Skeptical Science Search Results (2024)

brtipton at 10:41 AM on 1 May, 2024

I spent a large part of my career investigating, exposing and debunking scientific and engineering boondoggles or fraud within US DOD.

The SCIENCE behind climate change as about as well done as humanly possible. I have found zero politically motivated exaggeration of the situation on the part of climate the climate scientists. If anything, many reports have been watered down somewhat on the positive side.

Unfortunately, the opposite is true on the climate SOLUTIONS side of the coin. While all of the statements I can find are legally, and scientifically accurate; they are highly misleading creating a false sense of progress.

This became painfully evident during the 2022 meeting of the World Climate Coalition's conference on finance when the ONE climatologist who spoke correctly pointed out that ALL efforts to date have had no measurable effect on reducing atmospheric CO2 levels. In fact, atmospheric CO levels are accelerating upward. The MC followed up with "well, that's unfortunate. Let's move on to the good news." Followed by that session not being published on conference website.

Examples:

US Energy Information Administration (EIA) data states that about 2/3 of planned new generating capacity is green (correct.) They omit that new generating capacity if 1.2% of US total consumption and 2/3 of 1.2% is 0.8% PER YEAR for US conversion from fossil fuels to renewables.

The same source correctly states that about 25% of US sustainable energy comes from wind, but obscures that only 11% of total consumption is sustainable. This results in installed wind accounting for 4% of US total consumption. Note: That is INSTALLED wind, not ACTIVELY operating wind. A casual drive or fly by usually shows a large percentage of wind turbines are inactive. I have been unable to find data documenting the actual operating levels.

An article in the UK Guardian, about a year ago, reported that the first UK offshore wind turbine was operating. Based on their reported number and size of turbines, the entire installation, when completed, would generate about 1.9% of UK total consumption.

This linked in articles further digs into the state of affairs on "solutions." - https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/when-does-megwatt-114-watts-bob-tipton-asdfc/?trackingId=8eOLtQUcTwizRZ8AN%2Fe4Pg%3D%3D

All of these are observations and attempts to discover core facts and are in need of skeptical review. As a skeptical reviewer, I welcome this.

There is an engineering adage - you cannot control what you cannot sense. If our leaders do not know the true state of affairs it is not possible for them to make effective decisions. It's not enough to put laser focus on the accuracy of the risk reports from the climatologists while ignoring the over exaggerating capabilities of the solutions we are staking our success on.

In my OPINION, the tools we have are not adequate to win this battle. There are few to know effective efforts to develop new tools. The vast majority of out best and brightest minds are bogged down adding more volume to a case which is already well proven. Further documentation of our impending mass extinction is a poor use of strategic resources.
The true battlefield we are on is one of COST to the consumer and TAXATION of the taxpayers. Until we have solutions where the green way is the cheap way, we will be pushing a boulder up a mountain. When we achieve that point, progress will be rapid and viral.

Bob Tipton
Cofounder [Howard] Hughes Skunkworks

John ONeill at 07:32 AM on 24 February, 2024

'Nuclear is not economic' - the 17 countries building new nuclear missed your memo.

'..takes too long to build..' Mean construction time was 7.5 years, with a long tail. Countries involved in a concerted buildout do rather better - Japan averaged less than 5 years, China and South Korea less than 6. Sheffield Forgemasters, one of the few companies qualified to make reactor pressure vessels, has just demonstrated a new method of ion beam welding, letting them weld around the girth of an RPV ring in one day. This weld, on a 4 metre diameter, 200 mm thick piece, with very tight inspection requirements, would normally take up to a year. RPVs have been one of the bottlenecks for nuclear growth. Other solutions, such as the heavy water reactors used in India, don't have RPVs.

'..there is not enough uranium.' This was the perceived reality when the industry was just starting up - and when Cold War bomb-making led to a frantic search for uranium reserves, since enriching to 90% U235 bomb-grade uses up far more feedstock than does the 3-5% used in light-water reactors, or the natural uranium used in mainly Canadian and Indian heavy water reactors. At the time, it was also assumed that energy demand would keep growing at 1960s rates, and that most of the growth would be from nuclear. L Ron Hubbard's famous graph of human energy use rising sharply from a low base, as fossil fuel reserves are used up, and dropping equally sharply back to pre-industrial levels, was used by Peak Oil doomers to predict a coming crash, to be followed by unending scarcity. In fact, Hubbard original graph showed nuclear growing as fast as fossil fuel energy, completely replacing it, and then maintaining that level indefinitely. Plans were in place to switch to fast reactors, converting the 99.3% U238 of natural uranium to fissile plutonium, and to use thorium, 3x more abundant again, as fissile U233. This effort stalled when demand fell, and uranium proved to be much more abundant than thought. Until recently, global production has been well below demand, due to oversupply causing very low prices. Many high grade mines, like MacArthur River in Saskatchewan, were closed during the drop in demand after f*ckushima, with the word's third and fourth largest users, Japan and Germany, temporarily shutting their whole industries. With demand now booming, these mines are reopening, and new prospecting has resumed. (Many nuclear operators are on long-term contracts, and have existing stocks, so are not immediately affected.)

Hubbard's fossil peak has been slower to arrive than expected, and so has the nuclear growth he expected to replace it. Long term though, I expect his insight to be accurate. The drive for increasing energy use is still there - nobody wants to stay poor (religious orders aside). The down-ramp on fossil use will be steeper than the rise, as climate concerns spread. Can weather-based energy fill the gap? Not judging by the view out my window (mid summer, 8/8ths cloud cover, national wind fleet at 1/3 of capacity).

I've read some of Mark Jacobson's papers - all the way back to his cover article on Scientific American, in 2009. Before him, there was Amory Lovins' vision of a 'soft path' energy future, very influential on Jimmy Carter's policy. The two were actually diametrically opposite in their prescriptions. Lovins decried the cost and energy waste of the transmission grid, calling for efficiency ('negawatts'), small-scale, local wind and solar, backed by fluidised bed coal. Jacobson wants a maximal grid, moving greatly overbuilt wind and solar across continents, with probably battery backup, no biofuels or combustion energy, no new hydro. Neither prescription has done well when put into practice in reducing emissions. US CO2 emissions per capita hardly changed from the 70s to the 2000s, only falling with the switch from coal to gas (though increased methane leakage may have negated some of the climate benefit). Widespread, government-sponsored wind and solar growth, most notably in Germany, has bought a rapid rise in installation, but though the individual solar plants and wind turbines became much cheaper, their integration into the grid led to increasing power costs, while fossil fuel use persisted at a higher level than on grids that had already switched to nuclear for largely economic reasons.

Some countries whose governments had declared that nuclear power would cease have reversed course, and plan new build - notably Japan, South Korea, Sweden, and Italy. Others - Germany, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, which had 20 to 40% of their power from nuclear - currently persist in de-nuclearising. Russia is building plants in Turkey, Egypt, Iran, India, Bangla Desh, and shortly Hungary. Russia, United Arab Emirates, Iran, and possibly soon Saudi Arabia, are building nuclear plants at home because it displaces gas, which earns much more money as exports. Japan and South Korea are building nuclear for the opposite reason - it makes power much more cheaply than imported liquefied natural gas, at East Asian prices. The important question for the future is whether nuclear can take more than a toehold share in countries like India, Pakistan, South Africa, and Indonesia, where energy use is rising fast, and coal is now the chosen option.

guyho at 06:32 AM on 18 December, 2023

nigelj at 05:08 AM on 16 November, 2023

Just Dean,

"I probably spend too much time consuming climate change science and solutions online. It has become a passion for me in retirement. I suspect commenting at sites like this help me replace the interactions I used to have at work."

I'm retired and I spend a couple of hours a day sometimes more reading websites on environmental, political, current affairs and economic issues and often participating in discussions. Particularly on the climate issue. I think its a replacement for work interractions like with you, and it keeps the mind active and I like to share information and discuss issues.

I like light entertainment and fiction novels as as well, but I would go crazy if that was the only thing in my life, and I find 90% of reality TV is awful. Not really into social media gossip.

I don't think you should feel guilty for being passionate about the climate issue and spending time on it. Unless it was the ONLY issue you spent time on. That might be a warning sign. As long as we retired folk aren't somehow hurting other people or neglecting something important whats the problem? People can do what they want in retirement. We all have different tastes.

Thanks for the tips on the list of climate websites. I read some of those but I dont normally contribute to discussions. Might do so a bit more.

Just Dean at 22:59 PM on 15 November, 2023

nigelj,

I appreciate your kind words. It is fun to speculate. I probably spend too much time consuming climate change science and solutions online. It has become a passion for me in retirement. I suspect commenting at sites like this help me replace the interactions I used to have at work. I do appreciate knowledgable communities. Some of my favorite sites are The Climate Brink, Sustainability by the Numbers, And then theres physics and CarbonBrief.

I must admit I am biased when it comes to Zeke. If I have a question about a climate change issue, I always start by finding out what Zeke thinks, e.g. WDZT.

cheers,

Dean

Just Dean at 22:04 PM on 22 October, 2023

John,

Thanks. This is exactly the kind of exposure/coverage I was hoping to see here.

I have been disappointed with lack of coverage by the media. It is understandable given recent world events and maybe it is early days. Instead of choosing to cover the overall impact of the release on policy, even the Washington Post chose to zero on a single controversial recommendation, the the banning of natural gaslines in areas that haven't been served.

An articleby Sarah Isgur writing for Politico last year resonated with me. Here is a quote from that article,

"Climate change can’t be fixed in four-year increments. To effectively stem carbon emissions, the country needs a long-term plan that can be followed for 25, 50, even 100 years — something that can only be put in place by the U.S. Congress."

I think you could argure that this plan would be a good plan to follow and a good plan today beats a perfect plan tomorrow.

Rob Honeycutt at 03:40 AM on 30 September, 2023

Markp... Who do you think should be taking action on climate change and how do you think they should endeavor to do it?

I would note that, somehow, I guess inconceivably, government-led action is how we ultimately solved the crisis related to emissions of CFC's.

Mark, you might also want to note the IPCC doesn't have any power to regulate anything, nor can they implement any solutions. They are merely the intergovermental body that communicates the science, risks and impacts we face.

It's theUNFCCC at the COP conferences where goverments meet in attempts to create agreements that would address the problem. And those agreements are non-binding agreements between nations. The Paris Agreement was a product of the UNFCCC.

What is not clear in your post is, what do you think William Carton is saying?

nigelj at 06:42 AM on 17 September, 2023

Cork@7.

"Nevertheless, I opened the link to the Breakthrough Institute and all I found were articles promoting the reduction of greenhouses gasses emissions by expanding the use of Throrium/Uranium in pre-existing nuclear plants and other plants to be built in the emergent countries where no other option may be available."

When I opened the link I found articles on multiple different power sources, food and agriculture, and more issues. Listed right on the opening pages and menu bar.

The articles promoted nuclear power and mostly cricised wind and solar power judging by the titles. The articles leaned strongly towards free market solutions rather than governmnet lead solutions so there is a clear ideological leaning.

Out of curiosity I googled The Breakthrough Institute:

"Tucked away in the heart of liberal Berkeley is one of the most controversial organizations in the environmental movement: the Breakthrough Institute, known for advocating for nuclear energy and a pugilistic approach to disagreement."

"The think tank’s critics, who include prominent advocates and researchers, decry the group as advancing right-wing ideas and say its policy proposals would delay action on climate change. But if the Breakthrough Institute’s leaders are to be believed, they are reformers with a 21st century strategy for solving the planet’s problems......"

SF Chronical article

"While sometimes functioning as shadow universities, think tanks have been exposed as quasi lobbying organizations, with little funding transparency. Recent research has also pointed out that think tanks suffer from a lack of intellectual rigor. A case in point is the Breakthrough Institute run by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, which describes itself as a "progressive think tank."

"The Breakthrough Institute has a clear history as a contrarian outlet for information on climate change and regularly criticizes environmental groups. One writer describes them as a “program for hippie-punching your way to fame and fortune.” So it was not shocking to see their column last Wednesday in the New York Times criticizing a new documentary on climate change that was put together by award-winning journalists. In their article, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger state that the documentary will raise public skepticism about climate change because it uses scare tactics......"

ethics.harvard.edu/blog/breakthrough-institutes-inconvenient-history-al-gore

"Anyhow when I wrote "All hands on board! Each point of view should be heard. Teaming up will be the only answer." I meant that thorium/uranium are tools in the box and it may not be possible to do without them."

Possibly. I have no objection to the use of nuclear power in principle. I'm somewhat energy agnostic as long as its clean, zero carbon energy (or close to it). Nuclear power is essentially clean zero carbon energy.

That said, nuclear power is not looking like a big part of the climate solution. Its too slow to build, its very expensive to build, its more expensive generation than wind and solar power (refer to an energy analysis like Lazard), and there are problems with waste disposal.

Uranium is a finite resource and one of the less common minerals in the earths crust, and it cant be recycled like materials used in wind power turbines. Nuclear power is not liked by the general public in western countries due to the perceived danger (this may be overblown but perceptions are perceptions.)

Its therefore unlikely generating companies or governmnets in western democracies would choose nuclear power right now. And its totally understandable. Its up to the nuclear industry to solve these problems. Nobody else can solve them.

Personally I think we should push ahead with things like wind and solar power and perhaps nuclear power might eventually become part of the mix. Many countries have traditionally had a mixture of electricity generation. I suspect looking for the one perfect generating source is a delusion.

Markp at 02:35 AM on 7 September, 2023

Rob

Yes, real progress is being made. But if we don't pay attention to all the greenwashing, pure money-chasing and ill-informed "solutions" like tree planting, the real progress won't have as much room to breathe in and expand. I'm all for progress on climate change, but I'm not into the hype and the BS, and there's a lot of it.

Markp at 20:47 PM on 5 September, 2023

Scientists are human beings like everyone else, and while that explains much of the disagreement one can find among scientists on all sorts of topics, when people like Clauser come along and speak outside of their area of expertise, flatly contradicting the work of the majority of those directly involved specifically in that field, as in this case climate science, it really makes you wonder what motivated them to do that.

Honesty is important for everyone involved on the subject of climate science and global warming, of course, including those in the mainstream. The characerization of the IPCC here, for example, is so glowing, one might think it was written by the IPCC itself "one of the world’s greatest scientific bodies. It is composed of the world’s foremost climate scientists, who every 5 to 8 years devote tremendous amounts of time and effort to author reports summarizing the latest climate science research, without any remuneration whatsoever. The IPCC reports are in fact the world’s best source of accurate and valuable climate science information."

In fact, the IPCC is arguably not a scientific body: the "Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change" is, as the name implies, a governmental body, where scientists volunteer their work but must in a way "compete" with political appointees from 195 UN nations to haggle over messages delivered to policymakers. It is well known that those political agents have rejected and softened language in statements proposed by scientists numerous times, when that language was deemed problematic for their individual nations.

But it goes further than that. The IPCC in fact has been criticized, not only by cranks like Clauser, but by its own contributors as well as other, reputable scientists in the climate science field, for being far too cautious, particularly in their characterization of the speed and severity of the effects of climate change from global warming. Being on the "right" side of this debate between the mainstream climate science "community" and people who are clearly climate deniers, should not mean that those defending what scientists have discovered need be deniers themselves of the many errors and misinformation that has been produced by organizations like the IPCC.

Papers such as "What Lies Beneath; The Understatement of Existential Climate Risk" by David Spratt and Ian Dunlop, and "Faster Than Expected; The IPCC's Role In Exacerbating Climate Change" by Kyle Kimball, are a good start for those interested in examining clearly documented errors and pattern-forming cases of inaccuracy on the part of the public messages delivered by the IPCC.

It is one thing to be an outright climate denier. It is another to be one who so stridently opposes the outright frauds and fakes that one refuses to admit, and even attempts to hide or gloss over the real problems that do exist within what people call the climate science "community" and those various organizations responsible for gaining insight and finding solutions for humanity to fight what may someday soon be legally recognized as the ecocide perpetrated by numerous energy companies when they were warned numerous times by scientists of the need to swiftly switch to alternate fuels, and chose to bury, manipulate and deny that science in order to focus on business as usual and the maximization of shareholder value.

Markp at 22:43 PM on 3 September, 2023

For Rob: I know I have not provided much data to back what I've been saying, but that's mainly because I was going on the assumption that you may already be aware of the data that could support me. In other words, I don't think what I've said is uncontroversial from a data point of view, but I do accept that it might be controversial from the point of view of making those holding a mainstream view (and I know that's vague) uncomfortable.

I disagree with little of what you say about climate in this last post. From your list of 8 items, only 1,4 and 5 are problematic in my view. Unfortunately, those few items are weighty:

"A lot is happening towards decarbonization" is vague enough to require examples to qualify the statement. There has definitely been a lot of talk about decarbonization, but as 2022 saw global emissions hit a new high of 36.8 Gt, according to the IEA's report "CO2 Emissions in 2022" one has to ask what decarbonization achievements, what action, in place of mere talk, can we point to. Renewable energy production plus use of EVs, heat pumps and who knows what else saved about 550 Mt. Fine. But this growth rate (growth of renewable contribution) won't hold up. So when you say "a lot" is happening, what's that really mean? And could you give just a few bullets on how you think we'll achieve net zero by 2050?

I'm also curious to know how much your vision of "net" zero relies on offsetting schemes, because I don't trust them and fear that they are being relied on too much for comfort.

As for what happens to the rising temperatures in a net zero 2050, we'll have to wait and see.

I'm certainly with you on breaching 2C by 2050, but since I've got little hope we'll be anything close to net zero by then (for whatever net zero is actually worth as long as we've got all the offestting nonsense thrown in there) it looks worse to me than to you.

Finally, and to change the subject a bit, I think the talk about models went too far. I'm not saying models are bad, just that they're being relied on too heavily in certain important cases. And as my primary experience (nearly 30 years now) has been in the financial arena for many "quant" strategies where, in that industry it is painfully common to see wonderful quant investment funds with great backtested results finally have some real money thrown at them and start a live track record, only to see the live returns look nothing like the lovely return characteristics of those backtests, I confess a lot of my skepticism comes from just that type of environment. Still, when we continually see news reports with headlines running "Researchers present shocking new data that climate change is happening much faster than expected" and the previous expectation was based on models, I don't feel at all surprised. I've just had a look at the "myths" section of Skeptical Science specifically at the models myth and I also see there that most of the argument seems to be toward trying to convince climate deniers who say models are all wrong that GW is real. That's clearly not me.

For Eclectic: I don't think I've written too much, do you? I know people these days don't like to read anything longer than a twitter post, but I don't think your assessment here is fair. I've tried to keep it short, in fact. Like I said, I assumed, and maybe wrongly(?), that you folks had a decent understanding of the data already, and could follow commentary like mine that took a broader look at things rather than fussing over citations and decimal points because I'm not claiming anything that boils down to a disagreement over small measurements but has been more about one's basic orientation: some of you seem to be wearing rose-colored glasses in my view, like too many people are.

As for the mirror concept, if the goal were to limit global temperature rise to 2C by 2100 we would need about twice the surface area of the contiguous USA. Although these reflectors would be useful in many instances, like on rooftops, parks, outdoor markets, reservoirs, etc., the main idea is for them to be used in agricultural settings because there's a lot of agricultural land, and because the reflectors would bring both local benefits to the crops by cooling, saving water and increasing yield, and contribute to global cooling. How to do that on a large scale is a problem that needs to be worked out. Any cropland managed by tractors and other large machines would either need to involve reflectors that would be removed from time to time for those machines to do their work, which wouldn't be easy, or they'd need to be placed so as not to interfere with those machines, perhaps by having them suspended vertically alongside crops rather than horizontally over them. And of cource, horizontal coverage would not involve blocking all available sunlight as to choke off photosynthesis, but as most crops can thrive with up to 30% shading, it would be placed intermittently. Anyway, this is the rough idea. Reflectors made from PET and aluminum cans from landfill provide more than enough for this level of scale, but other reflector constructions/materials could pop up as well. If you feel this isn't the type of detail you'd like to see, I'm not allowed to offer more. Not to protect technology or profits, because this comes from a nonprofit, but simply because I'm not authorized. As some of you know, the science takes time. We're working on it.

If that surface area seems "too big" as in "nobody will go for that" I can certainly feel that, but what choice have we got? The Earth is big. We can do it. We've got 4 million miles of roads in the USA. When cars first got started, nobody would have thought that possible. All of our climate "solutions" are by nature on a grand scale. Nothing to do about that as far as I know. And why people might balk at lots of mirrors/reflectors when they seem to think DAC (or your solution of choice) can clean (enough of) the entire atmosphere, I'm stumped.

nigelj at 07:06 AM on 25 August, 2023

Markp @2

The IPCC do indeed have this scientific reticence. Its like a sort of conservatism. But its not just the IPCC. Science has operated that way for centuries and for good reasons.Some initial scientific findings prove to be false so the conservatism is a form of quality control. If the scientific community was too quick to endorse every new scientific finding then all its credibility would have been gone long ago, and everyone would have stopped listening long ago.

We have problems with a public backlash even now, when a theory proves to be incorrect (fortunately its very uncommon) so imagine if the scientific community was less conservative that it is. So although I'm not a conservative sort of person as such, and dislike playing down of risk assessments, I respect that its probably better that organisations like the IPCC are a little bit conservative.

That said how conservative are they? If you read their reports there are charts showing warming could reach 5 degrees this century and 10 degrees by 2300. And charts now upgraded to show that 2 M SLR is possible this century as low probability but high impact event.This does not look excessively reticent or conservative.

And do you think that adding a degree or two to those scary looking numbers would change the public perception much, and lead to stronger mitigation? I'm not seeing it. If the public cant work out that 5 degrees of warming this century under BAU is serious I doubt that saying its 7 degrees would make much difference. All we can do is repeat the implications for the planet of the official projections, explain them as well as we can, and point out the serious climate changes and the increased preponderance of heatwaves and flooding we are already seeing, and as loudly as we can.

Fossil fuel exporting countries do indeed have a malign influence on the Summary for Policy makers. Can't find the reference now but apparently some terms on levels of risk have been weakened and references to fossil fuels minimised. This is a very real concern and does mean we need to understand things are worse than the SFPM suggests. If you read beyond the SFPM and to the fine details, and the actual charts, things are not watered down in the same way. The trouble is who reads that?

Regarding your complaint that billionaires profit out of climate solutions and might have other ulterior motives, and countering this with the suggested alternative of placing solar reflectors on the ground. Its a possible climate solution, but billionaires will still make money out of this one way or the other. Its hard to escape the private sector making money out of climate solutions, given the structure of our economy. I don't care as long as the job gets done, and they are not breaking laws or profiterring as such. It would be good if they reduced their personal climate footprint, and showed some meaningful climate leadership and helped those less fortunate than themselves.

nigelj at 08:11 AM on 13 August, 2023

Regarding "With Temperature and Other Climate Extremes Shattering Records, Should We Call it 'Global Boiling'? 'Weirding'? Or...? by Tom Yulsman"

The idea discussed is that too much doomy rhetoric demotivates people. This is correct. It can have a deadening effect on people where they give up on contemplating solutions and habituate to the doom and just choose to live with the problem as best they can, like people in a war zone frequently do.

If there is any doomy rhetoric, its important to at least offer people solutions.

Another idea discussed is that creating too much climate fear is not a good thing.This is different from doomy rhetoric. However fear is a natural human motivator. We are hardwired genetically to feel fear when threatened and this generally motivates action. We communicate threats to each other that will cause fear and motivate action. This is all psychology 101. So its absurd to suggest we should somehow soften rhetoric to not make people fearful. This would be a dangerous manipulation that could backfire. It would not even be accurate.

However if the climate threat is innacurately described or exaggerated to try to cause fear this could backfire horribly because its likely the innacuracies or exaggerations will be exposed. We also cant solve problems effectively If we dont state them as accurately as possible neither understating or overstating a problem.

The reasons for the slow pace of climate action are probably not so much the way the threat is communicated anyway. Most people must know the basic problem by now and the scientists consider it serious, unless they have been living under a rock for the last 25 years. The reasons for slow progress are many and varied but one issue is we are psychologically hardwired to respond most urgently to immediate threats (like a wild animal attacking us) rather than slowly unfolding future threats like climate change even if they are very serious. Given climate change is now being more present and dramatic this might start motivate more change. Reference:

LINK

Other reasons are raised by people like OPOF to do with many leaders in society being reluctant to make lifestyle changes or support carbon taxes, because they are very addicted to materialistic displays of wealth as status signals.

However these problems do suggest to me we should try to motivate people to make changes by putting a lot of focus on the wider benefits of climate solutions, like EV's being more reliable cars, less reliance on imported petrol, cleaner electricity generation, etcetera.This is actually probably why renewables are gaining some traction.

Daniel Glick says " In communicating about that threat, we’ve tried terms like global warming, global weirding, climate emergency, and now global boiling." And he asks if any of this gets through to people and motivates people to make changes.

I can only give my gut reaction. Global warming - accurate. Climate emergency - a bit too colourful for me and people easily dismiss it as an exaggeration by giving examples of obvious dramatic and very present emergencies like Ukraine war. Global boiling - quite good. Nobody with any sense takes it literally, but this sort of satirical hyperbole might resonate with people. It does with me. Global weirding - accurate.

Just call anthropogenic climate change what it is: a huge problem for reasons xyz but that we have viable solutions.

nigelj at 08:37 AM on 24 June, 2023

OPOF, thanks for the very useful copy and paste quote.

The misinformation is very troubling. The climate denialists are still very active although its swiched to some extent from denialism about the science, to denialism about the impacts of climate change and the solutions.

However I'm not too keen on governments or the news media or other organisations becoming censors of information. I read George Orwells book 1984 recently and it certainly does a good job of raising awareness of the dire consequences of governmnet and media censorship even if it's well meant.

Of course we do have some established and reasonable limits on free speech, like laws against inciting violence but they are minimal and related to law breaking. I'm talking about going beyond this.

But at he same time the way Musk has allowed twitter to revert to an open slather for hate and misinformation is equally as troubling. It all leaves me unsure what the best solution is.

However there is no justification for algorithms that send people a deluge of climate denial. This is just manipulation to increase profits.

I recommend this book to people: 21 lessons for the 21st century by Yuval Harari. Very good chapter on climate change and other environmental issues. IMO this man has a great grasp of reality.

One Planet Only Forever at 03:08 AM on 2 May, 2023

Evan @6,

I briefly reviewed the 2014 Research Article you pointed/linked to (note it is almost 10 years old). I would update my previous comments to add that human actions causing increased N2O in the nitrogen cycle are to be considered the same way I refer to impacts on the carbon cycle. And I would add that there are other good reasons for more aggressive reduction of nitrogen cycle impacts than climate change (refer to Planetary Boundaries).

I will also clarify that reducing methane emissions from rice is still an opportunity for reducing the peak level of ghg impacts even if that methane could be considered to be ‘part of the natural carbon cycle (an action that does not increase the amount of carbon in the carbon cycle the way that burning fossil fuels or leaks of methane from fossil fuel operations or permafrost melting do).

More specifically, the report’s evaluated floor level of non-CO2 emissions from food production and consumption (Global total 7 GtCO2e/year by 2050 with more if population continues to grow beyond 2050 and also influenced by 'potential changes of attitudes towards being less harmful') appears to be based on the perceived willingness of the UK population, at the time the report was prepared, to learn and be less harmful consumers. And the evaluated UK willingness is extended globally with all people expected to want develop to live in ways comparable to the less harmful ways that the UK population was evaluated to be willing to live.

The following is a quote from the “Options and barriers to mitigating food system non-CO2 emissions - Agriculture” section of the Research Article:

“For both N2O and CH4, socioeconomic and environmental circ*mstances dictate the extent to which changed agricultural technologies and practices can deliver cuts in emissions at a systems level. Stakeholders suggested that important factors influencing uptake of mitigation options affecting the UK revolve around cost, dominant practices, the aging farming community and attitudes of ‘young farmers’, existing infrastructure, cultural norms, changing climate as well as a feedback linked to levels and patterns of consumption.”

A quote from the “Options and barriers to mitigating food system non-CO2 emissions - Consumption” section of the Research Article:

“Within the UK consumption-based scenarios, the most significant dietary change considered was a 70% per capita cut in meat consumption, with the deficit replaced with rises in other food types. However, even with changes to per capita meat consumption, absolute emissions levels are driven by population growth (consistent across the scenarios) as well as growth in per capita consumption levels. Population growth per se strongly constrains N2O mitigation, as crops for consumption and for feed for livestock continue to require manure or mineral fertilizer. Barriers to changing patterns of consumption are confirmed through consumer focus group analysis: moderate changes in meat consumption (20% per capita) were considered in line with financial pressures to reduce expenditure given the context of the 2009–2012 recession, whereas a 70% reduction was perceived too substantial a change for many [Citation33].”

That indicates that the evaluation was (likely unwittingly) biased by accepting questionable opinions like ‘the higher cost of being less harmful is a valid reason to be more harmful’ and ‘the developed popularity of eating more meat is a valid reason to not reduce meat consumption’. Note that I tried to present both of those points in a way that highlights that populist political misleading messaging significantly caused those attitudes to develop to be so influential that they compromise the evaluation and the way it is reported.

Quote from “Discussion - Implications for cumulative GHG emissions”

“Finding ways of reliably reducing non-CO2 emissions will become increasingly pressing as global demand for food rises. A wide range of feasible CH4 mitigation options were put forward by stakeholders, taken from the literature and quantitatively assessed during the scenario process, providing evidence for greater scope for achieving substantial CH4 mitigation than for N2O. This, coupled with the much longer lifetime of N2O compared with CH4 as well as the influence of carbon cycle feedbacks in raising the GWP of CH4 from 21 to 34, highlights the critical importance of fully exploiting CH4 mitigation potential whilst increasing the research effort towards developing agricultural systems that can minimize N2O production.”

That indicates that if the developed research bias is corrected there could be more reduction of N2O resulting in a lower ‘floor level’.

Quote from “Discussion - Implications for managing and mitigating CO2”

“The focus here on non-CO2 reinforces other studies that identify the existence of an emissions floor, further emphasizing an urgent need to mitigate CO2 emissions where it is most feasible and quickest to do so. The higher the non-CO2 floor, the more rapidly CO2 emission cuts are needed within the constraints of a chosen climate target. Conversely, relying on a low or non-existent emissions floor suggests a larger CO2 budget is available, again relaxing the rates of mitigation for a chosen climate change target, delivering a more palatable but less realistic assessment of the climate change challenge.”

This emphasizes that the learning from the report is that more rapid efforts to reduce fossil fuel use are required.

Quotes from the “Conclusion” of the research article:

“A continuation of absolute growth in global N2O emissions, despite assuming optimistic mitigation has, because of cumulative emissions, direct implications for how urgently and deeply to cut both CO2 and CH4 for an assumed climate target.”

This reinforces the need for more research to reduce N2O and the need to more aggressively cut CO2 and CH4 unless new research develops viable ways to rapidly reduce N2O.

“As energy systems become decarbonized, global non-CO2 emissions largely associated with food consumption and production will increase in the share of annually produced GHGs. Emphasizing the importance of making cuts in food-related emissions highlights an urgent need for policymakers in Annex B nations to consider not only technological and supply-side interventions, but tackle the thorny issue of levels and types of consumption. Unlike large-scale infrastructure developments, measures tackling consumption and demand have the potential to cut emissions of CO2 and non-CO2 alike in the short term and could improve the diminishing chances of remaining within the carbon budget commensurate with the 2ｰC threshold.”

That highlights the need for policymakers to “tackle the thorny issue of levels and types of consumption” because the reports conclusion is that current over-developed populations are not as willing to be less harmful as they should be.

A quote from the “Future perspectives” part of the research article:

“If the challenges posed by climate change are to be overcome, at least in part, a meeting of minds to define problems can offer new, much needed insights. This is already emerging in some quarters, with an increase in interest from research funders around the food–water–energy nexus as well as a rise in the number of researchers keen to engage in genuinely interdisciplinary activity. Of course disciplinary research may, out of necessity, continue to dominate, but the emerging expertise in interdisciplinary research needs support and encouragement given the extent of the systemic and complex challenges facing society.

"The climate change challenge becomes ever more urgent each year, with time limiting the options available for mitigating emissions to be largely those that can deliver change in the short term. Perhaps with agronomists, biologists, engineers, political and social scientists working increasingly in single units, systemic ‘solutions’ to the climate challenge can be found. Specialists in demand and consumption require the same prominence in the portfolio of research endeavour as technologists, physical scientists and engineers. Only then will resilient options be derived and ultimately implemented in a timescale befitting of the scale of change facing society.”

Bob Loblaw at 23:36 PM on 2 April, 2023

As usual, MA Rodger @115 manages to find links to useful links to these things...

I did read Lomborg's "The Skeptical Environmentalist" many years ago. The major thing that struck me was the way he compartmentalized the various "costs" and alternative solutions. He'd look at one specific/isolated problem caused by climate change, and then claim that it was cheaper to fix that problem after the fact than to avoid the climate change.

Of course, to avoid climate change you only have to pay for it once - not many times for each individual/isolated problem. He would never add up all the costs of the different isolated problems and compare that total to the one-time "avoid climate change" cost.

It's like saying "it will cost me $10,000 to fix that leaking roof on my house", and then conclude that it is cheaper to clean and repaint the bedroom ceiling when the water damages it. And then when the leaking roof causes damage to wall insulation, it's cheaper to replace the insulation. And when electrical wiring shorts out, it's cheaper to re-do the wiring. And when the TV gets wet, it's cheaper to replace the TV. And on, and on, and on.

Eventually, the rational home owner realizes that it would have been cheaper to fix the roof than to replace the many, many things that the leaking roof damaged. But as long as you can fool the home owner into looking at each individual problem in isolation, you can sell them a paint job, an electrical job, and new TV, etc. If your business is home repair - not roofing - then it becomes a lucrative approach. Also lucrative if your business is to prevent roof repairs.

MA Rodger's link to the rebuttal is worth reading. Lomborg, not so much. All you need to do is look to see what Lomborg's proposed alternatives are and assess how much effort he puts into making those alternatives happen - as opposed to how much effort he puts into arguing against preventing climate change. (Cue the XKCD cartoon...)

One Planet Only Forever at 10:05 AM on 2 April, 2023

retiredguy @112,

As Bob Loblaw has pointed out, serious pursuers of better understanding may not have bothered to do 'yet another' detailed debunking of Lomborg's nonsense. I read some of his earlier books and was able to easily identify many misleading claims he made. He has a history of changing his claims, but not his motivation to be misleading regarding the climate impact problem and its solutions.

Based on the title of the 2020 Lomborg item, I am almost certain that this version of his misleading story-telling efforts can be effectively corrected by reading helpful detailed documents like the UNDP's Human Development Reports. I particularly recommend the 2020 HDR which includes a robust evaluation that dispels the myth that GDP is a meaningful measure of advancement.

Other documents that help people learn how to dismiss the claims of people like Lomborg include:

• The series of documents in the SkS "New reports spell out climate urgency, shortfalls, needed actions"


• The Story of the Week in the : "Social change more important than physical tipping points" and the "Hamburg Climate Futures Outlook 2023" it summarizes.

One Planet Only Forever at 03:17 AM on 18 March, 2023

Peppers @36,

In spite of all that you have claimed the evidence-based understanding continues to be:

1. The climate impact problem of developed human activity is real.

2. The climate impact to date has already seriously compromised the future of humanity, especially due to the locking in of significant sea level rise). And because of the inertia of harmful developed over-consumption by the most harmful portion of the population things will be worse before humans stop making it worse. The continued harmful activity requires more repair (adaptation). And ‘adaptation effort’ delays human development of sustainable improvements. And the required adaptations will not be done for every body (I see not plans for the current portion of the population responsible for the rising sea levels to build flood mitigation systems that will be required for Bangladesh). And in some cases the harm is not repairable (The rising sea level impacts on Bangladesh may not be possible to adaptively mitigate).

3. The problem is the portion of the total population that is most harmful per-person. The total population increasing is a concern. But the problem of the total harm done is the real concern. And that can be understood to be due to the portion of the population that has developed a liking for over-consumption, not just unnecessary energy over-consumption. And the problem within that problematic ‘highest harm’ portion of the population is the portion that has less interest in learning about the harm caused (or the risk of harm) by their pursuits of ‘more personal enjoyment or benefit’

4. The problem can be solved. It just requires all people, even with an increasing population, to understand and accept the need to limit how harmful they are and to want to be more helpful to Others. There is a planetary limit on how many humans can live sustainably, concurrently live basic decent lives into the distant future. Many studies have established a consensus understanding that the maximum sustainable global population is a function of how much harmful over-consumption develops within the population. The planet can sustainably support more than 10 billion humans living basic decent lives (doing what is needed to live a decent basic live, and limiting the harm done by that essential activity). The planet cannot sustainably support the current 8 billion (or the most harmful 800 million) because of the developed harmful over-consumption within the population (and not just the harmful climate change impacts). Also, the developed systems fail to ensure that every body has the necessities of a basic decent life, including failing to provide basic minimum energy needs to every body and failing to have the ‘needed energy’ be as harmless as possible.

What is tragically missing from most discussion of the climate change problem, and other human harmful impact problems, is that the solutions require everybody to be governed by the desire to learn to be less harmful and more helpful to others. Some people 'doing their best to be less harmful and more helpful, and trying to help others be less harmful and more helpful' face the uphill challenge of overcoming the harm done by 'people who have developed other interests and related harmful misunderstandings'.

PollutionMonster at 14:13 PM on 8 March, 2023

Hi, I just read the book No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference by Greta Thunberg. Wow, what an emotional rollercoaster. I've played the Cranky Uncle game for hours, taken the edx101 course, surfed the skeptical science website, and argued with deniers.

Book no one is too small Greta Thunberg

Yet, only in 2022 have I heard about net zero emissions. Even then, I thought it was by the year 2050. Greta Thunberg makes the case that global climate change is an existential urgent crisis. That we need net zero by 2030. Is this really true?

As a millennial I feel a lot of the same emotions that the older generations are out of touch when I say I cannot get a job or having trouble with the basics like a roof over my head, running water, heat in winter. I find I get scolded by the older generations and they offer out of touch simplistic solutions blaming the victim or even calling me a liar.

Did I get distracted by the pandemic, George Floyd's murder, and possible nuclear war between Russia and Ukraine? With all my climate activist since 2016 did I really miss that we only have a 50% chance to avoid a climate catastrophe of runaway greenhouse effect if we go for a 2 degree Celsius increase by 2050 or whatever Thungberg said in her book?

How urgent is climate change? Thank you in advance. :)

PollutionMonster at 16:10 PM on 27 February, 2023

"The main point is that the land loss will include a great amount of fertile farming land, including the particularly productive river delta regions."

"And gradual worsening & lengthening of heat waves in India and the Middle East and Central Africa." Eclectic

Do you have a source for that? I wish to improve my arguments and I don't think linking to say BBC is the best choice. The part about losing fertile soil worries me because people still die of starvation in the world.

Mostly the deniers use the myth of climate change is overblown and climate change solutions are super expensive. Which to be fair, I was reading that some solutions are infeasible Weekly Roundup.

The denizens are mostly atheists, so that is some common ground we have that lets me tailor the message. I could also use some advice for keeping it all organized. I hate it when I loose track of a really good source or argument.

One Planet Only Forever at 04:32 AM on 9 February, 2023

Everyone wanting to better understand the required ‘transition’ should read the Report that is discussed in the Story of the Week. That would help develop the awareness and understanding of the required transition to most effectively limit harm done and develop sustainable improvements.

A key point is that ‘Social Transition (socioeconomic-political systemic change)’ is required. Technological transition without that systemic change is likely to be the most harmful pathway (the BAU case). ‘Climate problem solutions’ developed by the BAU socioeconomic-political system would be harmful in many ways. The harmfulness of the technological transition can be severe if the focus is on the perceived climate change harm done by energy use. Other harmful impacts of energy use could be ignored or excused.

Reduced energy consumption, limited to ‘necessary consumption’, with a transition to less harmful energy systems, all harms considered (not just climate impacts), is the least harmful ‘solution pathway’. What has developed is significant ‘unnecessary energy use’. And a lot of harm reduction, not just climate impact harm, can be done almost immediately, and could have happened 30 years ago, without technological improvements. That significant, but essential, ‘social transition’ is required to limit the harm done to the future generations.

The ‘resistance to reduced consumption and responsibly learning to be less harmful’ by many wealthier people, and people who aspire to be like them, through the past 30 years has created the current situation. The situation is now more harmful than it needed to be. Indeed, because the current situation is more harmful, the ‘responsible transition to limit the overshoot of 1.5 C impacts and bring impacts back below 1.5 C’ could involve changes that some current day people would see as ‘draconian reductions of their developed perceptions of success and limits on their opportunity for future perceptions of benefit’ (for some people, any external limitation of their freedom to believe and do as they please is Draconian).

A related point is that the harm of 1.0 C of warming is significantly unacceptable. Arguing that 2.0 C warming will not produce significant risk of unstoppable feedback is an example of the problem of ‘promoting the positives to the detriment of consideration of the negatives’. It needs to be understood that an overshoot of the 1.5 C target is a serious problem that requires rapid correction to limit the harm done. It can be argued that future generations will make the required correction. But that argument is a harmful misleading systemic BAU ‘kicking the can down the road’ cycle-of-harm argument. It is understandably important to break the systemic cycle of ‘excusing harm done because of the opportunity for benefiting from being more harmful’.

Rob Honeycutt at 01:55 AM on 9 February, 2023

Eddie and Slum... Are you both aware that the 2°C limit is at least partially predicated on the fact that was how warm the Eemian interglacial got? There are reasonable assumptions that under 2°C the climate system would not set off feedbacks that send us toward far higher temps. There are also reasonable assumptions that the actions that are taking place can put us on a path to keep the earth at or below 2°C.

The challenge before us (humanity) is truly massive. Yelling that the ship isn't turning fast enough doesn't change its direction. Real energy solutions do. Positive support for those solutions does. Barring the use of private jets does vitually nothing. Putting a price on carbon so that flying in those jets comes in line with the damages they impose, along with all other FF uses, does.

The technical solutions for successfully transitioning off of FF's are already here. They're continually being improved upon. Spreading rhetoric that the game is already lost is doing the bidding of the FF's industry, because when people believe all is lost they give up trying. And that's exactly what the FF's industry wants.

One Planet Only Forever at 04:13 AM on 30 January, 2023

The following CBC News item helps understand the challenges of getting people to learn about the harmful consequences of fossil fuel use, especially the climate change impact consequences.

Why don't we talk about acid rain and the ozone hole anymore? Scientists debunk misinformation

There are significant differences between the 'globally acted on and considered to have been reasonably resolved SO2 and Ozone issues' and the climate change harm of fossil fuel use. In addition to the 'immediate potential negative impact on influential people of a failure to address the problem' a major difference is the amount of 'developed perceptions of prosperity and superiority' that have to be given up to address the problem. However, there are other important things that can be learned from how each issue was addressed.

The SO2 (acid rain) problem was a developed problem that was impacting the environment that influential people, including large groups of voters, could identify with and potentially experience. But even the undeniable harm done did not motivate rapid correction everywhere. Some European nations led the transition to reduced SO2 emissions, including 'low sulphur' and 'ultra-low sulphur' diesel. Other nations, including the USA and Canada delayed implementing the harm reduction technology because of the competitive trade advantages of the lower cost of not leading the transition. That delay also kept cleaner diesel engines developed in the nations leading the transition from being import competition because they would not run as well on the dirtier fuel. But the major difference from the climate change challenge is that 'more harm done' was acceptable while technology development occurred to reduce the problem. And a critical difference is that sulphur emissions did not have to be 'almost entirely eliminated'. Also, removal of sulphur from the atmosphere is not required.

The ozone problem, like the SO2 problem, was also allowed to 'take some time to be solved'. And a major difference from the climate change challenge is that only a small part of the global economy was impacted by the required corrections of what had developed. The global agreement regarding the mitigation of the ozone problem was able to wait for new technology to develop. Also, the rate of harmful ozone impacts did not have to be brought to 'net-zero'. And actions were not required to remove harmful excess ozone impacts.

The climate change challenge requires the ending of a developed activity that is a massive part of the global socioeconomic system. And there is the added potentially unpopular requirement for the people who benefited most from the current accumulated problem to pay for removing excess harmful impacts. There is no time to wait for 'new cheaper technology to be developed' ('waiting for cheaper alternatives to be developed' through the past 30 years has developed the current undeniably harmful reality). The currently developed technology for removing CO2 needs to be built and be operating today. However, only technology that is well understood to have minimal 'other' negative impacts should be built and operated, even if cheaper alternatives are available.

For the climate change challenge, and so many other matters that matter to the future of humanity, the measure of acceptability of what has been developed and the alternatives needs to be 'essentially harmless'. Compromising the pursuit of being as harmless as possible 'because of other considerations' will fail to develop sustainable solutions. That reality is a major impediment to efforts to increase awareness and understanding of the climate change challenge. The science is solid. But it requires a lot of developed preferences and perceptions of status to be given up.

One Planet Only Forever at 07:24 AM on 5 January, 2023

Moderator,

I agree that discussing population and nuclear is not on-topic here.

The best location to discuss nuclear energy appears to be the following SkS Blog Post by scaddenp: Is Nuclear Energy the Answer?

That post and comments provide a wealth of relevant information. My only comment regarding nuclear energy has already been stated: To be lasting improvements, solutions to the harmful unsustainable fossil fuel climate change impact problem need to 'not be harmful and unsustainable alternatives'.

I did not find a 'population' discussion location in SkS. Maybe there isn't one. And there probably shouldn't be one.

Discussion regarding global population and development is part of the bigger UN Development Programme. Climate science regarding human climate change impacts is a subset of that larger issue. There is lots of great information available from the UNDP, including the annual UNDP Human Development Reports (one of my favorites is the 2020 HDR).

One Planet Only Forever at 15:15 PM on 4 January, 2023

Peppers @91,

The population issue may be better understood by performing the mental exercise of considering a case where the global population did not increase above 800 million.

If, by today, the 800 million developed to be as harmful ‘annually in total’ as the current most harmful 800 million are, then the magnitude of harm done so far, and rate of harm done, would be less than the current problem of the 8 billion today. More people being harmful, even if they are less harmful people, will produce harm more rapidly. But the continued increase of harm done at a lower rate would eventually produce a similar level of harmful results.

Once the harm being done was recognized (understandable) as something that had to be ended and undone (in spite of harmful efforts to promote misunderstanding, and ask questionable questions that have understandable answers, to delay the awakening of that understanding – prolonging understandably harmful misunderstandings that delay the reduction of harm being done), if each of the 800 million had developed a reasonably comparable level of harmfulness then they would all have a comparable responsibility for reducing their harmfulness. However, if the distribution of harmfulness was similar to the current distribution (refer to my comment @82 - the top 10% of the 800 million being as harmful as the top 1% of 8 billion, and the top 1% being like the current top 0.1%) then the common sense would be that the more harmful people, all of them, would need to more rapidly and more dramatically lead the learning and correction of behaviour.

The problem is the examples being set by the supposedly more advanced portion of the population, combined with the development of desires in more people to develop to live that way (as you say “they too want to live as full a life as possible” incorrectly believing that ‘desiring to be more harmful’ is ‘Living fuller’ or that ‘living fuller’ excuses the harm done). That harmful result is unjustified and relies on harmful misunderstandings like the following (refer to my comment @90 for an alternate presentation of the same point):

• those who are first to develop more harmful ways of living get to be more harmful


• harmfulness has to be accepted, because some people desire things that are understandably harmful

My point, unaltered by anything you have presented, is that unless there is a systemic ideological change that establishes the common sense that it is unacceptable for ‘desires’ to be obtained harmfully then any ‘solutions’ will likely be harmful and ultimately unsustainable.

Fundamentally the developed common sense understanding includes:

• the harmfulness of people continuing to ‘pursue desires (not needs)’ via harmful fossil fuel use is now undeniable because of climate science.


• the development and proliferation of misunderstandings about climate science, including questionable questions related to the need for the most harmful people to most rapidly limit their harmfulness, is undeniably harmful because it delays the limiting of the harm done.


• pursuing ‘solutions’ without acknowledging that only ‘meeting everyone’s basic needs’ is allowed to be harmful (with as little harm done as possible) will not produce sustainable solutions.

The problem is not solved by the development of new technology or 'other solutions' in a system that does not recognize the need for ‘desires beyond the basic needs of living’ to be harmless. The desire for people to maintain and increase developed perceptions of ‘fuller’ living does not justify the added harm done while they try to delay the understanding of the growing urgency for their desired harmful actions to be more rapidly ended.

Also, harmful climate change impacts due to fossil fuel use were the result of the pursuits of status through technology development competition in a system with success measured by popularity and profit. It is also common sense that some people harmfully resist learning about the harmful results of persistent and prolific presentations of misunderstandings regarding climate science. Even without the harmful delay of persistent misunderstanding, it is understandably unacceptable to ‘wait for the obviously harmfully inclined competition to end the harm it developed’. There is abundant evidence that limiting of harm done by activity related to fossil fuels (and other activities) has almost only ever happened through ‘regulation and restriction by Others who govern based on the pursuit of increased awareness and understanding of what is harmful’. Examples abound including: ending lead in gasoline, reduction of sulphur emissions, reduced particulate emissions, and improved fuel efficiency.

As for your point “I cannot censor others because I now want to call their opinion harmful misunderstandings”. That is a version of an already pointed out misunderstanding/misrepresentation of my presented points. One more time, stated a different way:

• the most serious population problem related to ‘climate science and understood to be harmful climate change impacts of human activity’ is the most harmful impacting portion of the population.


• the harmful portion of the population is not excused by claiming that ‘others want to be like them’.


• the small percentage who are most harmful are not excused by claiming that large numbers of other less harmful people are a bigger concern.


• continuing harmful activity that is unnecessary for decent basic living is not excused by claiming that harmless ways to do the desired things ‘will be developed’. Maybe they won’t be developed. Maybe harmful replacements, only a little less climate change harmful or harmful in other ways, will be used. Note that stopping unnecessary harmful activity would limit the harm done ‘and’ motivate the development of harmless ways to meet those unnecessary desires.


• it is harmful to maintain a misunderstanding that evades learning that fossil fuel use must be rapidly ended by the people who cause the most harm due to their harmfully over-developed ‘unnecessary’ fossil fuel use.


• the real root of the problem is the development of desires for over-consumption including energy over-consumption.

You say “Yet we have let 11 million (from lower per capita impact nations) in to our 15.52 per capita USA.” That is an argument against yourself. You have essentially stated that it is expected and OK for lower impact people to develop higher impact ways of living. Also, people moving to the USA would not be a problem if all of the USA, not just some portions of its population, were leading the awakening of the understanding of the need for a rapid transition away from the ideology that harmful ways of obtaining ‘desires’ are excusable.

In conclusion, I believe it is important for SkS to continue to raise awareness (awaken people) regarding the climate science understanding that results in people learning to be less harmful, including voting for representatives who will be less harmful and more helpful leaders. That includes efforts on Twitter until it becomes clear that there is no longer a significant number of people remaining on Twitter who are interested in developing the common sense understanding of the need to rapidly end fossil fuel use and curtail other harmful ‘desired activity’.

One Planet Only Forever at 12:29 PM on 31 December, 2022

Reviewing all of the comments helped me develop the following response to peppers @86. I hope it is helpful.

The following questions hopefully establish a common understanding regarding the harm done by the proliferation of misunderstandings on a public-service system like Twitter.

Note: The harmful results of efforts to delay or diminish the awakening of understanding of harm being done, including the attempts to over-power or threaten people who try to help others learn to be less harmful, is not restricted to climate science.

Important questions for everyone:

1. Do you understand how Bayes’ theorem explains the way (perhaps the only way) that humans ‘minimize conflict of interests by developing and improving common sense understanding’? Ideological indoctrination will make people resist following Bayes’ theorem and fail to develop common sense understanding. Problematic beliefs include:

• cheaper and easier (or more profitable, or more desired) justifies/excuses harm done


• richer and more powerful people are excused for being more harmful because they can afford to, and are able to, be more harmful


• harm done (to Others) can be excused if benefits are obtained (by the In Group).

Ideological beliefs can reduce conflicts within a group (or nation or group of nations). But the resulting group will increase their conflict with Others. Limiting the harm of global conflict requires everyone, or at least all leaders, to apply Bayes’ theorem in pursuit of improved awareness and understanding of what is harmful and how to be less harmful and more helpful to Others (that is the origin of important learning and presentations of understanding like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the IPCC, and the Sustainable Development Goals).

2. Do you accept that all of the Climate Myths presented under the Arguments tab are misunderstandings that everyone can learn to better understand? If not, revisit the Arguments after understanding the next question.

3. Do you accept that it is harmful to believe and propagate misunderstandings that would delay learning about the importance of rapidly ending fossil fuel use? Wouldn’t it be easier for everyone to learn to be less harmful and more helpful if there was less repetition of harmful misunderstandings, less temptation to excuse harmful actions? Wouldn’t it be better if there was a public gallery of misunderstandings with comprehensive, open to improvement, explanations everyone could learn from (like the SkS Arguments list)? Wouldn’t it be great if every posting that included a repetition of a misunderstanding directed viewers to the appropriate, already established, educational rebuttal?

4. Do you accept that a high level Ethical/Moral Rule is “Be less harmful (when possible)”? I admit that being harmless is not possible. To live you have to harm other life. But sustainable living is possible. It requires distinguishing ‘Needs essential to living’ from ‘All other desires’. The harm done by meeting essential needs can only be limited to ‘pursuing the least harmful ways to ensure those essential needs are met – By/For Everyone’. Desires, however, are not necessary. Desires should be screened/governed/limited so that the only desires acted on would be sustainable (without accumulating harm) if everybody did the desired action to the same degree (relates to the problem of developing people being tempted to want to live like the harmfully over-developed who are perceived to be superior).

That brings us to the population question raised by peppers. More people on the planet does result in more restrictions on ‘desired actions’. It also makes the provision of everyone’s essential needs more harmful. An understood solution is pursuing, and improving on, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Learning about the SDGs leads to understanding that pursuit of the goals would reduce the harmfulness of the developed and developing populations. And a recent research report in the Lancet “Fertility, mortality, migration, and population scenarios for 195 countries and territories from 2017 to 2100: a forecasting analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study” indicates that achieving the SDGs would also be expected to reduce the peak global population, primarily due to the birth-rate reductions expected to occur in societies with ‘more educated and freer women’.

Also, the more harmful the climate change impacts are the harder it is to achieve the SDGs. Exceeding 1.0 C of impact has been identified as entering the realm of significant risk of harm. Refer to my comment regarding the Story of the Week “1.5 and 2°C: A Journey Through the Temperature Target That Haunts the World” in the

With the above established, responses to specific statements made by Peppers @86 are as follows:

Responding to the population question point that “The causation is fossil fuels, the proliferation of them. But if it is the explosion of bodies from 1 to 8B, exactly matching the rise of Co2, is ID'd as the cause, then our solution would be re-thought as well.”

nigelj’s response @88 is great. But there is more.

The problem is admitted to be fossil fuels. But there is no admission of the need to ‘end the harm of fossil fuel use’. Not mentioning the harmful unsustainability of the ways of living developed by the ‘supposedly more superior people that Others aspire to be like’ indicates a lack of understanding of the basics of the issue (refer to the questions above).

Also, saying “An important part of my 8 billion comment goes past the division of consumption calcs, which I understood too...”, indicates more may be going on than a lack of understanding. Claiming that the comment regarding population “looks past” the fact that a small portion of the population has massive harmful impact is questionable. It is looking through, or looking around, or looking away from the understanding that more harmful people have to make more, and more rapid, corrections of how they live and that developing people should be helped to develop more sustainable lives with the least harmful transition through the fossil fuel use phase of development (waiting for technological developments that will be cheaper and more popular to end the harm done will fail without increased awareness and effective governing to limit misunderstanding and related harm done. Technological solutions, like nuclear, could be unsustainable and harmful like the problem they were believed to solve).

The problem is made worse by people perceiving the more harmful people to be superior. That misunderstanding could cause people to want to develop to be ‘part of that group and live like they do’. Developing a sustainable solution requires all of the ‘perceived to be superior people (not just the ones who care to learn to be less harmful and more helpful to Others)’ leading the rapid transition/correction past (away from) fossil fuel use.

Responding to the “One Planet, If you can decide your are so correct in defining that more input is deemed impossible to add anything, then you could move forward with the censoring and re-education plan. The world has seen that before however, and they are still reflecting, what were we thinking?”

Common sense understanding of the pursuit of improved awareness and understanding of what is harmful and how to be less harmful and more helpful to Others is not ‘my decision or definition’. It is common sense ethics/morality.

Claiming that limiting the influence of the proliferation of misunderstanding is ‘censorship’ is a misunderstanding.
Using the term re-education rather than saying ‘learning to be less harmful and more helpful to Others’ is a misrepresentation because re-education has negative connotations that do not apply to learning to be less harmful and more helpful.

What the world ‘has seen before’ is the result of harmful misunderstandings becoming popular and powerful. That results in ideological indoctrination of populations (with nationalism and other selfish interests). And that causes the resulting population to powerfully and harmfully conflict with Others. They collectively resist learning to be less harmful and more helpful to Others. People should reflect on ‘Seeing what happened’ (continues to happen) within many political groups in many nations. Many groups become increasingly resistant to learning about ‘the harmful results’ of fossil fuel use. People should also reflect on and how other harmful beliefs are embraced by those groups as they ‘wrap themselves in flags’ and pursue the ability to have more influence to be more harmful.

David Hawk at 21:19 PM on 25 October, 2022

Thank you for putting numbers on the future of the present. Your proposed situation for the very likely 2.0 degree C temp increase is pretty disheartening. Also, it looks realistic.

The next study might expand to include the actual yields from the same locations where moisture and temperature were collected. I run a 1,500 acre farm in Iowa where the harvest looks pretty bad. Many fields are running at a 50% yield. One field normally getting 200 bushels/acre produced only 11 this year via two month drought. Such looks bad for food availability.

Perhaps we need to rise above the Newtonian model of relying on cause-effect thinking about climate change consequences? I've been trying to develop a more systemic way to describe our future via the "effects of effects" instead of the usual cause-effect model applied to climate change. The public, including farmers, somehow relates more closely to such. Time is short; cause-effect studies are untimely and then unhelpful to change.

A new publication in Europe goes deeper into the effects from effects thinking. Titled, "Short-term Gain, Long-term Pain:Climate Change as a Faustian Tragedy" it responds to the question raised in a book "Too Early, Too Late, Now what?" It came from my 1975-77 research project done at the Stockholm School of Economics and Sweden's EPA. It was on environmental deterioration becoming climate change, with results from work with twenty major international firms and six governments trying to regulate them. Titled: "Environmental Deterioration: Analytic Solutions in Search of Synthetic Problems, " its results were heavily criticized, even by the then Head of the US version of EPA. He claimed climate change was an "ad hominem" issue to be avoided in serious research. His training was from a law school education.

Clearly, what we are now doing to manage climate change is insufficent.

One Planet Only Forever at 06:13 AM on 9 July, 2022

Evan,

It appears that you may be doing the most that can be expected of a individual – pursue increased awareness and improved understanding and apply it to be less harmful and more helpful. But changes of individual actions are only part of the solution (note: ‘individualism’ is identified as a specific strategy of ‘discourse of climate (action) delay’ presented in the Cambridge Core article “Discourses of climate delay” that is referred to by the Desmog article “Climate Deniers and the Language of Climate Obstruction” that BaerbelW provided a link to in comment 1 on the SkS post “Skeptical Science tackles 'discourses of climate delay' and 'solutions denial'”.)

The following quote about the ‘individualism discourse’ is from the Cambridge Core presentation:

“Who is responsible for taking climate action? Policy statements can become discourses of delay if they purposefully evade responsibility for mitigating climate change. A prominent example is individualism, which redirects climate action from systemic solutions to individual actions, such as renovating one's home or driving a more efficient car. This discourse narrows the solution space to personal consumption choices, obscuring the role of powerful actors and organizations in shaping those choices and driving fossil fuel emissions (Maniates, Reference Maniates2001). Blame shifting in this way can be explicit – “Yale's guiding principles are predicated on the idea that consumption of fossil fuels, not production, is the root of the climate change problem” (Yale University). But it can also be implicit, such as in the social media campaign run by BP – “Our ‘Know your carbon footprint’ campaign successfully created an experience that not only enabled people to discover their annual carbon emissions, but gave them a fun way to think about reducing it – and to share their pledge with the world.”

This is not to suggest that individual actions are futile. Rather, a more productive discourse of responsibility would focus attention on the collective potential of individual actions to stimulate normative shifts and build pressure towards regulation. It would also recognize that regulations and structural shifts are complementary to supporting individual behaviour change.”

Note that in spite of Yale University producing/hosting Yale Climate Connections the high level position of Yale is less helpful than it could be.

So, in addition to pursuing increased awareness and improved understanding of how to change what you do to reduce the harm done by what you do, it is important to politically engage in efforts to help others be more aware and better understand the required changes to help achieve and improve on the Sustainable Development Goals (less global warming helps). One way to do that is to understand the importance of, and ways to improve, political policy pursuits like Green New Deals. One improvement I note regarding most Green New Deal presentations is adding mention of the importance of limiting consumption combined with limiting how harmful the remaining consumption is.

That circles back to the 10% causing 50% concern you raised. The better way to think about the solution is that a major problem is the desires of the other 90% to develop to be like the ‘10% most superior humans’. Those ‘10% most superior humans’ need to set a ‘superior’ sustainable example for the 90% to aspire to. They need to dramatically reduce their consumption and constantly pursue ways for their reduced consumption to be less harmful and more helpful to others including future generations.

As far as helping others, I would suggest you can relax about concerns that you personally fail to be more helpful to those who live less than a decent basic life. That guilt trip is part of the ‘individualism discourse of delay’. My perspective is that collective government action at all levels (municipal up to national and international) is the best mechanism to help people sustainably improve their lives to at least decent basic lives. Acts of charity should be able to focus on the joy, for the charity giver and recipient, of providing improvements beyond that basic decent life. It is a tragedy to expect individual actions to address a systemic problem like a portion of the population not being able to live at least a decent basic life. Economic development can only be part of the systemic solution to poverty if the economic activity is sustainable and harmless. That said, I support groups like Red Cross, Food Banks, pursuits of sustainable assistance for the Homeless, Amnesty International ...

One Planet Only Forever at 14:26 PM on 8 July, 2022

Evan,

This is a good update of the presentation of the technical points regarding future global temperatures.

The future depends on the rapidity of changes (or delay of changes) of how humans live to limit the harm done by accumulating global warming impacts. The future temperature depends on the collective actions by humans today and in the future. And the tragic starting point is the current damage done and the time required for the massive required corrections of how people live due to the lack of responsible limiting of harmful over-consumption through the past 30 years.

I have one important point of elaboration.

In addition to climate “... scientists, such as James Hansen, refer(ring) to global warming as an inter-generational issue, because the time lag means that the heating due to our emissions are only fully felt by later generations.”, policy development experts such as Stephen M. Gardiner have presented the ethical and moral hazard of expecting the developed socioeconomic-political systems to effectively and equitably limit the damaging climate change impacts. Developing sustainable solutions requires significant systemic changes.

Stephen M. Gardiner’s book “A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change” presents an important perspective (note it was written in 2011). The book should be read in its entirety. But a reasonable understanding can be obtained by reading the abstract and the summary statements regarding each chapter of the contents on the following Oxford University Press Scholarship Online website for the book.

The following is a key point in the Abstract: “...the key issue is that the current generation, and especially the most affluent, are in a position to pass on most of the costs of their behavior (and especially the most serious harms) to the global poor, future generations and nonhuman nature. This tyranny of the contemporary is a deeper problem than the traditional tragedy of the commons.”

The ‘human caused global warming and resulting climate change’ problem is a case of some people benefiting from actions that are unsustainable and harmful to others. The ‘benefit by some causing harm to others’ distinguishes the climate change challenge from a tragedy of the commons problem (where all those benefiting from the commons are harmed by the collective damage and over-consumption). And human caused global warming is not the only development where Others who are harmed have little or no ability to limit the harm done to them and get those who harm them to make full amends and reparations for the harm done.

Rather than just saying global warming is inter-generational, it is important to understand that human caused global warming is one of many developed international and inter-generational tragedies that the developed systems fail to effectively govern because the people who benefit from the damaging unsustainable activity can, and will, misleadingly manipulate public beliefs to powerfully compromise the governing of things and to protect their interests.

One Planet Only Forever at 03:48 AM on 1 July, 2022

This comment was prompted by:

• michael sweet’s comment @9 “I am skeptical that large amounts of CO2 can be removed from the atmosphere. (because) Who will pay for it?”


• Mal Adapted’s @11 “At best, CCS must wait until the global carbon-neutral economy is built out.”

Those are both examples of ‘discourses of climate (action) delay’.

And examples of the diversity of degree of leadership being harmfully compromised by the popularity and profitability of ‘discourses of climate (action) delay’ include the following two recent reports related to leadership actions to effectively limit the harm of climate change impacts:

• CBC News “European Union countries reach deal on 2035 fossil fuel car ban”


• NPR News “The Supreme Court restricts the EPA's authority to mandate carbon emissions reductions”

My responses to michael’s and Mal Adapted points include:

• Who should pay for it? Obviously the people who benefited most from causing the harmful result should “pay the most to clean up the mess and repair the damage done”. This is why I used the analogy of Harmful Party People. Who should clean up and repair the damage done by a Harmful Party Crowd? Similarly, who should clean up litter? Those questions raise the more relevant questions “Why is harmful activity tolerated?” and “Why do people who are aware of the harm being done, the people who have to put up with or try to clear up or repair the damage done, not stop the harmful activity before it is gets too bad?” If the harmful people are the party crowd and they have the power, or ability to threaten and intimidate, to keep others for limiting the Fun They Are Having, then everyone else suffers the consequences and has to try to limit the harm done and try to clean up the mess made and repair the damage done - while the Party Crowd fight for the Freedom to be more harmful.


• Why is technological development considered to be the only possible way to reduce Carbon levels? Indeed, in addition to significant reduction of energy consumption by humans, the remaining essential energy consumption needs to rapidly become net-zero. But many corrections of what has developed, and new developments that will reduce carbon, do not require any new technology to be developed. Check out Project Drawdown for many examples of non-technical human actions that would significantly drawdown carbon. Many of the ‘solutions’ are changes of regional food production to pre-industrial ways that are more sustainable regional ways of growing food. What needs to happen is ‘un-learning of the belief that technological developments are improvements by default’.


• Why do people believe in and excuse systems developed by pursuits of Popularity and Profit that are undeniably harmfully compromised by persistent misunderstanding that excuses understandably harmful actions? Many harmful unsustainable systems have develop due to the collective of humanity inadequately limiting pursuits of power and personal benefit. Harmful winners can be expected to create harm through Authoritarian Rule, Dictatorship, Free Market Democracy or any other system that fails to effectively limit their Freedoms of Belief and Action. Any system can be less harmful and more helpful. It just depends on how harmfully compromised the people with the most power in the system become.

Looking that the BBC and NPR news items with that understanding, the leadership of some of the 27 nations in the EU are more harmfully compromised. But, collectively, they were able to advance the development of helpful policy. The EU appear to be making advances in reducing harmful leadership influence. However, in the USA, the Supreme Court is now harmfully compromised in a potentially long lasting way. The USA leadership of global sustainable development efforts has always been questionable (The belief that Americans did not have to change how they lived, and the related leadership refusal to accept the understanding at the root of the Kyoto Accord that those who benefited most from the harm done so far must lead the rapid correction, even if it reduces their status – and competitive advantage - relative to Others). The USA being able to provide a helpful leadership example appears to be more questionable today than it was a decade ago.

My closing point relates to Evan’s statement “Although we can talk boldly about what future we will "choose", ...”. That is also a tragically common misleading way of stating what is happening. The current day people are allowing the harmful among them to do more harm to the future generations of humanity. Current leadership is allowing harmful party crowd to make a bigger mess and do more irreparable damage to the ‘only known to be viable home for everyone now and in the future’. Another way to say that is “Although we can talk boldly about how much we will benefit from the harm our actions and inaction will impose on Others and the Future Generations of Humanity ...” (note that saying it that way makes it harder to continue saying anything).

One Planet Only Forever at 03:07 AM on 30 June, 2022

nigelj,

You have brought up a great example of "discourse of climate delay or denial" (refer to "Skeptical Science tackles 'discourses of climate delay' and 'solutions denial'")

The focus on a small part of the big picture can look appealing as a justification for delaying doing, or deny the need to do, what is understandably required to limit the harm done to future generations of humanity. And limiting the harm done is the first step in 'developing sustainable mprovements' (harmful developments can appear to be helpful, as long as the focus is only on the 'good looking bits').

The following Carbon Brief item from 2016, "Human emissions will delay next ice age by 50,000 years, study says", indicates that without the damaging human climate change impacts the next ice age would have been expected in about 50,000 years. It indicates that the current rapid increase of CO2 has created a long lasting condition that would 'delay' the ice age onset by an additional 50,000 years. Note that the ice age still happens. And this more recent Carbon Brief item, "Explainer: How the rise and fall of CO2 levels influenced the ice ages" provides more details regarding CO2's role in ice ages.

The current high levels that would delay the ice age by 50,000 more years were not needed to offset the ice ace until 50,000 years from now. Wouldn't it be great to have well known reserves of fossil fuels that are kept buried and accessible until they were really needed? Maybe the entire next ice age could be offset by timely thoughtful use of those fossil fuels.

In addition to finding and keeping the fossil fuels for that important future use (and 50,000 years is a reasonable amount of time for future humans to figure out how to effectively use the fossil fuels to do that), it is important for current day humans to reverse (clean-up, undo) the current massively harmful excess CO2. Expecting the next generation of humans to figure out how to live with the harm done (or correct things) is callous and irresponsible. There are many harmful results of keeping CO2 levels higher, not just sea level rise mentioned by michael sweet @9 (btw, michael I agree that if the systems of profitability and profit continue to be the governing systems more damage will continue to be done, and not just climate impact harm).

The following CBC News item "Analysis reveals how climate change is influencing extreme weather" and BBC News item "Japan swelters in worst heatwave ever recorded" are added examples. But there are even more harmful consequences of the current excessive CO2 levels, harms that are irreversible, harms that will not be undone by reducing the current CO2 levels. And those harms are made worse as the CO2 is pushed higher -— even if pushing it higher today could be claimed to delay the next ice age by even longer.

The best way to deal with high heat conditions is not the actions described in the most recent SkS repost of the Yale Climate Connections item "How to stay cool in hot weather". What would be best is leadership actions that rapidly limit the peak CO2 levels and rapidly bring them down (done in ways that still improve the lives of all those who are not yet living basic decent lives - but not caring if the higher-status harmful living ways get chopped down a few notches). The Joy Riding Party Bus humans who denied the undeniable understanding of how harmful they were being through the past 30 years and want to push CO2 even higher because they don't want their Good Time Harmful Fun ways of living to be limited or scaled back deserve to be severely disappointed (no matter how angry that makes them - like I, as a professional engineer, have had to tell clients they could not get what they wanted, no matter how angry it made them. And my MBA education helps me understand their anger and know what they want and why they want it. But I have maintained my engineering responsibility to Do No Harm rather than be tempted to personally benefit by letting them have what they want and reward me for allowing - and make me to blame if it turns out bad).

nigelj at 08:28 AM on 14 June, 2022

"Stopping greenhouse gas pollution will require a complete transformation of the way the global community produces and uses energy. We cannot achieve that goal without sustained efforts on many fronts: technological, scientific, socioeconomic and political."

Correct, and that's the key problem, because it requires literally hundreds of simultaneous changes and solutions, and this appears to be more than humans and our institutions can cope with mentally. Otherwise we would have made much more progress by now.

Imagine if one technological thing could fix the whole climate problem, and I think people would support that even if it cost them significant money. Its a mentally digestable sort of thing and clear cut. But we don't have that, so we are struggling.

GraceKanyanat at 01:40 AM on 5 April, 2022

We all know deep in our hearts that climate change will take a lot of effort to reverse. It would take a lot of both time and money to be able to make a single little change, but it will be for the better. As you have said in the text, “solar and wind farms are currently the cheapest sources of new electricity,” I totally agree with your solutions, but can there also be other ways to create electricity like hydropower? Could there also be a change in the lifestyles of people so that we consume less energy?
According to the data from Lazard, “Leveled Cost of Energy Comparison,” also shows that the cost for renewable energy is cheaper than conventional ones yet they are still cost-competitive with conventional energies. I would like to know if it is possible that one day there would be no more conventional energies since renewable energies might come out on top?
I also feel like we will be able to achieve this goal of slowing down climate if we all start caring less about the finances and more about the environment, governments could make policies where fossil fuel will be banned so that there would be less greenhouse gases going into the atmosphere.

One Planet Only Forever at 04:11 AM on 25 March, 2022

Evan @35,

A suggestion related to my comments @33 and @37 that relates to both the Consumer and Science Disconnect.

The image under Science Disconnect should be expanded to indicate “marketing” (pursuing popularity and profit) behind the curtain and connected to Industry and Politics.

And it would be helpful to have a way to represent “Helpful Governing: The pursuit of learning about the harm of what is developed and effort to limit harm done”. That feature has different values in front of and behind the curtain.

• In front of the curtain there is some interest in self-governing in pursuit of learning to limit harm done, but it is not the ‘governing’ interest.


• Behind the curtain there is a powerful ‘anti-interest’ including attempts to block investigations into potential harms. That drives the development of misleading marketing to cover-up or excuse the harm that cannot be kept hidden. And that marketing over-promotes potential benefits, promotes harmful misunderstanding, and encourages people to be dismissive of the harm or risk of harm (because the benefit has to be worth it).

It would also be helpful to present an "External Influence" - Governing what is going on by pursuing learning and education about what is harmful and implementing policy and laws to limit harm done through education, regulation, restriction and legal penalty.

External Helpful Governing to limit harm done, and change the developed system, is the Key Requirement. Expecting the pursuit of more benefits and higher status to be Self-Governed to limit harm done is obviously absurd. Without external governing effectively limiting harm done the "Science (learning) - Consumer (pursuit of benefit)" system will produce an endless stream of harmful “popular and profitable results”. It will also produce a bunch of harmful results that fail to be the most popular and profitable, but still get to compete in the market. And less harmful developments will have a competitive disadvantage because they will be "less rewarding", require more effort and be more expensive than more harmful alternatives.

Without effective external helpful governing the “solutions developed by the competition for status system” are almost certain to be more harmful and less helpful than they needed to be (like the madness of global geo-engineering experiments, only able to be fully understood after being implemented, to "solve the avoidable global geo-engineering experiment climate change problem that has been caused by the belief that the pursuit of new technology that is highly desirable and profitable will effectively develop The Required harm limiting Solution").

jan at 01:24 AM on 25 March, 2022

@Evan #31

Many power utilities will certify that they use "green energy credits" to ensure the power used for cars comes from renewables.

People are often subject to tempting keywords. 100% certainty that your electrical outlet is currently supplying electricity from "green sources" is only if your house is off-grid + connected to your PVe/Wind/Hydro power production system. Otherwise, your distribution company supplies a mix of energy from sources that are currently providing this energy. Just to be sure.

Also, getting a lot of EV's on the road sends the right signal to the company's making them and to the company's powering them.Hard to know where to start, but I think we need to just jump in and get things going whereever we can.

Shouldn't this discussion be scientific? This is just a chaotic shooting into a dark approach.No hypothesis verification.

I think they call this the chicken or the egg problem. :-)

For common people - yes.

If you want to run a stable distribution grid you need:

- the stable source of energy production for 24/7/365 operation (any time, any weather conditions). Today they are - Nuclear, Coal, Natural gas, Hydro (dams). You can't control the sun (irradiation, clouds) or wind (atmospheric pressure).

- for unstable energy sources you need storage with sufficient capacity. More unstable weather, more capacity for the storage.

- all the sources must be able to deliver power quality conditions (Variation in voltage magnitude, frequency, transient voltages and currents, harmonic content for AC)

- solve challenging demands for thetransmission losses. More warm conditions = more losses = need more energy production. Note: I have done a study in Slovakia power grid how weather conditions have a heavy impact on the transmission losses (in period 1964-2019).And I can responsibly say that this is a very modern power grid vs UK or US.

So, we have heavy challenges:

- transform existing energy production from the fossil fuels, including YoY increment of energy production

- upgrade the obsolete power grids to keep existing power demand

- in parallel create new energy production capacities for new electric charging points (EVs, trucks, busses, ...). You can't build up these points anywhere.

- create new power grids for the new energy sources, including new transition stations, ...

- and keep it all orchestrated to achieve a sustained power supply. This is really tricky now (see below)

- and in Europe, we have an additional heavy variable - to cut off from Russia natural gas - one of the important resources for Europe power production and power grid sustainability.

Finally yes - it is about chicken or the egg:

- you can't decrease emissions with EVs charged from Coal, Oil or Natural gas power plant energy sources.

- stabilize the obsolete power grid or new demand in the existing obsolete grid.

It's similar to enjoying a healthy diet that you're preparing on a coal fire stove.

Power production needs an order. No chaotic solutions.

Some useful information:

- Jan/2021 - Europe was near heavy Blackout due to power supply failure that is suspected to have originated in Romania disrupted the Continental Europe Synchronous Area. Its frequency dropped to 48.75 Hz (target frequency 50Hz), which caused the South-East area to be separated from the rest of the grid. This disruption and a lack of operating reserves in France nearly caused a Europe-wide blackout. Luckily, the automatic activation of power stations throughout Europe and the automatic initiation of contracted load shedding in Italy (1000 MW) and France (1300 MW) kept the grid stable and prevented a blackout. This incident shows the fragility of the grid and the real possibility of a Europe-wide blackout, which we need to prevent.link

- IPCC AR6 -The latest IPCC report suggests that average wind speeds over Europe will reduce by 8%-10% as a result of climate change.

-UK’s renewables share drops to 35.9% in Q3 2021 on slow winds

-The changing sensitivity of power systems to meteorological drivers: a case study of Great Britain (Bloomfield et all,2018)

-Quantifying the sensitivity of european power systems to energy scenarios and climate change projections Bloomfield et all, 2020)

-Spain's solar energy crisis: Thousands os Spaniards bankrupt after investing in solar panels

jan at 19:42 PM on 24 March, 2022

@nigelj #30

your opinion:

I disagree partly. You do actually have to start using some EVs even if the energy source is only about 10% renewables. You have to phase in EV's gradually. Otherwise we would have a situation where we get say 30 years down the road and the grid is say 75% renewables, then we have to start building EVs and everyone driving them which would probably be another 30 years because scaling them up is inevitably a slow process. By then the climate is totally cooked.

My note:
You read this sentence from my essay for masses: No More Good News on Global Warming;link

When you will read deeply my document:GHG [CO2] emissions problem in a dark box - 1st part of the Global warming series;link
you will get more answers to my point of view.

Step by step to your opinions:

“You do actually have to start using some EVs even if the energy source is only about 10% renewables.”

My point: YES

“You have to phase in EV's gradually.”

My point: YES

“Otherwise we would have a situation where we get say 30 years down the road and the grid is say 75% renewables, then we have to start building EVs and everyone driving them which would probably be another 30 years because scaling them up is inevitably a slow process.”

My point: YES – from the Global level only. But this is the wrong attitude. Reason:
Vehicles operation is not global but regional. It follows that we cannot use global emissions from cars as a tool to calculate emission reductions with the introduction of EVs, but strictly regional, per country.It will be mathematically correct (the global data approach), but you will not be able to put it into practice.

An example:
Slovakia - Electricity generation by source: almost 80% comes from Carbon Zero technologies (mostly from Nuclear, then Hydro, partially PVe) and just 20% from the fossil fuels (mainly Natural gas, partially from coal which will be terminated 2023 and thin part from oil and biofuels). Then according to the study from NREL (2016): Emissions Associated with Electric Vehicle Charging: Impact of Electricity Generation Mix, Charging Infrastructure Availability, and Vehicle Type;link

Slovakia has a Low carbon average Daily profile of electric grid carbon intensity. This will be changed from the autumn of 2022, as another 471MW reactor in the new NPP will be launched to operation, which will bring the next 3.7TWh to the grid. It will cover fully coal, oil and almost 50% of the natural gas power production in the country = ready to immediately switch off. Then Slovakia will achieve from the beginning of 2023 near to 90% of green electricity. So, not gradual, but the fastest possible strategy of exchanging combustion engines to EVs seems to be workable.

Ready for a discussion. But especially here we need to use more facts than opinions.

jan at 20:38 PM on 22 March, 2022

Gents, as a fan of your site, I have some additional points to this discussion:

1.Be careful when using data from a source Our World in Data. I found many discrepancies there.

2. Same regarding data from FAO/FAOSTAT. In my last study, you can find exact pieces of evidence.

3. Based on my last communication with EDGAR (Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research, EU JRC), I discovered that binding differences in outputs arise due to insufficient taxonomy data in their EDGAR DBs. Not to mention that their data are still necessary to be paired on LULUCF from FAOSTAT data sources (which, as I explained above, is in a catastrophic state). However, unlike the FAO, they thanked for the proposed adjustments that give them a sense of data quality.

4. Regarding the impact of animal agriculture on the total emissions, even in the case of the Food systems, I discovered several serious shortcomings from the FAO.

I like vegetables, even containing a lot more share on my plate, to be sure. However, I also like reliable data. I also like the interpretation of the data in a broader context.
To prove what was written by me, you can check my last document:

[link]

I would like to read your opinions, respectively. I will be happy to help you edit your article.

I think that too much meat production is being created unnecessarily. Sure. This does not mean that tackling climate change through extremism is right. Not all meat source is produced as it is made from various extreme videos. It's like a dream when someone thinks we can replace fossil fuels with RESs by 2050 - no, we're not (with current technologies and the G7/G20 approach). If we are looking for useful and long term sustainable solutions for this planet, we will be on the right track.

One Planet Only Forever at 04:19 AM on 15 March, 2022

Here is my response to what swampfoxh wrote @74 (in the context of other responses and all the other comments on this thought provoking OP).

Regarding animal agriculture, I support corrections of all food production, distribution, and consumption aligned with the understanding that harmful unsustainable ways of food production need to be ended. It is especially important to correct the developed types of production and consumption that have already caused phosphorous and nitrogen impacts to exceed safe planetary boundaries (see Planetary Boundaries). It is also important to limit waste and ensure that all people receive at least basic decent nutrition, preferably from maximized local food production (refer to the compendium of climate impact related solutions presented in Project Drawdown).

Upon reflection it appears that serious important questions are raised by the way that swampfoxh chose to try to focus attention on the matter Rights (in spite of the content of my first comment on this topic @3, and all subsequent comments).

The (sort of) quick response is:

Fossil fuelled development can produce perceptions of prosperity and superiority. And the competitive for pursuit of higher status (admiring and aspiring to be like the highest status) can develop harmful misunderstandings in attempts to develop and prolong harmful activity. Undeserved status would be lost by a correction of what has developed and a correction of the direction of development (away from fossil fuel use).

A correction to limit the harm of climate change impacts will cause loss of developed status. The more rapid the correction, the more significant the losses will be. And it now appears, based on Figure 2, that significant losses will have to happen in the remaining lifetime of many people who fought to delay the correction. Their fight against change, their fight against correction of harmful developed misunderstandings, has created the need for more rapid correction. That has motivated increased resistance to learning in people who would prefer to have the losses happen to Others, especially the future generations who have no influence today. They make excuses that the future will always be better for everyone. And they make related demands that they not suffer any loss of their status relative to others due to required corrections, claiming things like ‘everybody’s perception of prosperity needs to constantly improve fro the current developed starting point, like a marathon racer who wants to start 20 miles into the race, because that is where they are when the race starts.

Rights are an ethical matter that gets harmfully compromised by political game players. The harmful socioeconomic game players who have significant political influence can become the least ethical people, using the power of misleading marketing to promote and prolong harmful misunderstanding.

Poverty in the midst of Plenty is the result of systems that create cases of people who do not deserve the circ*mstances they experience. Many of the lower status do not deserve their lower status. And many of the higher status do not deserve their higher status.

A different response is:

It is a misunderstanding to believe that people who were less able to develop the more harmful, less sustainable, fossil fuelled ways of living (mistakenly perceived to be more advanced or superior) have ‘missed the bus’. It is also unacceptable to declare that the people enjoying the ride on the ‘harm-full bus’ must not have their level of enjoyment limited or governed externally by others. It is not right to declare that the ones on the ‘Harm-Full Bus’ have the right to be more harmful than Others. And it is not right to declare than others cannot develop to harmfully joy-ride like the ones already on the ‘Harm-Full Bus’.

And helpful people should not have to try to undo or repair the harm done by people on the ‘harm-full bus’. However, until the Harm-Full Party Bus is safely kept from harmfully compromising leadership actions, all possible helpful hands are required to build the power to limit the harm done - no more bystanders or people ‘just focused on the science’, because those type of people are part of the harm problem by not being as helpful as they could be.

Competitors who are willing to try to benefit from something harmful that others may not notice as harmful (like sports cheaters) or try to benefit from a harmful misunderstanding (including unethical rules or unethical enforcement of rules) can mistakenly develop the belief that ‘everyone is like they are’. That can create a mind-set that can be easily tempted to spiral down into more harmful misunderstanding.

Less fortunate people have more excuse for being less aware of how to avoid being harmful to others. More fortunate people have less excuse. And the legitimacy of the highest status, like the wealthiest 10%, should be evaluated based on the understanding that they all have ‘little excuse for maintaining harmful misunderstandings’.

Disclosure: I have lived for decades in Alberta, a major region of origin of harmful fossil fuelled misunderstanding. I have tried to be less harmful, engineering was a good fit for that, and more helpful to others (a diversity of volunteer activities are part of that). My abilities, combined with those focuses, appear to have enabled me to rise into the top 10% of income earners in Alberta. I may have been able to achieved a higher status, but I was not interested in compromising my ethical perspective in pursuit of that.

A detailed response regarding my perspective on the issue follows:

Constant learning from a constantly improving ethical perspective is an important part of the pursuit of increased awareness and improved understanding of how to be less harmful and more helpful to others. And that expanded ethical perspective includes consideration for all other life, humans do not stand apart from nature, now and into the future, constantly learning to correct, and make amends for, developed harmful misunderstandings and related actions.

Everyone learns and develops their motives and perspective from the environment they are born into and grow up in. A lack of diversity of experience, including a lack of natural experiences, can develop a harmfully limited perspective. And that developed limited perspective can resist learning how harmful the things that are perceived to be beneficial actually are. Too much focus inside a man-made socioeconomic-political environment of competition for survival and superiority relative to others can develop intensely held harmful misunderstandings.

Ethical fairness of what is being evaluated is determined by considering the system and its results from versions of the following perspective: The system is fair and just if I end up experiencing any of the diversity of individual circ*mstances that the system could potentially produce (consider the history of European colonial conquest from that perspective, and extend that thinking into the future).

That evaluation justifiably determines that systems that produce poverty in the midst of plenty need correction. It also establishes the understanding that a person who acts in ways that harm others does not deserve credit for helping ‘a different sub-set of others’. A person who ‘helps some people’ in ways that ‘harm other people’ is harmful. And that individual-based understanding can be extended to groups of people. A group or nation is not Collectively Good if some of its members are helpful pursuers of being less harmful while other members of the group or nation pursue benefit in harmful ways.

A fundamental ethical point is understanding that each person born should not have ‘advantages or special rights and privileges’ due to where and when they are born or who their parents and ancestors are. That understanding is often attempted to be denied by the promotion of harmful misunderstandings regarding ‘perceptions of status’ (like believing that a ‘special sub-set of the population’ deserve to be the first and only ones on a bus). A related point is that a person who has attained higher status relative to others by benefiting from harmful actions does not ‘deserve the ability to be harmful because they can afford it or can legally win attempts to penalize them for the harm they benefit from’. Harmful laws and harmful application of laws have been developed, proving that all Rule of Law is not Ethical Law and Order. Harmful laws and enforcement are often developed to defend and excuse harmful people who have become wealthier or more powerful through harmful means.

That context leads to ethical questions of how fair and just it is for someone to declare that:

• They were the first to benefit from a harmful unsustainable activity and therefore must not be corrected, but others who have not developed to live that way must not be allowed to develop to be like that.


• They have developed to be the most harmful pursuer of personal interest and must not be corrected, but others who have not developed to live that way must not be allowed to develop to be like that.


• Because they were born into a group that had developed perceptions of higher status relative to others through actions that are now understood to be harmful and that were/are excused and defended by harmful misunderstandings, they must not be corrected, but others who have not developed to live that way must not be allowed to develop to be like them.

Applying that thinking to climate change impacts, what swampfoxh states @74 can be understood to be arguing for the right to continue to be more harmful than Others are allowed to be.

Applying a different perspective, what swampfoxh argues @74 is no reason for nations like China or India to forego their development. There is lots of coal and oil to burn. It is clearly inexcusable for people in nations with a history of benefiting from harmful actions to demand that they have the exclusive Right to maintain their harmfully obtained benefits, insisting that others who have been less harmful and have less developed ways of living must not develop to be like them.

I will use Canada (representing the Western developed nations), the nation I was born in about 60 years ago and continue to live in, as the example to reinforce the point. The following compares per person emissions from 1960 (World Bank data) between Canada - USA and the BRIC nations. The average atmospheric CO2 levels are provided in brackets to indicate harm already done primarily by western nations (with 280 ppm as the understood level before those impacts:

Yr (ppm) Canada - USA: Brazil – Russia – India - China
1960 (317) 10.8 - 16.0: 0.65 12.1 0.27 1.2
1970 (326) 16.0 - 21.1: 1.0 18.1 0.35 0.94
1980 (339) 18.1 - 20.8: 1.6 25.1 0.45 1.5
1990 (354) 15.1 - 19.4: 1.3 14.6 0.64 1.9
2000 (369) 16.8 - 20.5: 1.8 10.2 0.89 2.6
2010 (389) 15.7 - 17.4: 2.0 11.1 1.4 6.3
2018 (410) 15.5 - 15.2: 2.0 11.1 1.8 7.4 latest World Bank values
2020 (412) Canada 16.8 (= 637 Mt / 38 million): China approx 10 (like Canada was in 1960)

There is ample coal and oil for China and India to develop to match the pattern of high emissions per person for 60 years. What is their motivation to not do that? Why wouldn’t they follow the examples set by the more developed nations? The argument by swampfoxh @74 would deservedly be laughed away.

And, revisiting my comments about how averaging things can obscure what needs to be seen, why wouldn’t every region of China and India develop to match what the region of Alberta/Saskatchewan in Canada has currently developed to be? The combined population of Alberta and Saskatchewan is 5.6 million (4.4 + 1.2) with emissions impact rates of 60 tonnes per person (potentially increasing if the rate of extraction and export of fossil fuels, especially Western Canada Select - diluted bitumen - is increased). It is important to note that that high rate of impact does not count the additional harm done outside of Canada to process the exported product into final products for burning. What is exported, WCS, is heavy sour crude. Upgrading it to the quality of other globally traded oil products before export would result in more emissions in Canada (that understanding indicates that the federal government shares the blame with the provincial governments for exporting more harmful products to make Canada’s numbers look better).

I am fairly proud of a lot of actions taken by Canada's leadership on matters of corrections of harmful developed misunderstandings, but not regarding climate change.

One Planet Only Forever at 08:25 AM on 11 March, 2022

nigelj,

I responded to the folowing in the context of the topic and comments.

"You appear to be promoting some form of perpetual and sustainable "green growth". I used to believe in this, but theres a growing body of expert opinion that it is neither possible or desirable. In addition cutting consumption of high income people is going to reduce growth by pulling demand out of the system. Adopting traditional farming would actually slow growth because its lower yield than industrial farming.

These things along with zero economic growth, or low growth, are not bad things - provided they dont happen too quickly. The system needs time to adjust. Human civilisation is getting old and is about to slow down. This may be a hard truth to accept.

This is all different thing to crazy agendas to rapidly cut resource consumption by massive levels."

That was twisting, significantly misunderstanding, my comments. So I replied accordingly. And I will maintain the understanding that 50 years ago there was potentially time to let the system adapt. But the evidence indicates that the system is powerfully uninterested in changing, and certainly won't change rapidly enough. That system has now developed the need for a much more rapid and painful correction, as illustrated by Figure 2, or massive damage will be done to future generations as many people today continue to enjoy what they believe to be success.

Agreed that many traditional agriculture systems are less productive per hectare in the short-term. But they have a longer future. Industrial agriculture is depleting the ability of lands to be productive, all while being more profitable than the longer lasting less harmful alternatives.

Reviewing the "Land Sinks" set of solutions evaluated and compiled in Project Drawdown is a way to learn about instances where modern industrial agriculture is not as good as pre-modern ways. And it can be appreciated that Project Drawdown is focused on changes and new developments that, in combination, address the required limiting of climate change impacts. There are, of course, many other aspects of developed modern industrial agricultural practices that need to be changed, to be more like the pre-industrial ways, to get Phosphorous and Nitrogen impacts back below safe Planetary Boundaries.

The summary page of the Land Sink set of solutions in Project Drawdown includes the following statement:

"Shift Agriculture Practices

What and how we grow, graze, or harvest can be a means to cultivate biomass and regenerate soil carbon. An array of “regenerative agriculture” methods are being rediscovered and developed worldwide, and show promising results. The integration of trees into farming through agroforestry practices is particularly powerful. All solutions that sustainably raise yields on existing farmland can also reduce the pressure to clear other areas."

And the most beneficial of the food related "Solutions" presented in Project Drawdown are (along with their overall standing among the 82 solutions evaluated in Drawdown Scenario 2 which is roughly in-line with achieving 1.5˚C temperature rise by 2100 - and Scenario 1 which is roughly in line with 2˚C temperature rise by 2100):

Reduce food waste (#3 in Scenario 2 - #1 in Scenario 1)
Plant rich diets (#4 - #3)
Tropical forest restoration (6 - 5)
Silvopasture (11 - 11)
Tree plantations (on degraded land) (13 - 13)
Perenial staple crops (14 - 19)
Managed grazing (16 - 17)
Tree intercropping (17 - 20)
Regenerative annual cropping (20 - 21)
Multistrata agroforestry (22 - 25)
Abandoned farmland restoration (23 - 23)

And there are more agriculture related items on the list. But always keep in mind that the Planetary Boundaries evaluation has identified that Phosphorous and Nitrogen impacts, largely unrelated to climate change impacts, are already significantly exceeding Safe Planetary Boundary limits due primarily to modern industrial agriculture.

I suggest multistrata agroforestry and indigenous people's forest tenure and tree intercropping as examples of traditional methods that are superior to industrial methods, from the perspective of being able to be continued long-term. Tree intercropping is described as something that was "Plowed under during the twentieth century to make room for industrialized methods of farming, tree intercropping is one of dozens of techniques that can create an agricultural renaissance—a transformation of food-growing practices that bring people, regeneration, and abundance back to the land."

But there are many other examples where more labour intensive methods, and ways that are potentially less productive per hectare in the short-term, are superior because they result in a lasting system that ultimately produces a larger total amount of food from the land that the industrial practices that deplete land quality and produce other harmful impacts while they 'appear to be superior - for a little while - because they are more profitable for investors who pursue maximizing their short-term return from every investment they make'.

One Planet Only Forever at 12:48 PM on 3 March, 2022

Dear Peter,

I have quickly reviewed the Intro and Conclusion of the paper and skimmed the contents, my standard way of starting to read a Report. I have yet to do a full reading, but I will.

I will open this response by confirming that we appear to be aligned regarding measures that will help limit population growth and the importance of limiting the total global population.

I will start by presenting the context of my perspective which is always open to improvement. But it is based on a significant amount of experience and learning. My name on this site reflects that perspective.

Awareness of the bigger picture is needed when looking at any part of the bigger picture. And for humans the bigger picture is the need for human activity to be governed (limited) to not harm Others or future humans, including not harming their ability to live a decent a life. And people will naturally be tempted to aspire to the examples set by the portion of the population that has developed the impression of being the highest status. That is important understanding since this planet is likely to be habitable for more than 100 million years. Sustaining humanity through that long period (almost forever) is the big picture. Many developed human activities are inconsistent with that understanding. And they would be inconsistent with sustained living on any other planet. The unsustainable nature of what has developed is not new. The growing awareness and understanding of the growing magnitude of the harmful unsustainability of what has developed is what is new.

Total Harmful Impacts of the Total Global Population are a developed problem that requires the development of solutions. The Sustainable Development Goals are a fairly comprehensive presentation of the solution that is open to further improvement.

We appear to be aligned regarding actions that would help limit global population. What you mention are understood parts of the Sustainable Development Goals and the Millennium Development Goals. Those sets of goals are steps in the constantly increased awareness and improved understanding of what is harmful and unsustainable. The pursuit of sustainable development understanding became a global coordinated collaborative effort 50 years ago with the Stockholm Conference.

It appears that the efforts to identify and limit harmful developments also sparked some harmful resistance to learning to be less harmful, particularly in the supposedly superior, more advanced, nations. But the resistance to that learning also appears to be strong among the supposedly superior, more advanced, portions of many less developed nations. And people who develop their thinking inside systems that promote smaller shorter-term perspective can struggle to see the bigger picture beyond their developed worldview. And, indeed, a part of the problem is the development of political groups that appeal for support by opposing, or not supporting, abortion and family planning. Some of them argue for 'abstinence' as the solution. But that is like arguing that 'not living' is a solution to the 'total climate change impacts of the total population' problem.

So we may also be aligned regarding the need to identify and try to reduce the popularity of political groups that would act in those less helpful ways. That would be good since it appears that 'these days' the political groups that are less supportive of measures to limit population growth are also less supportive of measures that would limit the climate change impact growth. And they also appear to be less supportive of actions that would limit or correct many developed harmful activities. They appear to be opposed to almost all the Sustainable Development Goals, one issue at a time (they even oppose limits on plastic use – the next globally acknowledged problem needing a global agreement to correct).

That brings me to a point I wish to make regarding something I noticed in the paper: “Emissions = Population x GDP/capita x Energy/GDP x Emissions/Energy”. That presentation can make it difficult to see the important need for superiority and advancement to be recognized as "reduced energy use per person" and "reduced harm done by the energy that is used" (because any use of technologically produced energy has the potential to produce harmful results).

I offer the following sequence of changes as a way to more comprehensively present the issue (guided by Einstein's advice to keep things simple, but not too simple):

"Emissions = Population x GDP/capita x Energy/GDP x Emissions/Energy + (a similar evaluation of all Other Emissions causing activity)".

That corrects for the over-simplification of only focusing on energy. However, fugitive emissions related to natural gas extraction, processing and transport also need to be counted. So Emissions/Energy is too simplistic. It could miss impacts associated with energy use that need to be counted. A more comprehensive statement would be:

“Global Warming Impacts = Population x GDP/capita x Energy/GDP x Global Warming Impacts/Energy + (a similar evaluation of all Other Global Warming Impact causing activity)”

That captures Evan's accurate point that many other things, particularly agriculture, cause global warming impacts that result in climate change. I noticed that the paper includes awareness of land use impacts on global warming. So the above would appear to be aligned with the understanding presented in the paper.

But there is also more harm done by energy use and agriculture than the climate change impacts. So a more comprehensive "Bigger Picture" presentation of the issue is:

“Total Harm Done = Population x GDP/capita x Energy/GDP x (Total Harm Done)/Energy + (a similar evaluation of all Other Harmful Impact causing activity)”

Now we get to the simple crux of the over-simplification that can be understood to apply to all of above presentations. The simplest way to present the above appears to be:

"Total Harmful Impacts = The sum of the harmful impacts attributable to each person"

That leads to understanding that there will be a diversity of degrees and types of harm that would be hidden by averaging the impacts of a group of people. And, as Evan also accurately points out, everyone wants a better life for themselves, their children, and others they identify closely with. So people can be expected to aspire to live like the people who they identify as being more advanced, more superior. And there is ample evidence that the current norms for identifying superiority and advancement, like the measure of GDP per capita, are harmfully misleading. People have been working to correct that misunderstanding about what deserves to be considered superior or more advanced, how to measure improvement, for a while now. The 2020 Human Development Report points out some of the efforts to correct that harmful developed misunderstanding.

That also leads to understanding that the people with the highest amount of harm attributed to their actions need to be the focus of efforts to limit harm done (Rule of Law works best when it is done this way). And it leads to understanding that people who act in ways that cause harm are not made acceptable by Other people acting to undo or adapt to the harm that is done. Reducing harm done requires the harm to be ended and, as much as possible, it requires those who benefit from the harm done to do what is required to undo the harm done.

Averaging the per capita impacts of a nation helps compare nations to identify which nations should be most focused on for harm reduction. But per capita does not identify the people within a nation who should be the focus of harm reduction efforts. As an example, immigrants into Australia may have remained as lower than average impacting people, which means their addition to the population actually disguises the increased harm done by the more harmful members of the population.

That brings me to my concluding point.

It is fundamentally unacceptable for a person to benefit from something that Other people will be harmed by, or be at risk of harm from. And regarding climate change impacts, it is unacceptable for people to be benefiting from creating the impacts even if Others are acting to reduce the impacts. And an averaging of a group of people can be harmfully misleading by hiding what the different people in the group have done.

Achieving Sustainable Development, developing a truly lasting future for humanity that can be improved by the development of truly sustainable improvements, can legitimately maintain or increase GDP per capita. Achieving those goals is likely to result in a lower peak population than would otherwise develop. And the per person impacts of that smaller total population would be lower. But to achieve that the harmful developed activities need to be identified and corrected.

The fundamental rule of "Do No Harm - Help Others" needs to be governing the actions of people. Everyone self-governing that way would be great. But that is a fantasy world. And the lack of that rule governing what has developed to date has produced an significant need for corrections, particularly corrections of the ways that the supposedly more advanced and supposedly superior people, who everyone looks up to and aspires to be like, live their lives.

That is the fundamental understanding I will be applying, and have been applying, to the reading of the paper, or any other presentation of thoughts. It is not the norm ... but it would be helpful if it became more of the norm.

Evan at 02:31 AM on 17 February, 2022

wilddouglascounty@8 Thanks for your comments and suggestions. I will readily switch to a new metaphor if it seems appropriate, and I appreciate you offering a menu of suggestions. Thanks.

Part of the reason I picked the land-use change metaphor is that I specifically want to include some level of "hurt" and undesirability. I don't believe we will get out of our climate mess without people making sacrifices that include getting by with fewer conveniences and overall consuming less. Whereas many GW/CC skeptics/deniers say that a switch to renewable energy will ruin our economy, and whereas leading organizations are proclaiming that we can maintain "robust economic growth" while reaching net-zero by 2050 (read the IEA report here), I interpret effective solutions as a mixture of these two views. The degree to which the transition will hurt depends on the time frame involved. Please understand that I am only talking about the pain associated with the transition. Obviously the longer we take to fix the climate mess, the worse it will be for future generations. I am not dealing with that issue here. Only the pain associated with the transition itself. That is, how fast can we slow down?

If we set a longer time horizon (e.g. more than 50 years) for reaching net zero, then we could possibly maintain "robust economic growth". If we try to reach net zero in 10 years, then we are likely to ruin our economy by trying to accelerate reasonable depreciation schedules so that we prematurely absolecing goods that still have useable lives. Given the 25-year time frame that is being advertized (I am rounding down a bit from 28 years), IMO, we are somewhere in the range where what we are being asked to do will hurt a lot more than I see being advertized. So I like an analogy that implies hurt, even though I agree that whereas we are trying to stabilize climate, road-building does not necessarily convey the same warm fuzzy feelings that building a renewable-energy based society does.

I will consider your suggestions for a different metaphor.

Eric (skeptic) at 23:26 PM on 14 December, 2021

Machine learning is only as good as the annotation of the examples. I doubt that the team of "climate literate" volunteers can do that objectively. Do they really understand climate policy? The lackluster recall for the "climate solutions won't work" suggests another problem: drift. ML performance is also determined by the sample set and using the 1998 to 2020 corpus, because that's the data you happen to have gathered, causes a problem.

Examples of contrarian climate solution claims from 1998 are not similar to examples from 2020 (and vice versa) because climate solutions have changed too much. A related problem shows up in the further analysis of contrarian funding. Cato, as just one example, has changed a lot from the days of climate contrarian Pat Michaels to the current climate policy writings which appear to be headed by a lawyer writing about policy. The bulk of the paper appears to be a rehash of those old grievances, and not a precise critique of what is actually wrong about so-called contrarian policy.

robinp1k2 at 00:15 AM on 26 November, 2021

This article has great information but as far as Uncle Pete goes, smile, nod, and quickly change the topic. According to the Yale program on Climate Communicatio, only 8% of Americans are "Uncle Petes". Nothing can change their mind so save yourself the frustration and keep your gathering pleasant.

https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/global-warmings-six-americas-a-review/

Here's a quote from an editorial in my local paper, The Dai Inter Lake, published today (Thanksgiving 2021):

Happy Thanksgiving!

Robin

One Planet Only Forever at 08:36 AM on 16 November, 2021

Evan,

This presentation of the problem is very helpful.

It is undeniable that to avoid imposing unacceptably harmful climate change impacts on future generations NET will be required even if it is not "profitable or popular". The requirement for NET to be implemented without being popular or profitable helps to clarify the understanding of what is required for the future of humanity to be protected from harm done by actions of previous generations. Without systemic leadership change the implemented NET is likely to be inadequate, and potentially harmful rather than helpful. Also, developing a sustainable improving future can be understood to require systemic changes that reduce BAR. Reducing BAR will reduce the potential risks of implementing larger amounts of technological NET, or the even riskier implementation of other artificial technological methods that are claimed to solve the ghg global warming impact problem.

This presentation also helps clarify how challenging it is to get global leadership to collectively act to responsibly and fairly limit global warming impacts and make amends for harm done. It is likely that the wealthy and powerful portion of the population in the developing world, there almost always are some very wealthy people in the developing nations or benefiting from actions in developing nations, will aspire to be more like the wealthy and powerful in the USA, Canada, and Australia (high per-capita impacting hide-outs for the climate impact opportunists) rather than aspiring to be more like the better examples set by the wealthy and powerful in some, but not all, parts of Europe.

It is also important to be aware that a review of the historical evidence of human “advancement” leads to understanding that harmful pursuits of wealth and power have a history of Winning and Powerfully resisting being corrected. And the harmful winners can temporarily regionally win-back the power to undo justified helpful corrections that reduced their undeserved wealth and power. Those people have been winning the ability to harmfully compromise leadership in many nations, primarily with misleading marketing, especially through misleading marketing attacks on people who would help the general population better understand how harmful some of the wealthy and powerful actually are. As a result the historical trend line may even be an optimistic presentation of future impacts. Significant sustainable systemic leadership changes can be understood to need to occur that the evidence of history indicates have not yet been sustainably achieved in any wealthy powerful region.

It is accurate to say that the developed attitudes in the current global set of governing systems are accurately described by the statement that "There is nothing in our experience to suggest that the world, as a whole, will accept stagnating standards of living. Developed countries want to consume more, developing countries want to raise their populations out of poverty." An extension of that understanding is that harm being done in pursuit of perceptions of improved living will be dismissed, discounted, or excused. A more insidious point is that many Developed countries have a history of not meaningfully sustainably reducing poverty within their population and do even less to help sustainably reduce poverty elsewhere. As your World Bank sourced chart indicates, global GDP has increased faster than global population. But, in spite of the increasing wealth, extreme poverty and tragic failures to avert horrific suffering by the poor continues to happen (the statistical measure of extreme poverty is being reduced, but tragic extreme poverty still occurs). And there are plenty of presentations of history showing the persistence of tragic poverty is a “constant throughout Greek - Roman - European conquest and colonization history” in spite of GDP rising faster than population population (read the 2020 Human Development Report to appreciate the flaw of using GDP as a measure of advancement).

A good explanation for the “persistence of poverty in spite of increasing affluence” is that solving the poverty problem is “not profitable, or necessary, for the wealthy and powerful”. A similar explanation applies to the lack of action on climate change impacts. And action to sustainably solve the poverty and climate impact problem can easily be made unpopular among the less wealthy and less powerful through the appeals of misleading marketing tempting people to want more for themselves and see Others as the problem instead of understanding that the problem is the harmful members of the wealthy and powerful (and history is full of examples of the more helpful among the wealthy and powerful being unjustly, but very successfully, targeted for attack).

Leadership action needs to systemically sustainably shift away from the history of harmfully compromised leadership actions that appease undeserving wealthy and powerful interests. Without the systemic change of leadership behaviour to penalize the harmful among the wealthy and powerful the indicated required actions are optimistic (i.e. less likely to happen). What is more likely to happen is a continued disregard for the harm done to the future generations, or the implementation of technological actions that are claimed to be solutions but are likely to be more harmful and less helpful than they are claimed to be (like many economic developments are discovered to be, especially new technological developments, especially if they get to be implemented “at scale” before an in-depth understanding of the consequences is developed).

Achieving a sustainable improving future for humanity will require systemic change, especially the wealthier and more powerful portion of the global population reducing their level of consumption, reducing how harmful the consumption associated with their ways of living are, and giving up some level of perception of superiority relative to the less fortunate by acting to sustainably improve the lives of the less fortunate (i.e. the more fortunate helping the less fortunate and foregoing opportunities to obtain more personal benefits). That systemic change will reduce BAR. It will also reduce other harmful results, not just reduce the climate change impacts.

A critical review of history indicates that institutions and related beliefs like the UN, the free market, and democracy were developed in the hopes of limiting the harm done by wealthy powerful people (and the IPCC and SDGs are even newer attempts to limit the harm done by unethical competitors for perceptions of superiority relative to others). Those developments are the most recent steps of the many steps of advancement of civilization. Each step was implemented as a result of it becoming undeniable that wealthy and powerful people competing for impressions of superiority relative to others produce harmful results. Without diligent Ethical Governing the less ethical people harmfully win unsustainable impressions of progress and prosperity for their misguiding leaders and misled followers. And those winning groups powerfully resist learning about the need to have their harmfully developed impressions of superiority and “Opportunity for More – the vicious pursuit of Growth (including GDP growth)” limited.

Based on the evidence of what happened at COP26 this can be understood to have played out at COP26. The rational justified perspectives of the less fortunate who have not significantly contributed to the problem but suffer significant consequences from the problem, and would only contribute if they “choose to improve their lives in the ways the wealthier and more powerful did”, the nations with leadership that is less “captured” by wealthy and powerful people, were essentially dismissed. And the last minute power-play by India can be seen to be the wealthy and powerful in that nation abusing the perception that a “developing nation” like India should obtain financial aid and economic competitive advantage at the expense of the perceived to be more developed nations (but not pushing for benefits for the less powerful nations who are more harmed by what is going on). And the more developed nations that have leadership more captured by harmful wealthy and powerful people can be expected to have their general population, rather than their wealthy and powerful, pay whatever price is required. And it is likely that the poorest in those "helping" nations will suffer most by having the amount of assistance they obtain reduced rather than having the wealthy of the nation lose status (like the way the wealthy and powerful in France attempted to put a price on carbon without providing improved assistance to the less fortunate).

One Planet Only Forever at 04:05 AM on 9 November, 2021

Evan@5

I agree that "... the baseline emissions seem to be one of the most difficult challenges, ...". But I am reluctant to believe that substantial negative emissions technology (NET) will be developed and can harmlessly offset the harmful impacts of other technological developments that were not understood to be harmful when they were implemented and because popular and profitable (which made the harmful new ways powerfully able to resist efforts to limit or end the harm done).

My baseline for understanding the problem may be the difference regarding our thoughts.

My baseline understanding is that poorly governed and inadequately limited pursuits of personal benefit have over-developed many harmful unsustainable ways of living. Un-developing the harmful over-developed activity is required. And that would mean un-doing the incorrect beliefs that the developed perceptions of prosperity and superiority are "deserved" and "deserve" to be maintained. That may mean reducing GDP as the harmful over-development is removed from the system. And it means that it is harmfully incorrect to believe that the correction of harmful over-development should be delayed in order to maintain increasing GDP and to maintain harmfully over-developed perceptions of prosperity and enjoyable living.

The reports you refer to do indeed indicate the magnitude of the problem and what to expect if the current system is not changed. The expectation that the harmfully incorrect over-developed food desires of wealthier people will be aspired to by everyone else is indeed the expected result if the systemic beliefs that cause the harmful pursuit of impressions of status are not changed. The belief that eating beef, and other meats, is a sign of status is just one of the many incorrectly developed beliefs that seriously compromise the nutrition and health of wealthier people.

I would say that studies based on the perspectives of helpful people "from within the harmfully over-developed system of beliefs" are like ivory tower speculation. The reality is that the resistance to the required corrections is more powerful than the helpful people "thinking within the system" are acknowledging. What should be presented is the understanding that unless there are serious leadership actions that rapidly bring about significant systemic changes, including ending beliefs like "eating beef or other meat is a sign of superiority", there is no likelihood that impacts will be limited to 4C. A related ivory tower belief is that "non-profitable carbon removal" will be implemented at a meaningful scale (and a related ivory tower belief based on the incorrect belief that "new technology is helpful advancement" would be the failure to recognize the potential harm of industrial scale carbon removal technology or other "technological development" believed to be solutions that allow harmful unsustainable activity to continue longer).

Without significant systemic changes the warming impacts are likely to exceed 6C, though the breakdown of global civilization, and the resulting global conflict and strife, may temporarily, or permanently, stall the harm done by the "endless harmful pursuit of More personal benefits and new likely to be harmful technological developments".

The 2020 Human Development Report presents a current summary of understanding that contradicts developed worldviews and beliefs held by many people among the wealthier and more powerful portion of the global population. And the 2020 HDR is not investigating things in a New way. It is a continuation of a long history of efforts to better understand how to protect the future of humanity that included the 1972 Stockholm Conference.

The worldview preferred by the wealthy and powerful has been constantly challenged by thoughtful people with interests that are not motivated by pursuit of personal benefit (for thousands of years). But more harmful wealthy and powerful people have repeatedly been able to quash or delay the advancements of civilization when that advancement would be contrary to the interests of the wealthy and powerful.

The system aspects that need to change are the aspects that the harmful among the wealthy and powerful fight to establish and that they can take advantage of to defend their interests and increase their ability to be more wealthy and more powerful.

One of the most insidious realities of the developed systems is the many ways that "Interests in Personal Freedoms" can be used against "Advancement of civilization's interests". The freedom to be more harmful and believe whatever excuses that behaviour is a significant part of the resistance to increased acceptance of climate science and the required limiting of the climate change harm being done to the future of humanity.

RedBaron at 09:35 AM on 28 October, 2021

The kinds of food you eat have from little to nothing to do with Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) caused climate change, one way or the other. Rather, how and where what you eat is produced would have a much bigger impact. In fact being vegetarian worldwidecould even be counterproductive in the fight to end climate change.

The reason for the confusion is what they call a “life cycle assessment” in calculating carbon footprints.

Product Life Cycle Accounting and Reporting Standard: This standard involves understanding GHG emissions related to a specific product, based on raw materials used, production, distribution, and disposal. [1]

Just to simplify things a little, lets break down the carbon footprint of a tomato.[2]

The primary importance in calculating tomato carbon footprints depend on the season and the type of production system as well as transportation, storage and refrigeration.

Basically you figure out the amount of fossil fuels used in the chain of supply from the farmer to the fresh market. Greenhouses need heated in winter, and cooled in summer. The fertilizer used could possibly be made from haber process nitrogen[3] which is made from Natural gas. Trucks deliver the tomatoes to markets and burn fossil fuels to get there. The market probably uses electricity made from fossil fuels to keep the air the ideal temp for storage and prevent them from spoiling. All of these factors added up together give us a quantified idea of the total fossil fuels used and a carbon footprint is calculated for each pound of tomatoes. Basically the tomato itself, like all food, has no global warming effect at all, but all the other things like fertilizers, production, distribution, and storage do!

So how do we fix this?

Well starting with fertilizers. Instead of haber process nitrogen used to make NPK fertilizers, we could use natural fertilizers like compost and manure. That would greatly reduce the carbon footprint of food production worldwide. Geothermal and solar heated and cooled greenhouses eliminate the need for fossil fuel use in out of season tomatoes.

Next is location. The backyard grown garden tomato has no transportation needed. A local organic farmer might have some fuel costs to drive to the local farmers market, but minimal if a close neighbor. Also electric vehicles, powered by electricity produced by hydroelectric, wind, solar, nuclear, have almost no carbon footprint. So transportation improvements and shopping local or growing a garden can reduce the tomato carbon footprint a lot. If you need a fresh tomato out of season, make sure the greenhouse growing the tomato is local. If it is an organic, geothermal heated, local greenhouse produced tomato, all the better!

One thing typically not included in calculating the carbon footprint of a tomato is soil carbon. It should be, but isn’t typically included because data is limited. Certain production methods (mostly organic and permaculture methods) have been shown to improve soil carbon dramatically. This soil carbon would need to be subtracted off the emissions side of tomato production. It is theoretically possible then to produce a tomato that has a negative carbon footprint, as long as the production method increases soil carbon more than the emissions caused by fertilizers, production, distribution, and storage.

Soils from organic farms had 26 percent more potential for long-term carbon storage than soils from conventional farms, along with 13 percent more soil organic matter (SOM).[4]

Better data would be needed to actually calculate carbon footprints based on soil carbon. But it is clear that some farmers have been able increase the carbon in their soils, and as long as the other side is not too high by using some of the above solutions to reduce emissions, we should be capable of mass producing tomatoes with negative carbon footprints! We are not now, not at any scale to speak of at least. But we potentially could!

Being a vegetarian could in fact be quite helpful in mitigating climate change, as long as the vegetables were fertilized, produced, distributed, and stored in these improved ways! Every bite you took of vegetables you eat could actually by a tiny amount mitigate climate changes caused by us humans! Not a lot mind you, but there are billions of people on this planet, and if enough of them did this, a little multiplied by billions of bites could indeed add up to a big improvement!

What about meat?

There is one thing that needs addressed though. Meat production is very similar to the above. Carbon footprints of meat production are all life cycle calculations as well! Most the carbon footprint for animal foods also lies in production, distribution, and storage! However, if what we feed a chicken or a cow etc has a positive carbon footprint, and the animal eats lots of that food to grow itself, then the carbon footprint becomes multiplied by how much food it eats![5] Some animals can actually eat so much that their feed conversion is as much as 10x! Certain industrialized production methods for meat production can have insanely huge life cycle assessment carbon footprints for this reason, as much as ten times higher than vegetable carbon footprints. That’s why you see so many campaigns to reduce meat consumption in the media these days. Keep in mind though, these are also life cycle assessments. The meat itself is carbon neutral or close to it, it's the fossil fuels used in production mainly to blame for the multiplied effect.

“The number one public enemy is the cow. But the number one tool that can save mankind is the cow. We need every cow we can get back out on the range. It is almost criminal to have them in feedlots which are inhumane, antisocial, and environmentally and economically unsound.” Allan Savory

But here is the nuance. If what we fed those animals had a negative life cycle assessment of carbon footprint for the feed we gave it, then we would be multiplying that number by as much as 10x too! So in theory we could produce animal foods with as much as ten times better NEGATIVE carbon footprints as vegetable foods! And by the way, people are doing that right now in fact. There actually are farmers raising both crops and animals with such improved NEGATIVE carbon footprints.

Why pasture cropping is such a Big Deal - Milkwood
Pasture cropping allows cereal or grain crops to be sown directly into perennial native pastures and have them grow in symbiosis with the pasture.

So you see? It's not the food, it's how that food is produced and distributed.

“Yes, agriculture done improperly can definitely be a problem, but agriculture done in a proper way is an important solution to environmental issues including climate change, water issues, and biodiversity.”-Rattan Lal

In that potential future case where all our future foods are produced, distributed and stored properly, then a vegetarian would not be helping end human caused climate change as much as a standard diet. But right now, that future does not exist. Right now being vegetarian does indeed help! However, changing the entire worlds dietary habits would seem to be much harder than just raising our food better to begin with! We had made that effort to produce the so called "green revolution" and that worked. We could do the exact same strategy again, this time emphasizing reducing carbon footprints in agriculture. It could work. And without the obvious dead end that simply forcing the world to become vegetarian has.

One Planet Only Forever at 07:21 AM on 27 September, 2021

Conservatively limiting harm done requires more, and more aggressive, actions than may be considered to be necessary to limit harm done. It especially requires more helpful, less harmful, leadership actions by the wealthiest and most powerful.

Framing a problem to ensure it is well understood is essential to effectively solve the problem. The climate change problem raises an important “framing” question. What is now required because of the lack of responsible leadership by “All of the wealthiest and most powerful” through the past 30 years?

The failure of leadership action on climate change impacts, and other harm reduction issues, by winners of competition for superiority relative to others is understandable. Allowing and excusing harmful actions that offer a competitive advantage in the competition for perceptions of superiority creates an environment that will motivate the development of harmful behaviour. It is also easy to understand that it is difficult to develop solutions that effectively address and correct for those social-political-economic market competition failures because of the powerful resistance to learning about things that would lead to more rapid corrections of harmful unsustainable developments. Especially challenging is the ability of political misleading marketing to:

• Support leaders who resist the actions that are understandably required to limit harm done and make amends, or assign penalties, for harm done


• Attack and discredit anyone who would try to raise awareness and improve understanding of what is harmful and required changes of harmful unsustainable developments, especially when those developments are popular and profitable for the more fortunate, more influential, portion of the population.

It is important to remember the harmful reality of the popular dogmatic Belief that “increased Freedom for people to believe whatever they want to believe and do whatever they desire to do” is the best way for things to be, and that it will produce lasting improvements for each person, each group, and all of humanity. That is a version of the “wide-open to interpretation” call for Liberty to pursue Happiness. (see footnote 1: A Bit on Ethics).

It may appear nonsensical to argue against Freedom or to argue that Winners are undeserving. But the evidence and improving understanding of what is harmful and what is fair and just is increasingly biased against the dogma of “Freedom” and “All Winners are Deserving” and any of its many ideological incarnations.

The measure of improvement is “leaving things better than they were found”. Lasting improvements only develop when the pursuit of increased awareness and improved understanding of what is harmful (like accumulating climate change impacts) and what is unsustainable (like burning up non-renewable buried ancient hydrocarbons) governs, limits, and corrects actions and developed results.

Everybody’s choices about learning, what they will learn and what they will not, and their resulting actions and inaction, add up to become the future. It is important to avoid the “tragedy of the commons” that can develop when individual or group pursuits of benefit add up to produce harmful unsustainable results. The rich and powerful cannot be excused for failing to learn to be less harmful. But the less fortunate who aspire to develop to live like the richer people can be excused for being tempted to aspire to the harmful examples set by Winners.

The lack of that understanding governing and limiting past developments has created harmfully over-developed beliefs and activity that are popular and profitable. There is now an undeniable need to un-develop many things that have become popular and profitable. That includes correcting developed perceptions of superiority between people or groups. That understanding is required to develop a sustainable future for humanity. (see footnote 2: A Bit on Politics)

The Sustainable Development Goals are robust, constantly improving and open to improvement, evidence-based understandings, like the climate change impact understanding presented in the IPCC Reports. And the 2020 Human Development Report is a detailed robust presentation of understanding that includes the understanding that developed measures of superiority, like GDP per-capita, are not legitimate indications of sustainable superiority. Increased GDP per-capita, or number of billionaires in a culture, are not measures of success or improvement. When the measures of success are harmfully incorrect then developed perceptions of status will need to be corrected.

The richest portion of the global population have had 30 years to show leadership on the required changes of ways of living and profiting. The failure of the games, that the rich and powerful made the rules for, to get all of the rich and powerful to be more helpful, less harmful, leaders indicates the need for the system to change. The currently rich and powerful cannot be allowed to compromise the awareness and understanding of what is harmful and the required actions to correct incorrect perceptions of superiority relative to others.

Possible actions to motivate all of the wealthier and more powerful individuals would be:

• giving credit for verifiable carbon reduction actions taken since 2015.


• penalties for the current wealthier people who have tried to increase how much benefit they get from harmful unsustainable activity


• severe penalties for wealthier people who have a history, especially a recent history, of trying to delay or discredit the development of increased awareness and improved understanding of the required corrections of what has developed.

Helping the less fortunate through the rapid transition to less harmful ways of living is also required. Lower income people face more of a burden from a carbon fee, even with an equal rebate to everyone. An improved way to rebate would be having the carbon fee fully rebated equally, but only to middle income and poorer people (like families with reported income below $120,000 or individuals with reported income below $60,000). Also, there should be funding for Charities and NGOs to help all the less fortunate, especially the homeless, submit income tax statements with the rebate system set up to ensure they receive their rebates, perhaps getting the rebate at the time that their “zero or near-zero income statements” are submitted.

Footnote 1: A Bit on Ethics: A common thought process for ethical considerations is to recognize that everybody’s actions add up and everyone has the right to behave the way any other person does. That develops the understanding that examples set by leading, higher valued, people are what other people can be expected to try to develop to match, and be excused for trying to do that.

The examples set by “all of the Winners” is the key. Allowing any Winner to Win by setting a more harmful, less helpful, example will produce increasingly unethical results. It would be great if the competitive advantages of getting away with benefiting from injustice or being more harmful failed to win. But that is likely a fantasy. Injustice and harmful behaviour likely need to be externally refereed or governed out of the game. A system that does not do that is ethically compromised would need to be changed in order to achieve ethical reductions of harm being done and ethical corrections for harm done.

Footnote 2: A Bit on Politics: Understandings like the 2020 Human Development Report, the IPCC Reports and recommendations, and the Sustainable Development Goals are not political. And I have tried to also be apolitical in my presentation.

What is being presented is apolitical evidence-based understanding, not political ideology. But there are developed social and economic ideologies that oppose learning it. And the proponents of those social and economic ideologies can be harmfully resistant to the learning and resulting understandably required changes, especially being resistant to changes of the system that would reduce developed perceptions of superiority. They will even argue against the undeniable understanding that GDP does not properly measure what is important (refer to the 2020 Human Development Report for a presentation of that improving understanding).

The opponents to learning about the required system changes use political misleading marketing to delay the learning and corrections. They often resort to accusations that “The Left” (or some other term that is hoped to trigger a emotional response rather than a rational consideration) are trying to turn things into “taking money away from rich people” even though there is plenty of evidence to support a common sense understanding that many wealthy powerful people got their wealth and power by pursuing competitive advantages available to those who are willing to try to benefit at the expense of Others or by harming the environment.

prove we are smart at 11:05 AM on 9 July, 2021

Extract from 1 of the 107 articles from this weeks new research

"A rapid low-carbon transition is central to achieving the well below 2 °C goals of the Paris Agreement1. In addition to current policies and plans, meeting current NDC pledges is estimated to require US$130 billion per year of further investment in low-carbon technologies to 2030—an amount which could double or even triple for 1.5-2 degree consistency.

For the full article from Climate Change & Economics,week 27 here www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-24305-3

Yes I know the bulk of that article is mainly concerned with the problems with financing green solutions in third world counties. Well maybe I am proving how smart I'm not but to me a big part of the slow response to new investment in green solutions is this?....

This probably also extends to our govt leaders, media and many more..

The extent of polluting affiliations exposed by the analysis underscore the need for closer scrutiny of board members, said Molly Scott Cato, Professor of Green Economics at the University of Roehampton and a former Green Party MEP."

“It’s shocking to see the very close links between banks and fossil fuel and other heavily polluting industries and helps to explain why, even in the middle of a climate emergency, it has been so difficult to undertake the rapid defunding of the very industries that are driving us to climate destruction,” she told DeSmog.

“This research needs to become a lesson for banks to conduct audits of their staff, not only to understand their potential biases, but also to ensure that they have undertaken mandatory sustainability education.”

Adam McGibbon of Market Forces, a group campaigning to prevent investment in environmentally-damaging projects, agreed that the extent of the connections that fossil fuel companies had to bank boardrooms presented a potentially concerning conflict of interest. He told DeSmog:

“Financial institutions are critical to driving the transition to clean energy, so it’s terrifying that their directors’ views are being shaped by the fossil fuel industry.”

“How can banks reasonably claim to support the Paris Agreement when their directors are linked to an industry with a vested interest in the Paris Agreement failing?”

For the full 11minute read see here www.desmog.com/2021/04/06/revealed-climate-conflicted-directors-leading-the-worlds-top-banks/

Nick Palmer at 09:33 AM on 23 June, 2021

Just in case you lot are still resisting the idea that the politics relating to climate science have become extremely polarised - in my view to the point where ideologues of both the left and right think it justified to exaggerate/minimise the scientific truths/uncertainties to sway the democratically voting public one way or the other - here's a video blog by alt-right hero and part of the original Climategate team who publicised the emails, James Delingpole basically saying that 'the left' have infiltrated and corrupted the science for the purpose of using political deception to seize power for themselves.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=866yHuh1RYM

Deconstruct or follow up Delingpoles' rhetoric elsewhere and you will find a helluva lot of intelligent articulate people who believe that the public's environmental consciences are being exploited by closet socialist forces to deceive them, using 'fear p*rn', into voting for policies which they otherwise wouldn't consider voting for, in a dark strategy to bring in some form of latter day Marxism. They insinuate this has got its tentacles into climate science which they assert has led to the reality of the science, as presented to the public, being twisted by them for political ends. It's absolutely not just Greenpeace, as I already said, who've 'gone red' to the point where it has 'noble cause' corrupted their presentations of environmental matters and, crucially, the narrow choice of solutions they favour - those which would enable and bring on that 'great reset' of civilisation that they want to see. It's much, much bigger than that.

I think we are seeing a resurgence and a recrystallisation of those who got convinced by Utopianist politics of the left and free market thinkers of the right taught at University - Marxist-Leninism, Ayn Rand, Adam Smith etc. Most of those students eventually 'grew up' and mellowed in time, leaving only a small cadre of incorrigible extremists but who are now, as the situation is becoming increasingly polarised politically, revisiting their former ideologies. In essence 'woking' up. I submit that the real battle we are seeing played out in the arena of climate matters is not between science and denialism of science - those are only the proxies used to manipulate the public. The true battle is between the increasingly polarised and increasingly extreme and deceitful proponents of the various far left and right ideologies and their re-energised followers.

It is now almost an article of faith, so accepted has it become, amongst many top climate scientists and commentators, that 'denialism' is really NOT motivated by stupidity or a greedy desire to keep on making as much money as possible but is rather a strong resistance to the solutions that they fear are just 'chess moves' to bring about the great Red 'reset' they think the 'opposition' are secretly motivated by.

Here's an excellent article by famous climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe identifying those who are 'solutions averse' as being a major factor in denialism. It touches on the 'watermelon' aspect. You can turn a blind eye to what I am saying if you want, but in that case you should also attack Hayhoe too - but don't expect many to applaud you...

https://theecologist.org/2019/may/20/moving-past-climate-denial

Also try this: https://www.thecut.com/2014/11/solution-aversion-can-explain-climate-skeptics.html

https://today.duke.edu/2014/11/solutionaversion

I think some people who fight climate science denialism still have the naive idea that just enlessly quoting the science to them, and Skepticalscience's F.L.I.C.C logical fallacies, will make denialists fall apart. I too used to think that if one would just keep hammering away, eventually they would give up. Anyone who tries this will find that it actually does not work well at all. Take on some of the smarter ones and you will rapidly find that you are, at least in the eyes of the watching/reading/listening public, who are the only audience it's worthwhile spending any time trying to correct, outgunned scientifically and rhetorically. That's why I don't these days much use the actual nitty-gritty science as a club with which to demolish them because the smarter ones will always have a superficially plausible, to the audience at least, comeback which looks convincing TO THE AUDIENCE. Arguing the science accurately can often lose the argument, as many scientists found when they attempted to debate such notorious, yet rhetorically brilliant sceptic/deniers such as Lord Monckton.

I haven't finished trying to clarify things for you all but right back at the beginning, in post#18, I fairly covered what I was trying to suggest is a more realistic interpretation of the truth than the activist's simplistic 'Evil Exxon Knew' propaganda one. In short, most of you seem to believe, and are arguing as if, the science was rock solid back then and that it said any global warming would certainly lead to bad things. This is utterly wrong, and to argue as if it was true is just deceitful. As I have said, and many significant figures in the field will confirm, I've been fighting denialism for a very long time so when denialists present some paper or piece of text extracted from a longer document as 'proof' of something, I always try and read the original, usually finding out that they have twisted the meaning, cherry picked inappropriate sentences or failed to understand it and thereby jumped to fallacious conclusions - similarly I read the letters and extracts that Greenpeace used and, frankly, either they were trying deliberately to mislead or they didn't understand the language properly and jumped to their prejudiced conclusions and then made all the insinuations that we are familiar with and that nobody else seems be questioning much, if at all. The idea that Exxon always knew that anthropogenic climate change was real (which they, of course, did) AND that they always knew that the results of that would be really bad and so they conspired to cover that bad future up is false and is the basis of the wilful misreading and deceitful interpretation of the cherry picked phrases, excerpts and documents that has created a vastly worse than deserved public perception of how the fossil fuel corporations acted. Always remember that, at least ideally, people (and corporations) should be presumed innocent until proven beyond reasonable doubt to be guilty. Greenpeace/Oreskes polemics are not such proof. Their insinuations of the guilt of Big Oil is just a mirror image of how the Climategate hackers insinuated guilt into the words of the top climate scientists.

Here's a clip from my post#18

NAP: "When activists try to bad mouth Exxon et al they speak from a 'post facto' appreciation of the science, as if today's relatively strong climate science existed back when the documents highlighted in 'Exxon knew' were created. Let me explain what I think is another interpretation other than Greenpeace/Oreskes'/Supran's narratives suggesting 'Exxon knew' that climate change was going to be bad because their scientists told them so as far back as the 70s and 80s. Let me first present Stephen Schneider's famous quote from 1988 (the whole quote, not the edited one used by denialists).

S.S. "On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but – which means that we must include all doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change. To do that we need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, means getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This “double ethical bind” we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.""

Stephen Schneider, as a climate scientist, was about 'as good as it gets' and he said that in 1988. Bear in mind that a lot of the initial framing to prejudice readers that 'Exxon knew' used was based on documents from considerably longer ago, so what are the activists who eagerly allowed themselves to be swept up in it until no-one questioned it turning a blind eye to? It's that the computer models of the time were extremely crude because computer technology back then was just not powerful enough to divide Earth up into enough finite element 'blocks' of small enough size to make model projections of much validity, in particular projections of how much, how fast and how bad or how good... Our ideas of the feedback effects of clouds and aerosols back then was extremely rudimentary and there were widely differing scientific opinions as to the magnitude or even the direction of the feedback. The scientific voices we see in Exxon Knew tend to be those who were suggesting there was lot more certainty of outcome than there actually was. That their version has been eventually shown to be mostly correct by a further 40 years of science in no way means they were right to espouse such certainty back then - just lucky. As I pointed out before, even as late as the very recent CMIP6 models, we are still refining this aspect - and still finding surprises. To insinuate that the science has always been as fairly rock solid as it today is just a wilful rewriting of history. Try reading Spencer Weart's comprehensive history of the development of climate science for a more objective view of the way things developed...

ExxonMobil spokesperson Allan Jeffers told Scientific American in 2015. “The thing that shocks me the most is that we’ve been saying this for years, that we have been involved in climate research. These guys (Inside Climate News) go down and pull some documents that we made available publicly in the archives and portray them as some kind of bombshell whistle-blower exposé because of the loaded language and the selective use of materials.”

Look at the phrases and excerpts that were used in both Greenpeace's 'Exxon Knew' and 'Inside Climate News's' exposés. You will find they actually are very cherry picked and relatively few in number considering the huge volumes of company documents that were analysed. Does that remind you of anything else? Because it should. The Climategate hackers trawled through mountains of emails - over ten years worth - to cherry pick apparently juicy phrases and ended up with just a few headline phrases, a sample of which follow. Now, like most of us now know, there are almost certainly innocent and valid explanations of each of these phrases, and independent investigations in due course vindicated the scientists. Reading them, and some of the other somewhat less apparently salacious extracts that got less publicity, and comparing them with the 'presented as a smoking gun' extracts from Greenpeace/Oreskes/Supran etc I have to say, on the face of it, the Climategate cherry picks look more evidential of serious misdeeds than the 'Exxon Knew' excerpts. Except we are confident that the Climategate hackers badly misrepresented the emails by insinuating shady motives where none were. Why should we not consider that those nominally on the side of the science did not do the same? Surely readers here are not so naive aas to believe that everyone on 'our side' is pure as the driven snow and all those on the 'other side' are evil black hats?

Here's a 'top eight'

1) Phil Jones "“I’ve just completed Mike’s [Mann] Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s [Briffa] to hide the decline.”

2) “Well, I have my own article on where the heck is global warming…. The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.” [Kevin Trenberth, 2009]

3) “I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data’ but in reality the situation is not quite so simple." Keth Briffa

4) Mike [Mann], can you delete any e-mails you may have had with Keith [Trenberth] re AR4? Keith will do likewise…. Can you also e-mail Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his e-mail address…. We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.” [Phil Jones, May 29, 2008]

5) “Also we have applied a completely artificial adjustment to the data after 1960, so they look closer to observed temperatures than the tree-ring data actually were….” [Tim Osborn, Climatic Research Unit, December 20, 2006]

6) “I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin [Trenberth] and I will keep them out somehow, even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!” [Phil Jones, July 8, 2004]

7) “You might want to check with the IPCC Bureau. I’ve been told that IPCC is above national FOI Acts. One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 [the upcoming IPCC Fifth Assessment Report] would be to delete all e-mails at the end of the process. Hard to do, as not everybody will remember it.” [Phil Jones, May 12, 2009]

8) “If you look at the attached plot you will see that the land also shows the 1940s warming blip (as I’m sure you know). So, if we could reduce the ocean blip by, say 0.15 deg C, then this would be significant for the global mean—but we’d still have to explain the land blip….” [Tom Wigley, University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, to Phil Jones, September 28, 2008]

Please at least consider the possibility that Greenpeace, who have been deceiving the public about the toxicity and carcinogenicity of this, that and the other for decades (ask me how if you want to see how blatant their deceit or delusion is... showing this is actually very quick and easy to do) were, in a very similar way, and motivated by their underlying ideology, deliberately (or delusionally) misrepresenting innocent phrases to blacken names excessively too.

John Hartz at 10:38 AM on 18 June, 2021

In the context of the ongoing discussion of CCS, the following caught my eye:

Mufson: One popular device here in Washington is the Section 45Q tax provision, which provides a tax credit of as much as $50 a ton for the capture and storage of carbon dioxide. Many lawmakers want to expand this.

Nordhaus: Section 45Q is a subsidy similar to what was given to ethanol in an earlier era. It is a carbon sequestration subsidy. It’s messy. In part, it is subsidizing people already doing that activity. It is helpful rather than harmful. But it is way down the list of priorities. It is going after one of the most expensive ways to reduce emissions, There are so many other things to do before that that are much more efficient than capturing carbon dioxide and pumping it into the ground.

The above exchange is excerpted from the Q&A article,Nobel winner’s evolution from ‘dark realist’ to just plain realist on climate change by Steven Mufson, Climate Solutions, Washington Post, June 14, 2021

FWIW, I wholeheartedly concur with William Nordhaus on this particular issue.

Nick Palmer at 10:20 AM on 15 June, 2021

This framing is preferred in part because it sells. The Left sees a “bad day for Big Oil” and celebrates. The fossil fuel-backed Right sees the same and freaks out. Both result in great click-and-share rates—way better than the rates for “A good day for life on Earth.” (Believe me, I know.)

Nick Palmer at 04:39 AM on 14 June, 2021

nigelj at 13:50 PM on 13 June, 2021

Nick Palmer @31, I do understand where you are coming from but I have a couple of disagreements.

"I thought I'd already addressed that. The short answer is that Big Oil continued to support the "B.S. factories" because they were effective at trying to protect those corporations against unwarranted attack."

That doesn't mean the corporations don't also use lobby groups to help spread denial. You seem a little bit stuck in an either / or mindset.

"Anyone who regularly takes on the really incorrigible denialists, as I do - I don't mean the brainwashed rank and file Hicksville idiots, but the much smarter ones - soon discovers that beneath all the high sounding 'alternative science' of the 1000frollyphds, the B.S. factories, Heartland's James Taylor, Quora's James Matkin etc are people who are almost always actually motivated by just a couple of things, of which by far the most common is extreme ideological antipathy to the 'big government' solutions promoted by extremist activists - the deep green environmentalists, the 'Smash Capitalism' closet reds and the 'System Change, not Climate Change' demonstrators."

This extreme ideological antipathy to big government is indeed common thing with the denialists, a libertarian and conservative leaning thing, but you need to understand many of these people define big government as anything beyond military and policing! They are opposed to anything that isn't very small government. So to say climate denlialism is the fault of a few extreme political activists proposing very big government is flawed logic.

"The 'Greenpeace knew' report and the recent Oreskes/Supran paper really are not evidence showing which way the truth lies being, as I've suggested before, chock full of cherry picking and insinuation and, in my view, the leading-the-reader attribution of malignant motives to innocent(ish) behaviour because of the underlying ideology of the authors. Oreskes is known to be significantly left wing and long ago Greenpeace's leaders adopted similar, or stronger, politics and I find their campaigning and assertions have got increasingly slanted and deceptive too."

I thought Orekses book was actually quite good if a bit too general, but there is plenty of hard evidence tying oil companies to spreading denialism of you look around. Read the book Dark Money for a start.

"What is noticeable is that no matter how convincingly one may have demolished their case, give them several weeks, or a couple of months, and one will often find them using exactly the same flawed logic, cherry picked facts and deceptive framing as before. This could mean either they have some sort of mental condition where their mind edits out their defeat so, like psychics who forget all their wrong predictions and only remember any correct ones, they maintain a spurious sense of their own abilities or they don't care much if you demolish their case in public because their only goal is to sway the public mind to their desired end and they know that the public has a very short memory and that the short denialist memes 'it's the Sun, it's cooling, it's cold now in Hicksville, it's cosmic rays etc have a very powerful ability to fool, or at least induce doubt and uncertainty in, the public's minds."

Yes its some sort of mental condition of a sort. Some people have difficulty admitting to themselves they are wrong or have been sucked in, so they hang onto beliefs. They become stubborn and entrenched. We probably all do a bit at times. With others the stubborness and arrogance is more extreme. Google narcissistic personality disorder. Combine this with small government leanings and a smart mind and a reasonable knowledge of science and you have a nuclear powered denialist, and the internet gives them the whole world to preach to. It's really frustrating to say the least.

Nick Palmer at 02:48 AM on 13 June, 2021

I realise I've got an uphill struggle with you lot because you are unlikely to have heard anyone arguing this position before - most seem to have been happy to accept Greenpeace et al's interpretation of events as gospel without deconstructing it enough. When one has been deconstructing the deceit, delusion and/or dumbness from the various denialist factions for decades, as I have, one can't help it if one sometimes notices the very same methods being used by our 'side'. I personally think that demonising Big Oil's past activities and misrepresenting them as if they were real denialism is very counter-productive. Apart from anything else, one of the most powerful arguments I use against tricksy denialist rhetoric is that these days even Big Fossil Fuel fully accepts mainstream climate science and they acknowledge that something serious needs to be done to avoid the very unacceptable risks. I point that if there was a trace of reality in the arguments that have sucked them in, Big Oil's scientists would have noticed and their corporate execs would have then beaten a wide path to the doors of the sceptic/contrarian/denialists with wheelbarrows full of cash to learn about their magic get-out-of-jail-free cards. When I challenge denialists to explain, if they are so sure of their beliefs, why this is not happening, and never did happen, they either shut up or go off into the lala land of conspiracies I list later on. In either case, the wider audience sees they have nothing real...

Bob Loblaw@25 wrote:

"Give me a break. I was studying climatology for 10 years before Hansen's speech, and a dozen years before the 1990 IPCC report"

I refer you again (3rd time) to my quote of Carbonbrief's article and the words of top climate scientist Andrew Dessler of Texas A&M Uni.

C.B.: "In 1979, the Charney Report from the US National Academy of Sciences suggested that ECS was likely somewhere between 1.5C and 4.5C per doubling of CO2. Nearly 40 years later, the best estimate of sensitivity is largely the same.
However, Prof Andrew Dessler at Texas A&M University pushes back on this suggestion. He tells Carbon Brief:

I think that the idea that ‘uncertainty has remained the same since the late 1970s’ is wrong. If you look at the Charney report, it’s clear that there were a lot of things they didn’t know about the climate. So their estimate of uncertainty was, in my opinion, way, way too small"

"Back in 1979, climate science was much less well understood than today. There were far fewer lines of evidence to use in assessing climate sensitivity. The Charney report range was based on physical intuition and results from only two early climate models.

In contrast, modern sensitivity estimates are based on evidence from many different sources, including models, observations and palaeoclimate estimates. As Dessler suggests, one of the main advances in understanding of climate sensitivity over the past few decades is scientists’ ability to more confidently rule out very high or very low climate sensitivities."

I'm not disputing that the basic science of radiative physics and the simple climate modelling of ECS of 'how many degrees per doubling' has been around a long time. As a matter of fact, as a science geek, I knew about some of the scientific views in my later teens (early 70s) - about the time I stopped buying aerosols (apart from WD40...) to protect the ozone layer. The uncertainty of outcome referred to by Dessler is to the 'known unknowns' and 'unknown unknowns' at the time and these were very significant. The (some of) CMIP6 model problems were mentioned just to show that even today some crucial feedback mechanisms affecting ECS are still being nailed down 40 years later.

It is the solidarity or otherwise of the climate sensitivity figures AT THE TIME of the memos and documents cherry picked in 'Exxon Knew' which is at the very nub of whether, as the populist environmentalist narrative goes, Exxon were evil or, as I am convinced, just cautious because the views of sensitivity at the time were just not solid enough to mandate massive corporation change without a lot more scientific work to more reliably figure out what ECS was (not to mention the Transient and Earth system sensitivities too). If Exxon's scientists told their bosses that, as Dessler wrote, Charney's figures were waay more uncertain than Charney thought they were, that is not evidence of psychopathic evil, it's just evidence of good scientists offering a very valid criticism of another scientist's work.

Sure, at the time, Exxon's own scientists acknowledged the basic 'settled' science but of course they would also acknowledge the great uncertainties which the 'anti's turned a blind eye to. There was nothing sinister about that and it is the attribution of malignant motives to Big Oil by Greenpeace et al that I have a serious issue with. There is so much deceit, deception, propaganda, selective and misleading information from all sides out there that I think our 'side' should clean up its act and disavow all that stuff and just stick to the best peer reviewed science, the best risk analysis and not indulge in dubiously demonising (probably) innocent'ish corporate behaviour that has been, in my view, massively misrepresented or rule out many solutions, as Mann has done, which have great potential thus making 'the answers' much harder to achieve.

Nick Palmer at 01:20 AM on 13 June, 2021

Nick Palmer at 02:05 AM on 11 June, 2021

Phillipe and NigelJ. I think you two have somewhat missed that I was referring to the definite and real uncertainty in the science BEFORE Hansen's 1988 speech and the formation of the IPCC. That is when the documents in 'Exxon Knew', which are now held up as evidnec of 'certain' knowledge and associated deceit, were created. It is less than honest of people to assert that our modern established science in any way is comparable to the nascent science back then, upon which it would have been simply wrong to base far-reaching, global economy affecting/dismantling policies. It is verging on deceit to cast aspersions at targets who are not guilty or, at least, very much less guilty than they are being accused of being, using sophisticated rhetoric, cherry picking, misattribution of motivation etc and all the liguistic techniques that such as John Cook has clarified the denialist 'side' as using.

The uncertainty I was referring to (ordinary man-in-the-street definition, not the scientific one), at the relevant time, and what was not well understood then, was of such a magnitude (look again at the Dessler quote I gave) that it was entirely justified that Big Oil did not turn on a sixpence and shut down when the environmental organisations seized on this new way to attack Big Industry by using activist's frequent tendency to make unwarranted speculations on fragmentary evidence, then deciding that whatever unlikely speculative doomy result they came up with is almost certain to happen and then using that to justify calling for bans and authoritarian restrictions to avoid that end.

There can be no doubt that Big Oil sponsored think tanks, Institutes and lobbying organisations that used actual denialist rhetoric as part of their portfolio of techniques to try to influence politicians and policy formulations but, and I think this is where a lot of people go wrong, this should not have caused people to jump to the conclusion that Big Oil was deliberately spreading denialism because they were actually in denial of climate science - pause for a lot of screaming and gnashing of teeth by the extremists! I submit that these tactics of Big Oil were just ordinary political manoeuvring to resist irrationally draconian 'green/red' calls until the science got strong enough. The primary function of such lobbying organisations is to help their clients fight back against what they see as heavy handed legislation or inappropriate policy making by government pandering to the views of misinformed activists and those members of the voting public whose views have been changed by them to the point where they would vote in such draconian and misconceived action.

It is a matter of record that the fossil fuel industry increasingly deserted the early 'denialist' fossil fuel organisation - which was formed in 1989 - the 'Global Climate Coalition' - until by the early 2000s it was disbanded, and this was because the science had got strong enough.

"The GCC dissolved in 2001 after membership declined in the face of improved understanding of the role of greenhouse gases in climate change and of public criticism" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Climate_Coalition

Anyone who engages with denialists, the right wing or who defends the basic priciples behind environmentalism (which are, of course, still very valid) will pretty soon be accused of being a 'watermelon' - green on the outside, red on the inside, by which they mean that environmentalists have a superficial layer of concern for the environment masking a far left 'smash capitalism' ideology underneath. This is not a conspiracy theory! It is clear that many recent significant spokespersons indeed do have a very deep seated antipathy towards the capitalism system, upon which they lay the blame for all sorts of mankind's woes and they have an ideological zeal that only their pet version of international socialism will save us all - which goal, to them, justifies the deceit and propaganda they use as they try to 'socially engineer' the masses.

Here is the very rational Zion Lights explaining why she disavowed her earlier extreme, ideology based, environmental beliefs and how she sees those beliefs as counter-productive these days.

https://quillette.com/2021/05/31/the-sad-truth-about-traditional-environmentalism/

Whether activists like it or not, I believe it was the environmental organisations excessive and unwarranted views, and the political engineering of (some) of their leaders, which led them to make simplistic and ill thought out (or craftily planned) demands for policy changes which would have been disastrous. A far more likely explanation of Big Fossil Fuel's stance and acts is not that their execs were real denialists possessed of a psychopathic disregard for humanity but that their adverts and public facing statements were their attempt to resist politicians moving against them and implementing the type of draconian policies called for by those with fallacious, or at least well over-the-top, views in some cases motivated by an underlying 'closet' political ideology - Smash Capitalism! - that the public would never actually vote for if it was expressed out loud.

BTW, are there are any links to Big Oil documents which actually deny the science in the way that deniers do - it's the Sun - it's cooling - it's cosmic rays - the temperature record was tampered with - it's all fraud etc? I've never seen any actual full-on denialism in them. That's why I made my point that the words in the documents have likely been mischaracterised by Oreskes and Supran et al to insinuate and attribute motives which really weren't there.

I think you really shouldn't characterise Stephen Schneider's views as "the opinion of one person". He was a very well regarded early climate scientist, who was also acknowledged as a brilliant communicator of that science to the public. His (unedited by denialists) quote which I gave is still a very accurate statement on the science and its communication and comprehension by the public. Unfortunately, in this area, he is almost peerless these days. Richard Alley, Katharine Hayhoe, Gavin Schmidt and Michael Mann are really good but, in my opinion, they are not quite at the same level. Schneider could take on a hostile audience of denialists and either defeat them or make their apparently plausible views look as irrational as they really are.

BTW, Phillipe, I actually referred to the CMIP6 models (not the CMP5 ones, as you incorrectly stated I did) running (considerably) too hot. This is not contentious. Ask Gavin Schmidt or any other similarly credentialled scientist...

Nick Palmer at 23:49 PM on 9 June, 2021

When activists try to bad mouth Exxon et al they speak from a 'post facto' appreciation of the science, as if today's relatively strong climate science existed back when the documents highlighted in 'Exxon knew' were created. Let me explain what I think is another interpretation other than Greenpeace/Oreskes'/Supran's narratives suggesting 'Exxon knew' that climate change was going to be bad because their scientists told them so as far back as the 70s and 80s. Let me first present Stephen Schneider's famous quote from 1988 (the whole quote, not the edited one used by denialists).

"On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but – which means that we must include all doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change. To do that we need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, means getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This “double ethical bind” we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both."

I submit that part of the apparently damning content of the documents was exactly caused by Exxon's scientists, Schneider-like, simplifying their message to initially present it to their corporate employers. In exactly the same way that the denialosphere combed though the Climategate emails to find apparently damning statements and then interpreted them through a filtered 'lens' to insinuate fraud and data manipulation, usually by editing out context etc and even previous and subsequent sentences which changed the meaning completely, I submit that Greenpeace's 'Exxon knew' team did that too. They knew that the majority of people who read their report would assume that the current science that projects the bad consequences that we are (fairly) sure about today was as rock solid back way back then as it is now and would therefore jump to their desired conclusion that Big Capitalist Oil was just being evil. I'm absolutely not suggesting that Greenpeace's team were consciously being deceptive, just that they allowed their zealotry to run away with them so they saw just what they wanted to see...

Today's science, that projects bad outcomes, was by no means solid back then. I think that what Big Oil should be fairly accused of is the much less 'evil' culpability of not adequately informing the public about the full probabilities of the risks - which again is the 'Schneider' method of tailoring one's output for one's audience. Perhaps they didn't get "the right balance is between being effective and being honest" quite right. As denialists will endlessly tell us, the use of fossil fuels has been on balance a huge boon to humanity and I suspect that past one-dimensional calls by activists (including those I naively made!) to not use or explore for any more fossil fuels almost overnight, to a corporate mind, would require a public relations strategy to counter that extremist view while waiting for the science to get solid enough to start serious corporate planning for change should it be needed.

'Ban all exploration for or use of fossil fuels today' is a frequent call of today's extremists and no doubt they are sincere that they think the risks are such that such draconian action must be justified, and that things such as new technology, carbon capture, Gen3/4 nukes, agricultural changes etc must be Machiavellian Big Industry just manouevring to do nothing now to protect their financial bottom lines - delaying tactics that must be resisted. I think Professor Mann too has fallen in to the trap of feeling 'certainty' about what he thinks the solutions should be and this has lead to his dismissal, even libellous characterisations, of those who offer up a more nuanced way forward. Activists who call for an immediate ban on fossil fuels and 100% renewables by next Tuesday do not seem to realise that they are thinking in a one-dimensional way. Their 'solution' might address climate change, but such a solution would instantly cause enormous global disruption and would likely spark off the mother of all global economic recessions, which would rapidly cause long lasting extreme global hardship much greater, at least in the short to medium term, than anything global warming is scheduled to do for several decades.

So what were the 'uncertainties' back then? Some of the most important parameters plugged into climate models are those for climate sensitivity. While (widely varying) estimates existed before 2000 it only got well constrained and modelled within firm(ish) limits by papers published after then. Check out the links in this Skepsci article to see when the major papers were published.
https://skepticalscience.com/climate-sensitivity.htm

Here is Carbonbrief.org explaining the lack of certainty back then

"From Carbon Brief https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-how-scientists-estimate-climate-sensitivity

"In 1979, the Charney Report from the US National Academy of Sciences suggested that ECS was likely somewhere between 1.5C and 4.5C per doubling of CO2. Nearly 40 years later, the best estimate of sensitivity is largely the same.
However, Prof Andrew Dessler at Texas A&M University pushes back on this suggestion. He tells Carbon Brief:

I think that the idea that ‘uncertainty has remained the same since the late 1970s’ is wrong. If you look at the Charney report, it’s clear that there were a lot of things they didn’t know about the climate. So their estimate of uncertainty was, in my opinion, way, way too small"

"Back in 1979, climate science was much less well understood than today. There were far fewer lines of evidence to use in assessing climate sensitivity. The Charney report range was based on physical intuition and results from only two early climate models.

In contrast, modern sensitivity estimates are based on evidence from many different sources, including models, observations and palaeoclimate estimates. As Dessler suggests, one of the main advances in understanding of climate sensitivity over the past few decades is scientists’ ability to more confidently rule out very high or very low climate sensitivities.""

Activists try to insinuate that the documents and memos show that Big Oil 'knew the scientific truth' back then and adopted a position of denial, or psychopathic deception for the sake of profits, in the face of noble environmental groups campaigning against them because they also 'knew the truth' too. Much though it pains me to admit it, I was part of the campaigning certainy of those groups back then. I used to coordinate a Friends of the Earth area group and all the material I saw did not mention any of the scientific doubts and the uncertainties which featured in the scientific literature. I trusted it - it was the same thing we see today when such as Extinction Rebellion go waay over the top with the certainty of their assertions and the cherry picked nature of the information they present to the public. This is why I think that all sides - denialist/alarmist/doomist/sceptic etc - use misleading rhetoric to spin their narratives. I realise that many of the environmental activist 'troops' in their crusades like to feel certain that they know the 'truth' that Evil Big Industry had psychopathically tried to hide but I think total honesty is necessary to enable the public to judge the situation properly, so that policy changes we need are not based on the shifting sand that the 'divine deception' of the rhetoric of extremist campaigners and political forces is. Noble cause corruption is not a good strategy whether it is that of the greens, the left or right.

It's not as if even today's science is completely bulletproof, as a new paper about clouds shows. Consideration of it offers up an explanation as to why the new CMIP6 models are running too hot, and that is because observations show that some parameters plugged into current cloud models about longevity, warming and precipitation are wrong which mean that clouds cool more than previously thought. It doesn't,as it happens, change what we need to do but it does demonstrate that even today a fairly major part of the mechanics of climate changee can - uh hm - be changed.

New paper on clouds
https://www.carbonbrief.org/cooling-effect-of-clouds-underestimated-by-climate-models-says-new-study

Nick Palmer at 23:24 PM on 6 June, 2021

I'm really not happy about the direction Dr Mann has been going. Whilst obviously not doubting his extreme scientific credibility in the field of climate science, I think he is increasingly adopting the appearance of some of the more extreme campaigning activists by, in my view, misattributing dark motivations to and unfairly demonising the actions of governments, the fossil fuel industry etc.

Dr Mann is speaking well ouside of his area of special competence when he dismisses CCS, afforestation, nuclear, soil regeneration etc as unworkable or as a Machiavellian poker play of the 'delayers, dismissives, inactivists' etc. It seems like he has seen a holy light that dictates that only 100% renewables can allowed in his vision and that any other possible solutions must have been manufactured by dark forces to muddy the waters and prevent this one-dimensional solution coming to pass. It's going to be hard enough decarbonisng fast enough using everything we can throw at it - Throwing out everything but Dr Mann's 'pure' solution will make it harder or even unachievable early enough.

In recent months it has become increasingly common to see extremist activists more or less entirely blaming the fossil fuel industry for the situation. Probably the original root of this was Greenpeace's highly misleading report 'Exxon knew' which, in my opinion, uses every one of the deceptive rhetorical tricks that the denialosphere use to make their cases, including the wilful attribution of sinister motives where there are other more benign interpretations.

Very recently, and this seems to be in Dr Mann's book now, the valid response that the consumers of fossil fuelled energy and products, services and materials manufactured and extracted with that energy - the great mass of the public - are at least as responsible as the sellers is being portrayed as a malignant tactic by the 'delayers, dismissives etc'. This is a seriously warped thing to assert. The public's choices every time time they go to the shops or buy a car or complain about their energy bill means that they must share at least some of the responsibility for those choices - in my view most of it - because there are alternatives available which the majority are still not choosing. Activists who are trying to portray the public as innocent fluffy bunnies manipulated by Evil Big Fossil Fuel are, frankly, away with the fairies (being kind) or more likely pursuing some hidden ideologically based poltical agenda which the public would not suport if they realised it.

Nick Palmer at 23:23 PM on 21 May, 2021

Doug Bostrom at 04:32 AM on 26 January, 2021

A fascinating effort to exploit new capabilities to produce policy guidance. We're bound to learn something of interest from this project.

I'm wondering how players will be selected for participation, or if they will select themselves.

If self-selected, how will simulation results account for self-selection bias?

It may be (is probably?) the case that fully self-selected participants will more or less converge on a population with proclivities not faithfully reflective of information, attitudes and beliefs of a more complete sample of the general population.

As well, drop-outs during the course of the game could result in a further distillation of users more divergent from the general population.

The resulting group of participants may feature unusual levels of information on various details of climate change, climate solutions. As well, they may not be reflective of general atittudes toward and acceptance of policy interventions, necessities for lifestyle changes etc.

If indicators for paths forward assessed by participation of such an unrepresentative subsample are then applied to the general population in the form of policy, incentives etc., there is a strong chance that misalignment due to the original self-selection will become visible, with acceptance and support projected by the game not mirrored in the real world.

I suspect that consumers of iinformation provided by the game in the political and policy realms will be aware of this risk.

How will self-selection be controlled for?

For readers wanting to learn more about the limitations of previous efforts mentioned by Daniel, a nice example is The Climate Action Simulation, Rooney-Varga et al, 2019 (open access). As is often the case, the supporting citations in this paper are of great value as a means of gaining at least a tenuous foothold on this domain, as valuable in their own way as the actual investigation described.

nigelj at 06:15 AM on 8 January, 2021

Yes there is clearly considerable denial about both the climate science issue and the covid 19 issue. The denial looks almost about equal and equally depressing. I guess the only way is up. Polling by pew research does suggest climate science denial is slowly reducing.

I think one of the big drivers of denial about the problems of both issues is just lack of intellectual horsepower, but another driver relates to personal liberty. Those on the right and conservative end of politics in America seem very strong on personal liberty and for example many clearly resent being made to wear masks and socially distance and avoid crowds. Those on the left / liberal (ironically) end of the spectrum seem happy enough to compromise and wear masks, seemingly more concerned about safety. It just seems to be quite a different mindset to me.

Obviously its not a black and white issue because we all have some desire for both liberty and safety, but its clearly become very tribal, polarised and non compromising where any imposition on liberty is seen as the work of the devil, which is of course crazy.

And perhaps as a result those that favour liberty attack the science behind both the climate issue and covid 19 issue to try to create the impression there is no reason to restrict liberty.

I have to admit I dont want this covid thing as an older guy and I'm happy to compromise a little bit on liberty, knowing its temporary, and it mystifies me why people would see mask wearing as some sort of stalinist imposition tearing at the heart of our reason for existence. I value liberty rather a lot, but the way some people view the liberty issue and resent temporary, moderate, commonsense, and effective restrictions looks strange to me.

There is resistance to mitigation of both climate change and covid 19, but it is clearly greater with climate mitigation, while covid 19 has at least resulted in some pretty tough measures. It looks to me like people have a much stronger more urgent response to the covid 19 issue echoing commentary by pscychologists that suggest our brains are wired up to react more strongly to immediate and huge threats, rather than slow moving train wrecks like climate change. Its hard to see how we change this, but with climate change becoming more and more obvious this could motivate change, and perhaps more focus could go on the wider benefits of climate mitigation solutions as a motivational tool.

One Planet Only Forever at 03:18 AM on 27 October, 2020

nigelj,

The following is my current understanding of the problems faced by efforts to develop sustainable improvements for the future of humanity. Better understanding a problem, and the desired outcome, is one of the most important steps in developing sustainable solutions, as every Engineer is very aware.

Regarding reactions to climate science and climate change information and misleading claims, a major difference between the USA and NZ is probably that, relative to NZ, the USA has more powerful wealthy people who have their wealth and power because of fossil fuels. They would lose status if the changes of how people live that are required to limit the climate change harm done to future generations are actually achieved. Increased awareness and understanding of the need to meet the Paris limits makes these powerful wealthy people more likely to lose their status. And that threat of losing their perceived status causes some of them to mentally 'lose it' and double down on harmful misleading marketing rather than striving to honestly change to be less harmful and more helpful.

Other possible reasons for the difference regarding harmful populism in the USA and NZ could be:

• The USA is the least Socialist of the supposedly more advanced nations. I use 'supposedly' because it highlights that 'impressions of advancement' may be misleading. Increased wealth or increased technological development that does not result in sustainable improvements of the living conditions for the poorer portion of the population is not 'advancement'.


• The USA, since its foundation, has been a nation of Anglo Saxon Colonists pursuing ever expanding Superiority for 'Their Tribe' relative to all 'Others' (the reason I pointed to "White Fragility" as a book to read). Books like "The End of the Myth" by Greg Grandin present an accurate and unflattering history of the formation and expansion of the USA (violent disregard for Others is a powerful part of the USA's history). And many Americans are still powerfully motivated by their collective lack of social development on acceptance of diversity and the related need to systemically more equitably treat the diversity of humanity.


• In the USA the 'pursuit of freedom' has been about the more freedom for powerful wealthy property-owning people (with property including Other people) to become more powerful and wealthier (small government having no role in regulating economic activity, not limiting the harm it does). It includes protection of the ability of likely unjustly acquired wealth to be passed to children who may be even less deserving of having that wealth and power. The wealthier a person is the more helpful and less harmful to Others that person needs to be, or the advancement of society is slowed or reversed.


• The USA has a 2 party system which makes it easier for the greedy and intolerant people to gather together and claim that 'The Other is the enemy'. And the history of the USA explains why the 2 Parties in the USA substantially share the objective of protecting the wealth of the wealthy. However, currently the Democrats are leaning towards being more Socially Sharing and Caring due to their party including the Social Democrat thinking. Multi-party systems may make people more aware of diversity rather than seeing things as Black-White Us-Them. In Canada there is only one party heavily focused on promoting greed and intolerance, the merged Right-Wing Conservatives. There used to be a Progressive Conservative Party that was centrist, but it disappeared when it merged with social conservatives and increased appeals to greed (which used to be in fringe parties). The inability of the hard Right-wing Party to get along with a diversity of Other Parties may make more people aware that it is the uncooperative party that is the problem, rather than a 2 party system where 'The Other' can always be blamed.

Another difference between the USA and NZ is that the Separation of Church and State has been removed by the current Republican pursuit of popular support from fundamentalist religious groups, because there is such a large population of fundamentalist evangelical religious people (and those people appear easily inclined to believe conspiracy theories about 'Those Others - Their Enemies').

A related difference between the USA and NZ may be that the USA has also amplified the power of wealth in government. It is clear that democracy requires a separation of Wealth and State (read Thomas Piketty's "Capital and Ideology") so that the State can act as the Responsible Governor of what is going on to limit harm done and help develop sustainable improvements for the least fortunate.

In summary, Social Democracy that effectively limits the influence of Religion and Wealth on the actions of Government may powerfully inoculate populations against populist autocracy. Note that anti-Socialism is part of the misleading marketing attacks by the greedy and intolerant portions of many populations that have joined forces to try to win the power to do as they please. Selfish people are more inclined to be harmful to Others, and less inclined to be helpful to Others. They easily dislike the idea of being 'forced to share and care by Government'. Any government that would do that is part of the 'Others'. They want the freedom to 'Win higher status any way they can get away with'. To them 'Harm Done is justified by Benefits Obtained'.

Closing back to climate change and climate science. The belief in conspiracy is strong in people who have developed preferred beliefs that are contradicted by expanded awareness and improved understanding of how to be less harmful and more helpful to Others. To maintain their perceptions of status and related beliefs, they accept anything that appeals to them, including the ability to declare themselves to be the Victims - of conspiracies, which requires the belief that there is no Objective Reality as a basis for Common Sense, every belief is equally valid - because of the barage of falsehoods they have developed a liking for but have been unable to make sense of.

One Planet Only Forever at 02:19 AM on 17 August, 2020

There are many news items about regenerative farming.

This CBC item is the latest I have come across "With better soil, farmers can fight climate change, make agriculture more sustainable".

The written article summarizes the longer radio conversation.

An important point made is that changing to regenerative farming is helpful, but the reduction of CO2 benefit eventually ends. So rapidly reducing the burning of fossil fuels is still required. Stopping rain forest destruction and stopping industrial farming are important helpful steps, but they are not lasting solutions.

The solution is for the highest consuming and impacting people to be low consuming and impacting people, and the richer they are the lower theiir consuption and impacts should be vbecxause richer people can afford to behave better.

That requires the combination of reduction of consuption that nigelj suggests along with corrrections of the consumption that occurs to only be sustainable activities like regenrative farming and renewable energy (not nuclear) done in a way that does not unsustainably consume materials, like the rare earth materials used in machines being fully recycled (no losses). It also requires external goiverning of the selfish among the population who will not responsibly self-govern to behave better than those who are less fortunate than they are.

One Planet Only Forever at 07:56 AM on 4 August, 2020

An important point to keep in mind is that Nuclear Energy Production is also a non-renewable system that creates harmful 'externalized costs'. Like climate change impacts from fossil fuel use, the waste is hazardous for very long time periods meaning it is inappropriate to use any discounting to determine the acceptability of the risk of harm. Believing a nuclear waste storage system is almost certain for almost 100,000 years does not make the cost of the increased chance of harm after 100,000 years almost zero (a fatal flaw of only evaluating costs and discounting the future when doing that).

Another item to keep in mind is that the nuclear power generation would be the intermittent filler in the energy production system. That means building nuclear power plants that are not the 'base-load slow to change capacity' type of generator.

New Nuclear needs to be thought of as a temporary helpful activity. It cannot be part of the required rapid transition to sustainable solutions for the benefit of the future of humanity.

All that considered, New Nuclear should be limited to safely generating power with the already created waste from existing nuclear operations and the material in existing nuclear weapons (nuclear weapons are harmful waste).

It would be a shame to claim to solve the problem of harmful consequences of the unsustainable use of fossil fuels by developing a different unsustainable harmful way of doing things.

Unsustainable and harmful activity needs to be understood to have no future, no matter how much cheaper and easier and more enjoyable it is than the alternative of lower energy consumption with that energy being sustainable and obtained with minimum harm done (accumulating harm is unsustainable).

Preston Urka at 02:48 AM on 22 July, 2020

One consistent current running through this blog topic is the wonderful peer-reviewed Abbott 2011 and 2012 papers. But they just are not of a high quality.

First, the two articles are pretty much the same.

Second, as sauerj's post atShould a Green New Deal include nuclear power?00:29 AM on 24 April, 2019 points out, Abbott 2012 is an opinion piece, published in their Point of View features, which "The scope of this section ranges from opinions on the importance of particular new concepts or discoveries to discussion of educational and professional trends to personal positions and predictions on various technical topics." - opinions, discussion, personal positions - not peer reviewed science.

Third, lets go thru the underlying references of Abbott:

1. "It can also be argued that nuclear power has a key role to play in meeting emissions targets (Brook, 2012) for mitigating climate change."

• Ok, so the first citation is 'here is an opinion, and here is the citation to that opinion'.


• It can be argued. Fine. Seems fairly innocuous.

nigelj at 08:16 AM on 6 July, 2020

The Guardian article says "I’m not saying facts don’t matter or the scientific method should be watered down or we should communicate without facts. What I am saying is that now the climate science has been proven to be true to the highest degree possible, we have to stop being reasonable and start being emotional."

Yes, but it may depend on the emotions. I get angry with lack of mitigation and denialist rhetoric, but getting angry with denialists and shouting at them or becoming personal can lead to them getting more entrenched in their views. Its a fine balance where the anger needs expression but needs control.

Crying tears about the end of the world gets a predictably negative reaction from the political right. Getting really angry with our leaders is sometimes very justified, but it can quickly escalate out of control to shouting matches and their views becoming more entrenched. Put it this may the anger needs to be very facts based and focused.

Climate scientists could write more accounts including their more personal fears. I think everyone would connect with that.

Yes world views are important. Much of the denialism comes from the political right and its driven by ideological fear of things like taxes etc. You can try to empathise with the political right, and find solutions that minimise the perceived problems of "big government" and couch the problem in terms the political right understand, such of concern for other people as our neighbours rather than using the word inequality. But attempts to do this have not yeilded great results.

Yes its clear climate denialism and weak climate mitigation policies are driven by political tribalism but mitigation is weak even in countries without much political tribalism. Even one party states like China are still building a lot of coal fired power. So other things are at work. Perhaps everyone is complacent and wants to preserve the status quo, especially the leaders in society. But I think much of it comes back to my previous comment:

Humans are hard wired to respond most strongly to very present threats (like covid 19) rather than long term and future orientated threats like climate change.This doesn't mean fear is not a motivator for climate action, but it clearly signals it may not be sufficient, so we need a focus on the benefits of solutions as well. (this creates positive emotions)

www.bbc.com/future/article/20190304-human-evolution-means-we-can-tackle-climate-change

And yes I can see facts are not enough to convince people. But facts are part of it. More needs to be made of the devastatingly high risk lower probability events like hothouse earth and multi metre sea level rise. This is lacking in the IPCC reports and its this politicians look at.

nigelj at 07:45 AM on 5 July, 2020

Must check the movie out.

There has been this seemingly never ending debate about the best way to motivate climate action, 1) fear and scare stories, or 2) positive stories and solutions and their wider benefits, and hope.

Traditionally problems facing society seem to combine both approaches, so Im inclined to think that is what should be done with climate change. Haven't seen compelling evidence to do differently but stand to be corrected.

Consider that climate change is clearly inherently scary to some people at least. It's when we are scared that we take action because fear is clearly a good motivator. It is therefore hard to see why anyone should play down the climate threat. And if the sum of the parts is catastrophic then that is what should be said. Fear is paralysing and painful, motivating us to find solutions.

So why has climate mitigation been weak despite media scare stories? Possibly because of:

1) Lack of trust of the general media and journalists and articles interpreting the climate issue.

2) Exaggerations and wild claims from the fringe element in the scientific and environmental community, that reduce trust.

3) Humans are hard wired to respond most strongly to very present threats (like covid 19) rather than long term and future orientated threats like climate change as below.

www.bbc.com/future/article/20190304-human-evolution-means-we-can-tackle-climate-change

This doesn't mean fear is not a motivator for climate action, but it clearly signals it may not be sufficient, so we need a focus on the benefits of solutions as well, suggesting the movie is on the right track and long as it doesnt gloss over the problem too much .

4) The IPCC, the one body politicians listen to seems overly cautious and non scary in its style and information. There is little discussion in the summary for policy makers of the very worst case scenarios, like multi metre sea level rise.

5) The denialist campaign and the power of fossil fuel lobby groups over politicians

6) Political tribalism

7) Complacency, vested interests, and (misguided) fear about costs of mitigation.

So there are many reasons for weak climate mitigation. It suggests we are wrong to blame the use of fear as a motivator, but that the scary messaging must be credible and accurate, and come from trusted sources directly like scientists rather than journalists interpreting things, and that we definitely need to empahises solutions and their wider benefits.

nigelj at 07:54 AM on 28 June, 2020

walschuler @13

I used to work in building design, and I agree you can get some big energy efficiencies especially if you go full passive solar. The problem is persuading people to bear the initial capital costs when they often have other objectives. For this reason mitigating the climate problem and other environmental problems requires constantly promoting a wide range of solutions, including energy efficiency, wasting less, having fewer children etcetera. Theres no magic bullet once you face the realities of human nature.

I suspect there is little difference long term between nuclear power and renewables, in terms of clean energy and ultimate costs, but nuclear power is not politically popular and the new smaller modular reactors are very expensive, and this could take a fair while to change, so renewables are proving more popular with generating companies and the public.

Getting the size of population down is an obvious good solution, but it probably wont happen quickly because of the risk of too many older dependent people as you mentioned. But that said, its interesting that in a couple of countries in Europe where population size has fallen and there are fewer young people and a bulge of dependent elderly, governments have tried to incentivise people to have more children, but this hasn't worked! Once the culture swings towards smaller families it seems to get quite popular.

michael sweet at 22:46 PM on 26 June, 2020

CBDunkerson,

You appear to be saying that technologies must be in place before we can start to implement them.

You listed what you apparently thought were the hardest problems to solve. I provided solutions to them using existing technology. Yes, if you do not count the climate, pollution and health costs than fossil fuels are cheaper than electrofuels. So what?

Many fossil fuels remain in place because they get so many government subsidies. In the USA several nuclear plants have been given hundreds of millions of dollarsjust to stay open. Fossil companies receive hundreds of billions of subsidies per year. Laws to require more efficient buildings, which save consumers money, are blocked. In Florida, where I live, it is difficult to install solar power on my roof because utilities oppose it.

As you point out, renewable energy is the cheapest energy. That is resulting in more renewable energy being built. If nations support renewable energy strongly not only they start to address the climate crisis but they will save money. Nations like Germany helped advance renewable energy when it was more expensive and showed the way.

Laws requiring more renewable energy will mean cheaper renewable energy will be installed faster. Current policy in Washington to remove environmental protections and allow more wasteful fossil fuels do not help. Currently wind and solar installations in the USA are forced to install uneconomic storage which slows implementation but makes fossil fuels more competitive. If laws are changed to make fossil fuels pay for the damage they do than renewable energy will be installed much faster.

David Hawk at 03:43 AM on 26 June, 2020

An early work from when skepticism towards the idea of climate change began. This was about a 2-year research project that ended with research results on climate change. These results were presented to OECD by Sweden's leadership. As project director I took the results into a dissertation at the Wharton School of Business. The research conclusions were in three volumes, titled "Environmental Protection: Analytic Solutions in Search of Synthetic Problems." The Dean of Wharton was firmly opposed to the reports, and the dissertation that followed saying: "I do not see what environmental deterioration has to do with business." I agreed that he did not see such. In anger he never sent the dissertation to the U of Penn library. The PhD was eventualy granted. Students, in protest, published the work via their organization at the Wharton School. That work was republished last year, with a 30 page update. The title: "Too Early, Too Late, Now what?"

A very pessimistic book on the most likely human future. There have been no signs of meaningful change in 40 years, even though some great ideas were available from business and government leaders back then.

michael sweet at 22:36 PM on 23 June, 2020

Preston Urka,

Perhaps if you read more current articles you would be less skeptical.This post from less than one month ago(Smart Energy Europe) here at Skeptical Science describes a 100% renewable energy system that delivers All Power at a comparable cost to fossil fuels. They account for all storage costs. They use only existing technology. They use the total energy use of the EU.

As for your response to Jacobson 2015, he has published a new paper, Jacobson 2018, that addresses all the issues raised about his original paper. There has been plenty of time to write a response to his 2018 paper but ctritics obviously feel he has answered their questions. I note that in his original paper he found many solutions to the problem and he only described one. In addition, the Smart Energy Europe paper uses a completely different system than Jacobson does and finds essentially the same result. That indicates that there are many paths to a completely renewable system.

Perhaps you should read the Smart Energy Europe OP and describe your complaints there. We certainly do not have a "done deal" and need to continue to worry about Climate Change. That does not mean that there are not solutions at hand, it means that politicians are not taking the needed steps to solve the problem.

A response to Burden of Proof, your reference to "refute" Jacobson is here. Burden of Proof is shown to have no basis in fact. I note that Burden of Proof is written by a group of nuclear no-hopers.

Perhaps you could tell us what you think needs to be done so different solutions can be compared. Criticizing possible solutions without offering alternates is not very helpful.

Vote Climate!

James Charles at 17:36 PM on 9 May, 2020

'A new documentary Planet of the Humans by Michael Moore and Jeff Gibbs – hardly right-wing climate change deniers – set out to understand how fossil fuel lobbyists and corrupt politicians had thwarted the increasingly urgent transition to a carbon neutral future. What they found, however – and what the documentary details – is an equally corrupt “green energy” lobby that has no real solutions to the predicament we are in. As Michael Donnelly at Counterpunch explains:
“The basic conclusion is that we have been following corporate foundation-financed, Democratic Party-tied misleadership and that is why we are where we are."
The issue here is not with the seriousness of the crisis, but with the way just one solution is on offer; and it just happens to be the one that makes the rich even richer and the poor even poorer.'

consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2019/08/13/goldsmiths-kebab/?fbclid=IwAR2zUO79Dbw3Cm3E9lS0FQCrWIQMlQBP4SgN3Xknguu_p3ZCmNeHHUiIlu4

alea at 20:52 PM on 7 May, 2020

nigelj@26

"Yes true about the low hanging fruit. It may surprise you, but I do think all the other solutions you list are realistic and people may yet adopt them better.But M Moores solutions require we go much further than that. Remember his solution to climate change is lower population growth and less use of energy. Full stop."

Thing is I can see that the extreme advocacy of living to the true definition of sustainability (as put forward by one contributor on RealClimate), and that literally doing that is impossible without hardship, and people will resist it, could both be right.

I have had a go at making significant inroads into my carbon footprint. I cut right down on meat intage, rented an allotment, turned the thermostat down to 12C in winter and compensated with a hoodie (UK winters are too cold to dispence with space heating completely), don't buy anything that I can't logically justify, use an energy provider which invests in renewable energy, avoid flying, use the train to visit family (240 miles away), cycle all local journeys, and worked up to being able to cycle to work daily (19 mile round trip with hills). I even went as far as going car free for about three years. The latter worked until I was hit by a careless driver and nearly died in hospital. My experience taught me that going beyond the low hanging fruit is tough, and is made worse with the system punishing me for taking more sustainable options. Visiting family by train costs over £100. Driving costs £45 in fuel. Which mode of transport would most people choose? I can't transport hundreds of kg of manure to my allotment for soil improvement, but now have a car again which solves that problem. Choosing a bicycle as my primary mode of transport means taking costs, in the form of limited mobility and increased vulnerability (externalised by motorists), because everyone else is still driving, but the tangible benefits are not immediately apparent, there are lagged benefits in the form of reduced financial cost and increased cardiovascular health.

I can't see how you can convince people en-masse to make lifestyle changes that make life less convenient or enjoyable without a tangible benefit, yet ultimately we have to do something to knock down emissions, and that something (or combination of somethings) is going to have to go beyond the easy stuff. This is where I haven't come across a decent solution, although cleaning up energy production is a good start, how do you tell businesses to stop having meetings requiring people to fly abroad, and use video conferencing instead, or stop people from buying consumer goods they don't need, or manufacture stuff to last so it doesn't need replacing as often, instead of either designing things to break just past the guarentee or telling people they need the latest model of xyz because..., or tell people to holiday locally instead of flying? Some of this could be done with regulation, but people don't like regulation beyond a certain point, and any democratic government that goes beyond that point will find themselves out of office next election.

I guess I am looking for some hope (to combat despair), in the form of a step by step feasible method of transitioning to a significantly more sustainable way of living on a global scale, it doesn't have to be the purist version, your definition would be adequate.

nigelj at 06:26 AM on 6 May, 2020

alea @24,

"People don't mind picking the easy low hanging fruit like changing to energy efficient light bulbs or recycling, but try asking them to give up their three abroad holidays per year, or downsize their huge SUV or house, or turn the thermostat down in winter and put another layer on, go vegetarian or vegan, i.e. anything that makes life a little bit less comfortable."

Yes true about the low hanging fruit. It may surprise you, but I do think all the other solutions you list are realistic and people may yet adopt them better.But M Moores solutions require we go much further than that. Remember his solution to climate change is lower population growth and less use of energy. Full stop.

That means much less use of energy. You would not just be turning down the themostat a bit and flying less, you would be turning the heater off most of the time and not flying at all and forget about owning a car. I take Moores solutions at face value, to show you how stupid they are. I cant second guess what he might really mean.

We need a new energy grid.

alea at 00:26 AM on 6 May, 2020

nigelj22:

He is right about one thing, that people do prioritise their individual desires, comfort and freedom over collective responsibility. People don't mind picking the easy low hanging fruit like changing to energy efficient light bulbs or recycling, but try asking them to give up their three abroad holidays per year, or downsize their huge SUV or house, or turn the thermostat down in winter and put another layer on, go vegetarian or vegan, i.e. anything that makes life a little bit less comfortable. That is at least partly why progress has been three fifths of bugger all over the last 50 years. If you want solutions, I don't have them, because they would very likely include policies/actions that you would claim to be unrealistic. The only suggestion I have is that we need to adapt to a new climate normal (increase robustness to the changes and extremes which are projected to happen over the next century), because even if we stopped anthropogenic emissions now, the CO2 in the atmosphere isn't going anywhere for centuries, but it is still going to be elevating the global temperature.

nigelj at 07:31 AM on 4 May, 2020

barryn56

"Climate change IS the default solution, since humans insist on individual 'freedom' above all else, and no-one wants to give up on the status quo (including everyone here, apparently), there's no need to do anything, because - if climate change predictions come to fruition, the human population will collapse, and everything will be fine.'

Oh come on this is pure bulls**t. Many posts above suggest we be more sustainable, look at various alternative economic options, change the energy grid. Maybe they dont go as far as you want, but you dont spell out your own solutions, which I suspect would be in fantasy land.

One Planet Only Forever at 08:17 AM on 1 April, 2020

This is a helpful sharing of knowledge and experience.

As an engineer I learned that it was essential to have a good understanding of a problem before coming up with potential solutions. When unacceptable results occurred, solutions that were developed without identifying the real cause of the problem were unlikely to be sustainable solutions.

And my MBA education in the 1980s, and observations since then, helped me understand that many people with Business Interests will limit their concerns and considerations to short-term Profit and Popularity (something that responsible engineers had to protect the Public from). Popularity derived from misleading marketing, especially from appeals designed to trigger desires or anxiety, could be effective ways to achieve Profit in the Short-Term.

And the ability to abuse misleading marketing in Politics, william's point about money in politics, is clearly abused by people who are inclined to try to personally benefit from their ability to influence leadership actions. An important part of politics is being able to influence the public in the very short-term of the critical few days when votes are cast in an election (and undeserving powerful people have even learned to abuse their power to keep some people from voting).

And the way laws and regulations get written and enforced can undeniably be influenced (compromised) to produce unreasonable and undeniably harmfully results that favour people who are focused on personally benefiting to the detriment of Others (any way they can get away with).

The establishment of the UN after WW2 and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, were the results of expanded awareness and understanding that the developed socioeconomic-political systems were producing many unsustainable harmful results that powerfully resisted being corrected. However, the UN structure itself was compromised by the powerful people at the time of its formation.

In spite of the flaws built into the UN by the powerful, the UN has been a mechanism for many global collaborative efforts to expand awareness and improve understanding and apply what is learned to help develop a better future for everyone. The 1972 Stockholm Conference was one of those helpful results. And the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are the latest helpful compilation of understanding regarding what is required for the Future of Humanity to be Better.

What can be understood is that there are many people among the currently wealthy and powerful who are anxious about the changes required to achieve the SDGs. Minimizing climate change impacts has been understood to be an important action for the benefit of the future of humanity for a very long time. However, minimizing the harm of climate change impacts will reduce the perceptions of wealth and superiority that many wealthy people developed.

Many people will lose developed perceptions of wealth and opportunity if the global Leadership actually acts to responsibly curtail the use of fossil fuels. And those undeserving wealthy people have been fighting against that awareness and understanding becoming more popular. And as result, the ones who are wealthier today because of the delay of responsible Global Leadership action on climate change impacts undeniably deserve No Consideration, and in addition to their loss of wealth due to their Bad Investment Choices they may deserve penalties for knowingly trying to benefit more from being harmful.

Which brings the discussion back to the similarity between the Governing Objectives that everyone needs to be governed by in order to most responsibly deal with COVID-19, Climate Change, and so many other challenges to global Humanity. Everybody needs to ensure their actions "Do No Harm to Any Others". And everybody needs to try to "Help Others".

Many of the Richest will lose developed perceptions of superiority relative to Others, especially if those perceptions were from unsustainable and harmful activity that was deemed to be "Legal", or not monitored for and penalized for its potential to be understood to be illegal (Illegal should mean Harmful to Others). The required changes would include "Legal Corrections". And the correct legal and regulatory requirements can only be developed by excluding People who have interests that are contrary to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, which would require that the rule-making or its enforcement must not be compromised by Consideration of Popularity or Profitability.

Beliefs that Popularity or Profitability legitimize or justify something need to be curtailed, the sooner the better. That means ending the Libertarian Free-Market beliefs that Good Results will be developed if everyone is freer to believe whatever they want and do as they please. The expanded awareness and improved understanding of the SDGs makes that required correction undeniably obvious.

Everyone's actions add up to produce the future. Everyone needs to be Governed by "Do No Harm, Try to Help". Everyone Self-governing that way would be the only way for the Libertarian and Free-Market dreams to be realized. That will never be the reality. Responsible Leadership helpfully governing and limiting what is done and expanding awareness and understanding will always be required. The challenge today is figuring out how to undo the harmful developed compromising Global Leadership that abuses harmful and ultimately unsustainable popularity and profitability as excuses to Resist Helpful Correction.

One Planet Only Forever at 13:07 PM on 23 March, 2020

nigelj,

I see correlations between the items you linked and the climate change challenge.

Major reasons the attempts to limit the rate of spread of COVID-19 have not been as successful as they needed to be and could have been are:

• the initial harm was happening to Other people far away.


• the potential for personal experience of harm was remote


• the actions to actually effectively limit the spread required 'harm to developed economic activity' and 'harm to perceptions of superiority of the winners in the developed economic games'.

The harm of COVID-19 was also increased because when it did start to appear 'locally' there was a developed resistance to 'correcting how people lived to reduce harm to Others or reduce the risk of harm to Others combined with a belief that the ones not correcting how they lived would be OK'. After all, 'only a Few Local Others' were the ones being affected.

A related part of the problem is the plethora of unjustified beliefs that some cure or vaccine will be developed rapidly enough to be the solution. Even USA President Trump made the tragic damaging mistake of promoting a made-up claims about existing malaria treatment.

There are parallels in the climate change challenge.

• The main problem is the powerful desire to not compromise the perceptions developed by the economic game playing that created the problem.


• The game of popularity and profit had developed powerful support for resistance to the required helpful changes.


• The excuse of hope in the development of new technical solutions

The result for climate change, as with COVID-19, is the problem becoming more harmful than it needed to become.

One Planet Only Forever at 04:39 AM on 31 January, 2020

In my previous comment @1 I meant to add that the authors of “Good Economics for Hard Times” recommend that the most helpful way to implement Carbon Taxes is to rebate the collected money to everyone except the richer people. That allows the Carbon Tax policy implementation to limit the negative impacts on middle income and less fortunate, and help assist the less fortunate. It also becomes a more powerful motivation for the richer people to reduce their impacts (they get no pay-back. For them it is a Tax that is used for actions they personally do not benefit from, like any other assistance for the less fortunate).

I provided a brief summary of “Good Economics for Hard Times” to encourage it to be read by people who are interested in better understanding the challenges of expanding awareness and understanding regarding climate science and the related required changes of human activity (Jeffery Sachs and Sustainable Development need no ‘summary description’).

In case some are reluctant to check out “Good Economics for Hard Times” , the following edited extracts from the book may help better understand the authors and their intentions and the value of reading the book (economic academics and climate science academics have similar challenges):

From the Preface:
“…Inequality is exploding, environmental catastrophes and global policy disasters loom, but we are left with little more than platitudes to confront them with.
“We wrote this book to hold on to hope. To tell ourselves the story of what went wrong and why, but also as a reminder of all that has gone right. A book as much about the problems as about how our world can be put back together, as long as we are honest with the diagnosis.
“…Many of the issues plaguing the world right now are particularly salient in the rich North, whereas we have spent our lives studying poor people in poor countries. It was obvious that we would have to immerse ourselves in many new literatures, and there was always a chance we would miss something. It took us a while to convince ourselves it was even worth trying.
“We eventually decided to take the plunge, partly because we got tired of watching at a distance while the public conversation about core economic issues – immigration, trade, growth, inequality, or the environment – goes more and more off-kilter. But also because, as we thought about it, we realized the problems facing the rich countries in the world were eerily familiar to those we are used to studying in the developing world – people left behind by development, ballooning inequality, lack of faith in government, fractured societies and polity, and so on. We learned a lot in the process, and it did give us faith in what we as economists have learned best to do, which is to be hard headed about the facts, skeptical of slick answers and magic bullets, modest and honest about what we know and understand, and perhaps most importantly, willing to try ideas and solutions and be wrong, as long as it takes us towards the ultimate goals of building a more humane world.”

From the first chapter:
“…The answers to these problems take more than a tweet. So there is an urge to just avoid them. And partly as a result, nations are doing very little to solve the most pressing challenges of our time; they continue to feed the anger and mistrust that polarizes us, which makes us even more incapable of talking, thinking together, doing something about them.
“…Economists have a lot to say about these big issues.
“…What the most recent research has to say, it turns out, is often surprising, especially to those used to the pat answers coming out of TY “economists’ and high school text books.
“Unfortunately, very few people trust economists enough to listen carefully to what they have to say.”

From the Conclusion:
“…Good economics alone cannot save us. But without it, we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of yesterday. Ignorance, institutions, ideology and inertia combine to give us answers that look plausible, promise much, and predictably betray us. As history, alas, demonstrates over and over, the ideas that carry the day in the end can be good or bad. … The only recourse we have against bad ideas is to be vigilant, resist the seduction of the “obvious”, be skeptical of promised miracles, question the evidence, be patient with complexity and honest about what we know and what we can know. Without that vigilance, conversations about multifaceted problems turn into slogans and caricatures and policy analysis gets replaced by quack remedies.
“The call to action is not just for academic economists – it is for all of us who want a better, saner, more humane world. Economics is too important to be left to economists.”

nigelj at 05:15 AM on 23 January, 2020

There's another psychological / political factor. The climate issue has become politically tribal. Once the tribe takes on a position on climate, so peoples views become stubborn. Dissension is not tolerated.

I also think that ideally we dont wan't to over do the big government component, because there are some legitimiate concerns there. Yet its very difficult to see how you resolve this mess without things like a carbon tax. So I'm completely stumped over this.

But this is the thing. There are literally a dozen psychological, ideological, political and cost factors that are impediments to change. Plus the climate problem is huge and requires multiple changes. Taking all this together, I don't see mitigation and lifestyle changes adequately fixing the climate issue, or even coming close.

We might be heading towards dangerous experiments with geoengineering, or sucking CO2 out of the air with fans and neutralising it chemically. However I will continue to advocate for the more usual solutions.

Nick Palmer, similar to the tragedy of the commons but theres another name for it.

Nick Palmer at 23:33 PM on 22 January, 2020

BarbNoon1 at 14:34 PM on 22 January, 2020

Yes, I really want to get out of this conversation, and we are off-topic, but I can't believe you don't know that cholesterol is bad for you!
When study results, funded by the dairy industry came out in 2010, Dr. Jeremiah Stamler immediately criticized them, followed by other prominant doctors such as Dr. John McDougall. Of course, Time Magazine writers did not know that, and they put "Butter is Back" on the cover. However, the science has not changed. Marketing is just more skillful. The huge industries repeated the same studies in 2014 in order to look like they had more "evidence," but the truth is, cholesterol still can cause heart disease.

https://www.drmcdougall.com/misc/2014nl/apr/saturatedfat.htm

We have to be "very scientific" about following a vegan diet? Really? I have many friends who have been vegan for over 40 years (I guess I have to show my sources, Hope Bohanic, Kim Stallwood, Fiona Oakes and Butterflies Katz are a few.) Fiona Oakes runs and holds about 7 world records in ultra marathons and eats once a day, at the end of the day after training and then taking care of an entire animal sanctuary - she is 50 and has been vegan since about age 4. Source? Running for Good documentary.

39% of Americans are deficient in B12. You'd better be careful about that deficiency! We can get B12 from plants - there is new evidence that duckweed has tons of B12 and there are four plants found so far that have B12. The few vegan parents who had children who died starved them! Just being vegan was not the problem.

nigelj at 06:51 AM on 14 January, 2020

Nick Palmer @61, yeah I agree that the exact middle ground people we need to win over get turned off by hyper alarmism. But we do need "evidence based alarmism" to motivate people to change. So its a nuanced juggling act.

Barlows tirade of insults were way over the top and probably reflect his general frustration over the climate issue, that I think we all share. I find insults like that hurtful but I've come to realise its not me at fault.

You mentioned "I came to see that there were sufficient people who cared to make a difference and I've seen many initiatives succeed in increasing recycling, protecting areas of wildlife, specific threatened species, certain types of air and water pollution etc and all without 'crushing capitalism' - which is unfortunately, an ideology that some 'extreme ecologists' get driven towards.....The extreme ecologist Barlow's of this world, who use 'fear p*rn' in their rhetoric in a bid to scare the public towards their favoured solutions - in Barlow's case I suspect he is deep down a Back to Eden type - are no doubt sincere in what they believe, but they then go on to believe that their back to nature/abandon industry methodology is the only solution."

Agreed totally. I contribute a few comments over at RC and there is a certain character over there who promotes exactly this anti capitalism back to nature simplicity thing, and we have "locked horns" many times and its become divisive. I have received the same insults and worse than you received from Barlow. The guy in question means well, but just doesn't think things through.

However there is room for a half way house, to the extent of more recyling, some frugality, less waste etcetera. My position is that capitalism is a good system, but is certainly causing some intractable problems, and its inherent in the current form of capitalism. But rather than "throw the baby out with the bath water", we need to somehow modify capitalism to work more sustainably without killing the good parts of capitalism. There are obvious ways to do this, but this is probably not the right thread for it.

Of course all this enrages the back to eden types who want a simple sort of utopia that is a clean break from the current system. But such a thing is massively problematic. Eg: if we stop using industry and large scale electricity generation, we have to burn wood. Where does a global population of 7.6 billion people get enough wood?

Don't be too hard on Greta. Bright girl but remember her age.

Nick Palmer at 01:31 AM on 14 January, 2020

nigelj@54 wrote: "However in these posts I always mention that I think climate change is deadly serious and why, to try and get across that I'm not minimising the problem, but that we just need accuracy"

100% yes!! It's the lack of accuracy in the rhetoric that motivates me to take on 'difficult' people, both denialst or doomist or left or right and all of the various combinations. I try to explain to the hyper-alarmists that their overblown rhetoric is actually a significant problem to getting the public on board and get labelled by themn as denialsist or a 'concern roll'. It's frustrating because I know that any undecided more reasonable readers who may be following can be turned away from the sensible middle path by the prejudice and misinformation on display

Thank you for taking the time to 'judge' the Barlow/Palmer contretemps. I must say I have never been so insulted by someone who is nominally on 'our side' before and that is why I needed a little confirmation that it wasn't me who had gone too far down a path...

I accept what you say. It's interesting that you sense that Barlow is/was an ecologist type. In my own 'environmentalist career' I started out completely believing the imminent tales of ecological doom spread by such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth - indeed I was a local groups FoE 'coordinator' throughout the 90s. I very much thought that modern society had us on a one way irrecoverable trip to ecocidal hell with the job of our organisations being to slow down the damage as much as possible while fearing the worst would happen. In one sense I go a little easy on Steven Barlow and others like him because I (kind of) was like him several decades ago - I know his arguments well because they were also close to mine before I wised up (I think) a little...

I came to see that there were sufficient people who cared to make a difference and I've seen many initiatives succeed in increasing recycling, protecting areas of wildlife, specific threatened species, certain types of air and water pollution etc and all without 'crushing capitalism' - which is unfortunately, an ideology that some 'extreme ecologists' get driven towards.

Are there still large ecological problems? Sure, and climate change will have many large impacts if we don't get on top of it, but the years have made me more optimistic about how the human race can handle big problems, once it is aware they are genuine and not over-hyped, as many things have been in the past.

The extreme ecologist Barlow's of this world, who use 'fear p*rn' in their rhetoric in a bid to scare the public towards their favoured solutions - in Barlow's case I suspect he is deep down a Back to Eden type - are no doubt sincere in what they believe, but they then go on to believe that their back to nature/abandon industry methodology is the only solution. I mentioned earlier on that there were 'sufficient' people who cared enough to forego the trappings of civilisation to 'save the world' but I have come to believe, at least in the West, that that figure is only about 20-25% of the general population. Try and impose policies that threaten the lifestyles, ambitions and aspirations of the large amjority too much and one will probably come up against what the President of the Finance and Economics Committee of my then government explained would be (metaphorically) a lot of angry people with swords fighting back!

That is why I reject the increasingly extreme rhetoric that Greta Thunberg, and her back seat driver advisers, are drip feeding out to the public that we have to drop fossil fuel use almost overnight - see the link...
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/01/10/greta-thunberg-and-20-youth-climate-activists-call-davos-attendees-abandon-fossil

I accept the view of many economists that such draconian action would immediately precipitate the world into a colossal mother of all global economic crashes. I think that's why IPCC targets allow for continued (but steeply reducing) use of fossil fuels as late as 2050. I think that is sensible. It's hard not to see, because of this relatively new development, that behind the Thunberg speeches that there is more than a hint of some politically minded influencers trying to engineer the destruction or hobbling of capitalism.

I worry that if such extreme action gets validated and taken on board by her many followers that the great mass of the population will be repulsed by it in short order.

In my view over-hyping dangers, calling for extreme and immediate one dimensional 'solutions' runs a grave risk of immunising the public against more measured action, and in this respect I think it a comparable to (or possibly greater, these days) problem than out and out denialism, which I think has recently moved into a new phase. In public fora and media they less and less actually deny the science directly any more but instead focus on cherry picking extreme media statements by alarmists and polticians, and innacurate 'shock horror' journalism, which they then knock down to smear the actual science in the minds of the public by proxy.

nigelj at 05:51 AM on 27 December, 2019

rayates55 @17

"You did not address many of the facts that I presented and that you had asked for."

I addressed most of them, and I'm not obliged to respond to all of your comments. Some were good, some were irrelevant.

"You are correct that I presented no solution to these problems, that is because I know of none. Neither do you."

There are plenty of obvious solutions. Start changing your lifestyle, there will be things you can do that won't hurt and will probably even leave you financially better off. I'm not going to write lists, these things are easily googled.

Lobby your local politicians, I've done this on various matters not just the climate issue and if you are skillful it can make a difference. Vote for politicians and political parties that prioritise the environment. Educate your kids. It all adds up. Things eventually reach a critical mass. Policies change and history shows this. Nothing naieve about this.

nigelj at 11:39 AM on 16 December, 2019

Wol @11

"I note the replies. They seem to put the emphasis on exactly the target that the deniers' aim at - being sustainable means living at a much lower standard of living."

I made no reference to adopting a much lower standard of living. In fact I've argued the opposite on this website, namely that expecting people to make large reductions in the use of technology and energy look completely unrealistic to me, so I do agree with you to a point.

The solutions to the climate problem that seem most plausible to me are zero carbon energy and negative emissions technologies, notwithstanding the political challenges. Lifestyle changes will help as a minor wedge measure. There are some things that can be done that would not hugely lower standards of living, like flying less and eating less meat, and both reduce expenditure so have a positive side.

I see population policies helping a bit as well, but you need to be realistic about what can be achieved, and they are also a wedge issue.

"Look at it from the other end: most authorities - and I have no reference here - would probably not argue that a population of a couple of a billion would be long-term sustainable even if all had our own standard of living. "

Agreed. I've argued for a global population of 2 billion people myself over at realclimate.org, but this is a long term plan. Business as usual population policies are a fertility rate of 2.2, taking us from 7.6 billion now to 11 billion by 2100, then stability. If we were to get fertility rates down to about 1.5 over the next couple of decades we would hit about 9 billion by 2100 and 2 billion by year 2300. I worked it out with a population calculator, you can google these.

But achieving a fertility rate of 1.5 globally over the next few decades is about as realistic as making "huge lifestyle changes". Ie not very realistic. A few countries in Europe have this number, but it took a lot of policies to get there and a lot of wealth and economic security, and they are already worried it is causing too many elderly people in proportion to young people.

Africa has scope to reduce population growth but I repeat they are not a big source of emissions and what is it you propose to do? We can lead a horse to water but cannot make it drink. You can't force them. Their population growth will still fall over a longer time frame anyway, as they become weathier and have better primary healthcare and access to contraceptives as has happened elsewhere. This will help keep temperatures from climbing to ridiculous numbers, but has little bearing on immediate goals and problems.

Even if by some miracle we got global population down faster, it won't change much by 2050, because of the demographics, so clearly won't do much to stop temperatures getting over 2 degrees! At most it will help stop temperatures getting over 4 degrees.

It is important to encourage slower population growth,and for both the climate and other reasons, but I'm just saying the world mostly already is doing this, and you have to be realistic on time frames and what can be achieved. We can talk a whole lot about it, but it distracts from the key issues of zero carbon energy etc and short to medium term Paris Accord goals.

"However we are at present in the 7 1/2 Bn regime and growing daily - clearly long-term unsustainable even without bringing the third world up to Western consumption. That statement has nothing to do with attitudes of superiority or whatever,'

Agree totally.

"Trying to contain emissions without addressing the fundamental issue - numbers - is the equivalent of running up the down escalator. A down escalator which is constantly speeding up, moreover."

The fundamental issue in terms of the climate is not population. It's the type of energy we use.

"My point is that the world is unlikely to accept the restrictions that are being debated at the moment "

The world is just as unlikely to accept radical population policies. We have to just work away at all the issues so zero carbon energy, population, and lifestyle.

"Look through a thousand random articles and papers on climate change and see how many references you can see to population numbers - hardly any."

True. I suggest there are obvious reasons. The IPCC and other authorities probably don't want yet more distractions from renewable energy goals, and they dont want to be accused of social engineering or blaming Africa for the climate problem etc.

John Hartz at 08:46 AM on 7 December, 2019

Doug @13: Here's the "About" statement posted on the website of MIT's Center for Global Change Science (CGCS). Note the final paragraph in particular:

The Center for Global Change Science (CGCS) at MIT was founded in January 1990 to address fundamental questions about the global environment with a multidisciplinary approach. In July 2006 the CGCS became an independent Center in the School of Science. The Center’s goal is to improve the ability to accurately predict changes in the global environment.

CGCS seeks to better understand the natural mechanisms in the ocean, atmosphere and land systems that together control the Earth’s climate, and to apply improved knowledge to problems of predicting global environmental change. The Center utilizes theory, observations, and numerical models to investigate environmental phenomena, the linkages among them, and their potential feedbacks in a changing climate.

The Center builds on existing programs of research and education in the Schools of Science and Engineering at MIT. The interdisciplinary organization fosters studies on topics as varied as, for example, oceanography, meteorology, hydrology, atmospheric chemistry, ecology, biogeochemical cycling, paleoclimatology, applied math, data assimilation, computer science, and satellite remote sensing.

CGCS sustains a program of discovery science with research on the natural processes in the global environment, concentrating on the circulations, cycles and interactions of water, air, energy, and nutrients in the Earth system.

Parallel CGCS activities incorporate the insight gained into climate prediction models, and climate policy analysis, with the aim of providing it in a useful way to decision-makers confronting the coupled challenges of future food, energy, water, climate and air pollution (among others). The CGCS also interacts with complementary MIT efforts in the Environmental Solutions Initiative, the Energy Initiative, and the Earth Resources Laboratory.

Given that cutting-edge research about carbon capture is occurring at MIT, you might want to nose around the CGS website to see if your question is being addressed.

nigelj at 08:21 AM on 28 November, 2019

In my experience the climate denialists who claim on internet forums that mitigating climate change will increase poverty are often the same people who downplay poverty on other forums, and who oppose government level solutions to poverty. People with inconsistent views generally aren't that bright, or they have an undisclosed personal agenda.

Grant777 at 06:23 AM on 7 November, 2019

MsGteacher,

I believe it's important for students to see how both sides of politics to skew data in their favorable conclusions. I love how you want them to think in a socratic oriented way. "Reading between the lines" is an important characteristic to develop at their age. It's easy assume in modern times that our civilization has all the answers. This new generation is exposed to many characteristics of instant gratifications - technology that provides instant feedback at a touch of a figure, etc... Its easy for young minds to see a problem and instantly want solutions to said problem. But what if we don't have all the answers? It is evident from previous climate models that durastic overestimates of environmental destruction took place, but getting them to think critically to why that was the case, would be a great take away. Why were the predictions in "The Inconvienant Truth" so far off from what we see approaching year 2020?

The basic knowledge of a high school student can easily look into the science of the molecule CO2, the positive feedback loops within the carbon cycle, and so on to result in a cynical veiw of Anthropogenic influences of Global Warming; although there are many things left out of standard text books. In pyschology, its learned that people in general feed on a negative situation 2x greater than a positive one. So thinking into the individuals studying climate change - an extremely complex system, one could see how derived parameters within a climate model might favor positive feedback loop characteristics over unknown or unpredictable negative feedback loops that would counterreact human influences over time.

Why were previous climate models overestimated? Precisely from human induced illogical assumptions in future outlook. What parameters did they miss to make them so durastically wrong?

Possibly increases to carbon sinks? https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fertilization-greening-earth

Creating an environment more favorable to organisms like Diatom?https://sciencing.com/diatom-ecosystem-5157.html

Also, solutions to "aid" our influences on our climate should be socratically reviewed. It'd be a good exercise with your students to do the same study I did for a college presentation on whether EV's are as eco-friendly as their advertisem*nts want you to believe. You can go to Tesla or other Ev's sites and find their car's Voltage/mile ratings, while taking your state's annual energy CO2 emissions / voltage produced from EIA.gov and compare it with some of the best hybrid model ICE cars. You'll find for states like West Virginia, driving a Tesla or any EV for that matter produces more CO2 than even a car getting 30 mpg. And that CO2 is all being released in one area at the power plant - easily escapable to the atmosphere instead of while driving an internal combustion engine in nature etc where CO2 sinks could readily soak it in. Also I discovered these inaccuracies without taking into account the amount of power lost in resistors over time when transferring electricity a great distance.

It makes it evident to me that people like jumping to a solution without vetting it properly. Really, it comes down to using peoples' fear in a topic like AGW for government subsities in one's new business venture. Its a good eye opener to the world. I hope this might help.

nigelj at 10:04 AM on 22 October, 2019

markpittsusa @20

Unfortunately your comments appear deeply flawed.

You say "This comment concerns my contention that economists are severely under-represented in making estimates of economic losses. ....Start by going to p. 551 of the Fourth NCA report Vol. II. This section concerns the increased mortality due to higher temperatures. In case there is any question concerning the importance of this section, Hsiang et al 2017, Fig 5., shows that premature mortality constitutes about 75% of the economic costs of climate change. So, this section is extremely important. (Hsiang, who has no educational or professional training in economics, is mentioned 33 times in the NCA report.)....The following are the economic “experts” cited directly in this section. Surprisingly, most are also not even trained in public health. How can you estimate the economic loss of premature death with no credentials in economics or in public health????... (list of people)"

Incorrect. You have only listed a few of the people involved in the section on heatwaves and related matters. Your references in this section are namely 161, 162 ,168 and they relate to a preliminary paragraph that only discusses the physical science as follows: "The projected increase in the annual number of heat wave days is substantially reduced under a lower scenario (RCP4.5) compared to a higher scenario (RCP8.5), reducing heat wave intensities161,168 and resulting in fewer high-mortality heat waves162,168 without considering adaptation ".

You have ignored the rest of the relevant sections on the economics of the heatwave issue that starts "Labor Productivity Under a higher scenario (RCP8.5), almost two billion labor hours are projected to be lost annually by 2090 ..." and numerous references in these paragraphs including 157, 160, 167, 169 and others. A quick scan of the bibliography indicates these include economics research institutes and the like.

S Hsiang is not an economist , however the other contributors to his paper include economics expertise and other experise as follows:

Solomon Hsiang1,2,*,†, Robert Kopp3,*,†, Amir Jina4,†, James Rising1,5,†, Michael Delgado6, Shashank Mohan6, D. J. Rasmussen7, Robert Muir-Wood8, Paul Wilson8, Michael Oppenheimer7,9, Kate Larsen6, Trevor Houser6

1Global Policy Laboratory, Goldman School of Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA.

2National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA, USA.

4Department of Economics and Harris School of Public Policy, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA.

5Energy Resource Group, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA.
6Rhodium Group, New York, NY, USA.

7Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA.

8Risk Management Solutions, Newark, CA, USA.

nigelj at 07:13 AM on 19 October, 2019

markpittsusa @4 , heavens above, we should never blame either corporations or ordinary people for this climate mess. Instead we should tell them what they are doing is fine. Give everybody a green light to continue the same behaviour. (sarc)

What is your solution? Hold hands and sing Kumbya? Is it "more research is needed?" Statements that technology is the answer, ie stating the obvious? Begging corporations to do better? Just what is it?

This problem clearly can't be solved purely by individual initiative, because that clearly isn't working. The solutions might be uncomfortable for some, but will require something like a carbon tax and dividend scheme. Even the IMF is on board with that.

nigelj at 08:51 AM on 11 October, 2019

markpittsusa @22, I hope you don't mind but I will weigh in on some of this. You will see why.

"1) Poverty kills. ....We also know that economic development is what cures poverty....So, we have a choice to make: (1) Put the brakes on development and/or divert massive resources to replace one form of energy with another, or (2) Keep moving ahead, limit carbon emissions, plan to adapt to some environmental changes....My assessment (which you may not agree with) is that we eliminate more poverty and save more lives with the second approach than the first."

Let's examine western countries like America. Economic growth alleviated poverty in past centuries but has been ineffective in recent decades at this. The benefits of growth have been captured by certain groups. Poverty has been reduced in recent decades by income redistribution in western countries because they have plenty of wealth to do this. I have a copy of The Economist Journal September 28th, which has a huge article on poverty in America. The Economist finds that things like food stamps and the in work tax credit and entitlement programmess have been effective in reducing poverty but don't go far enough.

Let's examine poor countries. They will need more economic growth to lift people out of poverty because in the early stages economic growth does this. However their emissions are quite low and electricity grids are limited, so climate mitigation is not really about a massive and rapid programme of replacing infrastructure. Its about building wind farms rather than building more coal power. Its an additive process. So its hard to see why climate mitigation in poor countries needs to be a huge brake on economic growth. You also mentioned the western world subsidising the climate mitigation of poor countries, so this would mean growth is not compromised.

Its also a false dichotomy to somehow consider poverty reduction versus climate mitigation. There's clearly more to the issue.

"2). A zero, or near zero, interest rate makes no sense."

I dont think anyone suggested zero interest rates for the economy as a whole. It's a question of whether a discount rate at zero or near zero is appropriate to deal with an issue like mitigating climate change and it may well be. I support capitalism and interest rates etc in broad terms.
This is my take. Discount rates make perfect sense applied to problems that have many possible solutions, and project planning, where one of the solutions may be just to invest money. The world will probably get wealthier ( we would probably argue about how much) and this alone may solve some problems. However some issues are different, for example a faulty bridge really needs to be fixed immediately because its life threatining, and as I said using the excuse that medical advances in the future may mitigate the threat would be pretty weak.

Climate change is more like the bridge problem in that mitigation needs to be fairly immediate and done whatever it costs (although phased in) and the problem is life threatening and a huge issue. And its worse because we cannot rule out catastrophic climate scenarios. We also need to be cautious because there are signs that economic growth cannot continue forever. So discount rates seem a dubious mechanism to decide on a carbon price, and at least they would need to be set quite low.

"5) The climate problem is more like “fix that old bridge that might hurt people in the year 2100”

Climate change is already hurting some communities, an issue easily enough googled.

ERRATA at 11:14 AM on 30 September, 2019

Hi again and thanks a lot for all the answers and links, I extremely appreciate it!
Unfortunately, I didn't go through all the links and I didn't read a lot since it's a bit late and I'm dead tired and have to wake up early for work. I definitely will read it as soon as I catch some time, but I'll take some time to at least put my thoughts here, hope that you'll feed me with more material so I won't have a chance to be bored tomorrow :)

First, about the "500 scientist" paper. To be honest, I didn't recognize a single name from people signed there, I'm still fairly new in this whole topic, and I recognize just some names from IPCC, however, before sharing links with you here, I did a bit of a homework and tried to look up names from "500 scientist" letter and the very first name on the list (Professor Guus Berkhout) already did arise some suspicion ((...) once worked in the oil and gas industry and became a respected professor after that. Berkhout started his career working for Shell. — Wikipedia). But digging deeper and deeper, I came across the thing which I really don't like (from any side) - articles which "prove" that some of the conclusions of non-deniers (how do we call them anyways?) were driven by money, greed, political or personal agenda. I don't have links now, but I'll give my best to share them eventually with you. This I find extremely disturbing, because whenever I come across such article/statement, my personal conclusions just fall apart and divert me from logical thinking (I suppose that's the whole point of those in the end). I simply cannot believe that people who we call "scientist" are able to degrade them to such a low level to try to discredit others by silencing them or by using silly "arguments" like pointing out their work history. Both of you (MA Rodger and Eclectic) concluded your comments by completely discrediting their letter. This is exactly what I tried to point out in my previous comment — there is no "questioning" whatsoever. How so? Are you saying that everything stated there is 100% incorrect (well, some of the statements sounds dumb even to me tbh)?
I tried to look up a bit about Lord Mockton and GWPF, but I'm really tired now and will try to continue with that tomorrow. What I found interesting in that letter what the sentence in the first paragraph on second page - Climate science should be less political, while climate policies should be more scientific. It really might be just a propaganda trick, but that sounds honest to me in some way, and I don't understand why non-deniers sit with them and give them a chance to talk (or did this happen already in the past)?

About Myles Allen's message... I didn't even notice the comment section, might go through it tomorrow a bit, although I tend to avoid such things just because of mentioned "opinion-fest". But his article somewhat triggered my skepticism again. The first time, it was this particular article which I still cannot explain to myself whether is it true or not?
(Just a quick digression, while searching for this one, I came across this link in comments section. Is this really true?)

Anyways, to cut my story short and get to some direct questions, looking forward for your answers!

@MA Rodger:
I might be wrong, but you sound a bit more pessimistic than others? Are you saying that in last couple of years there is almost no progress in cutting down emissions, because I personally believe that western world is really giving its best (well, to some extent) to do so.

To any of you:
As I said, you discredited completely the "500 scientists" letter with labelling it "unscientific nonsense", "extremist political/religious positions", stating that "they still don't have any actual evidence", "unsupported assertions, none of which stand up to scrutiny", etc. Now, pardon my ignorance, but I personally didn't get and impression that this is politically/religiously motivated and also that there might be "scrutiny material" there (e.g. "Warming is far slower than predicted" or "Climate policy relies on inadequate models"). On the other hand, current "solutions" to climate change problem (e.g. "Green New Deal" or "Climate Strike") have hidden political agendas all over the place (even SR15 report, which I didn't read yet, has a part "efforts to eradicate poverty" in the title description. I still cannot understand what "getting rid of poverty" or has to do with climate change, this sounds very political to me).

And finally, maybe a bit off topic here, but the thing which is bothering me for some time now is, how comes that no one in this climate change topic is mentioning SOx or NOx emissions? To my understanding (again, pardon my ignorance), those are directly contributing to GHG chemical reactions and we don't have enough knowledge of direct impact on climate, however, they are massively emitted from cargo ships which still make more than 90% of world's transport.

Thanks again for your time and effort, apologies for any errors/typos and general stupidity, it's getting pretty late now, I should avoid commenting at this hour :)

Postkey at 20:07 PM on 23 September, 2019

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

'Twenty five years before Greta, there was Severn, and we ignored her.
“Coming up here today, I have no hidden agenda. I am fighting for my future. Losing my future is not like losing an election, or a few points on the stock market. I am here to speak for all generations to come . . . We hear of animals and plants going extinct every day, vanishing forever . . . Did you have to worry of these things when you were my age? All this is happening before our eyes and yet we act as if we have all the time we want and all the solutions. I’m only a child and I don’t have all the solutions, but I want you to realise, neither do you. If you don’t know how to fix it, please stop breaking it.”
Reading this you could think it was from any one of the youth climate strikers. Greta Thunberg, or Saoi O’Connor from Cork. Instead, these words were spoken more than 27 years ago, by then 12-year-old Severn Cullis-Suzuki at the plenary session of the Rio Earth Summit in 1992.'

www.irishtimes.com/opinion/twenty-five-years-before-greta-there-was-severn-and-we-ignored-her-1.4022656

scaddenp at 14:23 PM on 16 September, 2019

Might also be worth pointing out that Bob's diagrams are worth studying for understanding what is going on, but for real applications (whether GPS, heat-seeking missiles or climate models), you need to do full integration of the radiative transfer equations which funnily enough back the consensus science. Observations of change in radiation as CO2 increases from both earth looking up and satellite looking down match the solutions from the RTE integration with very high precision. See the examples here. My favourite paper working through it all is Ramanathan and Coakley 1978.

I am curious as to where the "7%" came from.This paper which I believe to be the consensus position makes it more like 20%.

nigelj at 07:26 AM on 6 September, 2019

markpittsusa @1

As to your question on "what we should do now" to mitigate the climate problem I suggest read the IPCC reports here. Broadly speaking mitigating climate change comes down to adopting renewable energy solutions, which will resolve the majority of the problem, but not all of the problem.

The remainder of the problem is solved with supporting strategies of adopting negative emissions technologies through both enhanced natural sinks and systems of carbon capture and storage, and a moderate reduction in per capita use of energy and carbon intensive products.

Of course some warming is locked in, so adaptation to climate change is necessary.

John Hartz at 04:47 AM on 29 August, 2019

Recommended supplemental reading:

What Does '12 Years to Act on Climate Change' (Now 11 Years) Really Mean? by Bob Berwyn, InsideClimate News, Aug 27, 2019

Nick Palmer at 01:41 AM on 17 August, 2019

cstrouss at 17:23 PM on 10 August, 2019

Eclectic wrote:

>>> the scientific consensus is about the science, not the political response required. <<<

Yes, and I'm trying to keep that distinction clear. The consensus is that there is a problem. And given the inherently geo-political nature of the problem, I have not yet seen a workable solution proposed, let alone any wide consensus on it. In fact I very rarely see mention of the logarithmic nature of the problem, which is what makes it so intractable.

Is there another forum where those issues are discussed?

>>> ... the facts indicate that it would be foolish to delay the conversion to a renewables-based economy. Is there any other conclusion to be drawn from the consensus? <<<

Well again we have to be clear on what the consensus is. This thread is about documenting and quanitfying the consensus that AGW exists, not about its scope or the urgency of solutions. Some have asserted in the last few comments that the consensus is that the latest IPCC report is correct, which is a step in that direction, but there is no evidence presented for that or how wide the consensus may be.

>>> Cstrouss, if you have a point to make then please make it clearly and simply (and on another, more appropriate thread). <<<

I agree, my question has been answered... the consensus is that AGW exists, as indicated in the formal proposition in the header, and consistent with my other reading. I'm not the one continuing the discussion into separate issues, like the severity, urgency, and strategies.

I wrote:

"...That the AGW hypothesis is true... Or that there it is a catastrophic situation and humans must immediately... <<<

Rob Honeycutt responded:

>>> Why is this an either/or question? Can they not both be true? <<<

They can both be true, but are they both the consensus? If the consensus includes the latter, could you present evidence of that?

>>> What you're doing, though, is running off into hyperbole... <<<

Yes, guilty, that one thing was a bit overboard. My point is that what is being proposed are some very radical solutions with no real return, unless you go with the idea that if the USA spends a great deal of money, the rest of the world, including much poorer and rapidly developing regions will follow. (I heard Sanders say something along those lines the other day.)

But of course that gets far outside the domain of climate science. It is a matter for political science and psychology, and necessarily involves a tremendous amount of speculation.

>>> Therein lay the problem. Yes, if we continue to burn everything we can get dig out of the earth, most scientists will likely agree that would probably mean a total collapse of modern civilization. Lots of death, destruction and suffering. <<<

Now who is engaging in hyperbole? Are we digging everything we can out of the earth? And if so, who is proposing that we continue doing that? Is the collapse of civilization with continued CO2 emissions also part of the consensus? Documentation?

>>> Can we avoid that? Yes, of course. We are going to see significant challenges and costs due to our emissions so far. We are already seeing very good signs of progress with the cost of wind and solar continuing to fall. But there are so many more challenges we're going to see. <<<

The issue is what to do with the less affluent population. Will I be left behind? And even though I'm in the lower end of income in the USA, I'm still in the upper end in the world. I can barely afford one tank of gas per month in my 20 year old compact car now.

I know that places where large numbers of people are rising out of dire poverty for the first time, like areas in Asia and Africa, are on the ragged edge of affording energy in the first place. Even when alternatives are CLOSE to fossil fuel costs, that is a luxury they will not be able to afford. I'm sure you're aware of studies that show people will only sacrifice to improve their natural environment after a certain level of affluence is attained.

I'm sure you'll agree that it will not address the problem if the richest 20% reduce their emissions by 50%, when a billion or two people are increasing their consumption a great deal from virtually zero. So any attempts to force those nations and people to reduce (instead of increase) their use of fossil fuels will only happen if those rich nations are willing to foot the bill for alternative electrification. Certainly it is technically feasible, and would make a lot of sense, since distributed solar is a more efficient way of building rural electrical systems than power plants and long wired grids, but I have not heard this level of financial assistance being proposed.

>>> Nothing I'm saying here is controversial, and I believe this would all fall within the definition of the "scientific consensus on AGW." <<<

Well now we're getting back on topic. Is that your opinion, or do you have studies to back it? This thread refers to several studies that document a strong consensus that AGW EXISTS. I have not scoured the whole thing, but I have not seen any evidence to quantify the consensus for stronger propositions. Certainly that would have to be considerably less than the approximately 97% which apparently accept the minimalist proposition.

>>> Here's what should give you the most concern about all this: thermal inertia.... Best case scenario says we'll be able to bring emissions to zero by ~2050. That means continued warming through 2080 at a minimum. <<<

Yes yes, I understand that. But I have not heard any suggestions on how global emissions could realistically go to zero by 2050.

michael sweet wrote:

>> It is too bad that you canot afford future electric cars. According to this white paper put out by BNP Paribas (the eighth largest bank in the world) between 2020 and 2022 electric cars using renewable energy (wind and solar) will be by far the cheapest cars. You will be spending more to pollute the air for the rest of us. <<<

Wow, I'm really sorry I'm so poor I have to inconvenience rich people who can afford new cars. Thank you for the compassion and understanding for those less fortunate than yourself. And by the way, any solutions that do not address the issues of the less affluent masses will never happen.

By the time a 2020 electric car is affordable for people like me who need simple, reliable 20 year old cars, I'll be dead. Also, given battery life issues, it isn't clear whether any 2020 models will still be serviceable when they are 20 years old.

>>>... You show your true colors when you call Greta Thunberg an actor. <<<

I tried to research her. Certainly her parents and grandfather are in show biz. I couldn't find much else about her, but I'm going to assume she is not a published climate scientist who did original research. She seems to be repeating what others have told her... in other words, a celebrity spokesperson, and not a source.

Rob Honeycutt wrote:

>>> This is a genuinely bizarre statement: "Most of the IPCC signatories don't even agree with the entire report. So the IPCC report is not the consensus."... I'm very curious where you picked that up. <<<

Yeah, me too... I can't find it again now. I have seen interviews with signatories who were critical of how the process was segmented, and who very displeased with how the politicians tacked on a "summary for policymakers" that did not follow from the scientific parts of the report.

And I've read letters from other sigantories who have clarified that they do not agree with all of the conclusions, which of course is inevitable, as you won't ever get 2500 people to agree with everything in a long document, or even 97% of them.

But since I can't find my references at the moment, I'll retract it unless and until I can document it. Meanwhile, I think the burden of proof is on those who assert that the IPCC report does represent a community-wide consensus.

cstrouss at 03:42 AM on 10 August, 2019

Eclectic, I'm 100% in favor of conservation and a change-over to renewables as they become more economically feasible... more importantly I advocate serious investment in research to hasten that process. That is not an issue.

The issue is radical transformations that have been proposed like "the Green New Deal," which would have a devastating effect on low income people like myself, who will not be able to afford used electric vehicles for another decade or two. And it would have ZERO direct affect on AGW, given the logarithmic nature of the greenhouse affect and the number of people receiving electrification for the first time.

So I think it is important to view it as a long-term issue, that will necessarily involve innovation and mitigation of climate changes that cannot be avoided.

But as I said, that is all off-topic for this thread. This is about the consensus that AGW exists, not about the magnitude or solutions.