IN THIS ISSUE:
- My Comments on the DOE Climate Report
- Seas Aren’t Rising Faster, Study Finds
- Blame Pollution Cuts for Rising Temperatures, New Studies Say
My Comments on the DOE Climate Report
In Climate Change Weekly 553 I discussed how the U.S. Department of Energy’s recent climate report restarted the largely dormant debate about the possible causes and consequences of climate change. For nearly 20 years previously, the debate was over, as far as the media was concerned: catastrophic human-caused climate change was beyond discussion, a proven fact—as if anything that is only expected to bear visible fruit in the future can be proven as a current fact.
The DOE’s report blew that narrative up, forcing the researchers and the media who had long claimed there was a scientific consensus, the science was settled, and we must get on with disrupting industrial development, to engage in a scientific debate once again.
My earlier discussion of the report discussed it only in general terms. However, the DOE’s report, as with other government reports, regulations, rules, and advisories, must go through a public comment period. Below are the comments I filed on behalf of The Heartland Institute:
The U.S. Department of Energy’s “Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate,” (hereafter, DOECR) serves as powerful refutation of the oft-repeated claims that the science is settled concerning the role humans are playing in ongoing climate change and that present climate change poses an existential crisis meriting a wholesale government-directed remaking of the economy, eschewing the use of hydrocarbons to prevent a dangerous increase in greenhouse gas emissions.
These comments focus on a few key points that the DOECR discusses that have largely been ignored or suppressed in the settled science narrative of anthropogenic climate disaster and will suggest a couple of issues that merit further consideration.
DOE Secretary Chris Wright’s comments in the foreword are worth repeating as they accurately frame consideration of the relative threats posed by climate change when compared to the considerable harms proposals to prematurely end the use of hydrocarbons before commercially available, comparable technologies and materials exist to economically and reliably substitute for them are developed. Wright correctly states:
Climate change is real, and it deserves attention. But it is not the greatest threat facing humanity. That distinction belongs to global energy poverty. As someone who values data, I know that improving the human condition depends on expanding access to reliable, affordable energy. Climate change is a challenge—not a catastrophe. But misguided policies based on fear rather than facts could truly endanger human well-being.
Th authors of the DOE report are all noted experts on climate and/or weather. Their reputations and qualifications are above reproach.
Concerning substance, in contrast to the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and many scientists in the “settled science” community, the DOECR acknowledges significant uncertainties surrounding the extent to which greenhouse gas emissions are driving present climate change, recognizing other natural factors have historically driven such changes. There are significant uncertainties concerning climate response to carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, both the physics of the response in the light of questions about CO2 saturation and concerning [whether] any physical forcing from CO2 [impacts] other largescale systems that affect climate change, and what positive and negative feedbacks or impacts might arise in response to higher CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere.
Also, unlike the typical discussion of CO2, the DOECR report specifically and rightly acknowledges that CO2 is not a pollutant in any traditional sense, not being directly toxic to human life or welfare at any foreseeable levels.
The DOECR details the significant discrepancies between modeled impacts [on], among other features, surface warming, snow coverage, stratospheric cooling, and projected regional impacts on the U.S. corn belt, and what has actually been recorded or measured.
To its credit, unlike typical discussions of climate change, the DOECR examines the ongoing benefits of both CO2 fertilization for crops and other plants, human health, the lifesaving benefit of a modestly warmer world, and the significant social benefits of fossil fuels. Each of these topics [is] largely ignored, downplayed, or directly misrepresented in typical discussions of anthropogenic climate change by the mainstream media and all too often in government reports and scientists representing the settled science consensus position.
Arguably Section 3.3, on the influence of urbanization on temperature trends, is not as strong as it could be. Specifically, it is not just urbanization that biases measured temperatures. Such biased measurements are also recorded in rural or relatively rural areas where surface temperatures stations are poorly [sited], failing to meet the National Weather Service’s own standards for data quality and because temperatures are “reported” from stations that have been closed or discontinued. The former problem has been detailed in two reports produced by The Heartland Institute, “Corrupted Climate Stations (2022),” https://heartland.org/wp-content/uploads/documents/2022_Surface_Station_Report.pdf and “Is the U.S. Surface Temperature Record Reliable?” (2009) https://heartland.org/publications/is-the-us-surface-temperature-record-reliable/. The latter was discussed in a report by an investigative journalist with The Epoch Times, which found that, for continuity reasons, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports temperature measurements from more than 30 percent of the 1,218 USHCN reporting stations that no longer exist. These measurements are nothing more than guesstimates assigned to a location based on temperatures from nearby stations which may, in fact, not be representative of the temperatures that would have been recorded at the ghost site had it still been in operation.
As the report points out, despite years of work, the climate research community has still been unable to narrow the estimated range of equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS). Yet this is the key critical metric that is supposed to drive dangerous climate changes. If our understanding of the ECS is incomplete or inadequate, climate projections-based greenhouse gas driven ECS changes are not fit for scientific pronouncements, much less for imposing policies that impact peoples’ personal freedoms and individuals’ and societies’ economic prosperity. The whole edifice of climate alarm is built on claims of ECS driving dangerous temperature increases.
One of the key problems in producing an ECS with some level of confidence, as the report discusses, is the complexity of cloud coverage and changes in cloud cover and type in response to cosmic rays and CO2 forcing. Concerning clouds, the IPCC acknowledges two things that are true, it can’t model clouds well, and it has only a poor understanding of how cloud cover might change and how that might impact global temperatures. Despite these admissions, the IPCC based on climate models, which run too hot, claims clouds aren’t significant forcing factors for climate change.
Another key point the DOECR report identifies that is often overlooked or downplayed by members of the so-called consensus community is the fact that for key features of the atmosphere, “observed warming trends are so small as to be consistent with the output of models that have no anthropogenic CO2, and inconsistent with the entire envelope of warming trends generated by models forced with increased CO2.” (P. 37) When one can’t distinguish an expected or forecasted effect from a situation of no change, a null case, background noise, or randomness, then there is no justification for assuming the cause-and-effect relationship is true, accurately modeled, or well understood.
Perhaps the greatest service the DOECR provides by way of improving our understanding of the true state of the climate and opening the door for fair debate on the causes and consequences of climate change are its discussions of: 1) the fact that the IPCC actually has little confidence in its detection of climate signals for most atmospheric phenomena and shifting trends in extreme weather events, and is even more reticent or confident in its ability to attribute changes identified to human actions; 2) that there has been no identifiable worsening trend for most extreme weather events, either in number or intensity, despite repeated claims to the contrary in mainstream media reports and attribution studies; and 3) its recognition and examination of the tremendous benefits to agriculture and human life of modest warming, higher CO2 and economic growth underpinned by hydrocarbon use.
Concerning economics, the DOECR’s survey of the literature concludes:
Economists have long considered climate a relatively unimportant factor in economic growth, a view echoed by the IPCC itself in AR5. Mainstream climate economics has recognized that CO2-induced warming might have some negative economic effects, but they are too small to justify aggressive abatement policy and that trying to “stop” or cap global warming even at levels well above the Paris target would be worse than doing nothing.
In short, most sound economic analyses conclude the policies proposed to fight climate change by imposing a coerced or incentivized reduction of hydrocarbons across the economy will likely result in greater harm to human health and welfare than the realistically expected negative impacts of climate change itself. Economically, climate policies are worse for the world than ongoing climate change accompanied by hydrocarbon use.
The “. . . nuanced and evidence-based approach for informing climate policy that
explicitly acknowledges uncertainties” recommended in this report should have been the standard from the start of the climate change scare when James Hansen testified at a Senate hearing in 1988 that humans were having a “discernable” and dangerous influence on climate change. Hansen’s testimony was unjustified then and it remains so today. Humans are likely affecting the climate to some extent at the global and regional scales, but the extent of that impact, whether it is on net dangerous or beneficial, and how we ought to respond to maximize any benefits and minimize any costs, are all questions that remain very much open to debate. A debate this report was meant to spark and force into the light of day and public scrutiny.
Sources: U. S. Department of Energy; Climate Change Weekly
Seas Aren’t Rising Faster, Study Finds
A new study by Dutch researchers finds no evidence of a global acceleration in sea level rise due to climate change. The authors say their approach to studying sea level rise has not been undertaken before. Rather than extrapolating from climate models or short-term satellite data, they did a survey of tide gauge stations around the world with at least 60 years of data recorded in the Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level database. Of 1,500 stations, 200 met the criteria.
The peer-reviewed paper, “A Global Perspective on Local Sea Level Changes,” was published in the Journal of Marine Science and Engineering.
The long-term data from the tide gauges showed the average rate of sea level rise through 2020 was only around 1.5 mm per year, or 15 cm per century—less than half the amount of rise claimed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and in much of the literature.
“This is significantly lower than the 3 to 4 mm/year often reported by climate scientists in scientific literature and the media,” Hessel G. Voortman, the lead author of the study, told independent journalist Michael Shellenberger, reports National Review. “It is crazy that it had not been done.
“I started doing this research in 2021 by doing the literature review [asking] ‘Who has done the comparison of the projections with the observations?’ And there were none,” Voortman told Shellenbeger.
As a hydraulic engineer of 30 years who is involved in flood protection and coastal infrastructure adaptation projects all over the world, his experience had already indicated to him the projections of a significant shift upward in the rate of sea-level rise were false.
“From practice, I had already encountered the situation that sea level projections were exceeding sea level observations,” Voortman told Shellenberger.
In 2023, Voortman published a paper examining the coast of the Netherlands, which demonstrated sea level rise there had not accelerated in recent decades.
Regarding the research citing satellite imaging that has claimed sea level rise has accelerated significantly since 1993, about the time satellite measurements of sea levels first began, Voortman says this data fails to account for periodic fluctuations which appear in the long-term record, saying, “Once that is considered, the accelerated rate as an effect of recent climate change disappears.”
The rate of sea level rise was in one of its periodic troughs in 1993, whereas the rates were at a peak in 2020, Voortman says.
A small percentage of the 200 stations surveyed showed “notable, sometimes statistically significant, increases or decreases in sea level,” Voortman told Shellenberger, but since those stations were typically located near others which showed no accelerated change, it is “unlikely that a global phenomenon like CO2-driven global warming is the cause.”
For locations where the rate of rise has either increased or even decreased at a rate inconsistent with the long-term trends experienced by nearby stations, Voortman says local factors such as earthquakes, extensive construction, groundwater withdrawal, land subsidence or compaction, or post-glacial effects “almost always” explained the local trends.
The IPCC’s model-based estimates “significantly” overestimate the actual average rate of sea level rise by as much a 2 mm per year, which is more than double the rate of sea level rise that is measured in the tide gauge data set, the paper states.
As a practical matter, accounting for the difference is critical, Voortman says.
“When designing coastal infrastructure, engineers have long accounted for sea level rise,” Voortman explains in the Shellenberger interview. “Both measurements and projections are important sources of information [and] [u]nderstanding the differences between them is crucial for practical applications.”
Although Voortman and his colleague may well have been the first to do a systematic survey of long-term tide-gauged station data, others, including The Heartland Institute, have previously looked at even-longer-term data from a sampling of stations and came to a similar conclusion. Of the stations Heartland surveyed, for example, some with data going back more than 100 years, some had experienced very little if any increase in the background rate of sea level rise, some were experiencing much higher than average rates of increase, whereas other stations had actually experienced falling sea levels. The disparate rates of change among stations can only be explained by changes in local conditions, as opposed to trends driven by global climate change.
Source: National Review; Journal of Marine Science and Engineering; The Heartland Institute; Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change
Blame Pollution Cuts for Rising Temperatures, New Studies Say
A recent study published in Nature indicates a significant portion of recent global average warming is attributable to a decline in aerosol pollution from East Asian nations as a decline in emissions from power plants and transportation has changed the nature of clouds.
The study produced by an international team of researchers from universities and research centers in eight countries spanning Asia, North America, and Europe, found that because of the decline in pollution, “[c]louds have been getting darker and reflecting less sunlight as a result of falling sulphate air pollution, and this may be responsible for a lot of recent warming beyond that caused by greenhouse gases,” writes the New Scientist in reporting on the study.
The research suggests as much as two-thirds of the Earth’s warming experienced since 2001 is directly attributable to changes in cloud cover and the impact on the amount of sunlight being reflected (or not) back into space as a result of the decline in sulfur dioxide emissions.
The researchers write,
Global surface warming has accelerated since around 2010, relative to the preceding half century. This has coincided with East Asian efforts to reduce air pollution through restricted atmospheric aerosol and precursor emissions. … [W]e show, using a large set of simulations from eight Earth System Models, how a time-evolving 75% reduction in East Asian sulfate emissions partially unmasks greenhouse gas-driven warming and influences the spatial pattern of surface temperature change. We find a rapidly evolving global, annual mean warming of 0.07 ± 0.05 °C, sufficient to be a main driver of the uptick in global warming rate since 2010. We also find North-Pacific warming and a top-of-atmosphere radiative imbalance that are qualitatively consistent with recent observations. East Asian aerosol cleanup is thus likely a key contributor to recent global warming acceleration and to Pacific warming trends.
This study is not the first to posit an impact of traditional air pollutants such as aerosols and particulate matter on global temperatures. As early as the 1960s some scientists argued air pollution was suppressing temperatures around the globe. By the 1990s, some scientists were positing reductions in such pollutants were partially responsible for recent measured changes in surface temperatures. Recent research suggests the decline in ship pollution is responsible for some of the recent measured increase in warming.
If declines in pollution from energy production, transportation, and shipping each account for some amount of measured warming, how much is left to be attributed to rising greenhouse gas emissions? And since climate models don’t account for changes in aerosols and soot or their associated impacts on clouds, how can they be relied upon as accurate barometers of climate change?
Sources: Nature; New Scientist (behind paywall)
