It is good to get these distinctions into the conversation and, of course, easy enough to show even people who should know better not making it. But ultimately it does not get all the way to so what?
Humanity needs to know about anything and everything that will produce future cost to health, safety, and prosperity. It certainly makes sense to focus especially on human actions that, on net, produce these costs as modifying those actions would presumably be the way to avoid the costs. If the main way that mutiple distinct kinds of human action are going to produce harm is through changes in the average global temperature it seem reasonable to define goals for modifuing human action in terms of prevening average global temperatures from exceeding deficned levels by defined times. At the same time, if the principle action that can be modified is net emissions of CO2, then changes in CO2 accumulation levels would be a good approximation of progress toward reducing those future costs.
Ultimately regardless of the metric used to judge the effectiveness of policy, we need models that can identify policies that will minimize the "climate" costs at least cost to other human objectives.
When we ask the wrong question it hardly matters whether the answeris correct or not. What we want to know is what set of policies will effect CO2 other GHG and even SO2 emissions to reduce the net harm from human actions (subject to change by policy).
1988 motivation for establising the IPCC, assessing the science, impacts, and policy options, seems to get it right.
That is how how things played out. What ent wrong?
You give the IPCC and UNFCCC defintions on climate change. As written they are both temporal, i.e. concerning changes over time. When looking at the numerous claims of events that are supposedly due to,in part or full, climate change it seems to me the ones making such claims are also operating on spatial scales.
Is there any definition that tales the spatial dimension into account? Should there be? If not, why not?
I know this is a side issue to what you are discussing in this post. My questions arise from the climate issue in Norway, where our local alarmists have, over the years, claimed that a dry summer in the southeast of Norway was due to climate change and was set to "the new normal". The same for a wet summer in the same area, different year. Then of course the same for a flood, different but party overlapping area. Then a hot summer in the north, then a wet winter on the west coast. Now a hot summer in the middle part, where I live. All of them "climate change", all supposedly "the new normal".
Way back in school we were taught about the climate zones of Earth. That seems to me to be a relevant spatial part of the definition of climate. But how big does that space need to be to be relevant?
Dr. Pielke ==> Hausfather touches on another bad "settled science" that is not true in the real physical world. "PM2.5, which is responsible for millions of deaths from outdoor air pollution worldwide." The "evidence" for this is incredibly thin -- almost none existent.
At this point, it is merely a "talking point" -- repeated endlessly but not actually seen anywhere as real dead human bodies.
The weakness of the Samset et al paper discussing the diminishing negative forcing from East Asia aerosols is that the authors are trying to analyze changes over the short period of time East Asian aerosol emissions have been falling, about 15 years. That is far too short a time period for something as variable as weather. We've just been through an enormous spike in warming from ENSO and possibly the Tonga eruption and don't know how far temperatures will fall of plateau (as they did after 1997/80. The abstract mentions a mean warming rate of 0.7+/-0.5 degC/decade since 2010, with a confidence interval for the warming trend nearly as big as the warming trend itself. No wonder the paper was not published in a major journal despite its sensational claims. Even worse, the bulk of the paper is based on climate models in which the interactions between aerosols and clouds (and many other phenomena) are based on parameters that are tuned. IIRC, many models produce far too few marine boundary layer clouds - the most cooling clouds on the planet - and therefore likely contain large compensating errors.
However, falling aerosols provide two major rays of hope. Globally, aerosols reputedly have been falling since the early 2000's. The negative forcing from aerosols is the biggest source of uncertainty in energy balance models that estimate climate sensitivity from observed warming and observed changes in forcing agents. Soon we will have roughly 70 years of observed warming (mostly or all from the satellite era) with negligible net change in aerosol forcing! This will leave only GHGs as the main forcing - and estimates of climate sensitivity with significantly narrower confidence intervals. The record of ocean heat uptake will be longer too.
The second reason for optimism involves geoengineering - which is basically what this paper says Chinese coal plants have unintentionally been doing to minimize warming for the past several decades. Of course, it makes far more sense to deposit those aerosols in the stratosphere where they last longer and the Asians won't be breathing them. (Up there, aerosols probably won't be influencing cloud albedo as well as reflecting SWR.) If our transition to electricity from nuclear power is too slow and we are unhappy with how much warming we have caused, there is more clearly something we can do about it for a few decades while CO2 is being taken up into the deep ocean and methane is oxidizing.
At this point, who has more or less credibility, Hayhoe or Antonio Guterrez?
Is anyone surprised that these serial misinformation providers are front and center in advocating censorship laws and punishment for mal/mis/disinformation, when they are the primary purveyors of said claptrap?
As always, accuse others of that which you yourself are doing, its rule 1 in the playbook.
To be fair to Guterrez, he like Trudeau is simply unaware of whether the words leaving his mouth bear any resemblance to reality. Its just a performance.
I think you have posted about this definition issue before. So I will also make again: I don't think it's a definition problem but an attribution problem. They attribute al the climate change to GHG instead of looking at all the factors (both human and natural). One could argue that they define climate change to narrowly, ie as the change in global average temperature.
To me this post always raises the question what the factors are in the rise of global average temperature, both natural and human caused.
Thanks for this straight forward discussion of climate change, Roger. 8 billion people and energy humanism can’t afford this scientific misdirection, especially when doing no harm is doable and economic.
Excellent article. The hurrier we go, the behinder we get. Or something like that.
I find Hausfathers comment, “There is around half a degree of warming today that is “hidden” by aerosols” a bit odd. The word “hidden” seems disingenuous, like somehow someone cheated. Of course there is never any cheating in climate change……
The biggest climate event in the past four years was the Hunga Tonga volcanic eruption north of of the Pacific island of Tonga in January, 2022. This volcano was about 500 feet beneath the sea surface at the time of eruption. Some volcanologists have said that it was as powerful as Krakatoa several centuries earlier. The important effect on climate is that it ejected about 165,000,000 metric tons of water into the upper stratosphere. This was dispersed around the globe within several weeks. This increased the stratospheric water content by about 10 percent.
The effect on the Earth’s weather has been startling: Major rains in Vermont the following summer caused extensive flooding. Last year extensive rains in the Sahara Desert caused dry lake beds to fill for the first time in almost a century. Weather patterns have been modified worldwide.
Likely you may not even be aware of this as it has not been extensively reported. It simply does not fit the Climate Change Narrative .
I believe scientists in Australia have estimated- based on the inevitable modelling - that this could influence the world’s climate for up to a decade. Because it was a natural phenomenon and therefore didn’t fit anyone’s narrative, you’re right to say it’s gone largely under-reported.
Still assumes increased co2 means higher temps in this complex system.
Which is an assumption.
What about reduced cloud cover, hasn’t that also been shown to be able to account for everything seen in the last few decades?
All I see is decision based evidence making.
Or as per snark master John Robson;
All climate change is bad and all climate change is caused by humans so all human activity is bad.
Just nonsense on top of nonsense.
The little ice age was the worst period in human history, bad outcomes wherever you look, death destruction mass migration imperialism colonialism, and yet the stated goal is to return is to “pre-industrial” co2 and therefore temperatures of the little ice age based on their assumptions of linear relationships?
That would be the worst thing in human history with 8-10billion people to feed?
How would you characterize people advocating this?
I know how I would characterize them, but then I’m not as nice or diplomatic as you are.
With engineering, and then finance, backgrounds, over the years I've been rounding out my education with liberal arts. Philosophy, etc, but especially history. And esp lately, non European-Near East history. So, stuff like Angkor Wat. Or S. American empires. Amazing how changes in the climate destroyed so many sophisticated civilizations. But, those have been shoved down the Memory Hole.
I have read history forever and never was climate ever mentioned in any of these sweeping stories of cultural collapse.
Yet when you start digging you find that all these times of empires and civilizations collapsing happen in concert with rapid climate shifts and without exception its when the climate turns cold.
Warmer is always the golden ages, "optimums", etc, and yet all we read is how the moderate warming since the LIA is an existential threat and we are all going to die when in fact we are not yet as warm as the medieval warm period, which was not as warm as the roman warm period which was not as warm as the minoan, etc etc back to the holocene "optimum" which as you guess was even warmer and had hippos in the Thames.
"A cultural history of climate change is a great book, 1177BC another.
Just about everything you read is BS.
On climate, energy transition, on "cheap renewables, on covid, on "russia collusion", on starvation in Gaza (that starving baby in the video has a genetic muscular disorder, his little brother is perfectly healthy, not shown in video of course).
Almost everything you see in media is a lie, all about narrative control.
People need to start facing real penalties for this.
Also an article in 2009 by Fellows of the American Geophysical Union. Also ignored by the IPCC
Pielke Sr., R., K. Beven, G. Brasseur, J. Calvert, M. Chahine, R. Dickerson, D. Entekhabi, E. Foufoula-Georgiou, H. Gupta, V. Gupta, W. Krajewski, E. Philip Krider, W. K.M. Lau, J. McDonnell, W. Rossow, J. Schaake, J. Smith, S. Sorooshian, and E. Wood, 2009: Climate change: The need to consider human forcings besides greenhouse gases. Eos, Vol. 90, No. 45, 10 November 2009, 413.DOI:10.1029/2009EO450008, Copyright (2009) American Geophysical Union.
It is good to get these distinctions into the conversation and, of course, easy enough to show even people who should know better not making it. But ultimately it does not get all the way to so what?
Humanity needs to know about anything and everything that will produce future cost to health, safety, and prosperity. It certainly makes sense to focus especially on human actions that, on net, produce these costs as modifying those actions would presumably be the way to avoid the costs. If the main way that mutiple distinct kinds of human action are going to produce harm is through changes in the average global temperature it seem reasonable to define goals for modifuing human action in terms of prevening average global temperatures from exceeding deficned levels by defined times. At the same time, if the principle action that can be modified is net emissions of CO2, then changes in CO2 accumulation levels would be a good approximation of progress toward reducing those future costs.
Ultimately regardless of the metric used to judge the effectiveness of policy, we need models that can identify policies that will minimize the "climate" costs at least cost to other human objectives.
When we ask the wrong question it hardly matters whether the answeris correct or not. What we want to know is what set of policies will effect CO2 other GHG and even SO2 emissions to reduce the net harm from human actions (subject to change by policy).
1988 motivation for establising the IPCC, assessing the science, impacts, and policy options, seems to get it right.
That is how how things played out. What ent wrong?
Roger, Nice, timely post.
Plus we get 2 for 1 with your dad chiming-in and with some good links. Keep up the nepotism! ;)
Typo alert: "The figure above shows that sulfur dixide emissions..." --> dioxide
You give the IPCC and UNFCCC defintions on climate change. As written they are both temporal, i.e. concerning changes over time. When looking at the numerous claims of events that are supposedly due to,in part or full, climate change it seems to me the ones making such claims are also operating on spatial scales.
Is there any definition that tales the spatial dimension into account? Should there be? If not, why not?
I know this is a side issue to what you are discussing in this post. My questions arise from the climate issue in Norway, where our local alarmists have, over the years, claimed that a dry summer in the southeast of Norway was due to climate change and was set to "the new normal". The same for a wet summer in the same area, different year. Then of course the same for a flood, different but party overlapping area. Then a hot summer in the north, then a wet winter on the west coast. Now a hot summer in the middle part, where I live. All of them "climate change", all supposedly "the new normal".
Way back in school we were taught about the climate zones of Earth. That seems to me to be a relevant spatial part of the definition of climate. But how big does that space need to be to be relevant?
Dr. Pielke ==> Hausfather touches on another bad "settled science" that is not true in the real physical world. "PM2.5, which is responsible for millions of deaths from outdoor air pollution worldwide." The "evidence" for this is incredibly thin -- almost none existent.
At this point, it is merely a "talking point" -- repeated endlessly but not actually seen anywhere as real dead human bodies.
The weakness of the Samset et al paper discussing the diminishing negative forcing from East Asia aerosols is that the authors are trying to analyze changes over the short period of time East Asian aerosol emissions have been falling, about 15 years. That is far too short a time period for something as variable as weather. We've just been through an enormous spike in warming from ENSO and possibly the Tonga eruption and don't know how far temperatures will fall of plateau (as they did after 1997/80. The abstract mentions a mean warming rate of 0.7+/-0.5 degC/decade since 2010, with a confidence interval for the warming trend nearly as big as the warming trend itself. No wonder the paper was not published in a major journal despite its sensational claims. Even worse, the bulk of the paper is based on climate models in which the interactions between aerosols and clouds (and many other phenomena) are based on parameters that are tuned. IIRC, many models produce far too few marine boundary layer clouds - the most cooling clouds on the planet - and therefore likely contain large compensating errors.
However, falling aerosols provide two major rays of hope. Globally, aerosols reputedly have been falling since the early 2000's. The negative forcing from aerosols is the biggest source of uncertainty in energy balance models that estimate climate sensitivity from observed warming and observed changes in forcing agents. Soon we will have roughly 70 years of observed warming (mostly or all from the satellite era) with negligible net change in aerosol forcing! This will leave only GHGs as the main forcing - and estimates of climate sensitivity with significantly narrower confidence intervals. The record of ocean heat uptake will be longer too.
The second reason for optimism involves geoengineering - which is basically what this paper says Chinese coal plants have unintentionally been doing to minimize warming for the past several decades. Of course, it makes far more sense to deposit those aerosols in the stratosphere where they last longer and the Asians won't be breathing them. (Up there, aerosols probably won't be influencing cloud albedo as well as reflecting SWR.) If our transition to electricity from nuclear power is too slow and we are unhappy with how much warming we have caused, there is more clearly something we can do about it for a few decades while CO2 is being taken up into the deep ocean and methane is oxidizing.
At this point, who has more or less credibility, Hayhoe or Antonio Guterrez?
Is anyone surprised that these serial misinformation providers are front and center in advocating censorship laws and punishment for mal/mis/disinformation, when they are the primary purveyors of said claptrap?
As always, accuse others of that which you yourself are doing, its rule 1 in the playbook.
To be fair to Guterrez, he like Trudeau is simply unaware of whether the words leaving his mouth bear any resemblance to reality. Its just a performance.
But Hayhoe.
Roger,
I think you have posted about this definition issue before. So I will also make again: I don't think it's a definition problem but an attribution problem. They attribute al the climate change to GHG instead of looking at all the factors (both human and natural). One could argue that they define climate change to narrowly, ie as the change in global average temperature.
To me this post always raises the question what the factors are in the rise of global average temperature, both natural and human caused.
Next step is to answer if moderate increase in global temperature, regardless of the cause, is bad.
Great piece, sir. Thank you. Valuable information
Thanks for this straight forward discussion of climate change, Roger. 8 billion people and energy humanism can’t afford this scientific misdirection, especially when doing no harm is doable and economic.
Excellent article. The hurrier we go, the behinder we get. Or something like that.
I find Hausfathers comment, “There is around half a degree of warming today that is “hidden” by aerosols” a bit odd. The word “hidden” seems disingenuous, like somehow someone cheated. Of course there is never any cheating in climate change……
The biggest climate event in the past four years was the Hunga Tonga volcanic eruption north of of the Pacific island of Tonga in January, 2022. This volcano was about 500 feet beneath the sea surface at the time of eruption. Some volcanologists have said that it was as powerful as Krakatoa several centuries earlier. The important effect on climate is that it ejected about 165,000,000 metric tons of water into the upper stratosphere. This was dispersed around the globe within several weeks. This increased the stratospheric water content by about 10 percent.
The effect on the Earth’s weather has been startling: Major rains in Vermont the following summer caused extensive flooding. Last year extensive rains in the Sahara Desert caused dry lake beds to fill for the first time in almost a century. Weather patterns have been modified worldwide.
Likely you may not even be aware of this as it has not been extensively reported. It simply does not fit the Climate Change Narrative .
Roy Spenser's satelite temperature records show the initial effect of the volcano and the susequent fall in temperature as the effects wear off.
Tangentially related a April 1816 eruption triggered the "year without a summer" and poems like this:
Byron evokes the famine and despair that echoed real-world crop failures:
"The world was void,
The populous and the powerful was a lump,
Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless—
A lump of death—a chaos of hard clay."
Also, saying "water" is also incomplete as its seawater with all its chemical components. All of that spreading across the atmosphere.
Certainly saw changes in western canada starting in 2023.
Is that climate change? Certainly any change is screamed from every outlet as human caused.
So tiring, which i guess is the point, break down defences.
I believe scientists in Australia have estimated- based on the inevitable modelling - that this could influence the world’s climate for up to a decade. Because it was a natural phenomenon and therefore didn’t fit anyone’s narrative, you’re right to say it’s gone largely under-reported.
Great piece.
Still assumes increased co2 means higher temps in this complex system.
Which is an assumption.
What about reduced cloud cover, hasn’t that also been shown to be able to account for everything seen in the last few decades?
All I see is decision based evidence making.
Or as per snark master John Robson;
All climate change is bad and all climate change is caused by humans so all human activity is bad.
Just nonsense on top of nonsense.
The little ice age was the worst period in human history, bad outcomes wherever you look, death destruction mass migration imperialism colonialism, and yet the stated goal is to return is to “pre-industrial” co2 and therefore temperatures of the little ice age based on their assumptions of linear relationships?
That would be the worst thing in human history with 8-10billion people to feed?
How would you characterize people advocating this?
I know how I would characterize them, but then I’m not as nice or diplomatic as you are.
Some great lines. Thank you.
With engineering, and then finance, backgrounds, over the years I've been rounding out my education with liberal arts. Philosophy, etc, but especially history. And esp lately, non European-Near East history. So, stuff like Angkor Wat. Or S. American empires. Amazing how changes in the climate destroyed so many sophisticated civilizations. But, those have been shoved down the Memory Hole.
I have read history forever and never was climate ever mentioned in any of these sweeping stories of cultural collapse.
Yet when you start digging you find that all these times of empires and civilizations collapsing happen in concert with rapid climate shifts and without exception its when the climate turns cold.
Warmer is always the golden ages, "optimums", etc, and yet all we read is how the moderate warming since the LIA is an existential threat and we are all going to die when in fact we are not yet as warm as the medieval warm period, which was not as warm as the roman warm period which was not as warm as the minoan, etc etc back to the holocene "optimum" which as you guess was even warmer and had hippos in the Thames.
"A cultural history of climate change is a great book, 1177BC another.
Just about everything you read is BS.
On climate, energy transition, on "cheap renewables, on covid, on "russia collusion", on starvation in Gaza (that starving baby in the video has a genetic muscular disorder, his little brother is perfectly healthy, not shown in video of course).
Almost everything you see in media is a lie, all about narrative control.
People need to start facing real penalties for this.
For those wanting to read more along the lines of this post see:
Pielke Jr, R. A. (2005). Misdefining “climate change”: consequences for science and action. Environmental Science & Policy, 8(6), 548-561.
https://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/admin/publication_files/resource-1978-2004.10.pdf
Url for above AGU article
http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/files/2009/12/r-354.pdf
Also an article in 2009 by Fellows of the American Geophysical Union. Also ignored by the IPCC
Pielke Sr., R., K. Beven, G. Brasseur, J. Calvert, M. Chahine, R. Dickerson, D. Entekhabi, E. Foufoula-Georgiou, H. Gupta, V. Gupta, W. Krajewski, E. Philip Krider, W. K.M. Lau, J. McDonnell, W. Rossow, J. Schaake, J. Smith, S. Sorooshian, and E. Wood, 2009: Climate change: The need to consider human forcings besides greenhouse gases. Eos, Vol. 90, No. 45, 10 November 2009, 413.DOI:10.1029/2009EO450008, Copyright (2009) American Geophysical Union.