Posted by CE Marshall from.....
The Free Press
I post this article by Ted Nordhaus because it's the first clear and calm explanation regarding climate change that has kept my attention with facts and addresses the hyperbole behind climate change. It also delves somewhat into how the Silent Tyrants have been using it to control and dictate to the masses how they should live and what they should be concerned about. The article is somewhat tedious as most academics tend to be, but there are several nuggets of truth that we all need to read. Enjoy!
CE Marshall
I Thought Climate Change
Would End the World. I Was
Wrong.
My worldview was built on apocalyptic models sprung
from faulty assumptions.
By Ted Nordhaus
I used to argue that if the world kept burning fossil fuels at current
rates, catastrophe was virtually assured.
“The heating of the earth,” Michael Shellenberger and I wrote in our
2007 book,
Break Through, “will cause the sea levels to rise and the
Amazon to collapse and, according to scenarios commissioned by the
Pentagon, will trigger a series of wars over the basic resources like
food and water.”
I no longer believe this hyperbole.
At the time, I, like most climate experts, thought that business-as-usual
emissions would lead to around five degrees of warming by the end of
this century. That assumption was never plausible. It assumed high
population growth, high economic growth, and slow technological
change. But fertility rates have been falling, global economic growth
slowing, and the global economy
decarbonizing for decades.
Nor is there good reason to think that the combination of these three
trends could possibly be sustained in concert. High economic growth is
strongly associated with
falling fertility rates. Technological change is
the primary driver of long-term economic growth. A future with low
rates of technological change is not consistent with high economic
growth. And a future characterized by high rates of economic growth is
not consistent with high rates of population growth.
READ
Steven Koonin: The Truth About Climate Change ‘Lies Somewhere in
the Middle’
As a result, most estimates of worst-case warming by the end of the
century now suggest three degrees or less. But as the consensus has
shifted, the reaction among much of the climate science and advocacy
community has not been to become less catastrophic. Rather, it has
five to three degrees
been simply to shift the locus of catastrophe from
of warming.
This is all the more confounding given that the good news extends well
beyond projections of long-term warming. Despite close to 1.5 degrees
of warming over the last century,
global mortality from climate and
weather extremes has fallen by more than 96 percent on a per-capita
basis. The world is on track this year for what is almost certainly the
lowest level of
climate-related mortality in recorded human history. Yes,
the economic costs of climate extremes continue to rise, but this is
almost entirely due to affluence, population growth, and the migration
of global populations toward
climate hazards: mainly cities in coastal
regions and floodplains.
So the far more interesting question is not why my colleagues and I at
the
Breakthrough Institute have revised our priors about climate risk,
but why so many progressive environmentalists have not.
In the late 2000s, the
climate advocacy community figured out that
framing climate change as a future risk would not prove politically
sufficient to transform the U.S. and global energy systems in the way
that most believed necessary. And so the movement set about
attempting to move the locus of climate catastrophe from the future to
the present,
framing extreme weather events not only as harbingers for
future catastrophes, but as
fueled by current climate change.
But this narrative conflicts with existing evidence, including data
collected by political scientist and former environmental studies
professor Roger Pielke Jr. His work, going back to the mid-1990s,
showed again and again that the normalized economic costs of climate
related disasters, when adjusted for wealth and economic growth,
weren’t increasing, despite the documented warming of the climate.
The reason for my shift in opinion wasn’t only that Pielke had produced
strong evidence that undermined a key claim of the climate advocacy
community. It wasn’t even witnessing Pielke’s cancellation,
which was
brutal. It was, rather, that I came to understand why you couldn’t find a
climate change signal in the disaster loss data, despite close to 1.5
degrees of warming over the last century.
There are two linked factors. First, what determines the cost of a
climate-related disaster is not just how extreme the weather is. It is also
how many people and
how much wealth is affected by the extreme
weather event, and how vulnerable they are to that event. Over the
same period that the climate has warmed by 1.5 degrees, the global
population has more than quadrupled, per-capita income has increased
by a factor of 10, and the scale of infrastructure, social services, and
technology that protects people and wealth from climate extremes has
expanded massively. These latter factors overwhelm the climate signal.
The amount of warming that is conceivable even in plausible worst-case
scenarios is not remotely consistent with the sorts of catastrophic outcomes
that I once believed in.
Second, anthropogenic climate change is a much smaller factor at the
local and regional scale than natural climate variability. Some climate
scientists have pointed to anomalously high surface and ocean
temperatures as evidence that warming may be accelerating, perhaps
even faster than models have suggested. But even in the case where
climate sensitivity proves to be relatively high, additional anthropogenic
warming is an order of magnitude less than the
oscillations of natural
variability.
The absence of an anthropogenic climate signal in most climate and
weather phenomena is not paradoxical. It is simply not possible given
the small amount of anthropogenic warming the planet has experienced.
When scientists, journalists, and activists say that climate change made
a given extreme event far more likely, what they are actually saying is
that an event that is
somewhat more intense than it would have been
absent climate change could have been made so by climate change. To
take the simplest example, a heat wave that is 1.5 degrees warmer than
it would have been without climate change was made vastly more likely
to occur due to climate change. The claim is tautological.
Put these two factors together—the outsize influence that
exposure and
vulnerability have on the cost of extreme climate and weather
phenomena, and the very
modest intensification that climate change
contributes to these events, when it plays any role at all—and what
should be clear is that climate change is contributing very little to
present-day disasters.
This also means that the scale of anthropogenic climate change that
would be necessary to very dramatically intensify those hazards is
implausibly large. The amount of warming that is conceivable even in
plausible worst-case scenarios, in other words, is not remotely
consistent with the sorts of catastrophic outcomes that I once believed
in.
For a long time, even after I came to this conclusion, I
held on to the
possibility of catastrophic climate futures based upon uncertainty.
There might be
tipping points: low-probability, high-consequence
scenarios that aren’t factored into central estimates. The ice sheets
could collapse much faster than we understand, or the
Gulf Stream
might shut down, bringing frigid temperatures to Western Europe, or
permafrost and methane hydrates frozen in the seafloor might rapidly
melt, accelerating warming.
But once you look more closely at these risks, they don’t add up to
catastrophic outcomes for humanity. While sensationalist news stories
frequently refer to the collapse of the Gulf Stream, what they are really
referring to is the slowing of the
Atlantic Meridianol Overturning
Circulation AMOC. The AMOC helps transport warm water to the
North Atlantic and moderates winter temperatures across Western
Europe. But its collapse, much less its slowing, would not result in a
hard freeze across Europe. Indeed, under plausible conditions in which
it might significantly slow, it would act as a negative feedback,
counterbalancing warming, which is happening faster across the
European continent than almost any place else in the world.
Permafrost and methane hydrate thawing, meanwhile, are
slow
processes, not fast ones. Even irreversible melting would occur over
millennial timescales—fast in geological terms but very slow in human
terms. Likewise, even very accelerated scenarios for rapid melting of
ice sheets would unfold over many centuries, not decades.
Moreover, the problem with grounding strong precautionary claims in
these known unknowns is that doing so demands strong remedies in the
present in response to future risks that are unquantifiable, unfalsifiable,
and low probability.
Why do so many smart people—scientists, engineers, lawyers, and
public policy experts, all of whom will tell you that they “believe in
science”—get the science of climate risk so badly wrong?
The first reason is that highly educated people with high levels of
science literacy are no less likely to get basic scientific issues wrong
than anyone else when the facts conflict with their social identities and
ideological commitments. Yale Law professor Dan Kahan has shown
that people who are highly concerned about climate change actually
have
less accurate views about climate change overall than climate
skeptics, and that this remains true even among partisans with high
levels of education and general science literacy. Elsewhere, Kahan and
others have demonstrated that on many issues, highly educated people
are often more likely to
hold stubbornly onto erroneous beliefs because
they are adept at rationalizing their ideological commitments.
The second reason is that there are strong incentives to overestimate
climate risk if you
make a living doing left-of-center climate and energy
policy. The capture of Democratic and progressive politics by
environmentalism over the last generation has been close to total.
Meanwhile, the climate movement has effectively conflated consensus
science about the reality and anthropogenic origins of climate change
with catastrophist claims about climate risk, for which there is no
consensus whatsoever.
READ
How China Hijacked America’s Climate Fears
Whether you are an academic researcher, a think-tank policy wonk, a
program officer at an environmental or liberal philanthropy, or a
Democratic congressional staffer, there is simply no incentive to
challenge the central notion that climate change is an existential threat
to the human future. And so everyone falls in line.
Finally, there is a widespread belief that one can’t make a strong case
for clean energy and technological innovation absent the catastrophic
specter of climate change. This view ignores the entire history of
modern energy innovation. Over the last two centuries, the world has
moved inexorably from dirtier and more carbon-intensive technologies
to cleaner ones. Burning coal, despite its significant environmental
impacts, is cleaner than burning wood and dung. Burning gas is cleaner
than coal. And, of course, producing energy with wind, solar, and
nuclear is cleaner than doing so with fossil fuels.
There is
no evidence whatsoever that 35 years of increasingly dire
rhetoric and claims about climate change have had any effect on the
rate at which the global energy system has decarbonized. In fact, by
some measures, the world decarbonized more quickly over the 35 years
prior to climate change’s emergence as a global concern than it has in
the 35 years since.
There are lots of good reasons to support cleaner energy without
threatening the public with climate catastrophe. But the climate
movement is actually after something different than that—a rapid and
complete reorganization of the global energy economy over the course
of a few decades. And there is no good reason to do that absent the
specter of catastrophic climate change.
And so that is what the climate movement and its supporters in
academia, the media, and center-left political parties have offered for a
generation. The insular climate discourse on the left may be cleverer
than right-wing dismissals of climate change, but it is no less prone to
issuing misleading claims, ignoring countervailing evidence, and
demonizing dissent. What has resulted is a contemporary climate
movement that is deeply out of touch with popular sentiment.
A version of this piece was originally published in
The Ecomodernist.
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