Dealing with Global Warming Over the Next Fifty Years
Is this going to be the dominant narrative thread of pretty much every history of 2025-2075 that will ever be written?...
Is this going to be the dominant narrative thread of pretty much every history of 2025-2075 that will ever be written?...
Back on September 4, 2014 I put a 9 1/2 year email-delay message-to-myself tickler in the system. It came due several weeks ago.
It was provoked by my reading my Wall Street Journal back on September 4, 2014:
Matt Ridley: Whatever Happened to Global Warming?: ‘Now come climate scientists’ implausible explanations for why the 'hiatus' has passed the 15-year mark…. The climate-research establishment has finally admitted openly what skeptic scientists have been saying for nearly a decade: Global warming has stopped since shortly before this century began.The climate-research establishment has finally admitted openly what skeptic scientists have been saying for nearly a decade: Global warming has stopped since shortly before this century began…. In their quest to explain the pause, scientists have made the future sound even less alarming than before. Let’s hope that the United Nations admits as much on day one of its coming jamboree and asks the delegates to pack up, go home… <https://www.wsj.com/articles/matt-ridley-whatever-happened-to-global-warming-1409872855>
That was a prominent call at the time. I had been keeping a tickler file, and it reminds me of, half a decade earlier, reading Steve Levitt and Steve Dubner’s Superfreakonomics. In it I was told:
Steve Levitt & Steve Dubner: Superfreakonomics: ‘There's this little-discussed fact about global warming: while the drumbeat of doom has grown louder over the past several years, the average global temperature during that time has in fact decreased... <https://archive.org/details/superfreakonomic0000dubn/mode/1up>
as well as that:
Steve Levitt & Steve Dubner: Superfreakonomics: ‘The problem with solar cells is that they are black... designed to absorb light from the sun.... But only about 12 percent gets turned into electricity, and the rest... contributes to global warming… <https://archive.org/details/superfreakonomic0000dubn/mode/1up>
and:
Steve Levitt & Steve Dubner: Superfreakonomics: ‘The energy consumed by building the thousands of new solar plants necessary to replace coal-burning and other power plants would create a huge long-term “warming debt”...<https://archive.org/details/superfreakonomic0000dubn/mode/1up>
The champion comment I saw on Levitt and Dubner came in a personal email:
ChunkyReeseWitherspoonLookAlike: ‘I’m a little offended by the book's laziness. Had they wanted, they could've recruited some clever deniers to feed them material for the climate chapter. People like Chris Horner and Anthony Watts and Roger Pielke are dishonest and wrong, but they're not stupid or ignorant people—they engage in some high-level sophistry and deceit. But Dubner and Levitt didn't even know enough about the subject to seek out the A-list bullshit artists…
I believe that Roger Pielke (Sr.) still maintains that global warming to date is primarily due to “natural variation of atmospheric and ocean circulation features within the climate system [which] produces global average heat changes that…IPCC models have failed to adequately simulate…”
I last encountered the work of Roger Pielke (Jr.) in 2014, and I was really not impressed at all <https://web.archive.org/web/20140402164614/http://equitablegrowth.org/2014/03/28/2417/the-launch-of-fivethirtyeight-com-and-climate-change-disaster-weblogging-trying-to-be-the-honest-broker-for-the-week-of-march-29-2014>—he lacked knowledge of the generating processes underlying or of the shape of the data he was using, and had no control over his models.
Christopher Horner no longer pretends that global warming is not happening, but still shrills “as always, the question will be how much lasting harm the EPA can inflict before the courts act to stop it…”
Anthony Watts is still—on March 24, 2024—publishing and boosting things trying to persuade his readers that global warming is not happening at all: “unusual cold plagues both northern, southern hemispheres….arctic sea ice strengthens…”
And as for Matt Ridley? He no longer appears to dare to say that global warming is not happening.
He is, however, out there claiming “the public isn’t being told the full truth about the climate threat…” and “if I waved a magic wand and gave the world unlimited clean and cheap energy tomorrow, I expect many climate scientists would be horrified…”
He does spend his time ranting about how the 2023 Armistice Day “ceremony at the Cenotaph [in London] might be marred by violent protests from pro-Hamas demonstrators…” (Spoiler: it wasn’t. It was the right-wing counter-protesters who clashed with police.)
And he does say: “Yes, heatwaves are getting more intense thanks to global warming, but the alarmism is shameless…”
Shameless…
To my knowledge, neither Matt Ridley, nor Steve Dubner, nor Steve Levitt, nor Roger Pielke, Sr., not Roger Pielke, Jr., nor Chris Horner, nor Anthony Watts, nor any of the others who did a great deal of data misrepresentation in their day has given all they have to the poor and taken up a life of anonymous service to others.
From a reputational-bet perspective, there could not have been a worse time to die on the hill that global warming is not happening than the September 2014 moment that Matt Ridley chose. In the data record, strong El Niños in 1991-1992, 1997-1998, 2025-2016, and 2023 boost global average temperatures substantially above their trend. In their aftermath you can draw a trendline with a low or a negative slope—for a while, and as long as you start your trend at the El Niño peak. And when Ridley wrote in September 2014, meteorologists had already for six months been raising their forecasts of the likelihood of a 2015 El Niño.
And—in large part because of a long four-decade campaign of trying to cast fake doubt on the existence of global warming—we are where we are, and even the High Establishment Financial Times Editorial Board is alarmed:
Financial Times Editorial Board: The world is warming faster than scientists expected: ‘Fossil fuel groups and investors cannot afford to ignore the warnings…. Last week… Saudi Aramco [head]… Amin Nasser said the world needed instead to invest in fossil fuels to meet demand at a time when the clean energy transition was “visibly failing on most fronts”…. Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Climate records had been not just broken but smashed in 2023, the hottest year on record. More than 90 per cent of the world’s oceans suffered heatwave conditions, glaciers lost the most ice on record and the extent of Antarctic sea ice fell to by far the lowest levels ever measured…. To an extent not widely appreciated, the world is now warming at a pace that scientists did not expect and, alarmingly, do not fully understand….
Gavin Schmidt… warned that the data could imply that a warming planet was already “fundamentally altering how the climate system operates”. The surprising heat in 2023 had “come out of the blue”, he said, and revealed that “an unprecedented knowledge gap” had opened up…. We have a shakier grasp of what lies ahead — which is worrying when it comes to forecasting drought and rainfall patterns that are already aggravating food shortages….
Schmidt’s position at Nasa was once held by… James Hansen, whose 1988 testimony to the US Congress alerted the world that global warming had begun. The world did not entirely ignore Hansen’s warnings… but nor did it take them anywhere near seriously enough. Oil company bosses may prefer to preach a message of business as usual. But neither they nor anyone else can afford once again to downplay what science is showing us about a climate threat that is now moving into uncharted territory… <https://www.ft.com/content/6f858196-0a9c-4f0f-9720-a0a81849a998>
How expensive will the costs of changing our energy system so that in fifty years global warming will stop be? And how expensive will dealing with the losses as global warming eliminates some and degrades the value of many of the economic niches humanity inhabits? After paying those costs, will there be anything left over from the technological dividend that humanity expects over the next two generations from our R&D labs? Or will the history of 2025-2075 be the first period since the one starting in the late 100s with the fall of the Antonine Dynasty in the Mediterranean and the Han Dynasty in the Central Country in which humanity as a whole becomes noticeably poorer?
And given the pace of Schumpeterian creative-destruction we have experienced since 1870, we have only managed to hold things together when we have managed to hold things together because we have had a large positive technological dividend to distribute.
Stay tuned!
References:
DeLong, J. Bradford. “The Launch of fivethirtyeight.com and Climate Change Disaster Weblogging”. Equitablog. Washington: Washington Center for Equitable Growth. March 28. <https://web.archive.org/web/20140402164614/http://equitablegrowth.org/2014/03/28/2417/the-launch-of-fivethirtyeight-com-and-climate-change-disaster-weblogging-trying-to-be-the-honest-broker-for-the-week-of-march-29-2014>.
Financial Times Editorial Board. 2024. “The world is warming faster than scientists expected”. Financial Times. March 24.
Horner, Christopher. 2023. “The EPA Defies the Supreme Court”. Wall Street Journal. August 17. <https://www.wsj.com/articles/epa-environmental-protection-supreme-court-regulation-unconstitutional-climate-change-administrative-state-biden-42f31ce3>.
Levitt, Steven D., & Stephen J. Dubner. 2009. Superfreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance. New York: William Morrow. <https://archive.org/details/superfreakonomic0000dubn/mode/1up>.
NASA. 2024. Global Temperature. March 26. <https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/?intent=121>.
Pielke, Roger, Sr. 2010. “Update To Andy Revkin’s Question In 2005: ‘Is Most Of The Observed Warming Over The Last 50 Years Likely To Have Been Due To The Increase In Greenhouse Gas Concentrations’?”. May 4. <https://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2010/05/04/update-to-andy-revkins-question-in-2005-is-most-of-the-observed-warming-over-the-last-50-years-likely-to-have-heen-due-to-the-increase-in-greenhouse-gas-concentrations%E2%80%9D/>
Ridley, Matt. 2014. Whatever Happened to Global Warming? Wall Street Journal. September 4. <https://www.wsj.com/articles/matt-ridley-whatever-happened-to-global-warming-1409872855>.
Matt Ridley. 2023. “The BBC hAs Co-Opted Bad Weather rto Its Alarmist Climate Crusade”. July 19. <https://www.mattridley.co.uk/blog/the-bbc-has-co-opted-bad-weather-to-its-alarmist-climate-crusade/>,
Ridley, Matt. 2023. “The Public Isn’t Being Told the Full Truth About the Climate Threat”. September 8. <https://www.mattridley.co.uk/blog/the-public-isnt-being-told-the-full-truth-about-the-climate-threat/>.
Ridley, Matt. 2023. “The Cenotaph Was Designed as a Symbol of Multi-Faith (And Atheist) Unity”. November 11. <https://www.mattridley.co.uk/blog/the-cenotaph-was-designed-as-a-symbol-of-multi-faith-and-atheist-unity/>
Watts, Anthony (publisher). 2024. “Unusual Cold Plagues Both Northern, Southern Hemispheres….Arctic Sea Ice Strengthens”. Watts Up with That? March 24. <https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/03/24/unusual-cold-plagues-both-northern-southern-hemispheres-arctic-sea-ice-strengthens/>.
After WWII, movies made in the US and UK that involved strange phenomena had scientists explicate the possible reason and suggest experiments or solutions. Most importantly they were listened too. Any person engaging in denials was treated as comedic moment. By the time of the 1975 movie "Jaws", the denier (the Amity Island mayor) was clearly motivated by commercial interests. This seems to be almost coincident of the fossil fuel industry hiding their scientists' reports on teh consequences of fossil fuel burning. This went into top gear, especially after Hansen's Congressional statement. The useful idiots were paid to create doubt, as well documented by Naomi Orestes.
I find it of little value to listen to pundits, rather than domain experts, douubly so is they have little knowledge. I vaguely still recall a rant by Limbaugh about some science topic (energy I think) that was so ignorant of facts that it made me wonder if any of his claimed knowledge was accurate.
Hansen has proved remarkably prescient, including his claim of rapid loss of sea ice that was far less conservative than the consnsus of his peers.
Apart from Fred Singer, almost every climate denier is clueless about climate modeling and the science behind it. What I find interesting is that the deniers fixate on one detail - global temperatures - trying to find "gotchas" like creationists denying evolution. But as you showed with the Janaese tracking of the onset of the cherry blossom blooms, there is a host of orthoganal data supporting climate change, for example species changes and movements in response to warming - the global "canaries in the coal mine".
Any measured "technological dividend" isn't going to be worth much is the planet looks like the landscape depicted in Blade Runner 2049, or worse, Soylent Green, or any scifi books of the eco or cli-fi genre. As a culture, we pay far too litle regard to the state of the biosphere. It cannot be kept pristine, but there is no good reason to accept allowing it to degrade as we treat it as an exploitable resource. Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi" (1970) has the 2 lines that we should remember:
Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone?
Here is an excellent article from the New Yorker featuring a scientist who is a climate realistic. His analysis shows we will probably come up short in our attempts to stop global warming, and we'll have to learn to cope with a warmer climate. Ironically, he's a professor at the Univesity in Winnipeg, so his city will be one of the few places on earth that might benefit. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/vaclav-smil-and-the-value-of-doubt