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    Re: JMGreer on the reality of AGW, sorry, Rhys, no astroturfing here, just a serious ignorance.... Archived Message

    Posted by John Monro on October 18, 2019, 12:09 am, in reply to "JMGreer on the reality of AGW, and also of the gics' attempted astroturfing; also some practical"

    This must be one JWG's most disappointing efforts Actually it's really bad. There's a lot to take issue with here, in fact, pretty well everything.

    We'll deal with them in order:

    anthropogenic climate change is real and serious, and it’s being exploited by political and corporate interests to push a dubious agenda on the public

    Which political and corporate interests? From his analogy to an imminently drowning passenger on the Titanic accepting a preposterous "solution" to their likely demise, one has to assume he means those activists and corporate interests in who are insisting on or promising solutions from various ideas and actions, which are not appropriate in the state we find ourselves.

    This analogy is misleading. The problem is that there may be some interests promising such quack but profitable nostrums, but if the Titanic represents the state of our planet, then there are hugely greater numbers of political and corporate interests who have manned and steered this boat into the iceberg in the first place, and who, rather than taking avoiding action, are happy to crash the vessel and to hell with everyone on board, which is odd, as they don't seem to have noticed that they're on board as well.

    The same thing can happen on a larger scale when ecological shifts add or subtract large quantities of a greenhouse gas from the atmosphere. That’s what happened when European diseases swept across the New World after the first transatlantic voyages, causing 95% fatality rates among North America’s native peoples and letting millions of acres formerly cultivated as farmland return to forest. The drawdown of carbon dioxide required by all that tree growth drove a three-century cold snap called the Little Ice Age, plunging most of the northern temperate zone into sharply colder conditions, with drastic impacts on politics and culture worldwide.

    I think MJG is guilty here of what he accuses others of doing, overstating the science. It's true that one theory of the cause of the "Little Ice Age" is the colonisation of the Americas as noted by JMG, and others have suggested severely lowered populations of Europe and Asia by the Black Death epidemics had a similar effect. But these are only two of several other competing theories, for instance the known Maunder Minimum and the studied increase of volcanic activity during this time. And for me, the fact that the climate had already started significantly cooling by 1300 which was well before the colonisation of the Americas, indicates this theory is not enough on its own to explain this climate phenomenon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age

    Then we come to the nitty-gritty of this article, the criticism of the shrillness of global warming activists, the acceleration of hyperbole to “crisis” or “emergency” etc. The publication of books such as “Six Degrees” (and I suppose that would include the book “The Uninhabitable Earth”, he can’t have got round to reading this one yet) which he rather patronisingly dismisses “its gaudy portrayal of a world tucked under a broiler”, when in fact that’s exactly what a planet at six degrees heating would be. One can argue the six degrees, but Lynas doesn’t actually predict this, he takes his time to prognosticate a world at varying degrees of warming up to this level.

    The difficulty, in turn, is the same one encountered again and again by apocalypse-mongers: the universe keeps on failing to live up to their predictions. Do you, dear reader, remember the loud pronouncements not much more than a decade ago that the Arctic Ocean would be ice-free by 2013? 

    Again, he’s cherry picking his argument. There is absolutely no doubt that the Arctic is heating twice as quickly as the rest of the planet, and it is seriously losing its ice, both in extent and volume. 2007 saw a record minimum, and an obvious acceleration in loss, so a few scientists did suggest a rapid loss of all summer ice, but the fact is the most scientists didn’t. The IPCC continued to suggest that summer ice in the Arctic could be lost by 2100. In 2012 the summer ice crashed to a much lower level still, so whilst any prediction of ice loss by 2013 has proven to be wrong, that prognosis was not made in ignorance or a flight of hyperbole. And indeed the Arctic summer ice for the most part continues its death spiral, this year’s minimum being equal with 2007 as the second lowest recorded. https://www.arcticdeathspiral.org The date of the first ice free summer remains conjectural, but studies suggesting within three or four decades seem now to be very conservative. The scientist JMG is referring to is likely to Peter Wadhams, who has been recording the summer ice’s loss for some time https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/18/ice-scientists-arctic-ice-disappearing-reduce-emissions-peter-wadhams But he is one scientist, no the totality of science. And ultimately he’s likely to be more nearly correct than the IPCC.

    On the other hand, if you approach a discussion outside of the scientific community with all those caveats, and the subject is anything even remotely controversial, you can expect to have the caveats shoved down your throat by your opponents, who are used to a different mode of discourse. Scientists who find their feet in the public sphere thus quickly stop offering the caveats, and start using the same rhetorical tricks as their opponents. Unfortunately one of the most common of those tricks involves taking your argument further than the evidence will go, and making whatever claims you think you can get away with.

    He illustrates his point by describing Carl Sagan’s increasingly dire predictions as to what a nuclear winter might mean. But the fact is that most scientists, at least as compared with most other mortals, are still very reluctant to make pronouncements which the science cannot support, indeed I have noted this matter here in regard to weather extremes when the routine scientific response is to say “you can’t say that one particular event is due to climate change” when I believe, on firm statistical and causative grounds, one can indeed say, with a high degree of confidence, that this event would not have occurred in the absence of AGW. There are countless other examples of scientific reticence in regard to public discussion.

    Nor does MJG acknowledge the worryingly large number of examples of scientists being muzzled in what they’re allowed to say by their political and corporate masters, a rather more significant concern than a few scientists allowing their enthusiasm to run away with them. http://columbiaclimatelaw.com/resources/silencing-science-tracker/silencing-climate-science/ Take the case of James Hansen, the doyen of climate scientists. I am not aware of him saying anything at any time that couldn’t be backed by rational science, but in which case is he not going to be allowed to be scared by what he has discovered and to become a normal human being , reacting to a real danger to his grandchildren, and becoming an effective activist? His warnings are dire because the science is dire, and many scientists are having to leave their scientific comfort zone and start speaking out more forcefully. It’s not the scientists’ fault that so few have been paying attention until now.

    If you want to see just how far climate scientists have gotten into what we might as well call the Sagan syndrome, by the way, ask them about the global cooling scare of the 1970s. Odds are the immediate response you’ll get is an insistence that it never happened. If you present them with the titles and authors of books written during that period that treated global cooling as a reality—those aren’t hard to find—they’ll typically backpedal and insist that well, maybe so, but scientists didn’t support the global cooling scare. If you demonstrate that respected scientists did in fact do so—and again, this isn’t hard to do—they’ll either get angry and start shouting or insist that, well, maybe so, but it wasn’t the consensus among climate experts.

    Again, whilst it is true that there were some dire predictions of global cooling at this time, not completely out of line with observations of a cooling planet and particulate emissions into the atmosphere, in fact there were considerably more scientific studies predicting a warming world due to CO2 emissions, or other equally valid science suggesting that the understanding of the processes controlling the climate were not well enough understood to make such predictions valid. Skeptical Science is the best resource for countering such claims, or at least putting them into perspective. https://skepticalscience.com/ice-age-predictions-in-1970s.htm

    But whether or not the claims about the “Global Cooling Scare” are fair, there’s no logic at all to parallel this to the “scare” we’re having now in regard to global warming. Indeed it might even be logical to say that the predictions of an imminent ice age of the 1907s have only been avoided because CO2 emissions have been vastly greater than anyone could have envisaged in the 1970s and the consequent global warming so much worse. The figures are about a doubling, in other words as much CO2 has been emitted since 1970 as had been emitted since the industrial revolution to that time. It is more than possible that the predicted global cooling was correct, omitting AGW. JMG doesn’t acknowledge this.

    In point of fact, we don’t know what’s going to happen if we keep on dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Linear models—the sort that predicted an ice-free Arctic Ocean by 2013—clearly don’t work, and anyone familiar with complex dynamic systems knew in advance that they wouldn’t work:  in a system of any complexity, linear change in one variable doesn’t produce linear change in other variables, it sets off unpredictable feedback loops and turbulence that makes slow background shifts difficult to track. That’s what we’re seeing with the climate:  increased unpredictability and turbulence over a background of slow change. The Arctic Ocean will almost certainly end up ice-free one of these days, but it may be a while, and Florida’s going to be underwater eventually but it may take a couple of centuries for that to happen. That’s how climate change happens in the real world.

    The first sentence is only true as far as there’s no second sight in science. All “predictions” are really more in the way of “prognostications”, and no reputable scientist would say anything different. Linear models don’t work, writes JMG, but most scientists are not using linear models or simplistic extrapolations, and never had. To go back to James Hansen, he made a number of prognostications in the late 1980s. We now have 30 years of reliable measurement to confirm the worrying, or “alarming” fact that his predictions were amazingly prescient. That hasn’t stopped a number of climate change denialists cherry-picking some of his data to prove he was hopelessly wrong and “alarmist”. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2018/jun/25/30-years-later-deniers-are-still-lying-about-hansens-amazing-global-warming-prediction So the “alarmism” is not James Hansen’s, it’s the slur put on him by his detractors. (Shades of Labour and anti-Semitism?) The fact is that science is producing ever more accurate models of future climate and which measurements are confirming. The predictions are getting more dire because the the science and measurement is getting more dire.

    And for every argument that some scientists are exaggerating the threats of global warming, what about the massively outweighing exaggerations of the climate denialists? For instance, their continued attempts to show the planet had not warmed since 1998, and climate scientists saying, the world continues to worm, because the planet continues to absorb more heat, it’s not just for some reason not showing dramatically for the moment. Then comes 2016 and its El Niño to completely shatter the previous record heat, and even now, July 2019, not an El Niño year, have the highest ever recorded monthly global temperature. http://www.columbia.edu/~mhs119/Temperature/T_moreFigs/

    In New Zealand three or four years ago, a highly qualified scientist, Dr Jan Wright, The Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, produced a thoroughly researched paper, for Parliament and the people, on the effect of sea level rise on New Zealand, its vulnerable areas and likely consequences, based on the best science and measurement available then. https://www.pce.parliament.nz/explore/sea-level-rise/time-to-plan It was a worrying report, thousands of homes would be at risk, coastal erosion and regular flooding and there’d be significant costs. One of her recommendations was that money should be gradually set aside to pay these totally unavoidable costs. The Minister responsible for this matter at the time, Bill English, carelessly brushed aside such concern by saying, twice, this report is “speculative”, whereas in fact the whole point of this report was that it wasn’t “speculative”, but highly informed. He refused to acknowledge its usefulness and in particular said the country had more immediate concerns, so no prospect whatsoever of any planning or fund. That’s just a small example of overwhelming difficult science has had in getting its reasoned voice heard. Hyperbole has nothing to do with it. The whole problem is that reason and reality is itself under constant attack, in which case is it any wonder scientists, as ordinary human beings, have to leave the self-imposed carapace of scientific purity to actually emote some information with force and frustration?

    So the shrill insistence that we’re facing a climate emergency and we have to take drastic action right now is a political claim, not a scientific one.

    Sorry JWG, you’re wrong. The need for drastic action now is the science, nothing but the science. By far the greatest political shrill insistence up to now is that we disregard the science.

    The open secret of climate change activism is that the solutions being offered by activists have uncomfortable similarities to the claims of the fellow with the bullhorn in my metaphor. Decades of heavily subsidized growth in solar and wind power haven’t dented the steady increase in carbon dioxide emissions, for example—not least because solar and wind power technologies depend on vast fossil fuel inputs for their manufacture, installation, maintenance, and disposal—so it’s disingenuous to claim that putting even more money into solar and wind power will do the job. As for vegan diets, bans on plastic straws, and the like, those are virtue signaling covering up an unwillingness to accept meaningful change.

    Again, JMG, you’re wrong about wind and solar power- the embodied energy in these technologies depends a lot on the nature of the power source use in making them. Solar panels or wind generators improve their embodied CO2 emissions greatly when renewable energy is used to make them. The whole point of renewable energy is that is provides a working alternative to fossil fuels, which as more and more are installed, JMG’s arguments then make increasingly less sense and it's seriously disingenuous for him to argue like this. Additionally, the cost of solar and wind power has fallen so precipitately that these technologies are now cheaper in providing electric power than fossil fuels. Yes, subsidies were initially required to ensure their viability, but this is no longer the case, and in any case, JMG fails to acknowledge the massively greater subsidies afforded to fossil fuels and nuclear power. https://reneweconomy.com.au/solar-wind-and-nuclear-have-amazingly-low-carbon-footprints-study-finds-94129/ Plastic straws may well be virtue signalling, but vegan diets are not, because it requires real commitment to be a vegan, no virtue signalling there at all. These are individuals commendably taking not just the climate crisis to heart, but the converging ecological crises that are signalling their revolutionary messages. There’s also a moral element here being missed by JMG.

    For two decades now, in fact, the people who are loudest in their insistence that something has to be done about climate change have been the same people whose lifestyles disproportionately cause climate change.

    Again, this is just a slur, tarring every activist and concerned citizen with the same churlish brush. I would have expected much better from JMG. We human being try on the whole to be good people. We try, and fail, to live a virtuous life, raise a virtuous family and help living in a virtuous community. People frightened or just concerned by global warming are no different. But despite our best endeavours we often fail our own standards. Myself for instance, I still run an ICE and with family in the UK am still tempted occasionally to wish to visit them, my daughters because three live there and my sister and brother because they’re getting old, like me. But the rise in the use of expensive battery powered cars shows that people who can afford to take some action to help with the climate do indeed do so. Many people install solar power not because it is cheap but because they see that as an honourable thing to do. But JMG misses the point that many climate activists are not wealthy or privileged. That certainly doesn’t apply to Ethiopia for instance, where in one day, tens of thousands of some of the poorest people on the planet managed to plant 335 million trees in one day, beating a previous record held by Indians, again, hardly the richest people on the planet. https://edition.cnn.com/2019/07/29/africa/ethiopia-plants-350-million-trees-intl-hnk/index.html That’s not virtue signalling, is it?

    the behavior of climate change activists, and of the corporate media and multinational business interests that fund and promote them so lavishly, makes sense only if you assume that they want everyone else to stop using fossil fuels so that they don’t have to. The shrill claims of impending doom, the insistence that we’re in a climate emergency and everyone has to accept drastic restrictions that climate change activists show no trace of willingness to embrace in their own lives, make perfect sense if the game plan is to buffalo most of the people in the world’s industrial countries into accepting a sharply lower standard of living “for the planet,” so that the upper twenty per cent or so can maintain their current lifestyles unchanged.

    JMG’s opinions just get worse and worse. Is he suggesting in all seriousness that the corporate media and “multinational” business interests are funding and promoting climate change activists so lavishly. How can JMG get his logic into such knot as to promote any thinking or knowledgeable person’s ridicule? Does that apply to Greta Thunberg and the millions of children around the planet who are rightly giving voice to their concerns. How rich have they got from the lavish funding of corporations? Or all the millions or ordinary parents and grannies and grandads who have gone out of their way to support them.

    “Do as I say, not as I do” is what he suggests climate change activists are suggesting. There is only one sense in which this criticism makes any sense, that anyone concerned about global warming realised long long ago. It’s no use hugging trees or knitting woolly cardigans to save the planet, if everyone else carries on the same way. People concerned with global warming have to change attitudes and actions in the community at large, not just their own community but all over the world, or nothing sufficient will happen. One person buying an electric car won’t save the planet. That’s understood, nor can one person organise effective, efficient and affordable public transport for himself, nor reduce plastic in packaging or supermarkets, or stop cattle being reared in feedlots or forests being demolished. It seems almost as JMG resents the fact that he is being asked, rightly, to take on board the same concerns as rational science indicates he should.

    And the “lower standard of living for the planet”? What standard of living does he mean? A population exploiting the resources of the planet so aggressively, borrowing from a future that will never be repaid, a standard of living just about ready to collapse, as we undermine our existence’s very foundations? The price of living a life on this planet that actually has a comfortable future will be a “lower standard of living”, that’s unavoidable, but perhaps in seeing this as a serious problem, as does JMG, he’s failing to see that that this doesn’t mean we can’t be just as happy, just as moral, just a peaceful. Indeed there’d by no shortage of philosophers to tell us that letting go of some of our present assumptions as to what makes a standard of living, would be a highly desirable strategy for our future.

    I’m thinking here among many other things about a recent discovery at an Australian university. Did you know that cows like to eat seaweed?  Ranchers who raise cows near the sea routinely find their herds on the beach or even belly deep in the surf, munching seaweed. It so happens that one variety of seaweed has the effect of nearly eliminating the production of methane in cows’ digestive tracts. Methane is a far more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, and has been coming out of the bellies of ruminants in vast quantities since long before humans arrived—think of the herds of buffalo that used to roam the North American plains, or the herds of aurochs (the wild ancestors of cattle) that once thronged the steppes of western Eurasia.
    Could we fine-tune emissions by giving cows seaweed to eat, so that excess carbon dioxide (which benefits plant growth, by the way) is balanced out by decreased methane?

    My disappointment continues with this paragraph. Firstly, whilst this finding is interesting, it remains to be seen if in a large scale application it is practical. Do you remember the finding the forests discharge methane, that climate sceptics seized on this “fact” to pooh-pooh climate science in regard to forests and climate change?There are a lot of cattle in the world, is there enough seaweed, never mind the fact that seaweed is a vital ecological niche in the marine environment. It’s true, methane is a powerful global warming gas, on a temporary basis, and needs to be dealt with, but in total methane emissions, , account for about 17% of global warming potential of all global warming gases in the atmosphere. Of this methane, just 16% is from “enteric fermentation” of cattle, a bit more is from fossil fuel extraction and use, a bit less rice paddies, and about the same as sewage, landfills and biomass burning. So the idea that enough methane could usefully be avoided to make other than a relatively minor contribution to global warming is erroneous, never mind the suggestion that it would in any way counteract our overwhelmingly more important emissions of CO2, which idea is scientifically illiterate.

    Replacing wood with hemp as a feedstock for paper and other uses could be another—the faster a plant grows, the more carbon dioxide it sucks out of the air, and hemp grows much faster than commercial softwoods. For that matter, large-scale tree planting is a viable strategy, deliberately copying the events that led to the Little Ice Age to cool things off a bit, especially if the trees are left to mature rather than being cut down early in their life cycle—again, we’ve got hemp as a replacement. Combine these and other bits of appropriate tech with the phasing out of a few absurd extravagances like private jets, and we can bring climate change to a halt, or at least slow it down to a pace that we and other species can handle.

    JMG, no only do you seem to have a bee in your bonnet in regard to hemp, you’re again guilty of the very charge you make against climate activism and “alarmism”, proffering a few random ideas around the periphery of the problem - the very tokenism that you bridle at. How is stopping private jets going to deal to global warming when air travel increases exponentially by several percentage points annually, and at any one time, there are about 15,000 aircraft in the sky.

    Well, I’ve come to the end of this marathon. I hadn’t realised when I started just how much there is in JMG’s article to criticise and counter, or I might not have started. Fortunately it’s a cool, wet spring morning in this part of New Zealand and I haven’t much else to do at the moment. I have some music to learn though, should get on with this, and some spring planting to do.

    But JMG, I couldn’t let your article go unscathed. To say I’m disappointed by it is an understatement. I often read your articles, there’s a lot to like in them, a lot of grist to the thought processes. I often recommend your site to others. But underneath all this, is the realisation that, whilst you may not be a climate denier as such, though you skirt perilously close, you don’t understand climate science, nor science in general, nor do you understand that poisoning the only planet we have to live on is the very definition of an existential crisis. No placatory words can alter that fact.

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