The biggest loss to science of that action was to stifle the debate that would come from response to real comments (not legal challenges). I am curious if you think the committee will be resurrected, or if there perhaps will be a private response to the comments.
That quote was introduced with "Thirty years later virtually the identical point was made by the IPCC itself in the Fifth Assessment Report (Arent et al. 2014, emphasis added)"
I expect to see rebuttals to the report and responses by its authors, on the web and, more slowly, in journal articles. I don't think the debate depends on DOE sponsorship.
One interesting question is how much effect the realization that the people handing out federal money have reversed/will reverse their bias will have on the debate. That is relevant to the question of to what degree the present orthodoxy is due to the past bias in federal funding.
Thank you, sir.
In my opinion the five DOE panel members are all leaders in the significant aspects of the science of climate. The panel is probably the best in many years in both coverage of major scientific areas and in knowledge of the issues in climate policy.
Q: What do you call a situation in which a small group of researchers make bold predictions but won’t share their data, try to get contradictory articles blackballed from journals, lash out at critics with lawsuits, and see most of their predictions fall by the way side?
A: Settled science
If it's settled, it ain't science. If it's science, it ain't settled. -- someone famous
It astounds me how much more money the catastrophists want for something they claim is so settled.
Thank you for your supporting comment!
The five are among the best scientists and not at all like the ones you criticize.
Steve Koonin's book is "Unsettled". A second edition was published in 2024. Definitely worth reading. He was appointed by President Obama to be Undersecretary for Science at the Department of Energy and had some $100 million a year in climate research in his portfolio.
John Christy and Roy Spencer of course manage the official world atmospheric temperature database for NASA and are thus the number one climate data sharers in the world. Roy Spencer provides a monthly update on the temperatures usually on the second day of the next month.
Judith Curry and Ross McKitrick are leaders in their own areas as well.
Oh, I had forgotten, so I must hasten to add, I became interested in all this stuff for the same reason I was somewhat interested in the environment, 'ya know externalities and such. Little did I fathom that global warming would become a new religion.
I met Ross McKitrick once, years ago, at a conference he organized. I attended because I had no clue how physics models worked, but I did know how data worked. I learned that even people in the climate field had a healthy respect for data, too. Good man. Judith Curry I know from her website. Good lady.
completely agree, sir. that is why I mourn the loss of their response to the comments. Roger Pielke Jr. wrote last month about the "retraction," saying it had something to do with lawfare (my words). I don't want lawfare to stop the debate.
It won't.
Regarding heat/cold deaths, I think what would be interesting would be an analysis of why so many people die in winter. When eyeballing the graphs at https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps, it doesn't look like it's mostly happening in the colder countries. I'd like to think that this is because people in warmer countries generally don't have good heating and insulation, so they end up experiencing more cold than people in colder countries, particularly at night, but maybe there's some other explanation?
Take a look at my two posts on mortality and temperature. The mortality in Gasparini's _Lancet_ articles is not mostly from extreme temperatures but from temperatures above or below the temperature at which mortality is minimized. That temperature tends to be higher in warmer cities, as I point out (I am using Gasparini's data but I don't think he observes that pattern) which fits your point.
I wouldn’t call the increase in heatwave days misleading. Yes, there was a big heat anomaly in the US in the ‘30s. This was concentrated specifically in the US and from what I have seen seems to be linked to the dust bowl. (A lack of vegetation driving large but localized spike in temperatures).
Here are some papers discussing the dust bowl anomaly in the US:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0810200106
At its time it was by far the biggest anomaly on the planet.
There were surely other interacting natural forcings that helped drive that event. But the big one seems to be that we stripped the land of vegetation and altered the continental climate across several decades.
Thus one takeaway from this data could be: uh oh we’re at dust bowl levels of continental warming and we didn’t even strip all the vegetation!
But to state things more carefully and in line with the scientific method: if we’re going to discard the hypothesis of multidecadal increase in heatwave days across recent decades, we need to rule it out in more regions than just the US, which exhibits this big weird anomaly that’s too confounded with land use mismanagement.
The US record isn’t the best dataset to do that with
Do you agree that to present the data starting in 1960 is dishonest? It looks like a very clear case of cherry picking. It would not be dishonest if it included the statement that heatwaves were more common in earlier decades. Also note that, according to the black line, 2020 is only back to 1915, well before the dust bowl.
The graphic criticized was specifically on US heat waves. CRI does not claim that global temperatures have not been rising, only that US temperatures have not been. And one of their points is that patterns observed over a short period may turn out to be misleading in the light of longer term data.
There are two different issues here. One is whether the graphic is dishonest. A different one is whether the conclusion it is intended to support is true. It is possible to make dishonest arguments for correct conclusions, but the more willing people are to do that the harder it gets to know what conclusions are true. I take the climate debate as illustrating that, have supported the claim that work supporting one side accepted by respectable sources is sometimes provably dishonest in multiple posts including two linked to in this post.
"Biggest anomaly on the planet" could be misleading. How many reliable weather stations around the planet were there in Africa or most of Asia?
That is true, maybe I was too strong on that statement.
Still though, where we do have temperature records it’s shown that the 1930s warming was a US-based phenomenon, whereas the current warming we know is a global phenomenon.
The fact that the increase has been to similar levels as that known regional environmental disaster, but this time attributable to rising greenhouse gas levels, is significant.
One of the claims I have recently heard is that deaths due to temperature change are currently in decline. The argument is that because it's increasingly hard to raise temperature by the next degree than it was the last one, average temperature rise tends to skew towards raising the floor more than the ceiling, and that since too cold is generally more dangerous than too hot, the lives saved by raising the floor significantly outnumber the lives lost by raising the ceiling.
Do you have any references to a solid study on that argument, or any reason to think its anything other than a plausible conjecture?
The Lancet articles, which I cited in two posts: "Temperature, Mortality and Climate Change" and "Temperature, Income and Mortality" found mortality due to temperatures below optimal much larger, by more than an order of magnitude, than mortality due to temperatures above optimal. An article which Gasparini, the lead author of those, was a coauthor of, found that warming so far had reduced mortality.
On the other hand one of Gasparini's Lancet articles concludes that climate change will increase mortality by the end of the century. I discuss some problems with that in my two posts.
That minimum temperatures go up more than maximum is clear in the IPCC projections. The explanation offered by Freeman Dyson, which seems right to me, is that water vapor is a greenhouse gas. The more you have of one greenhouse gas the less the effect of adding another. There is more water vapor in the air when it is warm than when it is cold.
Do you have a take on the claim by Happer, Lindzen, and others that the relevant wavelengths become increasingly saturated as CO2 rises, so that each doubling has a greatly reduced effect? It seems plausible to me -- otherwise surely our atmosphere would have been much hotter when CO2 levels were far higher -- but I have nowhere near enough knowledge of the relevant physics to directly evaluate it.
I don't.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/09/14/the-hottest-summer-days-in-d-c-have-not-gotten-hotter-in-last-40-years/
It's only for DC and a preliminary part of a bigger study. But it may come close to what you want.
The Critical Review has a good deal of information on the issue of temperature trends in the US.
Hi. I have been following the climate controversy since 1988. On the face of the controversy it was obvious that it was nuts. I followed it on WUWT. I also follow Joe Bastardi on Weatherbell. I thinK we met years ago at UCLA. Doug Shetler.
Certainly possible. I was in the UCLA econ department from 1980-1983.
“Nuts” is both too strong and too weak.
Too strong in that the idea that humans emissions of carbon and methane could possibly cause accelerating global warming (2 degrees then 3 degrees, and then continually accelerating beyond that) is not completely nuts - even if it is *far* less than 50% likely - nor is the idea of taking some steps to buy insurance against that case [not dissimilar to investing in tech to deflect an asteroid that might in the future be coming at Earth].
Too weak in that it *is* very clear that the primary reason for this topic’s prominence is for the purpose of attaining political power for leftists - leftists who are generally anti-capitalist.
And because the idea that most of the policy prescriptions proposed are “worth it” on an economic cost-benefit analysis, or that the chances that said expensive policies would be the difference in preventing catastrophic accelerated warming, is anything but vanishingly small.
I.e. there is IMO at best *far* less than 1 in 1,000 chance that the current leftist public policy prescriptions that they advocate actually making happen would be the difference between catastrophe and avoiding catastrophe. While clearly making us all poorer and less able to adapt to any possible harmful effects of future warming even if they turn out to be correct on the “catastrophe” point.
While I mostly agree with your points, the criticism of the literature I have focused on is the claim that net costs of climate change are known to be large. As best I can tell we don't even know if the net effect is negative. If it is positive, then what you refer to as insurance is spending money to make us worse off.
Surely correct.
But the case I am really talking about is the extreme one where warming starts to accelerate, not only reaching 3 degrees but going beyond that with no sign of stabilization.
In that scenario *alone*, I am willing to take it on faith that the effects become significantly negative, and are even existential. Buying insurance against that (quite slim) possibility is the one thing that could be worthwhile.
But for anything short of that - or any plans of action that don’t address that case (e.g. the Paris Accords if fully implemented IIRC only reduce warming by 0.3 degrees, and clearly do nothing to avert the catastrophe case) - I strongly agree with all your points. Including even the seldom made point that two degrees of warming might be net beneficial.
Few advocates of climate policies are willing to make the case for the extreme measures that would be necessary to actually buy said insurance by way of emissions reductions in the present, because they know those measures would be politically unpopular everywhere, given the reduction in standard of living they would require.
But they still want the political benefits of being the ones “addressing climate change”.
Unfortunately, the average person’s intuition seems to be that this topic is like any other environmental one, where “every little bit helps”.
And so leftists make their case and implement their agenda in incremental fashion. They claim the Paris Accords are a “down payment” towards addressing the existential risk.
In fact, the odds are astronomically against those incremental measures making a material positive difference, in terms of the counterfactual of how humanity could have done with pro-growth policies, plus perhaps a relatively modest investment in “asteroid deflection” type technologies.
Most certainly if one values the well-being over the next few decades of the billions of the world’s poorest who do not have access to to low cost, reliable, highly available energy.
I find it hard to see how your accelerating warming is possible, given that average temperature has been much higher in the past — we are currently in an ice age, with temperature lower than it has been for most of the past billion years and CO2 lower than for much of it.
Also, if you are considering very low probability/high cost outcomes you have to also consider ones where preventing warming has catastrophic effects — most obviously the end of the current interglacial. As you may know there is serious work arguing that what is preventing that is anthropogenic warming, not from the industrial revolution but from the invention of agriculture about eight thousand years earlier.
https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/how-humans-held-back-the-glaciers
Lol.
I am unused to being on this side of the climate change argument. In fact I'm not sure I ever have been!
Make no mistake - not only do I *not* agree with the leftists here, I am very strongly opposed to almost all of their public policy prescriptions on the topic. The relatively few not brazenly hypocritical/political ones who are for deployment of nuclear energy I can support on that one point.
But I believe those of us opposed should *properly* steelman their case.
I am not a climate scientist and have no interest in being one. But I understand more than enough of basic economics, probability, utility and insurance to articulate a coherent view that seems lacking in almost all discussions of the topic.
For everything save "existential risk" it is ridiculously clear to me that the expected value of leftist policy prescriptions vs the alternative of not doing them is negative, and the only question is exactly how negative. I can add precious little value there, and am thrilled that people like Alex Epstein and yourself do so.
The most reasonable scientists I have seen on the left give a chance of existential risk on the order of 5%-10%.
I agree with you and Epstein that the actual risk is almost certainly *much* less than that.
What is the most proper judgement of the probability? No one knows. My personal best guess would be somewhere in the range of 0.1% - 2%.
But perhaps one in 10,000 or 1 in 100,000 (0.01% or 0.001%) is a more proper estimate. Still, it's not knowably zero, and IMO it is a weak argument for our side to claim that we should simply assume and act as if it were zero.
As I noted, the best data and arguments I have seen on this topic are from Alex Epstein and yourself. But IMO the *one* place you both are weak is in directly addressing the tail risk argument of actual existential risk.
My one contribution to the debate is that whatever semi-reasonable take one has on the probability of existential risk there is, the policies being proposed by the IPCC, every left politician and almost all notable leftist advocates are incredibly unlikely to deliver *any* material reduction to said chance of existential risk.
Which means it is incredibly stupid and self-defeating for even rich Western countries to pursue those, and grotesquely immoral to impose them on the world's poorest.
The game leftists are offering to humanity is:
Heads we lose (have made humanity notably poorer for no good reason),
Tails we 99.999% still lose (their policies did ~nothing to reduce the risk)
But I have seen almost no one do the simple multiplication of [existential risk probability] x [probability that the policies will prevent existential catastrophe] in making the argument against costly leftist policy prescriptions.
I cannot think of any direct mechanism by which either anthropogenic climate change or its prevention could destroy our species, which I take to be what existential risk means. But I can think of ways in which human action could do it, such as biological warfare or creating superintelligent AGI. And I can imagine climate change either triggering such action or preventing it from being triggered, and more easily imagine ways in which the attempt to block climate change could trigger it. That is the only way I can think of that either climate change or its prevention could pose an existential risk. And I see no reason to think that the former is more likely to do it than the latter.
Can you suggest direct ways? The problem with the obvious ones is that both global temperature and CO2 concentration have been much higher in the geologic past — for most of which there was not ice on the poles.
"the Great Barrier Reef, supposedly damaged by climate change, has at this point entirely recovered"
Am I reading the portion of the CRI correctly that indicates that it used "hard coral cover" as a measure of GBR recovery? Could this be misleading if the hard coral cover recovery was, in large part, due to Acropora coral, a particular fast-growing coral, which dominated the recovery? If Acropora coral is not as hardy, wouldn't the decrease in biodiversity and reduced resilience contradict the assertion that the GBR has entirely recovered?
I don't know.
My other basis for doubting a pH basis for the problem is that the pH was lower during most of the time the reef formed. As I said in the post, I am reluctant to put too much trust in claims made in the contest of the climate controversy.