IN THIS ISSUE:
- My Recommendations for the Upcoming NAS Climate Report
- Despite Rising CO2, Arctic Sea-Ice Melt Declines Dramatically
My Recommendations for the Upcoming NAS Climate Report
I recently submitted comments to the National Academies of Sciences in response to their proposal to issue a rapid report on climate change. My thoughts are below.
Anyone should welcome the National Academies of Sciences (NAS) engaging in an honest assessment of the state of the climate, the effects of greenhouse gases on it, and what potential impacts might realistically be expected to occur, both positive and negative, should atmospheric greenhouses gases continue rising on realistic concentration pathways.
Unfortunately, the timing of the NAS’s decision to produce such a report, and the short time frame it has given itself to form a committee and produce the assessment, lead one to conclude this is more of a political exercise: an effort to undermine the Department of Energy’s recent report, “A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate,” and derail the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s decision to withdraw its endangerment finding as not supported by law under the Clean Air Act.
Based on the makeup of the NAS’s provisional committee, this effort resembles the recent attribution studies that are so much in vogue. Attribution studies are not science; rather, they assume climate change has contributed to some damaging event, and with that assumption in hand, the authors of the report use computer models to compare imaginary counterfactual worlds without increases in greenhouse gases, to those with greenhouse gases. The models don’t consider other factors and show no recognition of similar historical events and what drove them.
If the NAS report is not just to be an exercise in the logical fallacy of affirming the consequent, then it must address issues raised for decades by parties who, examining the data, available evidence, admitted weaknesses in climate models, and biases inherent in ground level temperature measurements, question the claim that humans are causing a climate catastrophe. Many of those parties’ works and the questions that they raised are discussed in the DOE report.
The NAS’s report should also acknowledge that climate change, and any policies implemented to mitigate it, have and will continue to result in both benefits and costs. Any legitimate theoretical or real-world policy response to any purported threats forecast as likely to result from climate change must acknowledge the real and tangible costs of actions to prevent it that are also likely to occur. An honest accounting of both the benefits and costs of climate action, the timelines involved, giving appropriate consideration to future expected economic growth and a realistic discount rate, as well as the realistically expected impact of these policies on reducing future temperature rise and any ancillary proposed secondary effects of such, like slowing sea level rise or reducing the frequency of extreme weather events such as droughts, floods, hurricanes, etc.…, is critical to an honest assessment of actions to prevent climate change regardless of what is driving it.
These considerations guide my recommendations for the literature I believe the NAS should take into consideration as it develops its report.
Rather than seeking from the outset to refute the DOE’s recent assessment, the NAS should carefully consider among its key points: there is a beneficial greening effect of carbon dioxide that is contributing to improved food production and expanded wildlife habitat; that carbon dioxide has a diminishing impact due to infrared saturation; that climate models fail to accurately reflect past temperature rise and have consistently forecast rates of rise significantly higher than actual measured temperatures; and that the worsening of weather, human health, and human welfare outcomes projected by climate models to flow from rising temperatures are nowhere in evidence when real-world data are considered. The world, as a whole, regionally, or locally, just isn’t behaving as many researchers, general circulation models, and integrated assessment models have projected it should respond to rising greenhouse gas concentrations.
Concerning Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS) and the warming effect of continued rising greenhouse gas emissions, the literature cited in the DOE’s study is powerful and seemingly dispositive. It details the discrepancy between the ECS range produced by climate models and data-driven estimates. The DOE report also discusses the fact that projected temperature ranges from ECS have not appreciably shrunk over time despite improved knowledge, and how at the low end, which seems based on real-world experience as the most likely result, produce easily manageable outcomes with little cause for concern. Although the DOE doesn’t dwell on it, the physics of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases and how they absorb infrared radiation in an overlapping fashion, lessening the warming impact per molecule as emissions rise—the so-called saturation effect—should be considered. Warming is logarithmic, not linear. Among the literature discussing this that merit consideration are: W. A. van Wijngaarden, W. Happer, “Dependence of Earth’s Thermal Radiation on Five Most Abundant Greenhouse Gases”; W. A. van Wijngaarden, W. Happer, “Relative Potency of Greenhouse Molecules”; and R. Lindzen, W. Happer, and S. Koonin, “Fossil Fuels And Greenhouse Gases (Ghgs) Climate Science.” Lindzen, Happer, and Koonin’s bodies of work have been recognized by the NAS itself, with each of them being elected to the NAS as members.
Concerning the biological impacts of carbon dioxide on plant life in general and crops in particular, as a supplement to the discussion contained in the DOE report and the copious literature it cites, I suggest the NAS carefully consider the material contained in the multivolume Climate Change Reconsidered series. This work, assembled by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, represents a comprehensive survey of the literature. Specifically of importance to the NAS’s enquiry concerning the impact of rising carbon dioxide on life is Climate Change Reconsidered: Biological Impacts, Chapters 1-4, covering the impacts on plants, and Chapters 5-7, which review the literature discussing the impact on terrestrial life, aquatic life, and humans.
Hydrocarbon use is likely to be at the center of the NAS report, as their use is the primary way humans are contributing to the increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Climate Change Reconsidered: Fossil Fuels would be instructive for the final committee to consider in this regard, since it is a copiously referenced review of the literature, detailing the relative benefits and costs of fossil fuels.
Concerning the impacts of greenhouse gases on extreme weather events, the data tells the tale. As explored in the DOE report and detailed in Chapter 12 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment report, the impact of rising greenhouse gases on the frequency and severity of most extreme weather events is not in evidence. For most categories of extreme weather events tracked by the IPCC, it has found no discernable impact yet, and only low, very low, or medium cause for attribution to changes in the trends of such events. For most categories of extreme weather, the IPCC doesn’t expect a discernable signal to arise by 2050 or even 2100. Evidence of a crisis can’t be found in the data.
Three final considerations that the NAS report should forthrightly address head-on:
- Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, at least not in the traditional sense of having toxic human health effects at any foreseeable levels, but it is critical to life and life’s continued flourishing on Earth. Efforts to reduce atmospheric CO2 by ending the use of hydrocarbons for energy, chemicals, and materials and products in everyday use would likely have immediately deleterious effects on human well-being.
- Climate models don’t accurately portray past or current climate conditions without being forced or tuned to do so, because the physics and assumptions built into them alone don’t produce results that track real-world temperature measurements. Even the modelers and the IPCC acknowledge that the models run way too hot. Since GCMs were specifically created and especially tailored to project temperature trends in response to greenhouse gas forcing, if they fail to get that right for past and current temperatures without regular adjustment, their projections of future trends can’t be trusted. Nor can the projections of Integrated Assessment Models for global or regional climate impacts, as they are built on the flawed projections of GCMs, be relied upon for public-policy planning purposes in anticipation of changes in extreme weather.
- Thousands of peer-reviewed papers have been published that call into question or raise doubts about one or another aspect of the claim that human greenhouse gas emissions are the cause of various types of changes in the climate or specific impacts, since James Hansen pronounced in Senate testimony in 1998 that a discernable signal of human influence on the climate had emerged from the noise in climate data. While few if any of these documents question the narrative of catastrophic climate change as a whole, none of those papers were ever intended to and could not do so; the weight of these thousands of papers and the available data call into question the narrative. At the very least the collective issues raised by these papers strongly suggest that the theory that humans are causing dangerous climate change merits serious reconsideration, refinement, or adjustment. Concerning the causes and consequences of climate change, the science is not settled, and never has been.
Sources: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine; U.S. Department of Energy
Despite Rising CO2, Arctic Sea-Ice Melt Declines Dramatically
A new study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters finds that contrary to many mainstream media reports, the amount of sea ice in the Arctic has not changed appreciably over the past two decades.
After the significant decrease in 2012, many researchers studying climate change claimed it was a harbinger of a permanent decline in Arctic sea ice due to climate change. Of course, sea ice waxes and wanes each year, but beginning in 1995, sea ice began a general, relatively steep decline, reaching its nadir in 2012 and then stabilizing amid yearly ups and downs.
This new research indicates that the popular reading of the situation was wrong. The measured decline slowed as early as 2005 and annual losses remained low or even flat, with the exception of 2012. If this research is correct, over the entire 20-year period arctic sea-ice loss has been slow and minimal. As the international team of mathematicians and physicists from the Universities of Exeter in the U.K. and Columbia in the United States write,
Over the past two decades, Arctic sea-ice loss has slowed considerably, with no statistically significant decline in September sea-ice area since 2005. This pause is robust across observational data sets, metrics, and seasons. … The modeling evidence suggests that internal variability has substantially offset anthropogenically forced sea-ice loss in recent decades.
Despite the authors’ claims that barely measurable sea-ice loss, a loss that is not statistically significant, is consistent with climate model projections for short periods of time, 20 years is a significant period of time, and relatively stable sea-ice is not what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration say is occurring (or should) be occurring in their recent reports—reports generating hundreds of press releases from climate alarmist organizations and stories in the mainstream media pointing to Arctic ice loss as among the strongest physical evidence that human CO2 emissions are causing dangerous climate change.
As polar bear populations have stubbornly refused to decline and hurricanes, contrary to alarmist forecasts, have not played ball by becoming more frequent or hitting harder when they appear, the alarmists always fall back and say, “Oh yeah, but what about the disappearing Arctic sea ice, well ahead of model projections?” The problem is they extrapolated from a single year’s sharp ice loss and ignored what little we know about the history of the Arctic and its large swings in ice gain and loss. They also assumed that CO2 is the main driver of Arctic ice trends, which this study rebuts.
Since 2005, humans have emitted approximately 600 billion metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, much of which has lingered. Yet, if this research is correct, the needle on Arctic sea ice has hardly budged or has not moved at all.
“Scientists report that the melting of sea-ice in the Arctic has slowed dramatically in the past twenty years, surprising climate experts,” reports The Express about this study, which most media outlets ignored. “According to the UK-based researchers, these results are unexpected because carbon emissions from fossil fuel burning have been rising, trapping even more heat over that time.”
So much for settled science. This research underscores the fact scientists still don’t have a clear understanding of the drivers of a phenomenon as narrow or limited as the causes of Arctic sea ice expansion and contraction. If that’s true for our understanding of Arctic sea ice, how much more true is it of our understanding of the drivers of the much more complex phenomena of local, regional, hemispheric, and global climate change?
Sources: The Express; Geophysical Research Letters
