Climate Change, brought to you by those wonderful folks who brought you Covid Lockdowns.
The essence of any scam (walnuts, card-shuffling, lady sawed in half) is misdirection and distraction. And the scammers deepest belief: those being robbed deserve it.
“The ‘success’ of climate policies can only be captured by slowly unfolding abstract scientific indicators that no citizen can ever experience, such as net carbon emissions, carbon dioxide concentrations, global temperature”
"Make no mistake, mitigation is important and it can work."
You are not adressing the costs of mitigation. If the realistic costs of mitigation is higher than the realistic costs of climate change, then it is not rational to mitigate at all
Great analysis, I read yesterday that the wild fires on this continent in the last year put out more damage to our planet then all other sources of that contribute to warming? If that’s true the billions we spend on trying to net 0 by 2035 is being spent incorrectly. Could you answer the question regarding the fires and their impact please?
"Avec des ‘si’ et des ‘mais’ on mettrait Paris en bouteille."
(With ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ Paris could be put in a bottle).
If policies would be enacted… Are they today? All over the World? Which ones?
Almost nothing is being done about adaptation (except in agriculture), and only pledges are being made about decarbonisation and energy transition, which in fact only commit future generations and no current political leaders. Zillions are being spent on stuttering production of so-called renewable energy, with ridiculous results. This makes good business for Chinese producers of solar panels, and bankruptcy of European wind turbine manufacturers despite all kinds of subsidies.
Energy consumption continues to rise, and so too does the consumption of fossil fuels, which accounts for ~2/3 of this growth (energy review : https://blog.mr-int.ch/?attachment_id=10873). Any acrimonious chasing of every CO2 emitter accomplishes nothing.
Depending on fossil fuels for 88.7% of its energy consumption, the world is decarbonising at a rate of a mere 0.27% per year. See this diagram (https://blog.mr-int.ch/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/bubbles.webp) for the positions of the most important consumers.
Simplistic linear extrapolation: 88.7 divided by 0.27 makes 328.5 years until zero!
Furthermore, the pace at which decarbonisation is taking place is certainly not driven by policy, but rather by the economic shifts that are moving societies from industry to services, particularly in the West. The energy supply foundation is not in any real state of change.
The probability of getting a climate response to these ill-fated policies is no better than flipping a coin. Why ask to spend thousands of billions every year over the next three decades for such an improbable outcome? Bjorn Lomborg is quite right to point out that there are many other priorities to be addressed, which will put these funds to much better use.
Nevertheless, reducing or even ending our dependence on fossil fuels is a proposition that must one day be achieved. It is TECHNOLOGY that will make this possible and affordable, not useless carbon accounting or scenarios plays with climate models.
You are right that 'good' nor 'bad' appears in the text, but why would you be spending so much time talking about how to reduce CO2 unless you thought it was bad?
And, since you declined to answer the question regarding my thought experiment, I will. The answer is that within a decade or so, all complex life (not all - because some organisms don't depend on C02 in their food chains) would die off - including all of humanity. How's THAT for a climate catastrophe?
So why are we so laser-focused on reducing a known critical component of our ecosphere? Do we even know the minimum viable level of CO2? What if we were just fortunate that the industrial revolution came along just in time to save our collective asses from extinction due to CO2 starvation?
You talk about risk mitigation in the face of unknowns, but you don't mind everyone playing with CO2 levels when nobody knows where the limits are - except for two undeniable facts: 1) increases in CO2 above current levels lead to significantly increased plant growth 2) the current CO2 levels are at a historical minimum when looked at on a geological time scale. Everyone talks about 'tipping points' regarding global temperature rise, but that is almost certainly a red herring. However, there might actually BE a tipping point wrt CO2 levels, but nobody seems to care about that - talk about playing with fire. Mind you, I'm just an old broke-down engineer and have zero skills in climatology, but I do know how to read a graph, and I have a pretty well developed BS meter, and it is pegged out at the moment
This shows up clearly from a simple box model of climate. These box models were long since abandoned by climate scientists, but they can give useful back-of-the-envelope insights without needing a vast, complex (and expensive) GCM model. All one needs is some first-year calculus.
Looking only at changes from baseline natural processes, annual CO2 emissions drive the rate at which atmospheric CO2 concentrations change, not the concentrations themselves. And CO2 concentrations drive the rate at which heat is trapped within the earth system, and therefore the rate of temperature change, not temperature itself.
And (the Iron Law), annual CO2 emissions are not going to drop abruptly: the politically feasible change is to reduce the rate at which they grow, and perhaps to turn that rate negative. That is the sort of thing that governments are promising, and that mitigation policies are aimed at achieving.
So any change in emissions, such as moving from the SSP2-4.5 track to the SSP1-2.6 track, will involve a change in the rate at which emissions grow. That is, measuring time "t" from now, the mitigated emissions track in year "t" will be less than the business-as-usual track by some amount proportional to "t". So the rate of change of CO2 concentration will be reduced by an amount proportional to "t", and the CO2 concentration itself will be reduced by some amount proportional to "t^2" (here be calculus!). This affects the rate of warming, so the temperature track will be reduced by some amount proportional to "t^3". And the track of sea-level, whose rate of change is forced by temperature, will be reduced by an amount proportional to "t^4".
These powers of "t" take time to get going. The square starts to rise slowly; the cube very slowly; the fourth-power extremely slowly. So the effects of a change in the rate of emissions growth is going to take a long time to change the track of CO2 concentration noticeably; a very long time to affect the track of temperature noticeably; and an extremely long time to affect the track of sea-level noticeably.
That is just what the IPCC charts show. One can tidy up the mathematics (the box models have a feedback term, which I have ignored because its effects only start to matter later) and attach numbers to everything, but the insight remains.
If someone claims that mitigation of CO2 emissions can have any immediate effect on climate, they evidently did not pass first-year calculus.
Hi Roger, I ‘m a fairly new subscriber to your sub stack and enjoy reading your commentary.
First of all, I have to tell you, I’m not a “climate expert”, nor do I claim to be. I do consider myself to be a reasonable, logical thinking, human being. I feel capable of using my reasoning and mathematical skills to ask a couple of questions.
First, mathematical:
If we assume the earth has been in existence for 4.5 billion years, (science is now saying it’s existed much longer) and we assume that modern, industrial mankind, has been here for around 300 years that means that modern, industrial mankind has been here for 0.0000667% of that time. I find it hard, heck I’ll say nearly impossible, to assume that in that short of a period mankind has changed or as some say destroyed the climate of planet earth. I know humans can have large ego’s, but how would that be possible?
Second, reason and logic:
In all the climate studies I’ve seen, the experts never seem to factor in the variables of our solar system. The finger always seems to land on human beings and how their behavior has negatively affected climate. Our solar system and the variables that through billions of years (see previous math question) have caused climate to change never seem to factor into the climate experts doomsday predictions. Who, or more accurately what was to blame for the climate changes over billions of years past and why are they, it, not factored into climate change scenarios today?
Questions this mere mortal ponders on a regular basis.
"Make no mistake, mitigation is important and it can work."
Huh? You make this claim based ONLY on the possibility of detecting changes in atmospheric CO2 concentration - and NOBODY has shown ANY correlation of CO2 concentrations and global health. In fact, the only real evidence is the opposite - the earth is currently at a global minimum of CO2 in the atmosphere, and if it continues to decline it will almost certainly negatively affect global plant health (and therefore, the health of every living animal on earth).
So, I fail to see how your statement that "mitigation is important" tracks with reality, unless you meant this sarcastically. If we get to that point, we may actually be detecting a global biota collapse of biblical proportions - not quite what the "Climate Emergency" folks had in mind (or maybe it was!)
Climate Change, brought to you by those wonderful folks who brought you Covid Lockdowns.
The essence of any scam (walnuts, card-shuffling, lady sawed in half) is misdirection and distraction. And the scammers deepest belief: those being robbed deserve it.
“Lies, damned lies, and statistics”
Or
“A mathematician, and economist and a statistician were asked, what is 2+2?”
Mathematician. 4
Economist. Somewhere between 3 and 5
Statistician. What do you want it to be?
Most of what we see today is lies, or “facts” that have no provable underlying basis (same as a lie).
And the media wonders why they can only survive with govt assistance.
From Mike Hulme:
“The ‘success’ of climate policies can only be captured by slowly unfolding abstract scientific indicators that no citizen can ever experience, such as net carbon emissions, carbon dioxide concentrations, global temperature”
https://mikehulme.org/climate-medicines-do-not-alleviate-the-symptoms-of-climate-change/
Thanks for a stringent analysis. However:
"Make no mistake, mitigation is important and it can work."
You are not adressing the costs of mitigation. If the realistic costs of mitigation is higher than the realistic costs of climate change, then it is not rational to mitigate at all
Great analysis, I read yesterday that the wild fires on this continent in the last year put out more damage to our planet then all other sources of that contribute to warming? If that’s true the billions we spend on trying to net 0 by 2035 is being spent incorrectly. Could you answer the question regarding the fires and their impact please?
Dear Roger, as always very interesting. As you mention 'heavy precipitation' (one of the weather phenomena for whicht the IPCC claims detection, I wonder if you have seen this study showing/claiming that precipitation measured globally is actually declining: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022169423003281; as reported by https://notrickszone.com/2023/06/19/new-study-21st-century-precipitation-trends-have-become-less-intense-globally. I'm very intersted in your assessment of this study.
"Avec des ‘si’ et des ‘mais’ on mettrait Paris en bouteille."
(With ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ Paris could be put in a bottle).
If policies would be enacted… Are they today? All over the World? Which ones?
Almost nothing is being done about adaptation (except in agriculture), and only pledges are being made about decarbonisation and energy transition, which in fact only commit future generations and no current political leaders. Zillions are being spent on stuttering production of so-called renewable energy, with ridiculous results. This makes good business for Chinese producers of solar panels, and bankruptcy of European wind turbine manufacturers despite all kinds of subsidies.
Energy consumption continues to rise, and so too does the consumption of fossil fuels, which accounts for ~2/3 of this growth (energy review : https://blog.mr-int.ch/?attachment_id=10873). Any acrimonious chasing of every CO2 emitter accomplishes nothing.
Depending on fossil fuels for 88.7% of its energy consumption, the world is decarbonising at a rate of a mere 0.27% per year. See this diagram (https://blog.mr-int.ch/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/bubbles.webp) for the positions of the most important consumers.
Simplistic linear extrapolation: 88.7 divided by 0.27 makes 328.5 years until zero!
Furthermore, the pace at which decarbonisation is taking place is certainly not driven by policy, but rather by the economic shifts that are moving societies from industry to services, particularly in the West. The energy supply foundation is not in any real state of change.
The probability of getting a climate response to these ill-fated policies is no better than flipping a coin. Why ask to spend thousands of billions every year over the next three decades for such an improbable outcome? Bjorn Lomborg is quite right to point out that there are many other priorities to be addressed, which will put these funds to much better use.
Nevertheless, reducing or even ending our dependence on fossil fuels is a proposition that must one day be achieved. It is TECHNOLOGY that will make this possible and affordable, not useless carbon accounting or scenarios plays with climate models.
You are right that 'good' nor 'bad' appears in the text, but why would you be spending so much time talking about how to reduce CO2 unless you thought it was bad?
And, since you declined to answer the question regarding my thought experiment, I will. The answer is that within a decade or so, all complex life (not all - because some organisms don't depend on C02 in their food chains) would die off - including all of humanity. How's THAT for a climate catastrophe?
So why are we so laser-focused on reducing a known critical component of our ecosphere? Do we even know the minimum viable level of CO2? What if we were just fortunate that the industrial revolution came along just in time to save our collective asses from extinction due to CO2 starvation?
You talk about risk mitigation in the face of unknowns, but you don't mind everyone playing with CO2 levels when nobody knows where the limits are - except for two undeniable facts: 1) increases in CO2 above current levels lead to significantly increased plant growth 2) the current CO2 levels are at a historical minimum when looked at on a geological time scale. Everyone talks about 'tipping points' regarding global temperature rise, but that is almost certainly a red herring. However, there might actually BE a tipping point wrt CO2 levels, but nobody seems to care about that - talk about playing with fire. Mind you, I'm just an old broke-down engineer and have zero skills in climatology, but I do know how to read a graph, and I have a pretty well developed BS meter, and it is pegged out at the moment
This shows up clearly from a simple box model of climate. These box models were long since abandoned by climate scientists, but they can give useful back-of-the-envelope insights without needing a vast, complex (and expensive) GCM model. All one needs is some first-year calculus.
Looking only at changes from baseline natural processes, annual CO2 emissions drive the rate at which atmospheric CO2 concentrations change, not the concentrations themselves. And CO2 concentrations drive the rate at which heat is trapped within the earth system, and therefore the rate of temperature change, not temperature itself.
And (the Iron Law), annual CO2 emissions are not going to drop abruptly: the politically feasible change is to reduce the rate at which they grow, and perhaps to turn that rate negative. That is the sort of thing that governments are promising, and that mitigation policies are aimed at achieving.
So any change in emissions, such as moving from the SSP2-4.5 track to the SSP1-2.6 track, will involve a change in the rate at which emissions grow. That is, measuring time "t" from now, the mitigated emissions track in year "t" will be less than the business-as-usual track by some amount proportional to "t". So the rate of change of CO2 concentration will be reduced by an amount proportional to "t", and the CO2 concentration itself will be reduced by some amount proportional to "t^2" (here be calculus!). This affects the rate of warming, so the temperature track will be reduced by some amount proportional to "t^3". And the track of sea-level, whose rate of change is forced by temperature, will be reduced by an amount proportional to "t^4".
These powers of "t" take time to get going. The square starts to rise slowly; the cube very slowly; the fourth-power extremely slowly. So the effects of a change in the rate of emissions growth is going to take a long time to change the track of CO2 concentration noticeably; a very long time to affect the track of temperature noticeably; and an extremely long time to affect the track of sea-level noticeably.
That is just what the IPCC charts show. One can tidy up the mathematics (the box models have a feedback term, which I have ignored because its effects only start to matter later) and attach numbers to everything, but the insight remains.
If someone claims that mitigation of CO2 emissions can have any immediate effect on climate, they evidently did not pass first-year calculus.
Hi Roger, I ‘m a fairly new subscriber to your sub stack and enjoy reading your commentary.
First of all, I have to tell you, I’m not a “climate expert”, nor do I claim to be. I do consider myself to be a reasonable, logical thinking, human being. I feel capable of using my reasoning and mathematical skills to ask a couple of questions.
First, mathematical:
If we assume the earth has been in existence for 4.5 billion years, (science is now saying it’s existed much longer) and we assume that modern, industrial mankind, has been here for around 300 years that means that modern, industrial mankind has been here for 0.0000667% of that time. I find it hard, heck I’ll say nearly impossible, to assume that in that short of a period mankind has changed or as some say destroyed the climate of planet earth. I know humans can have large ego’s, but how would that be possible?
Second, reason and logic:
In all the climate studies I’ve seen, the experts never seem to factor in the variables of our solar system. The finger always seems to land on human beings and how their behavior has negatively affected climate. Our solar system and the variables that through billions of years (see previous math question) have caused climate to change never seem to factor into the climate experts doomsday predictions. Who, or more accurately what was to blame for the climate changes over billions of years past and why are they, it, not factored into climate change scenarios today?
Questions this mere mortal ponders on a regular basis.
What would a broader foundation for "mitigation" policy look like? I assume that by mitigation you mean reducing atmospheric CO2 emissions.
I think that you (as well as the Maui wildfires) have provided a persuasive argument for focusing on adaptation.
Hi, not quite off-topic but I've published an extensive piece on the Alimonti paper on climate extremes and the "retraction" controversy.
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2023/08/how-science-is-done-these-days/
Most of my material is from Roger himself but I hope to have value-added various aspects.
"Make no mistake, mitigation is important and it can work."
Huh? You make this claim based ONLY on the possibility of detecting changes in atmospheric CO2 concentration - and NOBODY has shown ANY correlation of CO2 concentrations and global health. In fact, the only real evidence is the opposite - the earth is currently at a global minimum of CO2 in the atmosphere, and if it continues to decline it will almost certainly negatively affect global plant health (and therefore, the health of every living animal on earth).
So, I fail to see how your statement that "mitigation is important" tracks with reality, unless you meant this sarcastically. If we get to that point, we may actually be detecting a global biota collapse of biblical proportions - not quite what the "Climate Emergency" folks had in mind (or maybe it was!)
Simple answer to question in your title:
Can a bear sh#t on a toilet?
Nice piece. Keep swinging the axe, Roger.