40 Comments

This is a very good piece! I especially enjoyed the list of Doomsday predictions from the past.

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Excellent! Had to lol at the Platte River prediction. I can personally verify that it has not dried up yet :)

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If you want to cherry-pick the stupidest things said by the climate movement, it sure isn't hard, as you have demonstrated. And of course, AOC and her Green New Deal is the mother lode of nonsense.

The fact remains that warming has accelerated, and the rate of sea-level rise from 2006 to now is 2.5-3 times what it was from 1880-2006, there has been very significant melting of the Arctic ice cap in the last 40 years (which does not cause sea level rise) and there are recent reports of instability of land-based ice sheets in Antarctica, which, if they slide into the ocean, will cause major sea level rise.

While SOME (not all) of the predictions of climate activist scientists have been inaccurate (because predicting something complex in the future is hard) they are at least telling the same story about what has happened thus far. This is not the case for climate skeptics:

- some say warming has occurred, but only because of solar variation

- others say no warming has occurred and there has been a conspiracy to fake the temperature record

- other say something about cosmic rays

- Patrick Michaels, formerly of the CATO institute, says human-caused warming has occurred and will continue, just less than the IPCC predicts and not enough to justify action

- Oren Cass of the conservative Manhattan Institute, says the predictions of the IPCC are accurate, but we'll just adapt and there will be no catastrophic outcomes

- Jordan Peterson agrees that human-caused global warming is real, but he doesn't have a solution, and (modestly) concludes that if HE can't think of a solution, NO ONE can

- Bjorn Lomborg does not disagree with the IPCC reports, but calculates that the most constructive way to spend money is on the health and nutrition of the third world, and therefore we should spend money on NOTHING ELSE, including decarbonizing the economy

Yet even though all these sources agree about ALMOST NOTHING, they consider themselves "brothers in arms", because they agree on one important point: that we should not interrupt the combustion of fossil fuels.

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"Cherry-picking" would suggest these are outlier viewpoints. They are not. They are what the AGW-alarmist community has put forth in order to motivate and influence policy - which it has.

People like Lomborg are the outliers. They argue against the brute-force carbon reduction impositions that I have argued (recently, here) not only won't work, but *can't* work given global realities - *and* are destructively immoral given the harm they'll do to the poor.

The point here is not only that many leading voices have overstated, and will continue to overstate, AGW, but that they are using the alarmism they created to advance an authoritarian, anti-capitalistic, socialistic agenda. With them at the top and enjoying the spoils.

I've made my views on AGW itself clear on these pages. Do I count as a "skeptic," because I'm not in the alarmist, doomsaying camp?

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""Cherry-picking" would suggest these are outlier viewpoints. They are not. They are what the AGW-alarmist community has put forth in order to motivate and influence policy - which it has."

The IPCC is conspicuously absent from the list of people you are quoting, and you seem to have mined most of the quotes from Anthony Watts, so yes, there is some cherry-picking going on. The IPCC is much more cautious and scientifically responsible that the lay press, and particularly more so than the far leftists trying to leverage AGW as an excuse for an authoritarian agenda.

I don't think it's fair of you to say that Lomborg is an outlier. Your position is not that far from his. In my reply above, I was just quoting one video he did, he says a lot of stuff.

I agree that there is a lot of overstating the severity of climate change, especially by non-scientific lay journalists and politicians.

I am not personally in the "alarmist, doomsaying camp". Neither, really, is the IPCC. When I heard that a group called "extinction rebellion" had formed, I wanted nothing to do with them, just based on their title. The IPCC reports are not predicting human extinction due to climate change within the next 1,000 years.

But when you talk about climate change, you spend 10 times as many column-inches shitting on the whole movement as you do suggesting solutions. That's what I object to.

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Lomborg's views are what's outlier, not the man himself.

It is not a stretch to say that the "global consensus" demands global decarbonization... but first in the West (IIRC, China only promised to stop *increasing* emissions by 2030 - and if you believe that...). Again, I speak of the popular narrative, that being repeated over and over, with ever-moving goal posts, and with every failed hyperbole doing nothing to temper the next one.

I've long complained of the coupling of AGW predictions with a particular and exclusive remedy. That continues, mostly unabated. There are more people peeling off from the alarmism and zero-carbon, as they realize the alarmists have gotten it wrong so many times, and as they realize that zero-carbon isn't simply a no-cost transition that won't affect their lives.

Again, the core of the point here is that all this is being used as leverage to emplace a socialistic economic structure.

As for the IPCC - there is the content of their reports, and there is the messaging that emanates. The two don't align.

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Look, you advocate a big push into a nuclear, which I agree is the best approach to solving global warming.

But most of the public has learned most of what they know about radiation from Godzilla movies and is very scared of nuclear. The left vehemently hates it, and the right is too indifferent to really go to bat for it.

So a push into nuclear is not politically feasible if the public dismisses the threat of AGW. And your essays are encouraging that dismissal.

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Even if we don't push into nuclear, forced decarbonization remains a wasteful folly. One bit I linked a while back shows that we're better off spending money to adapt as necessary, rather than trying to stave those changes off by shutting down carbon emissions (even if that could be accomplished, which it cannot).

Meanwhile, we could *easily* be spending money on geo-engineering research. Bill Gates had a project in the pipeline - but enviros shut it down, because in part they feared it would work.

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I'll continue. If the choice boils down to nuclear or nothing, then the answer is "nothing."

It doesn't, though. Fracking has shifted energy production from coal to natural gas, and that's a trend we should continue to encourage. Gas produces 1/4 the carbon per unit energy that coal does, and it's particulate-free. 15000 people die a year in the US from particulate pollution.

Meanwhile, I don't buy the notion that we can't get any more nuclear plants built. We have 55 in operation, providing us 19% of our power. France has 56, providing 70%. Quite a few were built after TMI and the China Syndrome.

There are nuke plants all over the world. I was surprised by the breadth of the list, TBT:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_reactors

All nuclear requires is an administration that wants to push it, and a press corps that's willing to be honest about it. The reality is that the Democrats are better situated, today, to manage that - if NYT and CNN sing the right tune, that'd be enough. The Right might even play along.

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You completely ignored what I said.

Absent taking global warming seriously, nuclear is completely politically infeasible. I was not attacking nuclear on economic grounds, I am not attacking nuclear period. I am a hard-core nuclear supporter. The effect of your essays is not a net support of nuclear, most of your essays are just saying to forget AGW.

And it's not clear that natural gas is such a win, given that methane leaks are more prevalent that we had believed, and that's a tough problem to solve,

You are also ignoring Carbon Fee and Dividend, which has about as much support in congress as the idiotic socialist woke Green New Deal, and which does NOT grow the size of the public sector or burden the economy with onerous regulation, and it is not burdened with agendas unrelated to the environment.

http://conservativeclimateactivists.org/CFnD.html

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"nuclear is completely politically infeasible"

I didn't ignore this - I disagree with it.

I also disagree with your conclusion that "most of your essays are just saying to forget AGW." Please show me where I've either written or implied it. I've repeated, more times than I can count, what I propose. You may think nuclear politically unfeasible - but you have not commented on the suggestion I've always offered in tandem - geo-engineering research. And, your conclusion is that it's unfeasible does not in any way support your assertion that I'm proposing doing nothing.

As for carbon taxes, again, I posit that anything the West does to coerce carbon reduction is utterly pointless if the BRICS and the developing world don't comply. Furthermore, it would make energy more expensive, and that is a regressive tax on the poor and working classes. It's not a "cost-free" remedy. It would only be so if wind and solar were cost-equivalent to oil and gas and coal - when scaled up to beyond niche production. If that were the case, there'd be no need for the government to do anything, because there'd be economic incentive.

Doing something instead of nothing may "feel-good," but if that something produces much harm and no benefit, there's no reason to and every reason not to. And, for the zillionth time, if the powers-that-be devoted their efforts to the two things I propose (along with the continued shift from coal to gas), instead of cramming wind and solar down our throats, the outcome would be far better.

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I didn't say "nuclear is politically infeasible PERIOD". I said "nuclear is politically infeasible if the public dismisses global warming". How is this essay, most of which is listing failed predictions of bad outcomes, not encouraging the public to "dismiss global warming"?

Geoengineering is not a great solution. If it's done by reflecting solar radiation, it does nothing to reduce atmospheric CO2 concentration, which is projected to reach levels that affect human comfort by 2100, and ocean acidification due to high CO2 concentration is a big environmental problem, given that the oceans are still a major human food source.

You obviously do not understand carbon fee AND DIVIDEND, dismissing it as a "carbon tax that will hurt the poor". The revenues from the fee are returned equally to citizens, the rich use more energy than the poor, so the poor get a bigger dividend than they pay in higher energy costs.

Carbon fee and dividend is contagious. Imports from countries without any form of carbon tax have tariffs impose to keep US goods competitive, and this provides pressure to join the scheme.

A big push into next-gen nuclear research could be tremendously beneficial to humanity, AGW or not, with meltdown-proof reactors that produce less waste than current ones and that provide energy cheaper than fossil fuels. But we can't sell it to the Godzilla-educated public unless they take AGW seriously.

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I spend a lot of time trying to persuade conservatives to take AGW seriously.

One thing that happens a lot is that, once I've addressed most or all of their objections, they start talking about nuclear.

Then I get excited because I'm totally for nuclear and I'd love to have them on board.

But then they lose interest. They aren't really interested in nuclear, they just expected me, as an "environmentalist", to be against it and they had just been looking forward to calling me a hypocrite.

I wonder if you're in that category -- you don't really give a damn about nuclear, you talk about it as just another means of crapping on most of the environmental movement?

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I haven't gotten very far into this but already encountered a whopper with cheese.

Sea level is increasing a 3.3mm/year now. Last century's average was 2.2mm/year. That's not 3x, it's a 50% increase.

The IPCC has predicted massive sea level rises "in the next decade" since the mid-1990s. It's not come to pass. If you look at the current IPCC forecast, you will find that it *relies* on global temperature models which have failed repeatedly. The IPCC at least has error bars in its forecast now, but the reality is that we're hovering near the bottom of those error bars. And when you look into the assumptions behind the high end of the error bars, as I have, you find that they predict a population of 11 billion, with 7 billion of those folks in Africa, for one highly improbable prediction among many. Can it happen? I'll give it 1% odds.

So the sea level rise predictions play off of bogus temperature predictions. The people crowing about ice shelves calving in Antarctica don't even seem to realize that this happens all the time and does not even affect sea level at all, something middle-school science classes have taught since the time of Archimedes.

The rest of your screed is all about strawmen too, seems to me. Good luck with that.

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Here's the chart of sea level: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-global-sea-level

I got the 2.5X-3X acceleration by reading sea levels for 1880, 2006, and 2020 from that. Read it from that and see what you get, or tell me why climate.gov is wrong.

What Archimedes found was that a floating ice cube won't raise the water level when it melts. This does not apply to land-based Antarctic ice sheets which melt and flow into the ocean -- they will raise sea level.

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Looking at the graph in your article, picking 1880 and 1980 in your trend line, almost perfectly linear and provably so by subsampling, I get -180 at the 1880 end and about -40 at the 1980 end. That's an increase of 140 over 100 years. At 2020 the level is about 60, or 100 over 40 years. 1.4 vs. 2.5. 70% increase. It's also quite noisy so if you try to claim trends over the last few years you will be dealing primarily with noise, so don't do that.

Your reference cites almost identical numbers to all government agencies under the Biden Administration. Other sources are beating the drum too but with different numbers, e.g. https://ocean.si.edu/through-time/ancient-seas/sea-level-rise . The claim that sea levels didn't rise at all for 2000 years beforehand is bollux too; the dikes in Amsterdam aren't there because the Dutch bailed out the ocean.

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'What Archimedes found was that a floating ice cube won't raise the water level when it melts. This does not apply to land-based Antarctic ice sheets which melt and flow into the ocean -- they will raise sea level.'

Yes. So in order to show that, you have to show that Antarctica is losing ice. And -- funny thing -- it's not. https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/nasa-study-mass-gains-of-antarctic-ice-sheet-greater-than-losses/

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That is outdated. It was the opinion of one group at NASA, not everybody at NASA, and it was a temporary trend that has since reversed itself.

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We can calculate what this ice loss means in terms of sea level rise. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet is now contributing 0.4 mm of water to sea level rise every year. That’s 4.4 mm per decade,

That's less than 1 1/2 inches by 2100.

Note, the reason for the change in gaining mass until recently and now losing mass was a change in the Easterly flow of Ocean currents, which of course can change again back to one where mass again grows.

https://www.antarcticglaciers.org/2018/06/mass-balance-antarctic-ice-sheet-1992-2017/

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Arthur, most of past sea level rise has been due to thermal expansion of liquid water.

However, the problematic sea-level rise that I was talking about due to Antarctica was potentially due to catastrophic sudden unprecedented future loss of large ice sheets that people are worried about.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/antarctic-ice-sheet-more-unstable-than-previously-thought-study-warns/ar-BB1gHR3Q

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You can't rely on any sea level measurements that old, we simply didn't have the ability to discern the difference between land areas falling and sea levels rising

We DO now have reliably accurate and fairly long term data on sea level and its been ~3 mm per year for as long as its been tracked (3 decades).

Which at ~4 mm per year results in about 12 inches by the end of the century.

No, Antarctica is NOT losing mass, and the Ross Ice Shelf is already floating, so no it also doesn't raise the sea levels.

https://sealevel.colorado.edu/data/2021rel2-0

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I'm old enough to remember when I was told that the world was going to freeze over and we would all die (obviously paraphrasing). I also remember being told that the rapture would happen in 1977. Then again, climate zealots and religious zealots have something in common.

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