I buy the argument that "we don't know." So, if I were to be asked to make a policy decision, I'd ask some simple questions. I've put them below, with some sample answers...
1. Is the earth really on fire like Bill Nye told my kids? - No, it's average temp is moderately increasing, mostly due to "less cold" temperatures at night, in the northern hemisphere, in the winter. We started tracking the temps at the end of a small ice age, and they went up "quite a bit" from then to WWII, which is approximately when human influences would have started to become big enough to have any influence.
2. So temperatures went up first... before CO2? - Yes.
3. Ok, does this moderate warming drive an increase in catastrophic weather events then? - Not really. Thus far, there's low confidence in human attribution for most major categories of weather phenomena (many are "normal," are decreasing, and/or are well within normal variability. The number of people affected and the dollar amounts of damage are going up... but because there's more people and stuff in the way.
4. Yeah but does this moderate warming kill more people? - While heat (and heat waves) do kill, the cold kills far greater numbers. Each is tragic, but statistically, more people survive with warmer temps.
5. Ok so won't the earth quickly become overpopulated then... with so many people surviving? - No. Globally there's enough space (everyone lined up in a group takes up the same space as half of Cherry County, NE). According to the FAO there's enough food for everyone (it's more of a distribution problem). People are generally living longer and more prosperous lives globally. Yes, some places are "crowded," but it's mostly due to local living conditions and development levels (a totally different problem). And actually, most demographers predict a population peak and then decline around 2050 anyways...
6. This modest warming has to be harming the environment, though? - While changes in temp do have some small effects, generally most places are doing rather well. Where there are big problems, it seems to be an issue of major land use changes and/or inefficient resource use. For example, wildfires are way down since the early 1900s, but the big ones we're experiencing now have more to do with our fire suppression for the last 100 years... now combined with natural drought cycles. Lot's of extra fuel = bigger fires. And FYI, the earth has actually greened by quite a bit since the 1980s... due to more CO2 in the atmosphere.
7. But wouldn't it be a good idea to reduce our carbon emissions anyway? - Yes. In fact, in most of the developed world we already are and have been since the early 2000s. This is due to the development of better technologies like hydraulic fracturing (fracking), leading to more natural gas use.
8. ??? What are we talking about then? - I dunno...
While I appreciate all of the scientific analysis, the real answer is we do not know, no one else knows, and the number of variables, none of which are steady state, and the long time horizon makes it impossible to know.
As a result, let’s stop spending huge amounts of money chasing rainbows of “renewable” energy, and adapt to conditions as things change.
The basic issue here is the reliance upon "computer models". Because they get the adjective "scientific" attached to them, they get a scent of veracity to the public. However any computer model of any phenomenon is at best an "educated guess".
Note that weather forecasters use computer models to predict the path and intensity of hurricanes. There are dozens of models in use today and each one makes different predictions from every other one. Predictions for a mere seven days out vary from each other by very substantial margins. I remember for example how wrong they were about Katrina even 4 days before it hit New Orleans as a category 5 storm.....
I knew the people who developed the models just for forecasting and "nowcasting" the tidal depths for certain critical locations in the Chesapeake Bay...its very much more difficult than you would ever guess....they take the data from a few hundred tidal gauges, plus the orbits of the moon and earth around the sun, even maybe Jupiter has some influence, but then there are other factors that are stronger than those, including the relative air pressure, past present and future at various locations, and the wind direction and speed, past present and future, at various locations, because a strong wind can blow up or down the bay enough to affect the water levels by several feet. Then they also have to add in the data from the different rivers and streams feeding into the bay, the water level and flow rates in those and past, present and future rainfall.
Those are the main variables for the models and it takes a supercomputer to do all the calculations.
It took them about 20 years of work and study before they began to get casts that were reliable enough to make public.
Since the big cargo ships need very accurate knowledge of bottom characteristics to know when and when not to move, its worth the expense to get good casts. But even with all of that there are extraneous and even many unknown factors that also have an influence.
Computer models are simplistic extractions, they are not themselves reality. Keep that in mind always.....
This is an example of the Extrapolation error logical fallacy. It works like this. You are speeding across the desert at 60 miles per hour. There is a sheer cliff 30 miles away. The conclusion: In 30 minutes you will fall off the cliff and die.
What is ignored in this fallacy is very broad. Many other outcomes are more likely. Among them is that the car may break down. You may slow down. You may stop. You may turn around and go home, etc. All of the climate predictions are made with the Extrapolation error and it could play a role in the outcomes of global warming predictions. The weather could start cooling tomorrow. There was no "trigger" for the Little Ice Age. 1350-1850. There is nothing that disproves that. Changes made by us may work, though I think they would be minimal unless we go all out for nuclear.
It is as though the activists don't want improvement, but they want crisis. Their end goal is a utopia with all people being like them. Elitists who think the planet should have about 1.3 billion people who are all like minded and are out composting and making hemp bags together while living in a paradise.
That is why they hate skeptics. If someone does not believe, they can't be manipulated.
The bottom line, and I think Roger would agree, is that we simply don't know. We can say we know what has happened recently, but we can't say with certainty it will play out the way the models or predictions say.
See my last article on "The Great Hurricane drought." Buried by media, the drought lasted 12 years. No Hurricanes 2006 to 2017. Almost no one knows that. Why? It doesn't argue for more hurricane damage. So, the media didn't bring it up.
The media and climate 'industry' is working for China, obviously. They're whipping up the hysteria so we dump all of our efficent energy production, wreck our economies and are unable to fight wars. This is China's second most successful psyop. The first was convincing people to vote Democrat.
This needs more explanation, at least for a simple economist like me.
"Emergence" sounds like an _indicator_ rather than a _measurement_ of physical effects of CO2 accumulation that could then be plugged into an economic model to estimate costs and thereby to estimate the benefits of different trajectories of reduction in net emissions of CO2.
Roger, just Friday the Wall Street Journal ran another article claiming "Scientists say that storms are becoming more intense and more frequent." I wrote to request a correction, citing the UN IPCC AR6 Chap. 12 table 12.12, to which you guided last summer. So far the WSJ's response has been...crickets.
According to Mark Twain, there are lies, damn lies, and statistics. If he weren't dead already, Einstein would die laughing ("God does not play dice with the universe") with all of these claims of existential threats extrapolated from statistics. Do we have any better tools, short of an AI-based crystal ball?
Funny thing, I don't necessarily argue the outcome - it certainly is possible - though I completely reject the catastrophic or end of civilization predictions. Humans are an adaptable species, and certainly resilient. We are certainly better off with a warmer climate, regardless of our carbon emissions, than a colder one. Pretty hard to grow corn under 2,000 feet of ice, but pretty easy to develop heat-tolerant varieties of seeds.
But is there a way we could use the entire record, that is, the geologic record in the IPCC reports, to forecast climate? Granted, data quality is a concern, but couldn't the outcome at least be useful as interpreting a trend, then use better data to refine the trend?
Re-read Part 1. The signal is baked into the deck but it can't be detected until many hands are played and analyzed before the effects can be discerned. From a policy perspective, I've long felt that the Prudent Person Rule would support policies that prudently de-carbonize the economy.
The Prudent person rule works for speeding around corners, wearing seatbelts, watching our A1C levels, etc. Not to shut down the world economy "just in case."
We already have the benefit of clean air. An inconvenient fact for climate alarmists is that our air (in the US) has gotten cleaner every year since 1989. 36 years of unabated improvement. EPA.gov
A signal that has not been detected can definitely exist. Detection is about our knowledge and existence is about reality. Just because we cannot detect something does not mean it doesn't exist. A bullet could be fired from a rifle at your head, you might not hear the sound of the shot, and it might blow your head off before you realize it's coming. That bullet exists.
How will it be possible to motivate the mainstream media from promoting the falsity of global warming creating "increasingly extreme weather" as in today's Wall Street Journal story about power problems in Texas . . . . here is the offender "as a Category 1 storm, was the latest event to show how the combination of continued population growth and increasingly extreme weather is proving difficult to overcome".
The implications here are interesting and disturbing. One could use these findings to make a case for being “excessively” alarmist early on, in that we will not get full statistical confirmation of even very damaging climate change impacts until it is ‘too late’ and we are well into the climate change process. This could be an argument that the kind of “unscientific” alarmism you sometimes criticize is actually rational
That’s the benefit of having these tools and analyses — we can project possible futures and see what we have to realistically contend with. RPJ just wants to be as scientific about the exercise as possible. Given that many weather impacts can already be very damaging we have no reason not to keep trying to improve our ability to defend against them. And we also have good reason to keep decarbonizing in order to remain below as many damaging thresholds as possible (+3 or +4C would be great to never see).
I do think it would be interesting for Roger to do a post on tail risks where climate sensitivity ends up on the high side for example or the AMOC shuts down.
Jason, IIRC the high sensitivity case (RCP8.5) has already been assessed economically: for the US at ~2100 our GDP will merely be ~4% less than if we attained full mitigation (ie, GDP would 'only' increase by 96% of cuurent output).
Read David Stainforth's book "Predicting Our Climate Future" (2023) for an interesting review of the problems in 'model land'.
We need to take all climate & integrated assessment models with a large grain of salt.
Let's not spend $200T (BloombergNEF) to $270T (McKinsey Co.) on NetZero 2050 based on unvalidated GCMs.
Looks like a very interesting book. I imagine that one of his messages is that the uncertainty can cut both ways. I’ll see if I can learn more.
As for the models I agree with you that “all models are wrong and some are useful”. The projection in your first paragraph after all is the result of one. I like to think of integrated assessment models as structuring our thinking about the issues rather than pointing out an exact figure on which to base all policy.
Finally, that the world will spend vast sums of money on attaining net zero in 2050 seems like a concern that should be pretty low on the list. Barring some catastrophic event in the earth climate system the Iron Law will see to it that the world only spends a reasonable amount on decarbonization and the cleaning of the air (the latter having the most immediate benefits). I think we’re looking at at least a fifty year timeline.
I am repeating myself, (one of my hobbies,) but my last article was on the "Great Hurricane Drought." We had 12 years right in the midst of this "warming crisis" from 2006 to 2017 but didn't hear a peep from the climate change industrial complex (Thanks Micahel Shellenberger.) I can picture deep into that drought the faithful, with knees pressed into their hand made hemp prayer rugs, praying to the great Beelzebub for a hurricane.
I buy the argument that "we don't know." So, if I were to be asked to make a policy decision, I'd ask some simple questions. I've put them below, with some sample answers...
1. Is the earth really on fire like Bill Nye told my kids? - No, it's average temp is moderately increasing, mostly due to "less cold" temperatures at night, in the northern hemisphere, in the winter. We started tracking the temps at the end of a small ice age, and they went up "quite a bit" from then to WWII, which is approximately when human influences would have started to become big enough to have any influence.
2. So temperatures went up first... before CO2? - Yes.
3. Ok, does this moderate warming drive an increase in catastrophic weather events then? - Not really. Thus far, there's low confidence in human attribution for most major categories of weather phenomena (many are "normal," are decreasing, and/or are well within normal variability. The number of people affected and the dollar amounts of damage are going up... but because there's more people and stuff in the way.
4. Yeah but does this moderate warming kill more people? - While heat (and heat waves) do kill, the cold kills far greater numbers. Each is tragic, but statistically, more people survive with warmer temps.
5. Ok so won't the earth quickly become overpopulated then... with so many people surviving? - No. Globally there's enough space (everyone lined up in a group takes up the same space as half of Cherry County, NE). According to the FAO there's enough food for everyone (it's more of a distribution problem). People are generally living longer and more prosperous lives globally. Yes, some places are "crowded," but it's mostly due to local living conditions and development levels (a totally different problem). And actually, most demographers predict a population peak and then decline around 2050 anyways...
6. This modest warming has to be harming the environment, though? - While changes in temp do have some small effects, generally most places are doing rather well. Where there are big problems, it seems to be an issue of major land use changes and/or inefficient resource use. For example, wildfires are way down since the early 1900s, but the big ones we're experiencing now have more to do with our fire suppression for the last 100 years... now combined with natural drought cycles. Lot's of extra fuel = bigger fires. And FYI, the earth has actually greened by quite a bit since the 1980s... due to more CO2 in the atmosphere.
7. But wouldn't it be a good idea to reduce our carbon emissions anyway? - Yes. In fact, in most of the developed world we already are and have been since the early 2000s. This is due to the development of better technologies like hydraulic fracturing (fracking), leading to more natural gas use.
8. ??? What are we talking about then? - I dunno...
While I appreciate all of the scientific analysis, the real answer is we do not know, no one else knows, and the number of variables, none of which are steady state, and the long time horizon makes it impossible to know.
As a result, let’s stop spending huge amounts of money chasing rainbows of “renewable” energy, and adapt to conditions as things change.
In the IPCC AR6 citation: "human and natural systems are largely adapted to natural variability".
Isn't it also the case for any anthropogenic variability, from food habits up to war preparedness?
Once adapted, what would be the purpose to mitigate the alleged cause?
Why does any intelligent person ever believe computer games models. Ridiculous GIGO.
The basic issue here is the reliance upon "computer models". Because they get the adjective "scientific" attached to them, they get a scent of veracity to the public. However any computer model of any phenomenon is at best an "educated guess".
Note that weather forecasters use computer models to predict the path and intensity of hurricanes. There are dozens of models in use today and each one makes different predictions from every other one. Predictions for a mere seven days out vary from each other by very substantial margins. I remember for example how wrong they were about Katrina even 4 days before it hit New Orleans as a category 5 storm.....
I knew the people who developed the models just for forecasting and "nowcasting" the tidal depths for certain critical locations in the Chesapeake Bay...its very much more difficult than you would ever guess....they take the data from a few hundred tidal gauges, plus the orbits of the moon and earth around the sun, even maybe Jupiter has some influence, but then there are other factors that are stronger than those, including the relative air pressure, past present and future at various locations, and the wind direction and speed, past present and future, at various locations, because a strong wind can blow up or down the bay enough to affect the water levels by several feet. Then they also have to add in the data from the different rivers and streams feeding into the bay, the water level and flow rates in those and past, present and future rainfall.
Those are the main variables for the models and it takes a supercomputer to do all the calculations.
It took them about 20 years of work and study before they began to get casts that were reliable enough to make public.
Since the big cargo ships need very accurate knowledge of bottom characteristics to know when and when not to move, its worth the expense to get good casts. But even with all of that there are extraneous and even many unknown factors that also have an influence.
Computer models are simplistic extractions, they are not themselves reality. Keep that in mind always.....
Thank you for poiinting out the truth regarding ensemble projections.
This is an example of the Extrapolation error logical fallacy. It works like this. You are speeding across the desert at 60 miles per hour. There is a sheer cliff 30 miles away. The conclusion: In 30 minutes you will fall off the cliff and die.
What is ignored in this fallacy is very broad. Many other outcomes are more likely. Among them is that the car may break down. You may slow down. You may stop. You may turn around and go home, etc. All of the climate predictions are made with the Extrapolation error and it could play a role in the outcomes of global warming predictions. The weather could start cooling tomorrow. There was no "trigger" for the Little Ice Age. 1350-1850. There is nothing that disproves that. Changes made by us may work, though I think they would be minimal unless we go all out for nuclear.
It is as though the activists don't want improvement, but they want crisis. Their end goal is a utopia with all people being like them. Elitists who think the planet should have about 1.3 billion people who are all like minded and are out composting and making hemp bags together while living in a paradise.
That is why they hate skeptics. If someone does not believe, they can't be manipulated.
The bottom line, and I think Roger would agree, is that we simply don't know. We can say we know what has happened recently, but we can't say with certainty it will play out the way the models or predictions say.
See my last article on "The Great Hurricane drought." Buried by media, the drought lasted 12 years. No Hurricanes 2006 to 2017. Almost no one knows that. Why? It doesn't argue for more hurricane damage. So, the media didn't bring it up.
Roger,
Good, necessary work, thank you.
To test limitations of data availability, do another run starting not now, but as if today was year 2000.
A modest bet says your times of emergence will be quite different.
Geoff S
The media and climate 'industry' is working for China, obviously. They're whipping up the hysteria so we dump all of our efficent energy production, wreck our economies and are unable to fight wars. This is China's second most successful psyop. The first was convincing people to vote Democrat.
This needs more explanation, at least for a simple economist like me.
"Emergence" sounds like an _indicator_ rather than a _measurement_ of physical effects of CO2 accumulation that could then be plugged into an economic model to estimate costs and thereby to estimate the benefits of different trajectories of reduction in net emissions of CO2.
Roger, just Friday the Wall Street Journal ran another article claiming "Scientists say that storms are becoming more intense and more frequent." I wrote to request a correction, citing the UN IPCC AR6 Chap. 12 table 12.12, to which you guided last summer. So far the WSJ's response has been...crickets.
According to Mark Twain, there are lies, damn lies, and statistics. If he weren't dead already, Einstein would die laughing ("God does not play dice with the universe") with all of these claims of existential threats extrapolated from statistics. Do we have any better tools, short of an AI-based crystal ball?
Funny thing, I don't necessarily argue the outcome - it certainly is possible - though I completely reject the catastrophic or end of civilization predictions. Humans are an adaptable species, and certainly resilient. We are certainly better off with a warmer climate, regardless of our carbon emissions, than a colder one. Pretty hard to grow corn under 2,000 feet of ice, but pretty easy to develop heat-tolerant varieties of seeds.
But is there a way we could use the entire record, that is, the geologic record in the IPCC reports, to forecast climate? Granted, data quality is a concern, but couldn't the outcome at least be useful as interpreting a trend, then use better data to refine the trend?
I am having trouble with the concept of a signal that has not been detected existing. Is this not just wishful thinking?
Re-read Part 1. The signal is baked into the deck but it can't be detected until many hands are played and analyzed before the effects can be discerned. From a policy perspective, I've long felt that the Prudent Person Rule would support policies that prudently de-carbonize the economy.
The Prudent person rule works for speeding around corners, wearing seatbelts, watching our A1C levels, etc. Not to shut down the world economy "just in case."
Whenever we think decarbonize we should also think clean air, a massive “co-benefit” that significantly changes the cost/benefit calculations given how many people are killed (never mind just damaged) by air pollution every year https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/five-million-preventable-deaths-per?utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true
We already have the benefit of clean air. An inconvenient fact for climate alarmists is that our air (in the US) has gotten cleaner every year since 1989. 36 years of unabated improvement. EPA.gov
Climate science is not a deck of cards in which the exact number and type of cards is pre-defined.
If only we could limit our policy makers to be Prudent People I could agree with you.
A signal that has not been detected can definitely exist. Detection is about our knowledge and existence is about reality. Just because we cannot detect something does not mean it doesn't exist. A bullet could be fired from a rifle at your head, you might not hear the sound of the shot, and it might blow your head off before you realize it's coming. That bullet exists.
So, we should shut down the world economy due to yet to be detected signals?
Your comment has aged in a rather interesting manner.
I’m having the same issue! My conclusion is that when something “exists” and yet it has not been detected it falls into the category of “speculation”.
I have read the following statement and agree 100% that: “Speculation is not evidence”. No matter how much you want it to be.
that is a very good question!
How will it be possible to motivate the mainstream media from promoting the falsity of global warming creating "increasingly extreme weather" as in today's Wall Street Journal story about power problems in Texas . . . . here is the offender "as a Category 1 storm, was the latest event to show how the combination of continued population growth and increasingly extreme weather is proving difficult to overcome".
The implications here are interesting and disturbing. One could use these findings to make a case for being “excessively” alarmist early on, in that we will not get full statistical confirmation of even very damaging climate change impacts until it is ‘too late’ and we are well into the climate change process. This could be an argument that the kind of “unscientific” alarmism you sometimes criticize is actually rational
That’s the benefit of having these tools and analyses — we can project possible futures and see what we have to realistically contend with. RPJ just wants to be as scientific about the exercise as possible. Given that many weather impacts can already be very damaging we have no reason not to keep trying to improve our ability to defend against them. And we also have good reason to keep decarbonizing in order to remain below as many damaging thresholds as possible (+3 or +4C would be great to never see).
I do think it would be interesting for Roger to do a post on tail risks where climate sensitivity ends up on the high side for example or the AMOC shuts down.
Jason, IIRC the high sensitivity case (RCP8.5) has already been assessed economically: for the US at ~2100 our GDP will merely be ~4% less than if we attained full mitigation (ie, GDP would 'only' increase by 96% of cuurent output).
Read David Stainforth's book "Predicting Our Climate Future" (2023) for an interesting review of the problems in 'model land'.
We need to take all climate & integrated assessment models with a large grain of salt.
Let's not spend $200T (BloombergNEF) to $270T (McKinsey Co.) on NetZero 2050 based on unvalidated GCMs.
Looks like a very interesting book. I imagine that one of his messages is that the uncertainty can cut both ways. I’ll see if I can learn more.
As for the models I agree with you that “all models are wrong and some are useful”. The projection in your first paragraph after all is the result of one. I like to think of integrated assessment models as structuring our thinking about the issues rather than pointing out an exact figure on which to base all policy.
Finally, that the world will spend vast sums of money on attaining net zero in 2050 seems like a concern that should be pretty low on the list. Barring some catastrophic event in the earth climate system the Iron Law will see to it that the world only spends a reasonable amount on decarbonization and the cleaning of the air (the latter having the most immediate benefits). I think we’re looking at at least a fifty year timeline.
I am repeating myself, (one of my hobbies,) but my last article was on the "Great Hurricane Drought." We had 12 years right in the midst of this "warming crisis" from 2006 to 2017 but didn't hear a peep from the climate change industrial complex (Thanks Micahel Shellenberger.) I can picture deep into that drought the faithful, with knees pressed into their hand made hemp prayer rugs, praying to the great Beelzebub for a hurricane.