by Andy West
My book ‘The Grip of Culture’, subtitled ‘The social psychology of climate change catastrophism’, is now published.
“Climate change catastrophism is a cultural disease haunting Western society. Andy West’s excellent study of this problem explains the different drivers of this disease. It is an important contribution to a debate where reason must prevail.” – Frank Furedi, emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Kent
You can find it in paperback on Amazon US, UK and Germany, plus it is also available as a FREE pdf from my publisher, the GWPF, see here.
The rear-cover synopsis reads:
“Attempts to explain attitudes to climate change, and the refusal of large parts of society to accept the idea of an imminent catastrophe, have largely foundered. This ground breaking book overturns the existing literature, developing a powerful new model of public attitudes based on the interaction of traditional religion and a new culture – a new faith – of climate catastrophism, which is instinctively accepted or rejected. At its centre is a series of measurements of public opinion, culled from major international polls, which make a strong case that society is now in the grip of a major new religion. That case is made still more powerful because the model is able to predict real-world outcomes, such as the deployment of renewables and the prevalence of climate protest groups in different countries.
The book ends with a warning. Cultures can bind societies together and cause great civilisations to grow and prosper. But they can also lead them to disaster. If society is truly in the grip of a new cultural entity, we should be very concerned.”
See this review by Andrew Montford:
“I HAVE been working in climate and energy for nearly 15 years, and it’s fair to say that it’s not often I find something that makes me radically change the way I look at the domain. But a new book, by Andy A West, has done just that.”
My book overlaps with some social aspects explored in Judith’s book, including the catastrophe narrative, the social nature of consensuses, and the highly tangled territory where group biases interact with, and damage, the enterprise of science. However, regarding the social aspects generally I see my book as exposing the ultimate root cause of the biases and the deep social need for arbitrary consensus. It does not explore much detail about what specific institutions and efforts are undermined by which biased advocate individuals or organisations, and indeed it does not delve into climate science or the IPCC procedures at all (see the note at the end of this post). The main presence of climate catastrophism is outside of science, and its culture can be characterised and measured from its footprint in global publics (inclusive of public authorities). However, climate catastrophism works to undermine all institutions that provide ‘rationality at social scale’, including democracy, the law (chapter 14), and science (which is considered generically).
A short description of each chapter follows:
- Introduction
The opening paragraph states:
“This book is about the social psychology associated with climate change, which can be characterized and measured across national publics without reference to the physical climate system, its future state, or how it responds to human emissions of greenhouse gases. This is the case because the social psychology has emergent characteristics of its own, which are unaffected by mainstream views on the science of the ocean-atmosphere system… …or indeed the arguments of the small minority of sceptical scientists.”
- A potent new cultural entity in our society
The observed social behaviours associated with the issue of climate change (a couple of dozen are listed), circumstantially point to a ‘cultural entity’ – shorthand: ‘a culture’ – dominating the public domain with respect to this issue. Cultural entities include religions and secular ideologies – an appropriate label for this one is ‘climate catastrophism’. The chapter points out that we should be able to apply 150 years of accumulated knowledge on how cultures work, to better understand this new one. However, this obvious angle has not been pursued, apparently because the relevant social science disciplines wrongly deem that certain global catastrophe (absent dramatic action) to be incontrovertible hard science. This chapter is based on the first half of my 2015 Climate Etc post ‘Climate culture’.
- Cultural entities: deep roots and key features
This chapter covers the origin of cultural entities in the evolutionary process of cultural group selection, and describes their features, including: emotive commitment to cultures and emotive hot-buttons, the cultural use and abuse of children, (irrational) cultural consensuses, cultural narrative (which is always false, and features a population of variants), cultural policing, demonisation and the pressure of fear, cultural rejection (innate scepticism), and more. The chapter also covers features of cultures that are more than the sum of their parts, and which imbue them with an agenda of their own.
- Child prophets and proselytisers
This chapter examines the cultural role of children as prophets and mass proselytisers. The approach is based on distinguishing these roles from reality-based (i.e. not cultural) scenarios. A detailed comparison is drawn between the pitches to authority of two girl prophets – Greta Thunberg and Nonqawuse – as well as a reality-based pitch from Malala Yousafza. A similar comparison is drawn between two child movements – the Alabama children’s crusade of 1963, and the current School Strikes for Climate campaign.
The vulnerability of children to aggressively promoted cultural ‘templates’, and climate catastrophism’s psychological abuse of children, are also covered. The chapter essentially consists of my 2019 Climate Etc post ‘Child prophets and proselytisers’.
- The Catastrophe Narrative
The ‘carrier’ of a cultural entity, its DNA so to speak, is an emotive cultural narrative that consists of a main ‘umbrella’ theme, under which sits a population of narrative variants linked to the theme. This chapter examines the specific cultural narrative of ‘imminent global climate catastrophe’, as propagated by a wide array of authority sources from presidents and prime ministers on downwards, and including examples of its most common memetic variants along with the details of how these work. The chapter is based on my 2018 Climate Etc post ‘The catastrophe narrative’.
The catastrophe narrative is ubiquitous in the public domain and propagated by virtually all authority sources; a companion file lists a couple of hundred examples of authority figures pushing the catastrophe narrative, categorized by variant type and with a clickable index of quotees.
- Demonisation and denialism
This chapter examines the mis-framed concept of ‘denialism’, which allows modern secular cultures (especially climate catastrophism) to demonise dissenters en-masse, yet without this being perceived as demonisation. The widespread use of the emotive and pejorative concept of denialism is in part due to its legitimisation by a scientific paper, which has given the concept a veneer of respectability. In this chapter I use that paper as a vehicle to expose the flawed framing of the term denialism. The chapter is based on my 2016 Climate Etc post ‘The Denialism Frame’, with significant additions.
- Innate scepticism
This chapter examines the critical mechanism of ‘innate scepticism’, an instinctive reaction against cultural invasion (or local cultural overreach). This is not rational scepticism (!) and may be apt or inapt. The bulk attitudes to climate change of publics across the globe cannot be adequately explained without taking this mechanism into account. Innate scepticism can be thought of as ‘cultural disbelief’, but is not merely the mirror image or opposite of cultural belief; it is semi-independent and possesses its own characteristics. The chapter is based on my 2017 Climate Etc post ‘Innate Skepticism’, with significant additions.
- Measuring climate catastrophism
This chapter moves from characterising cultural entities generally and climate catastrophism in particular, to measuring the presence of the latter as revealed by the attitudes to climate change of publics across the globe (from the polling of 64 nations). Leveraging the fact that cultures interact allows international attitudes that are otherwise incomprehensible to be easily understood. Plotting them against a scale of national religiosity confirms the straightforward categorical patterns that are expected from cultural causation. The patterns consist of a particular set of linear series (no complex models or even multi-variate analysis are required); these are generated from a range of independent sources yet they all fit into the same single framework. All the original charts, data and sources are available in a companion Excel file (the ‘Excel-Ref’).
- The cultural measurements explained
This chapter explains in detail why we expect the categorical patterns found in chapter 8, which confirm that a cultural entity dominates the climate change domain. At the top level, this is because the attitudes of international (non-US) publics reflect their cultural identity. In turn, only two identity components really matter here: the level of commitment to climate catastrophism, and the level of commitment to religious faith (of whatever brand). However, cultural rejection is also evident, which is not simply the opposite of belief; hence it is critical to take into account the characteristics of this ‘innate scepticism’.
Additionally, the validity of the Chapter 8 measurement is provided through a parallel example, which probes a different domain in the same manner, yet one that is inarguably cultural: the domain of religion. As expected, this produces the same type of patterns.
- The full model, a dismal failure, and ‘what if?’
The measurements above are sufficient to develop a basic cultural framework, but this chapter extends that framework by considering more response types and to a much wider set of survey questions than Chapter 8 employs. Although some classes of public response to questions about climate change are non-linear with national religiosity, even these remain predictable in the sense that they always occupy an ‘envelope’ between two linear trends. Hence in principle, and for measurements at the national level, the responses to all international (non-US) survey questions can be predicted via this fuller framework,* from knowing national religiosity alone, and with the linear series having predictor values that surpass by far the existing literature. (Latterly, the literature tends to evaluate groups of social predictors rather than single ones, in an attempt to increase predictive power). All data/sources are in the Excel-Ref.
This chapter also examines the reasons why the large and long-standing social predictor literature for attitudes to climate change, has completely failed to find the above outstanding predictor, and outlines the severely myopic way in which the literature perceives the nature of the domain it is attempting to measure, while presenting some results from representative papers.
* From 2015 onwards, and notwithstanding a modest reduction in average predictor values when Covid appears.
- The USA: same rules, unique factors
The situation is more complex in the US than in all other nations, because there are four cultures that matter. In addition to climate catastrophism and religion, the huge public polarization between Dem/Libs and Rep/Cons – on a whole raft of issues and inclusive of climate change – means that these two political tribes behave as additional cultures. This chapter demonstrates that nevertheless the same cultural rules apply, and maps the Rest-of-World (RoW) framework to the US scenario, which gives further insight on the latter. In agreement with the findings of social psychologist Dan Kahan, attitudes to climate change in the US are still about cultural identity, but not as he suggests owed only tribal political identity, instead as owed to all four cultures, two of which (climate catastrophism and religion) dominate the RoW picture. All data/sources are in the Excel-Ref.
- Climate catastrophism and policy: renewables
Having verified and indeed measured the presence of climate catastrophism, we can use the framework developed in chapters 8 – 10 to predict real-world outcomes, such as policy implementation related to climate change and Net-Zero. This chapter demonstrates that the commitment to renewables (wind-turbines and solar) across nations, is not owed to the climate or climate exposure of nations, or to science or technology or even to rationality, but to cultural motivation. The analysis of renewables commitment is executed step by step and supported by charts at each step; briefly, the end step is shown to be approximately same for the commitment to electric vehicles across nations. All data/sources are in the Excel-Ref. This chapter is based on my 2020 Climate Etc post ‘Cultural motivations for wind and solar deployment’.
- Climate catastrophism and society: activism
In addition to the policy prediction above, this chapter shows how the cultural framework can accurately predict the level of climate activism across nations. This is demonstrated both for Extinction Rebellion groups and the Childrens’ Strikes for Climate movement. It is further demonstrated that publics who are reacting culturally to the issue of climate change, cannot be educated with further information in order to rectify this undesirable situation. This is because publics also view all information on climate change as cultural in itself, and so will accept it or reject it on that basis, no matter what the content actually is.
- The characteristics revisited
This chapter further examines the list of social behaviours first introduced in Chapter 2, in light of all that has been learned from the rest of the book. It then focuses on how a burgeoning new cultural entity will undermine (prior) law, and even the moral foundations that the law and much else within society are built upon. A generic list of ways in which this occurs is assembled, and real-world examples are shown from the climate change domain that fulfil all of this list. This chapter is an expansion of a section in my 2015 Climate Etc post ‘Climate culture’.
- Historical comparisons and social impacts
This chapter describes some particulars of various historic cultural entities, especially with respect to their adverse impacts upon society. While strong caveats regarding historic comparisons with climate catastrophism (or other modern cultures) are emphasised, we can nevertheless learn from these, and for obvious reasons negative impacts are the issue that we most need to be alert to. The chapter also covers some thoughts about how much further the grip of climate catastrophism might extend and tighten, additionally and briefly how, if possible, the culture might be tamed.
Note1:
Apart from examining, in Chapter 5, some catastrophe narrative variants that are propagated by a small minority of scientists, this book does not delve into the disputes and positions of scientists about climate change, whether mainstream, sceptical, or luke-warmer. All the attitudes directly measured are public ones, as captured by mainstream pollsters and bodies such as the EU and the UN. Public authorities are characterised by their very many catastrophe narrative quotes (Chapter 5), and are effectively measured by proxy through the impact of their policies across nations (Chapter 12). Yet this likewise does not imply anything particular about the attitudes of climate scientists. Having said this, the gold-standard for a secondary confirmation that the catastrophe narrative is cultural, which we can see is the case from both textual analysis and public attitude measurements, is that it also contradicts mainstream climate science (as well as sceptical science).
Note 2:
Readers will be relieved to note that my first-rate and diligent editor, Andrew Montford, has enormously improved the readability of my text, including those chapters that are based on prior guest posts here. However, note that this is necessarily still an academic work, rather than having a popular science format.
Twitter: follow Andy at @AndyWest_tweets
Thanks Judith!
Splendid work, Andy. Delusions medieval and modern are similar manifestations of a common theme.
I’m reminded of Gibbon’s observation that in the Roman Empire “the people believed that all religions were equally true; the philosophers believed that all religions were equally false; and the magistrates believed that all religions were equally useful.”
Thus the belief in climate peril and our culpability persists despite the obvious truths that:
CO2 at this time, at these levels, is not in control of climate and
We are not in control of CO2.
Thankyou, jimmww, much appreciated.
That Gibbon quote is nice!
To which I would add a couple of quotes from Charles Mackay’s work, first published in1841 “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds”
“Every age has its peculiar folly: Some scheme, project, or fantasy into which it plunges, spurred on by the love of gain, the necessity of excitement, or the force of imitation.”
and
“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”
I earned a Master of Science in this field, unlike your other commenters.
Have none of you been outside?
Are you aware of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation?
Ocean Acidification?
Politics stop at reality.
George J Kamburoff – the coal plants I’ve been around emit nothing but steam.
And noise and CO2 and radionuclides, and other nasties.
I gave a seminar in one once.
“Courtesy of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
A new study finds ocean acidification is already dissolving the shells and damaging the sensory organs of young Dungeness crab off the West Coast.
So far, it’s unclear what that means for Oregon’s most valuable fishery.
The ocean absorbs about a quarter of the carbon dioxide released by burning fossil fuels and that triggers a chemical process that makes ocean water more acidic.
Researchers with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration were surprised to see acidic water having so much impact so soon.
“We found dissolution impacts to the crab larvae that were not expected to occur until much later in this century,” said Richard Feely, senior scientist with NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory and one of the co-authors of the study.”
George J Kamburoff – read up on the bicarbonate buffer system. Here, I’ll make it easy for you.
https://www.khanacademy.org/science/biology/water-acids-and-bases/acids-bases-and-ph/v/buffer-system
West Coast Dungeness Crab Stable or Increasing Even With Intensive Harvest, Research Shows
https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/feature-story/west-coast-dungeness-crab-stable-or-increasing-even-intensive-harvest-research-shows
Dungeness crabs are doing find, but don’t let facts stand in the way of your hyperventilation.
Why Has the Price of Dungeness Crabs Dropped So Much?
Unfortunately, due to the economy and recessions, there’s not a huge demand for Dungeness crab, which many consider a luxury. Therefore, people aren’t buying crabs. A way for crabbers to make up for the low prices is by catching more stock. However, many fisheries closed early last year (2022) due to low harvest numbers, so obtaining more crab is not always possible.
https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/feature-story/west-coast-dungeness-crab-stable-or-increasing-even-intensive-harvest-research-shows
Jim2,
The crab story is like suggesting that polar bear numbers rebounded so dramatically because we stopped shooting them to make rugs. But that’s not as emotionally resonant as talking about “rotten ice” or global warming.
It’s been observed that polar bear numbers are inversely related to arctic whale numbers, and they thrive in opposite climate states. This creates a dilemma for people who insist we must save all the cute animals, because saving the bears means the whales die and saving the whales means the bears die. Lots of people can’t deal with that emotionally, because their six-year-old self thinks “But we have to save both!”
Thinking like an adult is hard.
GJK – if you assert some study says this or that, please supply a link. Thank you.
Polar bears, seals, Dungeness crabs, and the Great Barrier Reef of Australia are all doing just fine.
Because you say so and want to believe it?
There is no real evidence to the contrary, GJK.
George comes across as a genuine high priest wannabe of the new religion. George – this is not ONLY “politics” – it’s an emerging religion. Much like we have Stone Age religions, Iron Age religions: I suggest “Climate Crisis” is the new Solar or Wind Age religion.
This is a really fascinating book and deep dive. It was a real journey and I can much more easily understand the overlap with other narratives. I was particularly interested in ‘innate skepticism’ and ‘cultural entities’. Great job, Andy!
Thanks, Jillybean, very much appreciated :)
George J Kamburoff | July 28, 2023 at 1:52 pm |
“Worldwide petroleum subsidies are over five trillion dollars per year ($5,000,000,000,000/yr!)”
As far as the USA goes, that is an anti fossil fuel talking point that has been throughly discredited, though it remains an often repeated talking point which the activists show zero comprehension of falsity of the claim. The Fossil fuel industry is the most heavily taxed industry in the US when accounting for all the federal and state income tax on net income, severance tax based on gross revenue- not net income, various excise taxes , federal and state land overrides based on gross revenue.
I got that number from oil price dot com. Look it up.
George J Kamburoff | July 28, 2023 at 3:26 pm |
I got that number from oil price dot com. Look it up.”
George – I am quite familiar with the frequent / unsupported / talking points claiming massive fossil fuel subsidies. That is my field, federal and state taxation. I see those fossil fuels studies frequently in publications with high readership.
Those claims are devoid of basis in reality, based on distortions of any economic concepts.
I would expect some one with an MBA, / MS with advanced engineering and math skills to quickly recognize the distortions,. I would expect someone to quickly recognize the agenda driven nature of the claim. Was I wrong in this case?
You did not look it up, you just implied what you want to believe.
You are incorrect.
George I am extremely familiar with those fossils fuel subsidies claims. There are a few hundred of those out there. They are all based of false premises and distortions of basic economic concepts
It not a question of whether I chose to believe them or not.
The question is why activists would so be fooled so easily
Same with the junk science gas stove causes asthma. Multiple repeated statements of the same false claim doesn’t turn a false statement into a true fact
I read the studies on gas stoves myself. You are incorrect.
George J Kamburoff | July 28, 2023 at 6:27 pm |
“I read the studies on gas stoves myself. You are incorrect.”
George – As I previously stated – someone with a masters of science should have better analytical skills,
Gas Stove asthma attribution study – multiple red flags – near academic fraud,
Meta study with design parameters specifically designed to remove studies which show no correlation.
Meta study with design parameters specifically designed to use studies with only weak association
Population attribution fraction – which is well documented in the professional literature to be meaningless when there are multiple confounding factors
negative correlation with asthma & gas stove rates in 20 of the 50 states,
concentration levels vastly too low to have any affect on asthma.
CDC and numerous asthma advocacy groups dont even list gas stoves in the top ten of causes, yet the “peer reviewed “study has the correlation at 12.9%
Tell me you didnt spot any of the aforementioned red flags.
Joe k wrote:
George I am extremely familiar with those fossils fuel subsidies claims. There are a few hundred of those out there. They are all based of false premises and distortions of basic economic concepts
It not a question of whether I chose to believe them or not.
Joe: Do you accept the science that traditional air pollution is prematurely killing 1 in 5 people globally?
That fossil fuels are causing climate change for at least the next 100,000 years?
If so, who is paying for these damages?
It’s not the fossil fuel companies, is it?
That means they get a subsidy — a cost of their product they aren’t paying for.
Apple do I accept that air pollution is killing 1 in 5 ?
Absolutely not – those studies are junk science & and you know they are junk science- or you should know at least if your weren’t so gullible
Go downwind of a coal plant and breathe deeply.
George J Kamburoff | July 29, 2023 at 10:40 am |
Go downwind of a coal plant and breathe deeply.
George and Appell – that doesnt get anywhere near 1 in 5
maybe 1 in 5,000.
Thought guys had degrees in math and science –
George J Kamburoff | July 28, 2023 at 3:26 pm |
I got that number from oil price dot com. Look it up.
George Kamburoff
Did you notice the multiple articles from oil price dot com never provide any detail of the supposed subsidies. As a engineer with a masters degree in science, the omission of any detail should have been your first clue to the falsity of the story line
Being a former engineer for a large power company and having earned a Master of Science in Energy and the Environment, I had PV panels installed eight years ago, with my estimated payback of 15 years, . . the right thing for an eco-freak to do. Before they could be installed, we acquired a VW e-Golf electric car. The savings in gasoline alone took the solar system payback down to 3 1/2 years. So, we added a used Tesla Model S, P85, and that took the payback down to less than three years, which means we now get free power for household and transportation.
We do not need to go to gas stations, we fuel up at home at night with cheap baseload power. During the daytime, the PV system turns our meter backwards powering the neighborhood with clean local power, which we trade for the stuff to be used that night. If we paid for transportation fuel, the VW would cost us 4 cents/mile to drive, and the Tesla would cost 5 cents/mile at California off-peak power prices.
No oil changes are a real treat along with no leaks. And since it has an electric motor, it needs NO ENGINE MAINTENANCE at all. We do not go “gas up”, or get tune-ups or emissions checks, have no transmission about which to worry, no complicated machined parts needing care.
Do you still pay for electricity and gasoline?
Could you fill us in on the details?
1. Total cost of PV system.
2. Subsidies for your grid system (money from the rest of us)
2. Cost of VW e-Golf
3. Cost of Tesla
4. Do you feed into the grid. If so, what is the payment per kWh.
5. The name of your grid organization.
It’s easy to make such claims, but they usually fall apart under scrutiny.
The PV system cost $12,400 and has produced 49.93 MWh (almost 50,000 kWh) worth $14,966.56. The three year payback was in gasoline savings alone. We bought a 2015 e-Golf as the new models were coming out. It was a fully-loaded demo with 40 miles on it and in perfect condition with all warranties, for $21,000 off the full price. The PV system and the car cost an even $30,000.
I feed into the grid but get no payment. It turns my meter backwards, “banking” that production for when I need to take it out.
My grid connection is with PG&E.
Going to find problems with that?
Do you still pay for electricity and gasoline?
George J Kamburoff, suppose ten million California home and car owners suddenly started making the same kinds of decisions you have and quickly adopted your energy management philosophies whole hog.
If this happened tomorrow, what would be the immediate impact on California’s energy consumption patterns and on its per-capita costs? How about the mid-term future, say the next ten years? How about the long-term future, say after ten years and beyond?
“How many EV vehicles are in California?
As of the end of Q1 2023, California now has 1,523,966 total EV sales”
I am a former senior engineer in technical services for PG&E and understand how the system will react. If the load is there, the power will be there.
What you are neglecting is that;
1. You are demanding power during peak times and net producing during low demand times. If everyone did this the system would become unstable.
2. You apparently do not need to travel large distances. The distance between charges for EV is approximately 100 miles. Whereas typical range for vehicles is about 400 miles. Obviously these figures vary considerably between vehicles of both types, but you neglecting them entirely is not a good comparison.
3. You are neglecting battery replacement entirely. Your EVs require battery replacements. These are expensive both in terms of environmental damage and cost.
4. Even electric motors are not maintenance free, nor are the suspension, power train, tires, etc. Further possibly no oil, but grease and other petroleum products are required. It might surprise you how much of a EV vehicle is made from petroleum products. Certainly all plastics. A quick web search yeilded this https://www.visualcapitalist.com/how-much-oil-electric-vehicle/. I have not vetted the information, but it is not as simple as you make it sound, regardless of whether the link is propaganda. If it is propaganda, it is no worse than your propaganda. The weight of the batteries is definitely a problem for EVs. If you compare a vehicle in the same class as your EVs, and a gasoline engine, which is heavier? My guess is that the electric engine is much lighter than the gasoline engine and transmission, but that the batteries more than make up for the difference.
5. I would be surprised if you were including the reduction in power curve that happens as the PV cells age. Most of the time people just assume either the nameplate capacity or at best the capacity seen when the PV cells are new.
It is clear that you are not really comparing apples to apples in your payback figures, but you don’t really show the figures so it is hard to see where other than in general statements.
I am all for any power source that makes sense when you add up all the costs and compare real numbers from cradle to grave. In my experience power that fluctuates like wind and solar are good for up to a percentage (that depends on the system) of the total power. After that they start causing issues and instability. A power company that I worked for in the past had a goal of 30% solar and wind, and offset that with large natural gas peaking units to keep the system stable. Not sure if they ever achieved the 30%, but they did not achieve it without natural gas to keep the system stable. The number that I have heard over and over is that fluctuating power sources being at 15% is not a problem. After that, the system needs to be designed with added capacity to offset the fluctuations to keep stable power. Remember power needs are by the millisecond, not by the hour or day. If power needs are not met then the system goes down, and this happens quickly. Therefore taking averages over hours, days, weeks, etc. are pretty meaningless. Your system may be paying off for you, but what about the thousands of people who are also on your system that are supporting your system?
No, my batteries do not need to be replaced, even for the 10 year-old Tesla which can still kick the butt of your polluter.
Most of my power production comes from the solar system, which paid back four years ago in gasoline savings alone.
Look into what percentage of Texas load is served by wind power.
I drive on 1000-mile trips and do it free. My Model S is grandfathered into free supercharging and superchargers are every 130 miles which is two hours on the road. By then I need a leg stretch and a fluid exchange. Otherwise I charge at home at night using that day’s production banked in the grid.
Yes, fossil fuel plants are being replaced by cheaper and cleaner renewables, and he first to go are the peaking plants, now replaced by cheaper batteries. Most of those were gas plants.
You give us nameplate capacity, but don’t elaborate as to actual power produced, so I assume that you used nameplate capacity for your calculations. How many hours did you assume for the nameplate capacity? Your calculations are very lacking in detail for an engineer. How about actual power? Do you have any way to measure this? You say that you turn the meter backwards and then when you use power the meter turns forward. This is a very bad way to calculate your usage on the system. Normally, when you pay for power you pay for the distribution system, and all of the components of it (it is incorporated in the price). When you get the same amount when you supply power as when you take power, you are in effect robbing everyone on your system because you are not paying for the system any more. Further, you are not paying the peak power rate and you are not “selling” your power at the off-peak rate. The power company is giving you a gift or subsistence that you are taking advantage off. This may be legal, but do you really think it is moral?
I already covered that. Look it up in this thread.
I posted cost and output in real numbers about this already.
I pay for the use of the distribution system in my bill.
My neighbors have PV systems, too
I do NOT sell power..
“No, my batteries do not need to be replaced, even for the 10 year-old Tesla …”
Unrealistic, every battery needs to be replaced, and batteries do not last as long as vehicles in general. The fact that you are not taking these costs into consideration speaks volumes.
“… which can still kick the butt of your polluter.”
Purely virtue signalling.
“Most of my power production comes from the solar system, …”
Does not tell us anything about how environmentally friendly that system is. Does not take into account all the costs that you are pushing onto others that do not have the capital to buy PV cells like you did.
“which paid back four years ago in gasoline savings alone.”
The calculation of which can not be confirmed by your figures.
“Look into what percentage of Texas load is served by wind power.”
Texas that had power issues a few years ago? Hardly an example of a stable system.
“I drive on 1000-mile trips …”
But no mention of how long it takes to recharge your car.
“and do it free. My Model S is grandfathered into free supercharging and superchargers are every 130 miles which is two hours on the road.”
Another example of others paying for your power.
“By then I need a leg stretch and a fluid exchange. Otherwise I charge at home at night using that day’s production banked in the grid.”
You power your car at night when your solar cells are not producing power. Another example of your system not really paying your fair share. You would not be able to do this if your system was not connected to a power system which you do not pay for.
“Yes, fossil fuel plants are being replaced by cheaper and cleaner renewables, and he first to go are the peaking plants, now replaced by cheaper batteries. Most of those were gas plants.”
They may be doing this in California, but not in Arizona. During California Peak usage hours they get power from coal powered plants in Arizona. During peak wind and solar production Arizona turns off, or brings their coal plants to half power. However, Arizona realizes that power during peak is worth a premium and power that they get back from California they only accept at a discount.
The only reason that California can put so much unreliable power in their system is because Arizona is there to keep their system from being unstable. Batteries are not cheaper than peaking power plants. If you have different data I would love to see it.
My gosh, emotion and political prejudice have dominated that post.
I PAY for use of the distribution system.
The other accusations are nonsense.
This is not your field, it is mine.
Worldwide petroleum subsidies are over five trillion dollars per year ($5,000,000,000,000/yr!)
“My gosh, emotion and political prejudice have dominated that post.”
State one thing that I have said that is “emotion and political prejudice”. I can name several of yours.
1. “I PAY for use of the distribution system.”
Really? You pay if your meter turns more to the usage side than the other. You do not pay for the power system for the power you produce that turns the meter the other way. This is where you are wrong also that “you do not sell your power”. When you turn the meter backwards it is the same thing as selling your power back to the power system. Basically when you have excess power you sell it back to the system.
2. “The other accusations are nonsense.”
Show how they are nonsense, a blanket sentence like that just uses common propaganda techniques to not really address the issues, but yet make an emotional argument.
3. “This is not your field, it is mine.”
Really? This is not the case, (I do not presume to know what your field is, but you presume mine) but even if it was, it is purely an argument from authority which makes it an emotional argument not a real argument.
What part of “Being a former engineer for a large power company and having earned a Master of Science in Energy and the Environment, ” did you miss?
I was a Senior Engineer in Technical Services solving power problems in customer factories.
I pay a monthly charge for the use of the distribution system.
Stop your accusations.
What part of “I do not presume to know what your field is, but you presume mine” do you not understand?
I told you what my fields are, and your posts do not include anything to make me assume the same about you.
What is your field?
From Scientific American
A Major Ocean Current Is at Its Weakest Point in 1,000 Years
By Chelsea Harvey, E&E News on April 27, 2022
George J Kamburoff | July 28, 2023 at 2:20 pm |
What part of “Being a former engineer for a large power company and having earned a Master of Science in Energy and the Environment, ” did you miss?
I was a Senior Engineer in Technical Services solving power problems in customer factories.
George – I presume with your background, you have the ability to ascertain the validity of the claims made by Jacobson in his 100% renewable studies
Yes, you told us what your field is. Presumably to try to make up for you emotional and political arguments. I may have inadvertently told you what my field is. However, I make my arguments not from an emotional “I am the expert”, but let them stand on their own. Someone’s credentials are not as important as the veracity of the argument. If a non-expert wants to take apart my arguments then I will respond to them the same as an expert.
Where did I say “I am the expert”?
“Where did I say “I am the expert”?” You did not say those exact words. I will leave it to others to decide if you said that same thing in other words.
atandb,
You must have miss this earlier discussion:
https://judithcurry.com/2023/07/11/alarming-deterioration-of-us-national-weather-service-tornado-warnings/?replytocom=991760#respond
I can 100% backup what George has said. I went solar in 2012, bought a low mileage Volt PHEV in 2015 and haven’t had an electric bill since 2012. The solar system was paid off in 2018 and has generated over 109MWh so far.
PS: My Volt also serves as my backup system for my home’s critical loads when the grid is down.
Sorry, wrong link.
https://judithcurry.com/2023/07/11/alarming-deterioration-of-us-national-weather-service-tornado-warnings/#comment-991760
“atandb,
You must have miss this earlier discussion:
https://judithcurry.com/2023/07/11/alarming-deterioration-of-us-national-weather-service-tornado-warnings/?replytocom=991760#respond
I can 100% backup what George has said. I went solar in 2012, bought a low mileage Volt PHEV in 2015 and haven’t had an electric bill since 2012. The solar system was paid off in 2018 and has generated over 109MWh so far.
PS: My Volt also serves as my backup system for my home’s critical loads when the grid is down.”
No, I looked at your discussion, and you show unlike George that PV cells have a power curve that means that the power decreases as the cells get older which is one of my points.
My other points still stand, as has been demonstrated many times on this website. I never said or implied that you could not generate power with PV cells. I do not dispute that you have generated 109MWh. I would have to look at how many years that represents, etc. I have no other information to dispute that you have not represented your system accurately. Therefore, I have not done the calculations, and trust that since you have represented things accurately (as far as I know) in other areas that this is also accurate. I do not dispute that you could use a volt for critical loads when the grid is down. I doubt that it will last for long, especially if you are running AC as part of your critical loads, but have no quarrel with your assessment as I doubt that you have experienced a long grid failure as they are fairly uncommon.
Li-ion battery degradation is real. My Model S started out with 265 miles but is down now to just over 250.
But it is ten years old, being a 2013.
How you get two-way power with a 2015 Volt?
One of our ICEVs is over 15 years old and has over 150,000 miles on it. The other is over 20 years old and has over 100,000 miles. The tanks can be filled in a couple of minutes and the tank maintains 100% capacity over it’s lifetime (is doesn’t get smaller like the charge of an EV battery). Natural gas backs up electricity from the grid and unlike you, I didn’t get anyone else’s money to buy the vehicles or the gas – instead I’m helping you pay for yours due to the subsidies and free charges you get. Freeloader.
World-wide petroleum subsidies are over five trillion dollars per year ($5,000,000,000,000!)
– from oil price dot com.
Parasite.
BTW, I want to thank all of you for a decent dialogue.
It’s the only way we hear the “other” side.
And learn how we must be sure of ours.
We have replaced gas peaking plants with batteries in California.
George, like so many Climate Doomers, you don’t know the differenece between a subsidy and a depletion allowance. A depletion allowance applies to any mining enterprise. It’s just a recognition of value already removed from the ground. You, on the other hand, get money handed to you to help buy your solar and probably your EVs. THAT’S a subsidy.
A depletion allowance is the scam put into law by oil-rich Texans like the porky Hunt brothers.
Oh, by calling me a “doomer”, you think you have responded. Want to discuss Ocean Acidification?
I’ll have many questions for you.
The ocean pH is still more than 8.0, down from 8.15, so acidification is still a long way off. But ocean pH varies by 1 or so throughout the day, at least in the upper layers, because plants photosynthesize. In fresh water variations are more dramatic, varying from 6 to 8.5, but some freshwater fish such as tetras like a pH of 4 to 6.
Of course ocean life evolved for a pH of 6 to 7, but life has amazingly managed to adapt to the extremely alkaline oceans we have today by excreting a protective slime layer. Perhaps we’ll be able to get ocean pH lowered back to more acceptable levels that don’t stress the fish so much.
Maybe Bill Gates will work on that.
George Turner wrote:
The ocean pH is still more than 8.0, down from 8.15, so acidification is still a long way off.
No George.
The ocean’s average pH is decreasing. (That is, its acidity is increasing.) The ocean is acidifying.
George,
RE: Volt as backup power.
I use a 1500W pure sine wave DC->AV inverter. I connected a couple of heavy copper welders cables (0 Gauge) wired to the Volt’s 12V battery with a quick disconnect plug. If the grid goes down I island the house by throwing the main breaker so I can then back feed the AC (110V) into one leg of the split buss. The Volt’s onboard inverter for the main traction battery (400V) automatically keeps the 12V battery charged even while I am drawing 1500W. Once the main battery drops to about a 10% charge the gas engine fires up and the onboard genset recharges the traction battery. I think I could run like this for days until my gas tank is empty.
Good News for our fossil fuel addicts!
Every time you inject your car with that sweet refined petroleum you can cruise 18% farther!
“The U.S. government wants to raise the fuel economy of new vehicles 18% by the 2032 model year so the fleet would average about 43.5 miles per gallon in real world driving.
The proposed numbers were released Friday by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which eventually will adopt final mileage requirements.
Currently the fleet of new vehicles must average 36.75 mpg by 2026 under corporate average fuel economy standards adopted by the administration of President Joe Biden, who reversed a rollback made by former President Donald Trump.”
My 2013 Volt uses about 3.5 KWh per mile and my electricity costs $0.06.
@David Appell
Going from pH 8.1 to pH 8.0 isn’t acidifying, it’s neutralizing, and getting closer to what the natural pH levels were long before humans came along. You see, ocean life evolved with the pH was actually acidic (< 7.0). Weathering and chemical processes keep making ocean processes more alkaline by destroying the planet's crustal materials and poisoning the water. Ocean salt content has also kept increasing, and we should probably try to address both problems by reducing the salt content through evaporative salt flats, and by decreasing the pH as best we can, so the fish don't have to go to such extremes just to survive in at a pH that wants to dissolve flesh.
Freshwater fish are happily little fish because they get to swim in water that's at a pH of 6 or 7, with a vastly lower salt content, just like the oceans used to be until too many nasty inorganic alkaline compounds got dumped into them, as if the oceans were some vast dump site. It's up to us to clean up the mess that our oceans were becoming.
And of course the ocean pH swings about 1 full point every day, so a tenth of a point toward neutral over a hundred years isn't nearly fixing things fast enough.
all your arguments will not save the Dungeness crabs.
Why do thy have the technical term of acidification if it is not acidification? Is it “Less-basification?
George J Kamburoff – Any issue with Dungeness crabs has nothing to do with about 200 more PPM of CO2. If you believe it does, prove it.
Study: Ocean Acidification Is Dissolving Shells Of Young Dungeness Crab
By Cassandra Profita (OPB)
Portland, Ore. Jan. 30, 2020 4:15 p.m.
Probably for the same reason we have the words “northerly” and “southerly”, which should not be confused with ending up north or south of the equator. It’s not possible for us to turn the oceans acidic because we simply don’t have enough acid to counteract a billion years of global weathering and erosion. There are now just too many alkaline buffers in the ocean.
Just to put the buffers in perspective, for every human being on this planet, ocean water contains 6 million tonnes of solid materials (salts, carbonates, etc). That’s 6 million tonnes for you, personally, and me personally, and everyone else. I don’t even have room to store 6 million tonnes of anything.
hat’s like you, and every other human, having to fill up an ocean-going cargo carrier with 25,000 tonnes of material, then dump it in the ocean, and then repeat the load and dump process 240 times.
To fill up the cargo ship, you’d have to buy one of the big dump trucks and spend a year hauling five 14-tonne loads per day to the ship. You, and everyone else on the planet, would then have to repeat that process the next year, and the next, every day for 240 years. That’s how much solid material is dissolved in sea water – 6 million tonnes per person. If it was oil by weight, that much mass would cost $3.6 billion dollars per human inhabitant of this planet. For every billionaire who could afford to spend that, we’d need three million other billionaires to match him, and they simply don’t exist because not every human on the planet is a billionaire.
By mass, it’s a million times more than the amount of CO2 we emit in a decade, or 10 million years worth of human CO2 emissions. So ocean pH is never again going to be acidic. There’s simply no way to drop the pH back down to 7, and ocean pH was even lower than that when ocean life evolved.
All those thick layers of limestone you see, chock full of corals, crinoids, trilobites, and other fossils were laid down when the ocean pH was about 7. Ocean life obviously does fine when the water is much less alkaline, and fish thrive in freshwater that’s quite acidic (pH far less than 7.0).
Perhaps more to the point, the pH range for aquariums is about 6.5 to 8. For a salt-water reef tank, folks try to keep the pH between 7.5 and 8.5, but in a thriving lake with lots of water plants, the pH might vary between 5.7 and 9.6 throughout the day. In Great Barrier Reef the pH will swing by over a full point throughout the day, depending on sunlight.
And yet alarmists have people convinced that a pH swing of 0.1 is catastrophic.
The process is to observe a tiny trend on a graph, then blame the trend on man, and then by default the trend must represent a planet-destroying catastrophe caused by mankind’s greed and gluttony, and the only solution is for mankind to repent and atone for his sins.
The narrative has nothing to do with science, and everything to do with a cultural belief system rooted in the same social psychology as most religions and revolutionary cultural movements.
The Dungeness crab fishery generates about $170 million a year in revenue for the West Coast commercial fishing fleet.
Courtesy of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
A new study finds ocean acidification is already dissolving the shells and damaging the sensory organs of young Dungeness crab off the West Coast.
So far, it’s unclear what that means for Oregon’s most valuable fishery.
The ocean absorbs about a quarter of the carbon dioxide released by burning fossil fuels and that triggers a chemical process that makes ocean water more acidic.
Researchers with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration were surprised to see acidic water having so much impact so soon.
“We found dissolution impacts to the crab larvae that were not expected to occur until much later in this century,” said Richard Feely, senior scientist with NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory and one of the co-authors of the study.
George Turner:
It’s not possible for us to turn the oceans acidic because we simply don’t have enough acid to counteract a billion years of global weathering and erosion
Absolutely nobody says the oceans have turned acidic. Scientists say the oceans are acidifying. Catch the difference?
Every solution has a property called “acidity,” regardless of its pH.
When the measured acidity is increasing, the solution is properly said to be “acidifying.”
That’s the case with the ocean.
Get it now?
George Turner wrote:
Going from pH 8.1 to pH 8.0 isn’t acidifying, it’s neutralizing
It’s acidifying. The pH is decreasing.
Every solution has a property called “acidity,” regardless of its pH.
When the measured acidity is increasing, the solution is properly said to be “acidifying.”
That’s the case with the ocean.
jim2 wrote:
Could you fill us in on the details?
1. Total cost of PV system.
2. Subsidies for your grid system (money from the rest of us)
2. Cost of VW e-Golf
3. Cost of Tesla
4. Do you feed into the grid. If so, what is the payment per kWh.
5. The name of your grid organization.
Funny. When I’ve asked you about the costs of adaptation, you ignore the question entirely.
Okay, tell me how much you spent on electricity, gasoline, oil changes, emissions checks, and engine maintenance for the last four years. I can tell you how much I spent right now: $0.00.
George Turner wrote:
…it’s neutralizing, and getting closer to what the natural pH levels were long before humans came along.
What data says ocean pH was near neutral (or less) before humans came along?
Or that, as you seem to be implying, humans caused an ocean pH > 7?
George Turner wrote:
And of course the ocean pH swings about 1 full point every day, so a tenth of a point toward neutral over a hundred years isn’t nearly fixing things fast enough.
See: weather vs climate.
@David Appell,
You could say the ocean is acidifying, which is a good choice for scaring children and fools, or you could say it’s moving towards a neutral pH, which more properly conveys the important information. Water with a pH of 7 is neutral, and the further the pH moves from 7 the more damaging a solution becomes to plant and animal life. Hydrochloric acid is bad, but so is sodium hydroxide.
Geologists know quite well that the oceans started out as acidic, with a pH somewhere around 6. Over time the pH slowly increased, likely hitting a value near 7 maybe 500 to 800 million years ago. Our blood is acidic, and has a low salt content, because that’s what the ocean chemistry was when we decided to crawl onto land. No scientist really disputes any of that history.
As for daily swing of 1 full pH point, which you ascribe to weather, wait till you find out about the seasonal swings! pH is very temperature sensitive, and as swimmers all know, near surface ocean temperatures are very different in the summer than in the winter, especially shallow bays and inlets where life thrives because the ocean pH shifts from season to season by far larger amounts than the annual average, just as the pH has shifted seasonally for 4 billion years. For example, in some bays it will shift from 8.15 to 7.95 and back every year, as a daily average, with a shift of a full point or more during every day of that seasonal shift.
As I said, show any trend line to an alarmist and say its linked to mankind, and they’ll see a catastrophe. It doesn’t matter what the trend line is or which direction it’s going, because any trend line in any graph can be used as evidence of their narrative. Lots of early Christian naturalists and scientists did the same thing, taking almost any observation as a sign that mankind was disappointing God, and pointing to the need to atone for our sins and return to the true path He laid out for us. Such religious narratives were commonly woven throughout papers that appeared in The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in its early days, and that same religious fervor is now found all throughout science.
@ George J Kamburoff – My youngest ICEV is over 15 years old. My experience and expenditures in that time aren’t comparable to the 4 year stint with your EV. I doubt our paths will cross if your EV lasts that long. Somehow I doubt it will.
My Tesla is ten years old. The VW is seven years old.
When do we have to start worrying about the battery?
Do you personally know of one or are you are settling for misinformation?
When should you start worrying about the battery? Ignorance is bliss, as they say.
The case of an early Volkswagen ID.3 1ST that appeared to lose 7.5% of its initial battery capacity after the first year of use is back – Volkswagen has confirmed a substantial capacity drop.
Let’s recall that Battery Life – an EV enthusiast and YouTuber – range tested its ID.3 1ST at 90 km/h (56 mph) after the first year and 22,644 km (14,073 miles).
The comparison of range and energy consumption numbers – when the car was new and after the first year – indicated that the battery provided 4.4 kWh (or 7.5%) less energy.
https://insideevs.com/news/548404/volkswagen-confirms-8percent-degradation-id3/
I have thousands of stories about ICE polluters.
Look up the ten cars most sold in their first year by the owners.
All ICE.
est. battery capacity degradation: 6.5%
1% per year
1.4%/10,000 km (2.2%/10,000 miles)
1.8%/100 virtual full charging cycles
https://insideevs.com/news/583279/volkswagen-egolf-battery-degradation-test/
No worries, VW guarantees your battery will have more than 50% capacity after 8 years. I wouldn’t be happy if my gas tank could only hold 70% of the gas vs when it was new.
Volkswagen: Our Electric Car Batteries Last The Life Of The Car
VW To Guarantee 70% Battery Capacity For 8 Years Or 160,000 km
https://insideevs.com/news/347324/vw-batteries-last-life-electric-car/
I’m sure I can find more on the internet if that isn’t enough for you.
That’s the guarantee.
How long have your polluters gone since warranty?
Why do you have this driving need to demean others?
It is the sickness of political prejudice.
Look up the study of discontinuities which is what we are experiencing now.
Now you are really starting to sound unhinged.
If you doubt this, you are still in the nasty old 20th century.
We have EVs in our neighborhood and many homes with solar PV. Where do you live?
I live in my Happy Place.
I knew you would dodge the question. Are you working for Prigozhin? What happened to Bystrov?
Outstanding. A topic that has been begging for a book. I’m looking forward to reading your work. Intuitively, I’m expecting many more such books to be written post 2075, with the general theme of “What was that all about?..…how the world lost its collective mind.”
“The situation is more complex in the US than in all other nations, because there are four cultures that matter.”
With this in mind, it’s not difficult to predict the reaction to the book from some of our denizens.
Thank you.
Thanks, Ckid :)
CKid wrote:
Outstanding. A topic that has been begging for a book. I’m looking forward to reading your work. Intuitively, I’m expecting many more such books to be written post 2075, with the general theme of “What was that all about?..…how the world lost its collective mind.”
Back to your favorite tacti: assuming already that your prediction of the future is correct, and crowing about it now.
As if you’re a time traveler from the future.
As if the entire climate movement isn’t entirely based on time travelers from the future warning us about how we nearly go extinct by 2100. ^_^
“Only one side is allowed to make predictions about the future!” he exclaimed.
Many have commented on how the West has entered a period of irrationality and the flat rejection of fundamental realities. Printing money does not contribute to inflation, mandatory wage increases to not increase the cost of food in restaurants, keeping kids out of school won’t hurt learning, cloth masks will stop respiratory viruses (when convenient), males can turn into females and vice versa, and a 2 C change in temperature will kill everyone, even though Westerners are happily living in climates that are over 20 C different without even commenting on it, and only 11 pairs of US states have an average temperature that is even within 2 C of one of the other states.
George Turner wrote:
As if the entire climate movement isn’t entirely based on time travelers from the future warning us about how we nearly go extinct by 2100. ^_^
Climate science isn’t based on time travelers, it’s based on models built on the laws of physics. Its models that have demonstrated a considerable amount of skill:
“We find that climate models published over the past five decades were skillful [14 of 17 projections] in predicting subsequent GMST changes, with most models examined showing warming consistent with observations, particularly when mismatches between model‐projected and observationally estimated forcings were taken into account.”
“Evaluating the performance of past climate model projections,” Hausfather et al, Geo Res Lett 2019.
https://doi.org/10.1029/2019GL085378
figure:
https://twitter.com/hausfath/status/1202271427807678464?lang=en
Exxon’s 1982 climate model:
https://debunkhouse.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/xom1.png
Exxon’s projections, made in the late 1970s for both CO2 and temperature, are today spot-on:
https://www.sciencealert.com/exxon-expertly-predicted-this-week-s-nightmare-co2-milestone-almost-40-years-ago
http://bitly.bz/UfBUD
—
Furthermore, George, I don’t know of any models that predict “how we nearly go extinct by 2100. ^_^” Can you please point to one?
George Turner wrote:
Many have commented on how the West has entered a period of irrationality and the flat rejection of fundamental realities. Printing money does not contribute to inflation, mandatory wage increases to not increase the cost of food in restaurants, keeping kids out of school won’t hurt learning, cloth masks will stop respiratory viruses (when convenient), males can turn into females and vice versa, and a 2 C change in temperature will kill everyone, even though Westerners are happily living in climates that are over 20 C different without even commenting on it, and only 11 pairs of US states have an average temperature that is even within 2 C of one of the other states.
This rant, George, is why I don’t take you seriously. You are wrapped up in ideology and assumptions and assumptions about what your enemies (as you see them) think.
It’s like you’re quoting straight from NewsMax. You’re sure of what you know and you’re sure of what your imagined enemies think.
And I’m not gonna get entangled in that.
Yes climate models are based on the laws of physics, except for ignoring Newton’s laws of local motion with regard to gravity, height, and conservation of momentum, as those complicate the computations, as does condensation and evaporation, which Navier-Stokes equations can’t deal with without adding an enormous increase in complexity. For what they’re calculating, relaxing requirements like F=mA is probably acceptable in some ways, and likely produces smaller errors than things like grid size and cloud problems.
But we don’t need accurate models to make rough and accurate overall predictions (as opposed to local predictions, which are very very hard). All we need are two simple back-of-the-envelope graphs, CO2 vs ECS and CO2 vs TCR, holding other things constant. We don’t have those, though, we have a range of estimates that are not much narrower than guesses from the 1800’s. Anybody who said we’d get maybe a half-degree or a degree warmer due to the sun entering a period of maximums would have been as good as the sophisticated models from MIT and elsewhere.
I bring up all the other craziness because climate alarmism may just be one of many symptoms of emotional “reasoning” and cultural movements.
And the climate alarmist problem goes back to the failure to establish some fundamental assumptions in the climate debate. Why is the Earth assumed to be at an optimal temperature? Why is everyone assumed to live in an optimum climate, no matter where they live? Neither of those is even a rational position, much less a scientific one. You can’t have an ideal temperature that can be anything. But scary stories about a coming apocalypse causes people to take interest, no matter what the alleged apocalypse is. Whether air pollution, acid rain, ozone holes, the coming ice age, global warming, pesticides, killer hornets, fire ants, or plastic bags, it all works pretty much the same.
By the 2 C limit, US states don’t have remotely similar climates, yet we don’t list a single state as uninhabitable by humans. How can that be? Cities are several degrees warmer than surrounding rural areas, due to man made warming, and yet everybody chooses to live in the cities with the post-apocalyptic climates. Why on Earth would they do that?
And of course throughout much of the temperate zones the average temperature, increases by about 2 C every ten days through the long spring, and decreases at about the same rate in the fall, so you’d only be within 1 C of optimal about 3 weeks a year anyway. The other 83% of the year you’d be suffering a climate catastrophe. Yet people don’t even miss work over it.
The climate catastrophe narrative doesn’t map to reality. A 2 C increase isn’t going to even be noticed by most people, and we’re not even going to have a 2 C increase, as most of that warming has already occurred and nobody really noticed, except maybe for some determine Brits who want to grow grapes again.
I’ve debated models and numbers for decades, but those don’t really matter to alarmists, because they’re alarmed regardless of the numbers. If the predicted warming is dT, where dT ranges from 0.01 to 20 C, then they change their mental image of “catastrophic” to be dT, because they’re convinced that the warming, whatever it will be, is catastrophic. So what occurs isn’t really a debate at all, it’s a performative ritual. They are expressing a concern for the future of humanity, based on a fairy tale that they adamantly believe in. To them, it’s as real as anything can be. It is a big part of their mental model of the world. Virtually none of them could guess the average temperature where they live to within 5 C, because they’ve never even bothered to find out what it is. Perhaps that’s because if they did they might start using their local number to argue about ideal temperature, and none of them would remotely agree with each other because they live in places that are easily up to 20 C different, without consciously realizing it.
And that ritual debate is quite separate from the technical and scientific debates about climate.
George Turner commented:
Yes climate models are based on the laws of physics, except for ignoring Newton’s laws of local motion with regard to gravity, height, and conservation of momentum
Ha ha, that’s f-ing absurd.
Do you really think modelers are idiots who don’t know about the first two weeks of high school physics? But yet only you do?
LOL.
Show me where exactly this climate model ignores Newton’s laws. Give the equation numbers.
“NASA GISS GCM Model E: Model Description and Reference Manual”
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/modelE/modelE.html
“Description of the NCAR Community Atmosphere Model (CAM 3.0),” NCAR Technical Note NCAR/TN–464+STR, June 2004.
https://www.cesm.ucar.edu/models/cesm2
Oh, that’s easy. When you divide up the atmosphere or ocean into a grid for a massive sequence of computations, based on Navier Stokes or Galerkin’s shallow water model, you need to simplify the math.
You make the Earth a perfect sphere, which is wrong.
You make gravity a constant (G=9.806…) which is wrong, because it doesn’t decrease with height according to Newton’s law of gravitation.
You generally stop using height in linear distance and use pressure or density altitude, as a shortcut that saves a whole lot of number crunching, but that is wrong too.
You ignore the Earth’s rotation regarding vertical air movements, which ignores F=ma and the conservation of angular momentum, where air going upwards should seem to drift west and air going downward should seem to drift east, to conserve its momentum in a spinning reference frame.
All these are violations of Newton’s laws of motion, but make the computations less intractable.
And of course many models use Navier-Stokes, which is invalid under conditions of evaporation or condensation because those effects change the total gas volume independently of the ideal gas laws. That’s a minor error for most aerodynamics problems, but perhaps a major flaw in modeling long term air movements driven by the evaporation and condensation of massive volumes of water.
If accurate modeling of atmospheric circulation was easy, they’d have done it with Commodore 64s instead of spending billions on supercomputers. But they’re probably tilting at windmills, because the results of the supercomputer runs can be replicated by accurately replicated by a simple spreadsheet and regression formula, as has been done.
What all those insane number of calculation cycles are trying to solve is dT = f(dCO2). They’re just using an almost infinitely laborious method to solve it. calculating f(CO2) could just use a lookup table, but we don’t know what the values are because we haven’t had time to actually measure them.
George:
Climate models do, of course, use Newton’s laws and conservation of momentum. The modelers aren’t idiots like you seem to think.
Does it matter if models consider the Earth a sphere when it’s actually an oblate spheroid? I doubt it very much. Why don’t you do a back-of-the-envelope calculate and estimate the order of magnitude of the difference in climate modeling between an oblate spheroid and a sphere. Give a number. The change in some important parameter.
Same for the gravitational constant g. How much does it matter if it’s taken constant and not a function of height? Give a number. Percentage difference in g from the surface to the tropopause. Calculate it. Then give some reasoning for why that difference matters in a climate model.
You would complain no matter how complex the model was, nitpicking about everything, yet not estimating the effects of changes you see, not doing any calculations, not being quantitative. That’s easy to do but not helpful.
Everyone knows models aren’t perfect, climate modelers most of all. That doesn’t mean they’re not useful. What’s your alternative?
David Appell – No.
Climate scientists say that climate is a complex chaotic dynamic non-linear system which is very hard to predict, as everyone, as even Phil Jones and Michael Mann and Kevin Trenberth admit.
Note Trenberth’s famous “There is an absence of warming, and it’s a travesty we can’t explain it.”
There are 9 major climate forcings and CO2 at this time at these levels is not dominant. Past predictions have been made inerrant by increasing the error bars as the years go by. Soon it may be impossible for them to be wrong even if the next glaciation begins.
Of course, the correlation of climate and CO2 is quite good, about as good as that of sex and marriage. No actual causal relation in either case.
If you’re trying to discredit climate science based on the models, don’t bother. The models are about showing where temperatures are going based on different scenarios. Models are continually updated and get better and better. That is how modeling works.
The only climate forcing that’s continually increasing is CO2. The planet’s temperature is on an upward trend. What is causing it must be continually increasing. The only forcing fitting that criteria is CO2.
David Appell wrote:
Some might, but most don’t. You argue that they do use the laws, then present arguments about why it doesn’t matter that they don’t.
But let’s focus for a moment on what they ignore, or have trouble modeling – clouds, and how Navier-Stokes and clouds are related problems for a model.
The Navier-Stokes equations ignore evaporation and condensation because the assumption is that air acts as an ideal gas. Evaporation and condensation violate that assumption because they change both the temperature and volume. When moisture condenses it releases heat, and the state change to a liquid reduces the gas volume.
For a problem like a Boeing flying through a cloud, this doesn’t matter a whole lot because you have a huge high-speed wing smacking the air aside in a turbulent environment. Slide-rule accuracy is more than sufficient for such aerodynamic calculations, when backed up by wind tunnel data with dry air.
But other problems really require better numbers. I once read a very lengthy paper on correcting Navier-Stokes for evaporation and condensation for the improved design of the low-pressure turbine section of marine propulsion systems. The extremely complex math went on for dozens of pages, but the results matched real-world measurements, whereas conventional Navier-Stokes produced very significant errors. But of course the calculations were at least an order of magnitude more complicated than Navier-Stokes, perhaps even more so.
But saving a bit of fuel on a steam ship is important, whereas coming up with accurate climate numbers is not, even though the real driver of atmospheric weather patterns is evaporation and condensation, when you view it as a big heat engine. So the small effects that Boeing aerodynamicists can safely ignore is the very driver of the huge effects the climatologists are supposed to be modeling. Instead they just add fudge factors to adjust the model outputs to resemble observations. It’s similar to how they just used pictures of clouds to represent clouds, because the models couldn’t internally generate them through modelled processes.
But even if you went ahead and modeled everything properly, it’s still not going to produce accurate and reliable long term models do some intractable problems in modeling chaotic systems with multiple uncontrolled inputs. And even if you hold the inputs constant, you still hit fundamental problems with computability. There have been some articles here that dug deep into that issue, showing that the entire mathematical approach is insufficient to produce the desired results, no matter how much computer power you throw at the problem. It could be that we’re just missing a few key insights and the whole thing could be solved on the back of an envelope.
And of course part of the problem is that gases don’t behave in a very nice way, mathematically. The temperature, pressure, and mass all interact across all scales. You can try to strip those complicated relations away by saying PV=nRT, but that’s only valid in a non-accelerating reference frame, so it doesn’t hold true on planets, except of course in free-fall. You can tell because the equation doesn’t have a component for height above the bottom surface, and under gravity the pressure at the bottom surface has to be higher than the pressure at the top surface unless the gas is massless, in which case “n” is zero. Bu as soon as you add a component for height, you’re straight back to tables of the standard atmosphere, where pressure, temperature, and density are all complicated things to figure out, with cp and cv appearing frequently in the exponents of big equations.
So from the fundamental simplifications we have to do just to get useable equations, we wade into the problem of a system that, in a way, is driven by the effects that we ignore, like evaporation and condensation, and how clouds form, and what makes them go up, release heat, get puffy, reflect sunlight, and then rain.
It could be that we’re barking up the completely wrong tree, and that trying to model the process based on dividing the process into grids and looking at mass flow or air flow is the wrong approach. I doubt many people would try to model an economy by building models of people and watching the Sims walk around in their model world, buying hamburgers and calling their stock brokers. You might throw up your hands and say the problem is completely intractable, and based on too many simplifications and guesses, and you’d be right.
But that doesn’t mean that economic modeling isn’t a real thing. It works to the extent it does by writing down equations for the observed aggregate behaviors of large number of people in response to certain pressures or inputs. Such an approach might not be good for modeling theoretical and novel scenarios that have never occurred before, but they are reasonably good for estimating the effects of an interest rate increase, on average, all things being equal. And that’s just the kind of problem climate scientists have.
Given an increase in CO2, all other things being equal, what’s the average effect? If we had really accurate and finely detailed CO2 and temperature data, we could probably answer the question with trivial ease with one or two graphs. You’d just read it off the charts. There would be other tables of average temperature versus average weather effects and average local climate, adjusted of course for solar insolation at any point of the Milankovitch cycles, with fudge factors for continental drift. It would be like a big Farmer’s Almanac that was entirely based on past observations, where you could read the answer to almost any question you’d have. The job of the modelers would simply be one of adding big urban heat islands, irrigation systems, and artificial water reservoirs to the past configurations to tweak the predictions.
But we don’t have such detailed data yet, so we’re still trying the equivalent of modeling the economy by making little Sim people drive around in Sim world checking their Sim bank accounts. In my Sim world I predicted that the Sim climatologists would predict a very small chance of cooling to a small chance of dramatic warming (the highly unlikely long-tail scenarios), with the most likely scenarios being slight warming. But what my Sim model failed to predict was how they’d get paid billions of dollars for a range of predictions that essentially cover all possibilities, and which could have been made by the Sim girl who works in the Sim drive-thru at the Sim McDonalds. I will have to refine my economic simulation, perhaps using the cross-country cultural comparisons from Andy West’s data tables, so that my rich Western Sim people act differently from my Sim Third World people.
Andy,
My draw dropped a bit that the publisher allowed your book’s PDF format to be downloadable for free. Perhaps this topic is so critical to framing the discussion that it should be freely available.
Topics like yours are at the heart of the debates, in my opinion. And your preface states that well, if I may: “Beyond a certain threshold, cultural behaviours aren’t dependent on what is objectively correct;”. Indeed, it doesn’t matter who is objectively “right” anymore.
I had a similar journey as you’ve shared in your preface, though I’ve come to the conclusion that languages and words used in debates have shaped the very thinking of people and explains their cultural behaviors.
Your cover is made by Midjourney — interesting choice, anyways.
I’m putting this on my reading list. Thank you!
Jp
Hi Jp. They weren’t going to provide a free version, but I specifically asked that they do this, and they were more than happy to comply. While a paper version must cost, for a PDF I figured, as you say yourself, that this topic is too important to impede with any cost, and I’m lucky enough to not to need any income from it. Thanks for your comment :).
Exactly my thoughts and why I also made my academic book available for free and the ebook so inexpensive.
Academic books have an incredibly low readership. Hardly anyone reads them. They are sold in collections and series as a package by academic publishers to universities and research institutions. They are priced so high that no one buys a copy.
If your main goal is to be read and don’t mind the money so much the way to go is to sell it and to give it away. If you only give it away, many people think it isn’t worth anything.
Andy, thank you. I usually avoid social psychology like a plague, so I would never have bought your book. But I downloaded it and I’ll try to chew through the epistemic paradigm :-)
Thanks, George, appreciated :)
If the ever deafening drumbeat to eliminate fossil fuels wins, will the proponeants take on the responsibility of deciding which 4 billion people will die. Without fossil fuels the planet can only feed 4 billion.
Well darn. This means I’m further behind on my reading than I thought!
I’ve long promoted the view that climate alarmism looks, feels, and acts just like an offshoot of Judeo-Christianity, with a narrative of gluttony and sin and collective punishment, complete with indulgences for the religion’s evangelists.
George,
The moral guilt to justify alarmism does scream religion to me.
And no, even as a practicing Christian, I don’t take offense to the comparison. :)
Jp
We can fix this.
Once AI predicts all the tipping points we simply modify humanity thoughts, emotions and memories and everyone will all come together and adapt to the new reality.
http://www.ft.com/content/48afd321-5323-449c-aacf-7562f38b2799
“AI-driven neurotechnology ‘on steroids’ needs regulation, says Unesco
Manipulation of brain signals advancing so fast it threatens human rights
…
Neurotechnology, including implants to diagnose and treat brain-related disorders, is beginning to improve the lives of people living with disabilities, but the increased investment in AI-based programs that can read people’s minds and store neural data has raised concerns about its use.
Gabriela Ramos, Unesco assistant director-general for social and human sciences, said: “The promise . . . may come at a high cost in terms of human rights and fundamental freedoms, if abused. Neurotechnology can affect our identity, autonomy, privacy, sentiments, behaviors and overall well-being.
“Developments that many thought were science fiction only a few years ago are here with us already and are poised to change the very essence of what it means to be human.”
What? Climate Change is a state of mind and the population is being bamboozled into moving to renewables by climate scientists? Like a cult?
Climate Change and what is causing it is a proven scientific fact. There is no “psychology” involved with it. We are moving from an old technology that is destroying the planet to a new technology that will not. It’s as simple as that.
Tell the people in TX , AZ, India, and China to name a few, who are suffering right now because of our addiction to fossil fuels. Tell them it’s all in their mind.
I read the other day that in AZ if you touch metal exposed to the sun you wind up with 2nd degree burns. I guess that’s not actually happening, but just in their mind.
“Climate Change is a state of mind”
Nothing in the book says this. However, imminent global climate catastrophe, a concept that contradicts mainstream / IPCC science, is indeed a cultural narrative. Over decades, it has travelled right around the globe to become the dominant narrative on CC, which publics emotively not rationally reject or accept (or both at the same time depending on unconstrained or reality-constrained circumstances).
Hydrogen sux as a substitute for methane. People are starting to come to reality now.
Hydrogen is better suited to store energy than to heat homes, UK Energy Secretary Grant Shapps said, adding to indications that a proposed hydrogen levy on household bills may be scrapped.
With the UK in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis, plans to impose a levy on household energy bills to fund the hydrogen industry drew criticism, especially as some point out that the fuel isn’t a serious option to decarbonize home heating in the short term.
A hydrogen levy is currently making its way through Parliament as part of the government’s proposed Energy Bill. Last month, the Telegraph reported, citing Shapps, that he didn’t support charging households to fund the government’s Net Zero drive.
Read More: UK Hydrogen Funding Model to Add 10% to UK Bills, Study Shows
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-07-13/uk-energy-secretary-says-hydrogen-isn-t-suited-for-home-heating
@ jim2 | July 13, 2023 at 2:54 pm in suspense.
See my Blogpost from 2019 – The CO2 Derangement Syndrome – the Millennial Turning Point and the Coming Cooling’
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/820570527003668244/349159438549945844
Opening Paragraphs:
“A very large majority of establishment academic climate scientists have succumbed to a virulent infectious disease – the CO2 Derangement Syndrome. Those afflicted by this syndrome present with a spectrum of symptoms .The first is an almost total inability to recognize the most obvious Millennial and 60 year emergent patterns which are trivially obvious in solar activity and global temperature data. This causes the natural climate cycle variability to appear frightening and emotionally overwhelming. Critical thinking capacity is badly degraded. The delusionary world inhabited by the eco-left establishment activist elite is epitomized by Harvard’s Naomi Oreskes science-based fiction, ” The Collapse of Western-Civilization: A View from the Future” Oreskes and Conway imagine a world devastated by climate change. Intellectual hubris, confirmation bias, group think and a need to feel at once powerful and at the same time morally self-righteous caused those worst affected to convince themselves, politicians, governments, the politically correct chattering classes and almost the entire UK and US media that anthropogenic CO2 was the main climate driver. This led governments to introduce policies which have wasted trillions of dollars in a quixotic and futile attempt to control earth’s temperature by reducing CO2 emissions.
The origins of this disease can be traced to Ehrlich’s 1968 book “The Population Bomb”. He said:
” In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate”
Such apocalyptic forecasts are a prime indicator of the CO2 Derangement Syndrome. In “The Limits to Growth” 1972 the disease metamorphosed first into a search for “sustainability” and then rapidly into a war on CO2 . This is a bizarre turn of events because CO2 is the basis of all organic life and the increase in CO2 alone is the cause of 25 % of the increase in world food production in the 20th century……………….”
CO2 Derangement Syndrome is a classic name that I intend to use often.
Norman,
How does your 2017 prediction of “the coming cooling”
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0958305X16686488
which is already wrong (3 warmer years since 2017, including 2023 (NASA global monthly data), 2 warmer years since 2019, also including 2023), compare to your 2003 prediction of global cooling (which was badly wrong):
https://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2016/03/the-imminent-collapse-of-cagw-delusion.html?showComment=1463026636699#c8404911868795910523
and your 2012 prediction of global cooling (also very wrong)
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/11/19/cooling-in-the-near-future/
?
When are you going to learn?
Here’s the history of Norman’s 20-year’s worth of bad predictions of global cooling:
https://davidappell.blogspot.com/2023/07/norman-page-again-with-cooling.html
David Check my post “The Rules of the Lebensraum game.”
https://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/
Excerpts
“1. SUMMARY
A battle for Lebensraum, i.e. energy,land, and food resources, broke out when Russia invaded Crimea.An associated covid pandemic, and global poverty and income disparity increases now threaten the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. During the last major influenza epidemic in 1919 world population was 1.9 billion. It is now 7.8 billion+/ – an approximate four fold increase.
The IPCC and UNFCCC post- modern science establishment’s “consensus” is that a modelled future increase in CO2 levels is the main threat to human civilization. This is an egregious error of scientific judgement. The length of time used in making the models is much too small .
A Millennial Solar ” Activity” Peak in 1991 correlates with the Millennial Temperature Peak at 2003/4 with a 12/13 year delay because of the thermal inertia of the oceans. Since that turning point Earth has entered a general cooling trend which will last for the next 700+/- years.
The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is .058% by weight. That is one 1,720th of the whole. It is inconceivable thermodynamically that such a tiny tail could wag so big a dog.There is no anthropogenic CO2 caused climate crisis.
Because of the areal distribution and variability in the energy density of energy resources and the varying per capita use of energy in different countries, international power relationships have been transformed. The global free trade system and the global supply The global free trade system and the global supply chains have been disrupted.
Additionally, the worlds richest and most easily accessible key mineral deposits have been mined first and the lower quality resources which remain in the 21st century are distributed without regard to national boundaries and differential demand. As population grows,inflation inevitably skyrockets. War between states and violent conflicts between tribes and religious groups within states will continue to multiply…………….
Latest UAH Satellite Data (7)
Global Temp Data 2003/12 Anomaly +0.26 :
2023/02 Anomaly -0.04 Net cooling for 19 years
NH Temp Data 2004/01 Anomaly +0.37 :
2023/02 Anomaly +0.17 Net cooling for 19 years
SH Temp Data 2003/11 Anomaly +0.21:
2023/02 Anomaly 0.0 Net cooling for 19 years
Tropics Temp Data 2004/01 Anomaly +0.22 :
2023/02 Anomaly – 0.11 Net cooling for 19 years.
USA 48 Temp Data 2004/03 Anomaly +1.32 :
2023/02 Anomaly + 0.68 Net cooling for 19 years.
Arctic Temp Data 2003/10 Anomaly +0.93 :
2023/02 Anomaly – 0.24 Net cooling for 19 years
Australia Temp Data 2004/02 Anomaly +0.80 :
2023/02 Anomaly – 0.12 Net cooling for 19 years ………”
This data was retrieved on 2023/2. Since that time an El Nino has developed and prioduced what will be shout term deviations from the long term cooling trend.
“The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is .058% by weight. That is one 1,720th of the whole. It is inconceivable thermodynamically that such a tiny tail could wag so big a dog. (13)
Stallinga 2020 (14) concludes: ” The atmosphere is close to thermodynamic equilibrium and based on that we……… find that the alleged greenhouse effect cannot explain the empirical data—orders of magnitude are missing. ……Henry’s Law—outgassing of oceans—easily can explain all observed phenomena.” CO2 levels follow temperature changes. CO2 is the dependent variable and there is no calculable consistent relationship between the two. The uncertainties and wide range of out-comes of model calculations of climate radiative forcing (RF) arise from the improbable basic assumption that anthropogenic CO2 is the major controller of global temperatures.
Miskolczi 2014 (15) in “The greenhouse effect and the Infrared Radiative Structure of the Earth’s Atmosphere “says “The stability and natural fluctuations of the global average surface temperature of the heterogeneous system are ultimately determined by the phase changes of water.”
AleksanderZhitomirskiy 2022,(16) says:
“The molar heat capacities of the main greenhouse and non-greenhouse gases are of the same order of magnitude. Given the low concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, their contribution to temperature change is below the measurement error. It seems that the role of various gases in the absorption of heat by the atmosphere is determined not by the ability of the gas to absorb infrared radiation, but by its heat capacity and concentration. ”
Zaichun Zhul et al 2016 (17) in Greening of the Earth and its drivers report “a persistent and widespread increase of growing season integrated Leaf Area Index (greening) over 25% to 50% of the global vegetated area from 1982 – 2009. ………. C02 fertilization effects explain 70% of the observed greening trend.”
Policies which limit CO2 emissions or even worse sequester CO2 in quixotic CCS green-washing schemes would decrease agricultural food production and are antithetical to the goals of feeding the increasing population and bringing people out of poverty.”
Norman, you ignored my point. Why are you still predicting global cooling when you’ve been repeatedly wrong in the past?
Don’t blame Norman. It is a natural result of his culture.
David- looks like you didn’t read the 2023 UAH data and note in my reply.
David Andrews – I’m an empirical data freak – First thing every morning I check the Oulu cosmic ray count , the NSIDC sea ice graph. and the SOI – which are useful canaries in the mine.- No doubt that is what you are referring to.
Norman wrote:
The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is .058% by weight. That is one 1,720th of the whole. It is inconceivable thermodynamically that such a tiny tail could wag so big a dog.
Ozone is less than 10 ppm in the ozone layer, max. But without it there’d be no life on Earth.
Talk about the tail wagging the dog!!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_layer
Norman J Page wrote:
David- looks like you didn’t read the 2023 UAH data and note in my reply.
Norman, cherrypicking in the extreme. You’ve found a few points where one month was lower than one earlier month.
That’s not climate, Norman. If you don’t understand why what you’re doing is absolutely laughable, you can’t expect anyone to take you seriously except as a stress reliever.
Andy … best of luck with the book!
I had just read this article before reading your post.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/07/the-long-march-of-the-left/
For me, any cultural analysis of the west should take note of the long term effects of Marxists (social ‘religionists’ par excellance) on education.
Thanks, Bill :). As you’ve said before, culture is upstream of everything else!
True … ala Andrew Breitbart.
But who paddles upstream better than the Marxists? :-)
Dialectical Materialism: The Marxian interpretation of reality that views matter as the sole subject of change and all change as the product of a constant conflict between opposites arising from the internal contradictions inherent in all events, ideas, and movements.
Regrettably, we can see today, they’ve gotten their mileage out of that.
As the sub-title of Donnely’s Spectator article above says:
Instead of ‘I think therefore I am’, the credo is ‘I feel therefore I’m right’
I’ll be definitely reading your book.
The book is own its way.
Thanks, Andy. I’ll be reading your book this weekend.
No matter the specific dynamics, though, dysfunctional cultures die out.
Thanks Dave :) Re dying out, they do, but at what cost? Some took their whole society down with them (see the Xhosa in Chapter 4).
“THE GRIP OF CULTURE: THE SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY OF CLIMATE CATASTROPHISM” appears on initial scanning to be but half of the story. A full analysis would have been titled “THE GRIP OF CULTURE: THE SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY OF CLIMATE CATASTROPHISM AND OF CLIMATE CHANGE APATHY”. (Note that I have avoided the word “denial”.) West appears guilty of finding irrational biases in a culture different from his, while remaining oblivious to the irrationality of his own tribe. Perhaps he excuses himself since his is a minority culture.
I sometimes judge what I read with the wisdom of Bertrand Russell: “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.” I was pleased that Curry’s “CLIIMATE UNCERTAINTY AND RISK” shows her to be among the wiser people, just as Koonin’s UNSETTLED does for him. But I quickly put many who comment on this blog in the “fools and fanatics” category for obvious reasons. I need to read more of West to place him. He makes the valid observation that unjustified certainty, arrogant belittling of other viewpoints, and narratives that appear to be coordinated suggest a cultural or group bias rather than conclusions from a rational analysis. How then can he not apply that insight to the common narrative on this blog that there is nothing to worry about in regard to climate, that “alarmists” are leftists and maybe Marxists trying to gain control over us? I believe this is a fatal deficiency of this paper.
I myself am a physicist with no formal training in climate science who upon retirement several years ago began looking into skeptical arguments, with an open mind. I ended up publishing a few papers in pay-to-publish predatory journals pointing out black-and-white errors in articles written by several fools and fanatics in those same journals. I have developed a strong disrespect for the nominal 3% of skeptics to the conventional narrative, not because they made honest errors but because of their refusal to acknowledge them. Cultural bias, pride, and possibly financial incentives forced them to turn honest mistakes into lies. Tribal standing was more important that truth. With that decisions they ceased being scientists. All of the lies I have found concern denial that human activities have caused the atmospheric CO2 increase, an empirical fact (not assumption) affirmed in Curry’s book.
The grandkids are here for a week. In 2100 they will be about the age I am now. Am I really supposed to believe that my concern for what their future might look like is an irrational cultural bias? I don’t think so.
I recommend you read it, whereupon you will find for instance, as it says in head post, that it does not delve in any way into physical climate change or climate science, or the various arguments put forward by those with different scientific opinions about the climate. However, when looking for secondary confirmation of narratives determined to be cultural via textual analysis and measurement, in that they should also contradict science, it takes the mainstream / IPCC stance as the gold-standard for that science. It also points out that, as far as publics across the world are concerned (who are essentially climate-change illiterate) the great majority of the acceptance AND rejection on the issue is cultural. I am not a climate sceptic; what is my tribe?
For example, in Section 2.4. under the heading “Use what we know” you include the bullet “How can the culture have directed such enormous spending to projects that will not only fail to solve the purported problem, but may well cause harm along the way?” This statement is hardly objective fact, though the reader is encouraged to take it as such, and it will indeed fit many of your readers’ cultural biases. Although you claim to be above the fray, you are squarely in the tribe of skeptics. I acknowledge cultural influences on my opinions. As stated in my earlier post, you seem either oblvious to or in denial of cultural influences on you own opinions.
This is about relative costs of mitigation / adaption policy, not the climate science. The ‘purported problem’ that the primary cultural narrative proclaims, is an imminent (decades) global catastrophe. As I’m sure you’ll agree, since you presumably align to the mainstream science, the problem is therefore massively mis-stated, and not only is it the case that no amount of spending can fix a fairy-tale catastrophe, it is highly likely that cultural belief in catastrophe blinds policy makers so that they do indeed enact net harmful policies to avert said fairy-tale. Chapter 8 shows that the renewables commitment across nations is not due to their climate or climate exposure, or science or technology, but has a clear cultural pattern This is a measurement, not an opinion, though of course you should read the chapter and subject it to critique. No-one is free of cultural influence, including me of course; I just wondered what tribe you thought I might be in. All the attitudes measured are public ones, which in any case excludes the tiny amounts of more climate knowledgeable folks who comment at blogs like this one, whatever their opinion. Publics accept and reject, or both in different scenarios, climate catastrophism on a cultural basis. They have no other basis to work with, because the only information that has come their way, from practically every authority source starting at presidents and prime ministers and UN elite downwards, and in contradiction to mainstream science, is actually cultural narrative.
P.S. at the end of Chapter 12, it shows that there is far more commitment to solar power from those nations with low sunshine hours, than there is from nations with high sunshine hours. This again is due to the cultural nature of the commitment, coupled with a historical coincidence.
During a local storm-induced three-day power outage a few weeks ago I was talking to a management employee of Kentucky Utilities/LG&E/Duke Power, and he mentioned that if we had gas water heaters, they would still be working and we would all still have hot water.
I mentioned that the push to ban gas stoves is crazy because gas produces heat (for cooking) at nearly 100% efficiency, whereas burning the same gas (or coal in our case) to run a powerplant at 35% efficiency to heat a coil of wire to cook the food means we’ll emit about three times as much CO2 to cook the same food. He laughed and agreed, and then we both talked about how California shuttering powerplants while trying to switch everybody to EVs was going to abjectly and hilariously fail.
Reflecting on that conversation, it occurred to me that there might be some good camping analogies to illustrate it. If you take a Coleman propane single-burner cooker you can run 10,000 BTUs/hour for two hours, burning 0.466 kg of propane. Or you can go green and run a 3000 Watt electric heating element for two hours (producing the same BTUs/hr) using a 6 HP propane-fueled electric generator, which will burn 2.5 kg of propane and emit five times as much CO2.
If CO2 emissions are the metric, it is irrational to cook using a generator and an electric heating element because the large majority of the heating is being wasted on the generator’s exhaust manifold, muffler, and warming up the great outdoors.
The same applies to most powerplants, and so the same would apply at home, except maybe in France which has nuclear producing 62% of its electricity, which might be pretty close to having the stoves evenly matched for CO2 impact.
But the climate alarmists are on a kick to ban gas stoves, because they directly emit a gas that is tainted, unclean, sinful, haram. It’s the same gas that’s vomited out by volcanoes bubbling up from the stygian depths of h3ll. And that noxious gas comes in contact with your food, which you eat!
It’s another case of environmental culture producing demands that increase overall CO2 emissions.
Somehow you get from “the problem is massively mis-stated” to a conclusion that any action is futile and potentially harmful. I just don’t follow that logic. Perhaps we should discuss your notion of “catastrophe”. Neither of us agrees with your Stephen Hawkings quote about the Earth turning into Venus, though we could agree that would be catastrophic. What about a two meter sea level rise by 2100? That is higher than most predictions according to Curry, but she takes it as a sort of bad case scenario upper limit. I would emphatically object to characterizing it as a “fairy-tale” scenario. Our species would of course survive. Does that make it non-catastrophic and not a motivator for action? If action could buy some time and push the two meter rise back 50 years, would not our descendents be grateful? If we do nothing and the seas rise, would they find a name for us different from “the Greatest Generation”?
I have no disageement with your seeing cultural/ political influences on attitudes about IPCC reports and climate action. Unfortunately that has been obvious for some time. But your framing of the analysis as demonstrating the irrationality of “alarmists” is pure spin, and it is not coming from an unbiased observer. Thank you for acknowledging that you too are a member of a tribe, no more rational than anyone else.
Sea level rise? That’s trivial to stop just by pumping sea water onto arctic landmasses. I’ve costed it many times using the levelized cost of electric power (so all market forces, the time-value of money, etc are figured in), along with pump efficiency, and head height (how high you make the new ice sheets). It’s an extremely affordable solution that would require only a fraction of the new coal-fired powerplants that China is building every year. (I illustrate it with coal plants just to make environmentalists’ heads explode, and costing nuclear plants has too many uncertainties. ^_^)
But just draining some water out of the ocean basins, though obvious to an eight-year-old whose sink is about to overflow, would solve the problem, and the whole point of the climate crisis is to evangelize about the climate crisis, not solve it. In fact, solving it would be extremely destructive to the people who bought in to the apocalyptic narrative. Irrationality and fear are what keeps the machine going.
I do not know what you define ‘alarmists’ as, but all that publics receive from their presidents and prime ministers and religious leaders and uncle Tom Cobbly and all, is a narrative of global catastrophe, and salvation via a crash Net Zero program. This is documented in Chapter 5, with a quote data-base in a companion file. Not a smidgeon of actual caveats and constraints and uncertainties from mainstream science gets through to their understanding. Including that there may only be say dangers in this area or that, in X decades time, or whatever. The dominant narrative by far is the extreme ‘no planet b’, ‘save the children’, ‘all life on Earth’, ‘save the planet’, ‘Extinction Rebellion’ (no we’re not going extinct) and so on ad-finitum, also with climate change now apparently affecting everything we do and everything we can think of. This all convinces emotively, so all your nuance that may distinguish a Venus effect from say a worrying seal-level rise in x,y,z nations by 2080 or whatever, are completely and emotively overwhelmed within people’s minds. You can see in the measurement chapters (8,9,10, and 12 for the US) that responses, whether acceptance or rejection, or both in different (unconstrained or reality-constrained) scenarios, are all about emotive cultural reactions. And indeed it is a classic cultural signal that the CC most endorsing responses to unconstrained questions, wildly mismatch the CC most-endorsing responses to unconstrained questions. There is naff all rationality in these responses; not only can they all be explained by a simple model of cultural causation, most of them are eminently predictable from national religiosity alone, of all things, which is a purely cultural phenomenon! How could there be any rationality when publics only perceive the cultural narrative of catastrophe and all else is (emotively) wiped out. They do not have your knowledge; they do not have any meaningful knowledge.
However, the real problem then becomes (as explained in Chapter 12) that policy implementation in each nation reflects the *cultural* stance of that nation. So I think you are labouring under the misconception that policy responses would perhaps still be proportional to what (mainstream) science projects for each particular nation’s circumstances, no matter what publics think. But this is simply not so, as shown for renewables (and EVs). The policy commitments very clearly follow a cultural pattern, and so in effect they *are* being implemented as though to combat the fairy tale, and not any science at all, whether that comes from the IPCC or from anywhere else.
I get it. You think the public is not to be trusted because leaders misrepresent IPCC positions. (Usually people in your tribe make the IPCC itself the villian.) So what do you think should be done? A carbon tax or no carbon tax? Renewable incentives or no renewable incentives? Fossil fuel subsidies or no fossil fuel sunsidies? Something or nothing?
Andy West wrote:
However, the real problem then becomes (as explained in Chapter 12) that policy implementation in each nation reflects the *cultural* stance of that nation.
Why is this a problem?
How could it be any different?
A nation’s culture is a representation of its values.
You really think a nation is going to ignore its culture when making decisions about the future?
Sorry, but that’s absolutely nuts. Will never happen.
I get it. You don’t like the science. Don’t care. But assuming you’re right about everything and that science is wrong, in light of all the evidence, is arrogant to the max. Trying to blame that on culture is just unserious and lame.
Besides, I’m interested in the science. I find books with sentences like your’s, looking at 2nd order ancillary issues, maybe 3rd, to be dull and meaningless. It won’t matter to the issue, which is +0.25 C/decade warming.
“I get it.”
You don’t! The leaders are NOT misrepresenting the IPCC position; this would imply dishonesty, and largely (there will always be some bad apples), this is not the case. They are instead simply *believing*; they are emotively convinced by the narrative of catastrophe, which therefore they also propagate incessantly. You can only use the word ‘misrepresent’ if it is made clear that this is inadvertent (not usually the connotation of that word). But given leaders are so influential, then this is a great deal of the reason that publics have been soaked in the cultural narrative for decades – which in turn causes just as much emotive rejection as acceptance, but within different segments of publics, and even more so in the same people but in different scenarios (very different for unconstrained versus reality-constrained scenarios, the signature of a cultural entity).
“So what do you think should be done?”
I do not address physical climate change, and only what should be done about it in a very peripheral manner. My focus area is
demonstrating that the culture of climate catastrophism exists, and indeed can be measured. As a non-expert observer, I like the kind of no-regrets policies that Judith recommends, as part of which more nuclear, especially SMR. I guess I know better what I don’t like, which is abusing the environment in a big way to create and deploy renewables, or shunning gas only to end up using more coal instead (Germany), or shunning fracking of gas (UK), only to end up shipping gas in from thousands of miles away, and also burning wood-pellets in vast volumes that have been made by clear-cutting old forests in the south-east of the US, and shipping them across the Atlantic. Or vast monocultures grown for bio-fuels that end up pressuring world food prices. And this gets us back into my area of expertise; the reason that all these things are being done is because nations implement policy in proportion to the cultural stance of their publics (see chapter 12, which demonstrates this). Hence cultural irrationality is what is ending up dictating these often highly inadvisable policies. If rationality regarding solutions is to eventually triumph, I think the first thing that should be done is to recognise the culture, and then figure out how undo its grip on policy.
Andy,
First, thanks for distinguising between intentional and inadvertent deviations of leaders’ positions from the best science. You are absolutely correct that my phrasing could imply that I was questioning motives. I have long believed that one of the prime causes of dysfunctional communications between tribes is ascribing nefarious motives to the other tribe. You don’t have to look far on this blog or any other to find examples.
Second, since I have been quick to point out differences in our viewpoints in earlier posts, I want to point out some similarities in our “what to do” positions. We both prefer natural gas to coal, being concerned with harm from CO2. We both hope for a renaissance in nuclear, presumably for the same reason. But I certainly don’t see the deployment of renewables as “abusing the environment in a big way”, and I would prefer a revenue neutral carbon tax to the renewable incentives that the US’s IRA has provided. But I suppose a discussion of nuclear, carbon tax, etc, takes us quite far away from your paper.
David A:
“Why is this a problem?”
Because the culture contradicts science. This is bound to lead to all sorts of downsides. The disbelief of evolution can cause serious real-world issues, for instance (even long before covid) anti-vax stances and other resistance to medical techniques. I take it you wouldn’t think that this culture should be celebrated and left unaddressed in such conflicted circumstances, just because a very large slice of the US public believes in it (which doesn’t mean we should be brutal about it, either). And the potential of irrational downsides from climate change policy enacted through emotive belief, is far higher than for the evolution case. It’s worth remembering that across global publics the *rejection* is a cultural mechanism too; if this is to be addressed also, then the best solution is still to dissolve the culture.
David Andrews, a reply stuck in moderation, no doubt it’ll pop out soon.
P.S. a fix:
“Because the culture contradicts *mainstream/IPCC* science…
George Turner comment – “I mentioned that the push to ban gas stoves is crazy because gas produces heat (for cooking) at nearly 100% efficiency, whereas burning the same gas (or coal in our case) to run a powerplant at 35% efficiency to heat a coil of wire to cook the food means we’ll emit about three times as much CO2 to cook the same food. ”
Adding to George’s comment – The activists claim is that gas stoves cause around 12% of asthma cases, based on the 2022 meta study which was just a regurgitation of a 2013 meta study. Along with the multitude of red flags pointing to academic fraud in the gas stove asthma study, it should be noted that the level of pollution from gas stoves rarely if ever reach a level that would ever trigger asthma. The CDC and asthma advocacy organizations dont even list gas stove pollution in the top 15 causes of asthma, yet somehow a peer reviewed study attributes 12% of asthma to gas stoves.
Really?
“David Andrews | July 16, 2023 at 12:30 pm”
David. Yes, all reasonable points that bear reasonable discussion. But indeed wandering away from the social psychology of the domain 0:
Andy West wrote:
“Why is this a problem?”
Because the culture contradicts science.
The culture is a monothilic thing?
Contradicts it how, exactly?
“The culture is a monothilic thing?”
It has many narrative variants, but all linked to main theme. Where the theme produces emotive acceptance, is in the culture. But this is not the limit of its effects, because there will be emotive rejection too, which is outside the culture yet still impacted.
“Contradicts it how, exactly?
The main theme is ‘imminent (decades) global catastrophe’, which contradicts mainstream / IPCC science (and sceptical science too). Chapter 5 details memetic population variants of the theme and how they work, as pushed by almost all authority sources from presidents and prime ministers and religious leader and the UN elite, on downwards.
David Andrews, re > I sometimes judge what I read with the wisdom of Bertrand Russell: “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.” < I met Russell after he gave a talk at LSE about sixty years ago, and he was perhaps the person I most admired before going to India in 1972. On my journey, I came to the conclusion that there must be something beyond the rational, conscious mind.
I was very fortunate to learn Vipassana meditation from a great teacher, S N Goenka. At the end of the course, I felt sorry for Russell that, with his great capacity, he had not come across something beyond rational thought, but dependent on direct observation.
Vipassana is a non-sectarian technique taught by the Buddha, which was lost in India and neighbouring countries but maintained by small groups of monks in Burma, where it began to be taught more widely in the late 19th century. It involves observing with equanimity reality as it manifests within each one of us. Looking inside, we find sensations arising and passing away with great rapidity – we observe reality directly, rather than through thought. We find that we react to these sensations as good, bad or neutral, reacting to the good and bad with liking and disliking, which becomes attachment and aversion. It is this pattern which causes our problems, creating harmful mental conditionings, which the Buddha called sankharas. When we observe with equanimity, we cease creating new sankharas and begin dissolving the old ones, leading to a peaceful and productive life.
David, there is no historical evidence that we are in control of atmospheric CO2. After all, we produce less than 5% of the annual contribution to the atmosphere), and we note no effect on CO2 rise for 1929-1931 and for 2020, despite our decreases in output (30% in 1929-1931 and perhaps 17% of a much higher production in 2020). No, not the slightest effect on the languid rise of CO2.
That latter greatly disappointed Arizona State University climate scientist Randall Cerveny who, unaware of 1929-1931, expressed his disappointment: “We had had some hopes that, with last year’s COVID scenario, perhaps the lack of travel and the lack of industry (that 17% drop in output) might act as a little bit of a brake. But what we’re seeing is, frankly, it has not.”
Nor is there any theoretical evidence for CO2 control of climate, following the discovery of the exponential decline of the GHG effect of CO2 by Arrhenius (50% of its GHG effect in the first 20 ppm), and the modern calculations (MODTRANS, U of Chicago) are now correct, predicting that the next doubling to 800 ppm will increase its GHG effect by less than 3%. The nine major forcings, including CO2, make the changes as a vector force, with CO2 not a dominant factor at this time.
Jimww and Tom Anderson,
You both ascribe the rise in atmospheric CO2 to non-human causes. Tom’s uncited “seven recent studies” saying temperature drives CO2 rise instead of vice-versa are clearing wrong, and nothing new. This bogus argument has been made for at least a decade. The reason they are clearly wrong is that human emissions are about 2x larger than the atmospheric CO2 growth, whether measured for the last year, the last decade, or the last century. These means that non-atmospheric CO2 reservoirs, land and sea, have been NET SINKS, not net sources, during the industrial age. Land/sea resevoirs were occasionally sources of atmospheric CO2 rises in preindustrial times.
Read Judith Curry’s book and you will find that she concurs. Read Steven Koonin’s book and you will find that he concurs. There is absolutely no doubt that humans are the cause of the current atmsopheric CO2 rise.
Tom, I find your second point on radiative forcing shows no understanding of the greenhouse effect and no insights into radiative forcing. It might itself be described as sophistry.
I find the subject of your book fascinating since it is so far removed from my area of expertise, and I will look with interest into its findings.
I would note, however, that I don’t believe in innate skepticism. Children are born capable of believing anything and they usually believe in many impossible things. You can easily convince them of anything. Skepticism is developed to a different degree as people age, and many people remain gullible for their entire lives.
Skepticism can be taught and trained, but our society promotes gullibility as a skeptical population is much harder to govern.
Not believing in something that contradicts your views is not skepticism. Skepticism is not believing in something that supports your views because it lacks sufficient evidence. I developed that as part of my scientific training and I don’t see it in many people. Most people are just happy to be skeptical of what the other side says, while uncritically believing anything that aligns with their views.
Skepticism is a rare and precious quality difficult to develop, not something innate that everyone possesses.
Thanks Javier. The chapter on Innate Scepticism and the part of Chapter 4 that deals with how vulnerable children are to cultural programming, will I think answer your questions and show you how Innate Scepticism works. Incredibly briefly, it is not rational in any way (so very different indeed to rational scepticism), and also it cannot detect what is objectively true or false. It is an instinctive capability that detects (when firing correctly) that something is a culture, and hence must be wrong, because main cultural narratives are *necessarily* false. It does not and cannot say what is the truth of the issue upon which cultural falsity is detected. When firing incorrectly, it falsely identifies a scientific consensus as a cultural one, because they are similar enough in various ways (as described) for the capability to misfire. Whether it triggers or not also depends on established values in the individual, which is why so many are simply sceptical of the other (cultural) side, as you say. It is a kind of ‘cultural disbelief’, but critically as explained, it does not simply mirror cultural belief.
> because main cultural narratives are *necessarily* false.
Cultural narratives are false … hmm. Is this a thesis in the book? Or a general conclusion from what’s been studied, like in sociology or anthropology?
I can think of many examples of cultural narratives that are inaccurate but this is the first I’ve heard that the “main” ones are false.
It comes from the evolutionary purpose of cultural groups, see Chapter 3. Also, find me one that is true (say, for religions: all powerful gods or spirits, judgement day, universal sin etc = fairy-tale), Fascism (e.g. 1930s/40s style = our race is superior, races x,y,z especially are inferior = fairy tale). Marxism (capital is evil = fairy tale), Many dictatorships (our leader is infallible, perhaps a god = fairy tale), Extreme Trans rights culture (a trans woman is a woman = blatantly contradicts biology = a fairy tale), so called anti-racist culture / BLM (black people can’t be racist, white people are all inherent supremacists = fairy tale), climate catastrophism = imminent global catastrophe and needed salvation from crash Net Zero = blatantly contradicts *mainstream* science [and sceptic science too] = fairy tale). And so on…
I personally have no problem with the statement that cultural narratives are false, but formally we can only say so when they infringe in the physical reality that is the domain of science. Everything in the domain of morality or espirituality cannot be said to be false as the word does not apply, since science cannot say anything about it.
Clearly some cultural narratives are better morally or espiritually than others as they promote more individual well-being or less violence.
History shows that cultures are adaptive and help groups survive. “Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society” by David Sloan Wilson is particularly enlightning in this respect.
Javier,
I just saw your reply and agree.
>Everything in the domain of morality or espirituality cannot be said to be false as the word does not apply, since science cannot say anything about it.
This is why I’d questioned what Andy meant. The other examples could work for falsehoods, but religion is a different ball game. Many religious accounts are criticized by secular views as false but some of these accounts aren’t meant to be viewed as literal so they cannot be valued as scientifically true or false. This is no surprise. The basis of science is framed around finding observable truths. Religion gets us into the metaphysical, which is often unobservable. So religious accounts are often not going to be scientifically true. As a religious person, I don’t see a contradiction :) They are different domains.
Studying climate views as potentially similar to religious views is enlightening. It’s just unexpected to find it rigoursly treated in this book :)
Jp
To add a 2c worth and with some twist. I do not quite agree on the use of the word ‘skeptic’ defined as a “rare and precious quality”. Some skeptics I knew were extremely dangerous – to themselves and others.
The more apt word to use IMO would be ‘analytic’, a character trait of one who would look the horse both in the mouth and at the other end too.
def: “The analytical personality type is very deep and thoughtful. Serious and purposeful individuals, analytical types set very high-performance standards, both personally and professionally. They are orderly and organized and tend to have a dry but witty sense of humor.”
Neither is the word ‘cultural’ quite right for such use. The horde that killed the scientist Hypatia belonged to a cultural group, but were primarily fanatics, and oblivious of the cultural group’s beliefs.
“Some skeptics I knew were extremely dangerous ”
This is in part why it is extremely important to separate innate scepticism from rational scepticism. They are very different indeed (see reply to Javier for very basic bones of the innate one). But not only are they regularly conflated, there isn’t typically even any acknowledgement that the innate form exists, or that it can aptly detect a cultural (aka false) narrative, but can also be inapt, mis-triggering and so painting a correct scientific consensus as being cultural/false.
“…but were primarily fanatics…”
All cultural groups (once they’ve developed a bit, at least) feature more a ardent wing, at the end of which is fanaticism.
“Some skeptics I knew were extremely dangerous – to themselves and others.”
You would have to demonstrate that their dangerousness had anything to do with their skepticism. Otherwise it is irrelevant. We are a very dangerous species to ourselves and others.
From Wiki: “Skepticism, also spelled scepticism, is a questioning attitude or doubt toward knowledge claims that are seen as mere belief or dogma.”
I had other examples in mind from my past experience in power generation, and there are many. The percentage of cowboys in the trade is quite high.
But this may fit the bill just as well: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jul/04/titan-sub-implosion-details-safety-oceangate-experts
I don’t see the skepticism there, but total disregard for safety considerations and faulty risk analysis.
Just like base jumping, the odds of dying are just absurdly high. It has nothing to do with skepticism. Some people are just risk takers, others don’t understand the risks involved.
The high-risk taker is basically foolish. The one who disregards what the probability is based on sound technological knowledge is a dangerous skeptic. Many times based on inadequate knowledge of the fundamentals involved.
This is one of the most common pitfall for the skeptic: “LCF is a type of fatigue caused by large plastic strains under a low number of load cycles before failure occurs. High stresses greater than the material yield strength are developed in LCF due to mechanical or thermal loading.”
Andy …
I don’t want to get into the weeds here without reading your book. But just one quick question. How are you using the terms ‘true’ and ‘false’ cultural narratives? For me, there are none, as they are all in the realm of belief, which I thought (maybe I’m mistaken) you and I have agreed upon in the past. I would think for/against or attract/repulse would be better descriptors?
In the sense of whether the narratives describe reality or not. Notwithstanding all cultures feature a wide range of memes, at the fringes of which will be some that aren’t entirely false, the main umbrella narratives for all cultures are necessarily false, i.e. they cannot describe reality (this would subvert their ‘purpose’). See Chapter 3, and the answer to Jp just above. As you imply, they are believed emotively, not rationally, and regarding bulk public attitudes, most of the rejection that occurs is similarly emotive not rational, via innate scepticism (see my reply to Javier at 6:10am).
Ah… maybe you meant do I think any of them are true? No, the all the main themes are necessarily false, even if there is minor accommodation of / compromise with truth at the fringes (which lends the culture some credibility and helps disguise its primary nature).
Thanks, Andy.
Yes, your reply to Jp, both your replies to me, and to mm above are clear … and agreed.
It is a long and tortuous journey from good and bad weather to apocalyptic prophecy of Hot World Catastrophism caused by man and his cursed modernity.
The global warming establishment of climate catastrophism has become the ISIS of science, rounding up and stoning the productive for the crime of living, terrorizing the population and robbing our children of any opportunity to rise above the fear and ignorance of the society they were born into.
Andy, I am not particularly convinced that innate skepticism exists, or that the word skepticism applies to what you are trying to describe. The idea of an innate mechanism that fires correctly or incorrectly constitutes a problem to my understanding of biology, which is high because I am a biologist. Innate mechanisms might be helpful or not depending on the situation, although helpful overall or wouldn’t be there. But they don’t fire incorrectly. A shadow will trigger an escape response in many animals, even if from a harmless entity, but the innate response is acting as programmed.
That humans would come programmed with a cultural response that sometimes is correct and sometimes not is already a hard swallow for me. And if the response consists in accepting something or rejecting it, I’ll definitely be very skeptical about it in the traditional or rational sense of it.
Javier, I think you are introducing constraints that don’t exist in reality. Even avoiding the complexity of long gene culture co-evolved systems in humans, as a biologist you will know that there are very highly studied arms-races of deceit and detection both within and between species (some refs in the book). I’m not quite sure what your comment means, but if you are suggesting that the detection side of this balance can never be mistaken, then there would never be an arms race to start off with, because deceit could never work. Nor for humans is it a case of simple biological mechanisms. The biology (hardware) is highly adapted to cultural behaviours, but cultural values (software) will determine what behaviours occur to what extent, with an emphasis on emergence over a group (culture is a group phenomenon). At this point it is probably better to read the book, but as it points out, there is a well-known mechanism for knowing that people are lying, which in modern times are studied but people have always been instinctively attuned to. So, detecting unusual levels of discomfort, blinking, lack of eye contact, sweating, and more, which clues get more noticeable if the target is subject to stress from other activities. Our instinctive detection may not always get it right, it may miss the signals (especially from a practised liar), or generate false positives, but crucially the signals have nothing to do with the subject matter being hidden, hence they can potentially be detected by anyone, not just someone who is versed on whatever knowledge is being lied about. Innate scepticism is the group level version of this, which uses a completely different set of clues to detect group deceits (believers in group deceits are not being dishonest, they are merely believing, so the clues for individual deceit are no good). Just like the individual case, this ability may miss a deceit, or may have a false positive, and is independent of the knowledge in question.
Regarding liars, it’s been noted that catastrophic military adventures often stem from the self-deception or self-delusion of the leader. Most groups won’t follow a leader off a cliff if they think he’s lying or if he shows a lack of confidence in his own plan’s success. They follow the leader who is absolutely convinced that he will lead them to victory, even when a look at the reality of the military situation indicates that he’s bonkers. The first person an adventurous military leader has to fool his himself.
And we’re seeing that in the plans for decarbonization, net-Zero, and EVs. For everybody to switch to EV’s we need to almost double our grid capacity, but none of the leaders preaching an EV revolution are doing anything in that regard. They’re throwing up a few windmills and shutting down existing coal plants, which from even the most basic engineering perspective cannot possibly work.
Fully implementing zero CO2 plans would quickly lead to mass starvation (at least 4 billion deaths), as farmers struggle to grow crops without fertilizer or pesticides while running the remaining tractors on biodiesel, only feeding people who are within easy transport distance of the farm because the transportation grids have collapsed because we don’t have enough production of lithium and other rare elements to replace the entire fleet with zero-emission ships, trains, and semis.
Javier, reply trapped in moderation…
Looks like the Grip of Culture has Time by the throat and maybe another place. Nothing like printing outright lies to gain credibility. RSA shows multiple other hottest months.
June’s 61.79 degrees (16.55 degrees Celsius) global average was 1.89 degrees (1.05 degrees Celsius) above the 20th Century average, the first time globally a summer month was more than a degree Celsius hotter than normal, according to NOAA. Other weather monitoring systems, such as NASA, Berkeley Earth and Europe’s Copernicus, had already called last month the hottest June on record, but NOAA is the gold standard for record-keeping with data going back 174 years to 1850.
https://time.com/6294637/june-july-record-extreme-heat/
RHA should have been UAH. Oh well.
Andy, thanks for a most fascinating précis of your book, and for your combined defense and explanation of your novel and interesting ideas.
Well done, that man!
w.
Willis, that is very, very much appreciated :)
There is a lot of talk about the increased presence of carbon dioxide in the upper layers of the atmosphere, even above 100 km, where it radiates in infrared into space. Where does CO2 come from so high up?
The answer is simple, CO2 in the uppermost layers of the atmosphere is increasing as a result of increased galactic radiation, the levels of which have increased significantly since the 24th solar cycle.
https://i.ibb.co/Ytbqt0R/onlinequery.gif
“Carbon-14 (symbol: 14C) – a radioactive isotope of carbon, discovered on February 27, 1940 by Martin Kamen and Sam Ruben. The atomic nucleus of 14C contains 6 protons and 8 neutrons.
It is formed in the upper troposphere and stratosphere by the absorption of neutrons by the nucleus of the 14N nitrogen atom. These neutrons are created by the interaction of cosmic radiation (consisting mainly of protons) with the atomic nuclei of the elements present in the atmosphere.
The resulting elemental carbon is oxidized to carbon dioxide, which enters the organic carbon cycle in nature through photosynthesis. Carbon-14 undergoes beta-minus decay, forming non-radioactive nitrogen 14N, an antineutrino and an electron.”
Mlynczak et al. (2015, hereafter, M1) presented a combined solar and geomagnetic index using the F10.7, Ap, and Dst indexes to accurately represent the observed 15-year record of global infrared power (W) at 5.3 μm wavelength radiated from Earth’s thermosphere by the nitric oxide (NO) molecule. The observations were made by the Sounding of the Atmosphere using Broadband Emission Radiometry (SABER) instrument on the NASA Thermosphere-Ionosphere-Mesosphere Energetics and Dynamics (TIMED) satellite. Mlynczak et al. (2016, hereafter, M2) extended this concept to the global infrared power at 15 μm wavelength radiated from Earth’s thermosphere by the CO2 molecule.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1364682618301354
Ireneusz, please, this is not a thread on which to discuss the physical climate system or the science thereof. There’s plenty of threads that do this!
Sorry. I just wanted to state that a lot of information about CO2 is false.
Section 2.3 states that climate catastrophe is not supported by mainstream science and that the IPCC does not maintain that it does.
One of the most cited papers on SLR is Church, et al 2006 with 1047 citations. Adjusted and updated for 2023 , that paper concludes the rate of acceleration in its findings would increase SLR about 10-11 inches by 2100.
That is hardly 2 meters mentioned in a comment above and not all that much above the rate for the last 100 years. Subsidence, which would have been in play with 0 change in CO2, is a more immediate and certain threat to communities than AGW.
CKid wrote:
One of the most cited papers on SLR is Church, et al 2006 with 1047 citations.
Why are you replying on a paper that is 17 years old, when a lot more data has come in since?
It’s numbers are out of date, as is your conclusion. Its abstract says
“Here, we extend the reconstruction of global mean sea level back to 1870 and find a sea-level rise from January 1870 to December 2004 of 195 mm, a 20th century rate of sea-level rise of 1.7 ± 0.3 mm yr−1 and a significant acceleration of sea-level rise of 0.013 ± 0.006 mm yr−2.”
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2005GL024826
However, if you do a second-order polynomial fit to all the SL data to-date, it now says
acceleration = 0.072 mm/yrs
SLR = 4.7 mm/yr
Huge, huge difference. It gives 0.57 m higher SL in 2100, relative today.
data:
Aviso:
https://www.aviso.altimetry.fr/en/index.php?id=1599
You don’t seem able to read. Here is what he actually said.
“If this acceleration remained constant then the 1990 to 2100 rise would range from 280 to 340 mm, consistent with projections in the IPCC TAR.”
Your cultural indoctrination is showing.
CKid wrote:
You don’t seem able to read. Here is what he actually said.
“If this acceleration remained constant then the 1990 to 2100 rise would range from 280 to 340 mm, consistent with projections in the IPCC TAR.”
You don’t seem able to calculate.
SL accelerations HASN’T remained constant. So why are you citing this paper and its numbers when it’s very out-of-date?
Here is a more recent paper by the same author and the acceleration rate is LESS than the older paper. Nice try.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10712-011-9119-1
The acceleration rate 1/8th of your numbers. And they are actual scientists.
CKid wrote:
The acceleration rate 1/8th of your numbers. And they are actual scientists.
Really? It’s trivial to fit the data to a 2nd-order polynomial.
Can’t you do this elementary math?
Using the AVISO data, I find SLR accelerations of
June 2011: -0.051 mm/yr2
June 2023: +0.072 mm/yr2
Is that a factor of 8?
I see that C&W’s paper has data ending in 2009.
For then, I find the acceleration of Aviso’s SL data to be -0.031 mm/yr2.
But please check me on this and let’s compare values.
AVISO:
https://www.aviso.altimetry.fr/en/index.php?id=1599
Dangendorf and Kleinherenbrink, both cited in IPCC6 have 0.018mm/2 well below your crayon graph. Nice try. You need to learn the literature. Why do you let yourself be brainwashed?
CKid wrote:
Dangendorf and Kleinherenbrink
Link to their paper? Citation? Year?
both cited in IPCC6 have 0.018mm/2 well below your crayon graph
You calculated the acceleration for the tidal gauge chart?
What is the result, please?
Appell
July 16 you said this “acceleration = 0.072 mm/yrs”
C+W was 0.009mm/ys2
Looks like I was correct.
I’ve linked to those Dangendorf and Kleinherenbrink papers many times in the past. You should bookmark important studies like that rather than purposely erasing them from your mind to preserve these fantasies you keep.
CKid wrote:
July 16 you said this “acceleration = 0.072 mm/yrs”
C+W was 0.009mm/ys2
What publication of C&W said that?
What year?
Are you truly unable to do a simple quadratic fit to spreadsheet data???
Appell
Do you zone out sometimes? I just linked to that paper above?
The same things have happened dozens of times. I link to a paper and you don’t even read it. Is English your first language?
Even your boys Tamino and Rahmstorf had this to say
“ Fitting a quadratic to test for change in the rate of sea-level rise is a fool’s errand.”
Call your homeboys and tell them they are wrong.
You are so lost about what the issue is, I’m not sure you will ever catch up. A good start though would be to brush up on your reading comprehension skills or even more fundamental, brush up on your reading skills. Read the links that I provide.
CKid wrote:
Do you zone out sometimes? I just linked to that paper above?
What paper is that?
I can’t read your mind. You need to be clear.
CKiddie wrote:
“ Fitting a quadratic to test for change in the rate of sea-level rise is a fool’s errand.”
Why is that?
How else do researchers determine SLR acceleration?
Tell us.
You are so lost about what the issue is, I’m not sure you will ever catch up. A good start though would be to brush up on your reading comprehension skills or even more fundamental, brush up on your reading skills. Read the links that I provide.
You insult me because you don’t have any real replies. If you had science to present you wouldn’t need to get personal. Your personal attacks are from weakness. You’re afraid, of something.
Project much? ^_^
There is nothing going on regards to sea level rise because it would affect the Earth’s spin rate, which is impossible to fudge because we can measure it to sub-milliseconds.
It the sea level goes up the Earth’s spin slows down. As soon as anybody detects that in Earth’s spin rate a thousand scientific papers will be rushed into print and we’ll all be bombarded with breathless headlines about it how astronomer’s “proved” global sea level rise.
That has not happened, thus there is no detectable anomaly in sea-level rise.
Did you read who said that? Two of the most famous alarmists. Two who you worship. You ask them.
I had a thought this morning related to the book (which I have not nearly finished!) relating to how this climate culture got started. Normally the history of the environmental movement is told as one of society waking up to the catastrophic destruction mankind inflicts, and how we were polluting our environment until we developed a more advanced consciousness and concern for the natural world. In part this narrative is true because people struggling to survive don’t have the luxury of caring about endangered newts when they’re worried about getting enough food for dinner, but one could also view the history to look at the birth of a culture based on what becomes a self-created fairy tale. Keep in mind that I’m reeling out my proto-thoughts and haven’t really dug into this. It’s just my notions upon this morning’s reflection.
As I’ve said many times, people say they care about the climate but they actually don’t. It’s a case where they express agreement with a vague term, really saying “I am a good and responsible person”, while not actually caring about their own specific climate. My usual example is that if they got job offers from a range of cities, from Oslo, London, Madrid, Boston, Houston, LA, Miami, and Phoenix, they’d look at salary, benefits, tax rates, schools, and the local arts scene long before they’d worry that the cities’ average temperatures are over 20 C apart, ten times the temperature difference they think will spell the catastrophic doom of human civilization. That’s because we don’t really care what our local climate is, except perhaps when we have to shovel too much snow, but by spring we forget about it.
But saying that we “care about the climate” to show we were good responsible people came after we were saying “we care about the environment” to signal the same virtue. People say the care about the environment, but what does that mean? What is “the environment”? It’s not one physical thing, it’s a word we started using to vaguely refer to “the natural world” when a more specific or concrete meaning isn’t sought. Saying you care about the environment is like saying you believe in emotions or “the power of love”. I grew up surrounded by Appalachian forests. I care about the environment. And if you paid me to bulldoze Appalachia, salt the Earth, and make it look like southern Arizona, I could plant cactus to show I really care about the environment. The environment is neat. You can obliterate it and still care about preserving the lifeless wasteland that results. Canada used to have palm trees, but that doesn’t stop us from fighting to preserve the barren ice sheets on the north slope of Alaska, because we care about the environment.
If you ask people if they believe in God, the answer isn’t particularly meaningful, nor is the question, except perhaps to distinguish avowed atheists, Buddhists, Confucians, and communists, or figure out if your in a particular subset of people at a science conference. George W Bush, Obama, Clinton, and Biden will give the same answer as King Charles II, Putin, Zelensky, the Pope, Bibi Netanyahu, Saudi Crown Prince Salman, Ayatollah Khamenei, and the head of ISIS. They all believe in God, but they’re not talking about exactly the same thing. Going back in time, Vikings, Greeks, Romans, Carthaginians, Egyptians, Hindus, and Aztecs all would’ve said they care about the gods, while refering to completely different pantheons. They might all answer the same way to the same question while having almost no shared beliefs, because what they’re really saying is “I do not fundamentally disagree with those around me. I fit in.”
Similarly, “the environment” is not the same thing to different wildly scattered people, it’s a catch-all word for a category of different things, coined because sometimes we needed a term to refer to a set of things, whatever those things might be. It originally meant “the area around”, and we would say things like “the environment in Paris is very artistic.” It’s first use in the ecological sense wasn’t recorded until 1956, and it wasn’t used much in the ecological sense until 1967. “Environmental” and “environmentalism” in the ecological sense aren’t recorded until 1970 or 1972. They’re really post Earth-day terms. When Nixon created the EPA, it was one of the earliest uses of the modern meaning of “environmental” and likely, in part, defined and refined the word’s accepted meaning to reflect whatever the EPA had responsibility for.
Judith has mentioned how when she started out, there wasn’t a “climate” major. There was geology, meteorology, and some other fields, but they hadn’t been pulled together to focus on the climate, and the idea wouldn’t have made much sense at the time. I get the similar impression that if someone in the 1950’s suggested creating a department of environmental sciences, people would think it would be related to urban architecture, sociology, or geography. What we now think of as environmental sciences would probably have been shoehorned into forest management, wildlife management, or evolutionary biology, because those studied plants and animals. The folks in state government nearest to what we now consider environmental management would be the Department of Fish and Wildlife, who issued hunting and fishing licenses.
If you asked someone in 1950 Brooklyn if they cared about the environment, they’d have probably replied “Yeah! Crime is up and Italians are taking over everything!” But by the 1970’s the response would be “Of course I care about the environment. We have to stop polluting.” And since the pollution was coming from big evil corporations and powerplants, in an already polarized political environment (hippies), saying “I care about the environment” became an obvious tribal indicator and a virtue signal.
In 1970 there was Earth Day and the creation of the EPA. In 1971 Iron Eyes Cody’s “Crying Indian” ad came out, urging us not to pollute. But it was connected to visible pollution, logging, and mining, not climate. In the movie “Silent Running” from 1972, the Earth had cut down all the forests, with the last trees preserved on some special space ships. In “Logan’s Run”, 1976, the Earth had been destroyed by nuclear war, not climate change. But the US had very harsh winters in 1972 and ‘73, with Newsweek running their article on climate change (using that term) in 1975, discussing the risk of global cooling. “In Search Of” ran their episode “The Coming Ice Age” in 1978, narrated by Leonard Nimoy, focusing on those worries.
In 1982 “Koyaanisqatsi” (Crazy Life) came out, starkly contrasting the amazing beauty of nature with scenes of mankind’s urban distopias, worst environmental abuses, and crazy obsession with destruction. It present no downsides to nature and no upsides to modern civilization. It was good versus evil, and which side to pick was not left in doubt, so by 1982 environmentalism was definitely acting as a culture, whereas as late as sometime in the late 1960’s it was probably not, and they didn’t even really have the word “environmentalism”. But Koyaanisqatsi also had nothing to do with climate change.
But the hook had been set in the mid-70’s with global cooling, a message far more powerful than something like water pollution or smog because it foretold global doom and apocalypse, not merely inconvenience. There was no upside or tradeoff in an ice age. And the ice age worried connected to nuclear winter scenarios, commonly discussed through the 1970’s and 80’s, in which a nuclear exchange between the US and Russia would not only plunge the world into darkness, but destroy the ozone layer. Post-apocalyptic narratives resonated, with “A Boy and His Dog” coming out in 1975.
Although nuclear winter was certainly an apocalyptic scenario, it wasn’t fertile to sustain a culture because people would logically debate the best way to avoid nuclear war, which was the domain of diplomacy and arms control, not collective action for most, and then the Soviet empire collapsed in 1989, making the subject rather moot. Finally the nuclear winter models were largely invalidated when they predicted a similar catastrophe from burning oil wells in the Gulf War, which failed to materialize.
So in the 90’s the environmental culture was still short of a widespread and long-term belief in a global apocalypse that would drive them to new and powerful heights, but conditions were set for the rapid acceptance of one. And that gets us to the era of the global warming movement, which is probably a topic for another comment.
Anyway, I though it might be interesting to look back on the birth of the culture given the view expressed in the book, that it is a culture, seeing how different factors coalesced over time, and how various versions of the environmental apocalypse them underwent selection for the most powerful forms. Instead of the history being one of “becoming aware” or “developing consciousness”, or of societal advancement, it could also be told as a story of “How everyone went freakin’ nuts and blew trillions of dollars.” ^_^
George, I distil from this 1) culturally instilled fears change with the era, but are always with us, 2) emotively stronger forms of narratives are selected both within a culture [with some limits], and competitively between cultures, 3) there is a fundamental difference between virtue-signalling responses to posed questions about cultural issues, which are given to unconstrained questions, and more moderated or sometimes completely different responses, that are give to reality-constrained questions.
All these areas are covered. For 3), this is actually measured across many charts. I don’t cover the historic growth of the culture from its early shoots (although it gets a mention here and there). Other folks have good accounts of the historic growth, my main goals are to show how and why it works, the *generic* rules to such working as determined by our evolutionary legacy, and to measure its current effects and activism and policy with the social predictor of national religiosity, as the theory of cultural causation says this will be a great predictor (and indeed it obsoletes the literature in this area!)
The hype has reached a fever that breaks all records!
Record heat is forecast around the world from the United States, where tens of millions are battling dangerously high temperatures, to Europe and Japan, in the latest example of the threat from global warming.
Italy faces weekend predictions of historic highs with the health ministry issuing a red alert for 16 cities including Rome, Bologna and Florence.
The meteo centre warned Italians to prepare for “the most intense heatwave of the summer and also one of the most intense of all time”.
The thermometer could hit 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) in Rome by Monday and even 43C on Tuesday, smashing the record 40.5C set in August 2007.
The islands of Sicily and Sardinia could wilt under temperatures as high as 48C, the European Space Agency warned — “potentially the hottest temperatures ever recorded in Europe”.
Greece is also roasting.
https://news.yahoo.com/record-heatwaves-sweep-world-us-093731485.html
Let’s see if it repeats on August 17th.
Has it repeated?
High temps in Europe but not as bad as one lunar cycle ago. Storm Hilary on the other side, plus an earth shudder (gifted?). Cal; Magnitude: 5.3 Origin Time: 20/08/2023, 23:41:00 right at time of traversing conjunction, saturn side.
Conjunction sun, venus, moon, earth, saturn. moon critical.
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NATO may be one of the worst political institutions for the rights of the hoi poloi since the Roman Empire. Win at all costs; our view is THE view.
So now Berkeley Earth is getting into the act. They can’t wait for the data to be in, they have to shout this nonsense from the rooftops to scare people. That’s the only reason, pure and simple.
The hottest June on record has been followed by an early July that now includes 10 of the hottest days in history. Simultaneous heat waves are suffocating the US, much of Europe and parts of Asia, while El Niño intensifies in the Pacific Ocean and the Atlantic waters off Florida hit an unprecedented 90F (32.2C). It’s already enough to put 2023 on a likely trajectory to become the warmest year since record-keeping began in the 1800s.
Since October 2019, the research nonprofit Berkeley Earth has been analyzing each month’s global temperatures and issuing predictions for the year’s ultimate rank in terms of heat. Its latest analysis, published July 11, found “a fairly high chance — above 80% at this point — that 2023 will be the warmest year on record,” says Zeke Hausfather, a Berkeley Earth climate scientist.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-07-17/2023-is-already-on-track-to-be-the-hottest-year-ever-recorded
Only a simpleton wouldn’t be scared by what is happening with the climate. This is not an anomaly. This is the new normal which will continue to get worse.
As climate change progresses the political pressure to do something will be enormous. The fossil fuel industry money will not be enough to prevent the move away from fossil fuels.
What is the fossil fuel industry doing now? They keep trying to get immunity from liability for their lies and disinformation campaign over the past 40 years. The current and coming lawsuits will force them into bankruptcy.
The other thing they are doing is pushing adaptation to the changing climate. I read they have applied for money from the IRA to do research on carbon capture and sequestration. There is zero chance that will amount to anything that allows them to keep selling fossil fuels. Watch for an advertising blitz on the future of carbon capture and sequestration and implying there is nothing to worry about with the continuing use of fossil fuels.
If the climate grifters want to continue to make money off of climate change, they should change their discredited position to one of adaptation. That’s the new growth area for climate disinformation that they can be paid for.
jim2: what your culture calls “nonsense”, I call data.
Come on David. What’s this “80% chance” BS! That’s not data, that’s a guess. You have to be more critical David. Ask yourself why they are blasting this out in the middle of July? Why aren’t they waiting until this data you speak of actually exists??? The “data” isn’t in yet. They are scaremongering, pure and simple.
Jim2,
You were so wrong about the dangers of PFAS chemicals. Industry has made over 2,500 different PFAS molecules and the FDA has barely tested a handful of them to see if they are safe for the environment.
In fact, there is a 99% chance you have at least a dozen different PFAS chemicals in your body and not one of them is natural or safe. I worry more about pollution than I do about CO2 emissions.
jack – where’s your proof I was wrong? There are a handful of half@$$ studies with a lot of weasel words. But lawyers are already getting rich off them.
Thought this interesting … political therapy.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-doctor-wont-see-you-now-psychology-white-supremacy-politics-9a3c32b5?st=u4kev3tf7ap7ymz&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
Great, fascinating, eye-opening book, hope it will be translated in French
Thank Robert, much appreciated :) While I’d like for it to appear in French, and Spanish too, I doubt my publishers would go for this.
By the way, I really like the term climate catastrophism. I wrote a piece some time ago entitled «How climate catastrophism will die» (https://www.climato-realistes.fr/comment-mourra-le-catastrophisme-climatique/). I also use the term climatism on the same structure as communism, fascism, etc. My 2 cents.
Very interesting. I make similar cultural comparisons in Chapter 15. But the issue is not so much that climate catastrophism will end one day, but how much damage it will do before that day comes, or in the actual act of ending, which may not be gentle. The culture gripping the Xhosa (Chapter 4) took its entire host society down with it. CC may also prolong its presence by decades or more, through making concessions to reality, easing back on its demands and conformance. A culture that has worked its way up to a dominant position can afford to do this, and for instance the mainstream religions have become adept at compromise over the last couple of centuries.
Andy West wrote:
But the issue is not so much that climate catastrophism will end one day, but how much damage it will do before that day comes, or in the actual act of ending, which may not be gentle.
Andy, can you please succinctly define “climate catastrophism.”
Whatever it means, are you dismissing concerns about climate change? You seem to be lumping a lot of different opinions and positions into one term you can dismiss for…cultural reasons(?)
The possibility of 3 C of warming by 2100? Is that concerning to you or not?
‘Andy, can you please succinctly define “climate catastrophism.”’
‘Climate catastrophism’ is the culture associated with the emotive narrative of ‘climate catastrophe’.
In turn, the latter is not a term that comes from an objective definition. It is an emergent cultural narrative that dominates messaging on climate change as far as publics are concerned, which from the social data can clearly be seen.
Publics *emotively* not rationally either reject this narrative, or accept it, or do both in different scenarios (reality-constrained or unconstrained – so a classic signature of a culture). It is the umbrella narrative, the linking theme, of the entire population of memetic variants as described in Chapter 5 (with a couple of hundred examples from a wide range of authority sources – presidents and prime ministers etc on downwards, directly quoted or linked from the companion file).
“Whatever it means, are you dismissing concerns about climate change?”
It is not my term!! It has nothing to do with me, it is the dominant narrative theme of climate change as is propagated by virtually all authority sources (and over a long time), which as a result is measurable as being the primary way in which publics perceive climate change (whether either rejecting or accepting). Given it is the linking theme of a wide population, it has no fixed definition, although ‘imminent (decades) global catastrophe’ covers the great majority of variants I would think. But the crucial point to understand is that it is *not* understood rationally in any case – publics are either pulled in by it, or pushed away from it, or both in different scenarios, *emotively*, i.e. bypassing their rationality. (This may well not be the case, indeed it is likely not the case, for knowledgeable folks on climate blogs such as this, but such people are a tiny % of populations and so not represented in public survey samples).
What I think about climate change is not relevant. This narrative is an emergent feature that has nothing to do with what I think. And it does anything but dismiss concerns, it is the (highly emotive) opposite of that. Personally I don’t know who is right in the scientific arguments about climate change; but for the purpose of secondary confirmation of narratives shown to be cultural, I use the IPCC working group output as the gold standard, this being by far the majority supported position. (Strong cultural narratives are necessarily untrue, and this one certainly contradicts that gold standard).
It is worth noting that the public perception as briefly outlined here, is entirely independent of all the scientific arguments anyhow – cultures are self-sustaining through emotive propagation of narrative and the triggering of associated behaviours that occur in all cultures throughout all our history. In other words, the social psychology of the climate domain has long since become disconnected from (any) climate science, or the climate system it describes. Surely no-one can think this is a good thing, from the highly climate concerned to the climate sceptical, and not least because cultures bend all possible effort into *not* solving what is touted by their main narrative, because this would kill the culture!
David, why would 3 C be concerning? I’ve worked in states whose average temperature was 6 C, and I’ve worked in states whose average temperature was 18 C or higher. Despite the 12 C difference, I never gave their climates a second thought. Americans live in states that have a 24 C difference in average temperatures. Heck, on one job I had to go through a 60 C temperature leap just to hit the break truck. That didn’t bother anyone a bit. Sometimes I’d exit the building through the giant flash freezers just for the fun of moving through an 80 C temperature jump in under a minute. I laugh at 3 C.
A message based on irrational fears isn’t effective on people who aren’t beset with the same irrational fears. They don’t see catastrophe, they see a bunch of fearful crazy people who want to drive everyone off a cliff.
And we can deduce that man-induced warming will be beneficial overall because the people who pay rapt attention to warming move to big cities to get as much of the man-made urban heat island effect as they can. Perhaps that’s because we evolved on the African savannah and instinctively favor broiling heat, and prefer running around in T-shirts and flip flops over wearing three layers of expensive cold weather gear from North Face.
Americans currently live in essentially random climates, based on where a boat landed in 1720 or 1920 or where they’re grandfather landed a factory job. Many have moved long distances, changing their climate by 10 or 20 C based on where a new factory opened up, or where somebody says they found some gold, oil, or really rich soil. And the climates they moved into are also essentially random, staggeringly different from 10,000 or 20,000 years ago, and in many cases dramatically different than just a few thousand years ago. A slight shift to what is already a staggeringly wide temperature range cannot produce a global catastrophe because all it does is just nudge the lines on the USDA garden hardiness maps.
https://planthardiness.ars.usda.gov/
Note that the map for the continental US already has a 72 C range, and the color bands on the map are 2.78 C apart. For the catastrophic climate change narrative to be true, that anything more than 2 C outside of somebody’s current temperature has to be catastrophic, the entire US population would have to be packed into just one of those USDA color bands, afraid of freezing if they went north and afraid of dying of heat stroke if they went south. But that is not the planet we live in.
The alarmists have picked a very slight shift in a parameter (temperature), that varies by a staggering amount geographically and temporally. Almost everything on this planet is already used to huge daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly temperature swings. Many animals, including Canadians, are seasonally migratory and cut through multiple climate zones with abandon. Global cooling at least made sense because returning glaciers would wipe out a lot of cities and agricultural areas, and falling temperatures and CO2 levels would drastically reduce farm output in areas that aren’t covered in ice. But warming just makes more of the Earth’s area resemble our equatorial homeland, aka “tropical paradise” as opposed to “arctic wasteland”.
But the cultural problem is that many, like you, have been convinced that any change is a catastrophe, and thus instead of asking whether that’s true, you instead look for reasons that a slight shift would be this catastrophe that you’re convinced will occur. Math, science, and logic can’t fix that. That’s a psychological problem, not in the sense of mental illness (though fears often play on mental illness), but in terms of a mismatch between reality and expectations.
George Turner wrote:
David, why would 3 C be concerning? I’ve worked in states whose average temperature was 6 C, and I’ve worked in states whose average temperature was 18 C or higher.
George, this is a very old question. It has been answered innumerable times. Try to find the answer for yourself.
BTW, do you know the difference in global average surface temperature between the pre-industrial era and when Chicago had 2 miles of ice over it?
robert girouard wrote:
By the way, I really like the term climate catastrophism.
What does “catastrophism mean?”
George Turner wrote:
Heck, on one job I had to go through a 60 C temperature leap just to hit the break truck
Are you saying then that the Earth could undergo a warming of 60 C and there’d be no effects?
Andy wrote:
‘Climate catastrophism’ is the culture associated with the emotive narrative of ‘climate catastrophe’.
A circular definition.
In turn, the latter is not a term that comes from an objective definition.
Ah! Just what I thought. You can’t define a “climate catastrophe” in any objective way.
That makes it a meaningless term.
That makes the rest of your writing meaningless.
I’m sorry, but I don’t see that you’ve added anything at all to the discussion of climate change. Nothing at all. All you want to do is negate any concerns about it. But you give no reason why we should do that.
Disappointing.
Andy West wrote:
But the issue is not so much that climate catastrophism will end one day, but how much damage it will do before that day comes
How much damage will climate change do, Andy, in the near- and far-future?
“Ah! Just what I thought. You can’t define a “climate catastrophe” in any objective way.”
Of course we can’t! The whole point is that it has no *rational* meaning, because it is an emergent narrative through selection of the most emotive variants propagating through society. (We can approximate its meaning from many of these variants, such as ‘no planet B’, ‘the end of all life’, ‘imminent global catastrophe’, ‘our children have no future’, ‘an uninhabitable planet’ etc etc ad-infinitum from virtually all authority sources – I provide a couple of hundred examples). Hence, far from being unimportant, this is far and away the most important thing to know about the climate domain, because this narrative (via emotive acceptance or rejection, or both in different scenarios), dictates the attitudes of all publics across the globe, and policy is proportional to these attitudes too. Irrationality wins, which sometimes the climate concerned may like, and sometimes the climate sceptical may like, but in practice all are losers except the culture that propagates the narrative.
“How much damage will climate change do, Andy, in the near- and far-future?”
No idea. But why would we want a culture in charge, when cultures do everything in their power to *not* solve the issue that they tout, because this would kill the culture!! And along the way they will also cause lots of random collateral damage of their own, to add to any actually caused by the climate, which isn’t being rationally addressed. Unless the culture is somehow dissolved, it can only be worse, not better.
Andy West wrote:
“Ah! Just what I thought. You can’t define a “climate catastrophe” in any objective way.”
Of course we can’t! The whole point is that it has no *rational* meaning
OK. So you can’t define the very subject of your book.
To me that makes all that you’ve written meaningless. Just word salad. I’ve tried to read your first several pages and it’s frankly mind-numbing word salad that doesn’t say anything, primarily because you don’t define the terms you’re using.
I can’t understand why you would write an entire book but not define your most important term of all.
By that measure, there’s never been a coherent book studying socialist movements because nobody can define what people mean when they say they want socialism, or socialist policies.
The very point is that it means a wide range of things to different people. To the pro-socialist camp it means rainbows and unicorns, while the anti-socialist camp points to, well, “the camps”. It has some concrete meanings when there’s a socialist party that identifies itself as the Socialist Party, but as some kind of aspirational goal, it means whatever people seem to want it to mean, and often different things in different conversations on the same day.
But you can study the behavior of the believers, collect hard data comparing them across countries, see how the respond to various implementations, and see how people drift in and out of the movements, and see how socialist parties rise and fall.
What you can’t do is find more then three socialists in a bar who are using the same definition of socialism. “It means helping people!” “No, it means government regulation of the marketplace.” “No, it means the workers control the means of production.” “No, it means and end to corporations!” “No, it means we make corporations pay their fair share of taxes.” “No, it means no more private property. “Except of course my personal iPhone and stuff!” “No, it means no more inherited property.” “No, it means that everybody gets their own property provided by the government.”
And if you ask Eastern Europeans who lived the dream, you get a very different set of answers.
There is no official definition because it’s an aspirational dream, a set of historical examples (all somewhat different depending on the particular place and time), or an apocalyptic vision. Those can be described but not very meaningfully defined in one or two sentences.
For believers, Net Zero and Climate Change are “the good thing we’ll do to stop the bad thing from happening”, for almost all known suggestions of a Net Zero program and all prophecies and descriptions of climate change.
In cases like that it doesn’t matter if some authority figure writes some definition of them, what matters is what the masses of followers each think the term might mean, possibly on a Wednesday, but only when they’re talking to Veronica and Chad, because those are the people on the ground spreading the word and casting their votes based on what’s going on in their devoted little heads.
“I can’t understand why you would write an entire book but not define your most important term of all.”
It is very obvious indeed that you don’t understand at all, and that the whole subject is passing you by. As noted above, the many memetic variants of catastrophe narrative are NOT perceived by publics rationally, objectively, but ONLY emotively. The book DOES define this situation as it occurs in reality, so describing the distribution of the memetic variants of the narrative population, how many of the main variant types work for emotive punch, and measuring the consequences of the narrative population as seen in the attitudes of publics worldwide.
But you do not appear to be seeking this kind of answer. You don’t appear to want to know that the term ‘catastrophe narrative’ refers to a large set of highly emotive and existential meme variants that form a linked population around a common
theme, which we can reasonably characterize as ‘imminent global catastrophe’, as propagated by the culture named after this main theme, ‘catastrophism’.
You constantly return instead to what I presume is a question of the kind “but what does ‘catastrophe (for the Earth) actually mean, objectively”. So, for instance, “how is it envisaged that this catastrophe comes about? What are the mechanisms and probabilities and possibilities and such for how it may occur.” Or in other words, if people understood an arbitrary pick of one of the narrative variants (e.g. ‘global catastrophe’ itself, this variant does occur) *completely rationally*, what is it that they think? But the whole point is that publics do NOT understand any of the catastrophe narrative variants objectively at all, they ONLY understand them EMOTIVELY. And we can easily demonstrate this, and indeed see reactions of different degrees as provoked by different strengths of emotive alignment to the generic theme of global catastrophe. This is the great power of emotive cultural memes, in that they persuade or convince people without any reference to reality at all; they work via the evocation of emotions (hope, fear, etc) alone.
Just one variant example is ‘No Planet B’ as this often appears in isolation on protest banners. What does this mean, objectively? Well it means what everyone knows and has always known, merely that there is only one Earth. Completely objectively, it doesn’t say anything else. However, this is not how publics perceive the variant. They instead get a huge emotive hit, because the emotive understanding is that we will trash Earth irretrievably and there is no rescue boat, no second Earth on which we can start again. But if you try and pin down the objective meaning in that reaction, such as “well exactly how is the Earth trashed”, “why is this irretrievably so”, “what are the mechanisms and probabilities and possibilities and such for how this situation may occur,” there isn’t any rational meaning in it at all! Its persuasive power works purely via the emotive hit from its generic raising of an undefined shadow of fear. Whether rejecting it or accepting it (or both in different scenarios), this is entirely how publics perceive it.
So the book does define the meaning of ‘catastrophe narrative’, and indeed provides a huge amount of sampling and detail and measurement to support that definition. But it does not seek an objective meaning of ‘catastrophe’, as carried by the many narrative variants as outlined above (often with the actual word ‘catastrophe’, often via other words), because PUBLICS DO NOT PERCEIVE any of these variants OBJECTIVELY, ONLY EMOTIVELY.
Excuse the shouting; I’m beginning to lose the will to live in trying to make this still more simple.
David, long comment submitted, but I think its fallen into moderation. Meanwhile, George has it right.
Andy West wrote:
David, long comment submitted, but I think its fallen into moderation. Meanwhile, George has it right.
Andrew, I’m catching up on comments, taking them in chronological order.
On what page of your PDF did you define “climate catastrophism?”
The answer is a simple integer.
What is that integer, Andy?
Andy West wrote:
“I can’t understand why you would write an entire book but not define your most important term of all.”
It is very obvious indeed that you don’t understand at all, and that the whole subject is passing you by. As noted above, the many memetic variants of catastrophe narrative are NOT perceived by publics rationally, objectively, but ONLY emotively
Andy you’re admitting that you can’t define “climate catastrophism.”
You wrote a whole book on a topic you can’t define.
That’s laughable, but mostly it’s very sad.
“You wrote a whole book on a topic you can’t define.”
Too funny. I do not think completely ignoring answers and repeating yourself regardless, will serve you, or indeed any readers. No doubt you’ll ignore this one too.
The whole book characterizes climate catastrophism, in a similar manner that a theology book may characterize Christianity, or a physical science book characterizes climate change.
Andy West wrote:
“I can’t understand why you would write an entire book but not define your most important term of all.”
It is very obvious indeed that you don’t understand at all, and that the whole subject is passing you by
Hey, I like to understand what words and terms mean!
You’ve admitted that you can’t define our terms. At least, the most important term of your book.
So I can’t take your book, or your words here, seriously. I won’t be reading it for this reason.
“So I can’t take your book, or your words here, seriously. I won’t be reading it for this reason”
You blank the answers to your trivial questions in order to give yourself a reason to not read the text that you might find too uncomfortable; brilliant strategy 0:
Appell reminds me of Bela Lugosi recoiling and shielding his eyes from the cross. He doesn’t want to look at anything too uncomfortable. Not good for the cognitive dissonance. The same thing happens when confronted with scientific literature that debunks the establishment mythology.
I think this post underestimate the effects of Behavioral Sink syndrome on culture and beliefs.
This is why I stopped worrying about CO2.
https://www.mercatus.org/macro-musings/jesus-fernandez-villaverde-demographic-trends-recent-macroeconomic-developments-and
…
“South Korea as a Case Study for Global Demographic Trends
…
Fernandez-Villaverde: I find the case of South Korea interesting. Because I feel it’s a little bit the canary in the mine, the future for a lot of us.
…
But at the end of the day, South Korea is in a path to lose, I will say, 80% of its population over the next century, unless they have massive immigration, because the fertility rate now, in 2023, they are going to be around 0.7.
…
2023 may be the first year in the history of humanity where the fertility rate of humans fall below replacement rate, okay? And I don’t think people have really internalized that. Let me walk you through some numbers.
…
A lot of listeners probably have heard that the replacement rate is 2.1. That’s kind of the number people always quote. But that’s actually not true. That’s true for the United States. That’s true for western European countries. It’s actually not true for the planet. And the reason is because 2.1 is basically the following idea: a woman has 2.1 children, on average you have around 105 boys born for 100 girls. And not all the girls survive to their fertility age. So, you need a little bit more than two. The problem is, on the planet, there is still a lot of selective abortions, particularly in China and in India, but in many other Asian countries as well, which means that, on the planet, there are not 105 boys born for each 100 girls. There are actually around 108, 109.
So for the very first time since 200,000 years ago, we are not reproducing ourselves. So yes, in the past population went down, because there were famines and hungers and wars and epidemics, but there were always a lot of births. Now, the planet… and again I want to emphasize this, this is not about the US. This is not about rich and advanced economies, this is about the planet as a whole. We are not having enough kids to replace ourselves. Just fast-forward 30, 40 years, and that implies that the population will start falling around 2060, 2065.”
What’s wrong with a gradual worldwide population decline over the next 150 years?
But who is contributing to the decline?
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-07-americans-unprecedented-mortality-exceeds-wealthy.html
“Comparing age-specific death rates in the U.S. and 21 other wealthy nations from 1933 through 2021, the authors find that current death rates in the US are much higher than other wealthy nations, and the number of excess U.S. deaths has never been larger.
“The number of Missing Americans in recent years is unprecedented in modern times,” says study lead and corresponding author Dr. Jacob Bor, associate professor of global health and epidemiology at BUSPH.
Nearly 50 percent of all Missing Americans died before age 65 in 2020 and 2021. According to Dr. Bor, the level of excess mortality among working age adults is particularly stark. “Think of people you know who have passed away before reaching age 65. Statistically, half of them would still be alive if the US had the mortality rates of our peers. The US is experiencing a crisis of early death that is unique among wealthy nations.”
Nothing at all wrong with a gradual decline.
“Comparing age-specific death rates in the U.S. and 21 other wealthy nations from 1933 through 2021, the authors find that current death rates in the US are much higher than other wealthy nations, and the number of excess U.S. deaths has never been larger.
“The number of Missing Americans in recent years is unprecedented in modern times,” says study lead and corresponding author Dr. Jacob Bor, associate professor of global health and epidemiology at BUSPH.
Nearly 50 percent of all Missing Americans died before age 65 in 2020 and 2021. According to Dr. Bor, the level of excess mortality among working age adults is particularly stark. “Think of people you know who have passed away before reaching age 65. Statistically, half of them would still be alive if the US had the mortality rates of our peers. The US is experiencing a crisis of early death that is unique among wealthy nations.”
It’s not surprising. The other countries all have some form of socialized medicine. We don’t.
What’s wrong? Plenty. Assured productivity and good living conditions increase in proportion to the population growth. The idea that there can be too many people was, and is very short-sighted.
Worse if the population increase is in the unproductive sector (because of the social unbalance worldwide).
Agrarian Man had to replace the Pastoralist. The latter could never develop since he was necessarily a nomad. The former was sedentary and that allowed him to develop in many ways – technically. (why Cain had to kill Abel; see the metaphorical).
The next 150 years will see the earth over the next Eddy cycle peak, and then the hardship experienced at similar times in the past 8000 years will start to bite. Humans need productive numbers if it hopes to maintain its advances. Otherwise it will be the new dark ages. (some cultures seem to have smelled the opportunity).
“Assured productivity and good living conditions increase in proportion to the population growth.”
What is the good evidence of your claim? More people deplete resources more quickly and add to the number in poor living conditions.
The evidence is 5000 years of waxing and waning of civilisations. It has been cyclic, and the better times and better conditions were when civilisations were at their peak. Peak as in population number, conditions and achievements.
Cyclic roots were times of population decline; adverse times. Quote google: “The 7th century is the period from 601 through 700 in accordance with the Julian calendar in … The world’s population shrinks to about 208 million people.” From an assumed ~300 million. That was the Dark age cold period.
It doesn’t under-estimate the effect as such, because it doesn’t address the effect in any way 0:
The underlying cultural behaviours presented in this book as being the primary cause of climate catastrophism, have occurred throughout the entire history of homo-sapiens-sapiens, and probably earlier in other humans too (for instance, Neanderthals had some religious behaviours). Hence they have also occurred in every historic group of humans of any size and at any location on the planet, and at all stages of civilizational development, including our own. While in very recent times (~2 to 3 millennia), ‘rationality at scale’ has increasingly limited cultural entities, I’m not sure that there have been other significant changes. I say all this only to indicate the behaviours are likely to be robust to an extremely wide set of conditions.
I wasn’t aware that anyone knew whether behavioural sink syndrome (BSS) applied to humans yet, or if so what it would imply. I may be out of date but some experiments were negative. While the birth-rate is certainly falling more or less everywhere but Africa, this might well be due to physical factors such as all the artificial materials in our environment. It’s also the case that the measurements across nations hold for their relationships between climate catastrophism and religiosity, whether those nations happen to be very densely populated like Holland or even city-states like Singapore and Hong Kong, or sparsely populated places like Australia or Russia or others.
Perhaps (BSS) is having an impact for humans, maybe even a big one. But if so I doubt this has much interaction with the cultural behaviours responsible for entities such as the religions or Communism or Fascism or climate catastrophism. I guess it would more likely be operating at right-angles, so to speak, doing its own thing independently. Interestingly though, cultural behaviours, which don’t occur for rats (or at least, only in a very primitive fashion), make us far more comfortable about living in big groups, to the extent that we police ourselves into them, and making those groups act as one (‘singing off the same hymn sheet’), in a manner that has greatly increased survival chances, not decreased them (hence the opposite to BSS), which is why we are so subject to these behaviours. (Albeit I don’t think anyone has a clue whether they are still net beneficial in modern times, this is discussed in the book).
I recall reading about the BSS research in 1965 (I think it was Scientific A). Living in a densely populated country I am pretty sure it has started to bite. There appears to be a rise in discontent proportional to the rise in level of affluence.
However around 1970 Desmond Morris published the book “The Naked Ape”. One explanation was given how we counter the problem by creating different group identities. Sort of several ‘hymn sheets’. But that also complicates issues, possibly like the skeptics versus alarmist case. The book is worth a re-read.
Rob Starkey wrote:
What’s wrong with a gradual worldwide population decline over the next 150 years?
Ask Japan.
Japan is a country and can not answer questions. Also the issue was worldwide and not individual countries.
I would have to read Andy West’s book to make a fair comparison, but from what I read in his chapter summary here it appears to me that Andy is attempting to make a case for climate catastrophe as something cultural and new.
I find using catastrophic arguments for sending more power to government in attempts to fix real or invented problems nothing particularly new or cultural. This has been for years the basic approach of governments in the US and other nations to obtain emotional support for large government programs – be they domestic or military. The strategy is used by governments at all reaches of authoritarianism from total to where voters still retain various levels of say about new and large programs.
Politicians, as a class, are not particularly interested in mounting reasonable arguments whether it be for or against these programs, nor for that matter, are intellectually capable of such an undertaking. They are also inclined to have short time horizons which makes them susceptible to using emotional arguments of which promoting catastrophe is sufficiently simplistic to obtain a more immediate citizen reaction. The political goal is for catastrophic to override issues of uncertainty and in some cases to outright ignore facts counter to their supporting arguments.
Far from making the case that climate catastrophism is something ‘new’, “The Grip of Culture” in fact makes the completely opposite case that cultures of this kind are a legacy of our gene-culture co-evolution, and have essentially occurred forever for homo-sapiens-sapiens (in that even other types of humans before us had religion behaviours, for instance). And so, while each culture has a different narrative, which leads to a cascade of surface differences, their underlying behaviours are the same, which is what allows us to categorize and indeed measure what is really going on.
I took Ken’s comment to essentially agree with your position on culture, and he’s taking this conclusion to the next actionable step: government action.
COVID was a kind of cultural verification of how far people will fall in-line with government regulation that has lessons for climate action. The shift was a cultural belief that “the science” risked catastrophe for the species, and a belief that “the science” justified government quarantine. Skepticism has shown, through contentious Congressional testimony, Musk opening up Twitter, etc. that risks were not reported accurately, dissents were squashed, and alternatives government quarantines were viable. People were harmed both directly and indirectly from COVID. Yet we moved on quickly, and I doubt we learned one lesson about how far culture has shifted in support of government action without question.
The government factor for culture is indeed the next step for action. Ken’s point is spot on. There’s no need to win the scientific argument about climate action if a government can impose itself on a culture of the willing.
Long term, that trend would always occur.
Democracy has always been subject to certain pressures. “Voters support more free stuff for voters, paid for by free money or higher taxes on some different group of voters.”
“Politicians voice support for whatever voters say is their major concern. Promise immediate action to solve whatever the problem is, as long as they get elected.”
“Politician who told voters they were flag wrong about the big problem they were concerned about gives concession speech.”
You can swap out the individual players, and even the parties, and this will still occur. So to understand each country, you have to look at how successfully various cultural messages have taken hold among the voters.
That’s how you end up installing solar power in countries that have very little sunlight but lots of public support for solar power, and not installing it in countries that have lots of sunlight but very little support for solar power.
The Church of Climate Doomers is working overtime lately. Propaganda 101, headlines:
UPDATE: Heatwave reaching max strength… 128℉ PEAK!
ON AND ON AND ON…
Phoenix braves relentless scorch…
What happens to your body during broil…
Europe hottest EVER? New Saharan Blast…
Athens Wildfire Forces Evacuation… Blaze on Canary Islands…
Smoke Pollution From Canada Returns…
@ jacksmith4tx | July 17, 2023 at 10:59 am | said:
Jim2,
You were so wrong about the dangers of PFAS chemicals. Industry has made over 2,500 different PFAS molecules and the FDA has barely tested a handful of them to see if they are safe for the environment.
Jack, chemicals ARE tested in a variety of ways for toxicity. It’s not the FDAs responsibility to test them. At least try to do some research before you freak out and scare everyone.
Andy, this book is a constructive and timely contribution – deserves a wide and influential readership.
A couple of thoughts for the next edition:
1. A footnote for Chapter 7 – innate scepticism – why it doesn’t kick in, sometimes, when objectively it might be best for the society.
Senators Gore and Kerry have in common that they could and in hindsight probably should have been US Presidents, but were frustrated in significant part by operators from Texas and Oklahoma with extensive oil and gas industry connections and financing. Jim Baker led the 2000 post-election frolics, and Kerry’s candidacy was damaged four years later by the late Aubrey McClendon’s Swift Boat operation – a pretty fragrant piece of work even by the standards of US presidential politics. So when a story shows up that implies a need for policies that would take the oilers and the gassers down a few pegs, it seems natural that they and their many supporters might not have their critical faculties engaged to the same degree that would occur on other issues. The opposite of an inconvenient truth is a highly congenial notion – and those are the ones that sell like hotcakes.
2. And while I’m in the political weeds, I have to note that you’ve produced – inadvertently, I’m sure – a useful resource for those trying to understand the Trump phenomenon in the Republican party. The subject matters are completely different, but the ways they operate certainly do rhyme in many ways.
Thank God we dodged the Gore or Kerry President bullet!
At a time when debates over AI bias and the technology’s potential existential risks to humanity have become their own culture war, Musk’s new firm could nudge the trajectory of the technology’s development in a libertarian direction — if it ever gets off the ground.
During a launch event Friday afternoon, the mogul argued that politically correct AI is “incredibly dangerous” because it requires the technology to provide misleading outputs, citing the lies told by HAL 9000, the murderous AI in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film, “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
Musk has said that his AI will be designed to be “maximally truth-seeking” in order to understand the universe, arguing that a curious AI would be safe for humans because humans are inherently interesting, and the AI would therefore want to protect them
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/07/17/ai-musk-chatgpt-xai-00106672
Whatever Musk opines on AI doesn’t matter.
Hinton and Sustkever are experts worth listening to.
The core problem with AI fact-checkers is human supervision during model training. The human bias is essentially imprinted onto AI’s when they’re trained. This is inevitable given the current technology. So there will be no tipping points or whatever found by humans training models on climate science.
AI’s evaluating the performance of trained AI models, i.e. AI’s training AI’s, could overcome the human factor in time. Hinton and Sustkever have made comments that our human factor doesn’t matter much in the long run because AIs independently “thinking” would naturally emerge.
Here is a direct link on Reddit because Youtube makes it near impossible to find the video: https://www.reddit.com/r/bing/comments/14ybg2t/not_all_experts_agree_a_series_of_interviews_of/
The challenge of estimating GDP, employment and the general levels of prices and interest rates — along with their directions, even in the near or medium terms — is daunting enough. The Biden administration, nevertheless, recently convened the first of a series of four workshops under the auspices of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine aimed at “incorporating Climate Into Macroeconomic Modeling.”
Errors of the past notwithstanding — few if any macroeconomists foresaw the Great Depression, the Great Recession, or any other economic crisis — the White House now wants to add even more complexity to macro models by accounting somehow for the market “frictions” supposedly created by climate change in economic forecasts.
…
As Prof. Richard E. Wagner, my former colleague at George Mason University, has argued forcefully, macroeconomists erroneously treat macroeconomic aggregates, such as GDP, employment, the price level and interest rates, as explicit objects of choice by public policymakers. It is as if some politician or bureaucrat — or a group of them — decides what the output of final goods and services will be at any given time, how many people will be employed in producing that output, what general level of prices or interest rates will prevail, and so on.
https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/4097759-the-fallacy-of-climate-change-and-macroeconomic-modeling/
If I were a psychologist who was treating a patient in late stages of climate catastrophism disorder, before prescribing medication for nightmares and terror and anxiety, I would first hand the patient a packet containing 500 studies on sea level rise.
After reading those papers and counting up the times the studies used the following phrases, words and terms, I am sure the patient’s symptoms would quickly disappear.
Assumptions, estimates, uncertainties, corrections, methods, processes, data removal, random and systematic errors, filtered, biases, recalibrating, projections vary significantly, approximation of errors, disagreements about conclusions, no agreement, paucity of data, very complex, troubling issues, auto correlation, too small to be observed, calculations with known accuracy very difficult, not particularly unusual, no increase, small deceleration, ensembles, remains challenging, not equivalent quality standards, etc etc etc.
A little bit of knowledge would go a long way to solving a lot of mental health issues for a lot of people who rely only on what they are told about global warming rather than them actually investigating the science.
CKid wrote:
Assumptions, estimates, uncertainties, corrections, methods, processes, data removal, random and systematic errors, filtered, biases, recalibrating, projections vary significantly, approximation of errors, disagreements about conclusions, no agreement, paucity of data, very complex, troubling issues, auto correlation, too small to be observed, calculations with known accuracy very difficult, not particularly unusual, no increase, small deceleration, ensembles, remains challenging, not equivalent quality standards, etc etc etc.
This is called science.
This is how science is done. It’s imperfect. It requires all of the things you mentioned above. The goal is to keep working at making the calculations better. That’s what scientists do every day, in all fields of science.
You want to dismiss concerns about sea level rise. But the sea keeps rising and it’s starting to cause problems. There will be a lot more problems in the future, huge problems. Does it matter if SLR is 3.5 mm/yr or 4 mm/yr? Not really. It’s a big problem that will be going on for centuries. It can’t be ignored just because you don’t like some estimate. If you don’t like it, provide a better one.
You would complain no matter how much the science improves. When it’s finally perfect Florida will be half underwater.
You don’t want to accept all the uncertainties with these papers. If you picked 100 papers they would have 100 different estimates of the past and future trend and acceleration.
This what models predict. Only off track by 97%.
https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/2019-02-15190822_shadow.jpg
This is reality. SLR of 5 inches a century.
https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/plots/120-012_meantrend.png
“If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.” – Ernest Rutherford.
And as I’ve mentioned, reversing sea level rise by simply removing water from the oceans is drop dead simple, hardly a challenge for a third year mechanical engineering student. But climate alarmists would never accept the solution because it’s an act of basic engineering, not penance and performative ritual.
Now if I formed a mass movement of school kids who were going to remove the water bucket by bucket, or power the pumps by running barefoot in giant hamster wheels while wearing tie-dyed frocks proclaiming their absolute devotion to saving the Earth, alarmists would whip out their checkbooks to sponsor millions of kids working themselves to death in an act of sublime purity, while Broadway would produce plays extolling their heroic efforts and adult believers would shame each other over not spending their vacation days powering a hamster wheel.
That difference (solving the problem efficiently is bad, solving it inefficiently is good) exists because what’s going on is almost purely emotional, not rational, and quite divorced from science and engineering.
Yes, half of Florida will be under water. That must be why people are moving there in droves.
jim2 wrote:
Yes, half of Florida will be under water. That must be why people are moving there in droves.
Housing prices in south Florida in relative decline due to sea-level rise:
“In this paper, we explore dynamic changes in the capitalization of sea level rise (SLR) risk in housing and mortgage markets. Our results suggest a disconnect in coastal Florida real estate: From 2013-2018, home sales volumes in the most-SLR-exposed communities declined 16-20% relative to less-SLR-exposed areas, even as their sale prices grew in lockstep. Between 2018-2020, however, relative prices in these at-risk markets finally declined by roughly 5% from their peak. Lender behavior cannot reconcile these patterns, as we show that both all-cash and mortgage-financed purchases have similarly contracted, with little evidence of increases in loan denial or securitization. We propose a demand-side explanation for our findings where prospective buyers have become more pessimistic about climate change risk than prospective sellers. The lead-lag relationship between transaction volumes and prices in SLR-exposed markets is consistent with dynamics at the peak of prior real estate bubbles.”
Neglected No More: Housing Markets, Mortgage Lending, and Sea Level Rise, Benjamin J. Keys & Philip Mulder, National Bureau of Economic Research, WORKING PAPER 27930, DOI 10.3386/w27930
ISSUE DATE October 2020
https://www.nber.org/papers/w27930
Besides, taxpayers will be bailing out any houses/property lost due to SLR. Insurance companies are leaving already.
02
JUNE 2023
“ South Florida continues to see a surge in domestic and international wealth migration, as homebuyers from high-tax, high-density states relocate and purchase prime properties of $1 million and up. The region’s real estate market is unique due to the significant number of cash transactions and the high rate of migration.
The housing market in South Florida, particularly in Miami-Dade County, continues to show robust growth and resilience, outperforming pre-pandemic levels. According to the April 2023 statistics released by the MIAMI Association of Realtors (MIAMI) and the Multiple Listing Service (MLS) systems, the market is leading the nation in real estate appreciation.”
That pretty much blows your theory to smithereens.
https://www.noradarealestate.com/blog/south-florida-housing-market/
A few years ago a NASA director said that US space activities would stop because the launch pad at Cape Canaveral would be underwater due to rising sea levels caused by global warming.
Pad 39A is 48 feet above sea level and Pad 39B is 55 feet above sea level. So at the rate of 0.14 inches per year in the 2000’s, they’ll go under water in 6100 and 6700 AD. I think we’ll hit another glaciation period before then, and sea levels will plummet.
But we must take action now! We only have 4,000 years to save the launch complex!
What it illustrates is how divorced the messaging is from the science, even from the leader of one of our premier science agencies.
”
Housing prices in south Florida in relative decline due to sea-level rise:”
So of all the factors impacting current market pricing of housing in S FL., you see sea level rise as driving short term fluctuations???
George Turner wrote:
A few years ago a NASA director said that US space activities would stop because the launch pad at Cape Canaveral would be underwater due to rising sea levels caused by global warming.
Pad 39A is 48 feet above sea level and Pad 39B is 55 feet above sea level.
Maybe before you imply that NASA directors are idiots you should get your facts straight.
The Kennedy Space Center is 10 ft above sea level:
https://elevation.maplogs.com/poi/kennedy_space_center_florida_usa.556327.html
Moreover:
“Based on historical records and aerial photos, the beach in front of Kennedy has thinned and moved inland by as much as 200 feet (60 meters). The losses have been most acute and persistent along a stretch near the center’s two most prized launch pads.”
and
“In 2012, Hurricane Sandy offered a glimpse of the new normal along the Atlantic coast. The storm passed 200 miles offshore from Kennedy, but it moved so slowly that the heavy surf scoured the beach for three or four high-tide cycles. By the time the skies cleared, the dunes along a 2-mile (3-kilometer) stretch near Complexes 39A and B had retreated as much as 65 feet (20 meters). Nearly 650 feet (200 meters) of railroad track in the vicinity of 39A were undermined by the storm surge. The high-tide line moved closer to a service road, under which lay some of the center’s natural gas, communications, liquefied rocket fuel, and water lines. That road sits just 4 feet (1.2 meters) above sea level.”
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/NASASeaLevel/page3.php
They really do know more than you.
Rob Starkey wrote:
So of all the factors impacting current market pricing of housing in S FL., you see sea level rise as driving short term fluctuations???
I never wrote any such thing.
CKid wrote:
You don’t want to accept all the uncertainties with these papers. If you picked 100 papers they would have 100 different estimates of the past and future trend and acceleration.
Everyone accepts the uncertainties!
But listing 20 uncertainties doesn’t make the overall uncertainty 20 times larger. You know that, right?
Different results come different assumptions. That’s how science is done, as scientists try to understand all the uncertainties, narrow them and hone-in on the assumptions. That’s how it is in any science.
https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/2019-02-15190822_shadow.jpg
Quoting a newspaper article from 40 years ago doesn’t impress me in the least. It’s an attempt at deflection (and a pretty lousy one at that).
This is reality. SLR of 5 inches a century.
https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/plots/120-012_meantrend.png
Quoting a single station, implying that it means something for the world — or any place other than that station — is extremely misleading, and you know it.
You don’t even take yourself seriously.
Global tidal gauge result: More like an average of 7 in in a century so far, and clearly accelerating:
https://www.globalchange.gov/sites/globalchange/files/global_average_sea_level_change.png
Appell
You link a crayon graph and you think that means anything. The following studies represent what actual science is about.
Houston 2021…acceleration 0.0128mm/yr2
Wenzel 2014…0.0042+-0.0092mm/yr2
Palanisamy 2015 “anthropogenic fingerprint too small..”
Boretti 2012 worldwide tidal gauges no signs of acceleration
Holgate 2007 first half of 20th century larger rate of SLR
Iz 2017 overwhelming absence of acceleration
Fasullo 2016 magnitude of acceleration in mid 21st C depends of future ice sheets loss, which is highly uncertain
Gregory 2013 “insignificant or small…” acceleration
Ray and Douglas 2011 no significant acceleration
Meyssignac 2012 influence of anthropogenic SLR hardly detectable
Camargo 2020 “ This study showed that the choice of data set and noise model results in large differences in the steric sea-level trend and the associated uncertainty.”
Visser 2015 “ Varying trend patterns can be found for the same data depending on the method chosen”
Kleinherenbrink 2019 “..acceleration in line with Dangendorf at 0.018mm/yr2
Dangendorf 2015 up to 55% natural variability
Prandi 2021 mean value of uncertainty in acceleration 0.062mm/yr2
Watson 2015 uncertainty of acceleration 0.058mm/yr2
Ablain 2019 uncertainty of acceleration 0.07mm/yr2
Anyone who has actually read the literature realizes there are many papers that don’t conclude there is runaway SLR and in fact are forthright about uncertainty.
Even with a value of 0.018mm/yr2 in acceleration, that doesn’t mean 1+ meters and with the uncertainty levels above, predictions of catastrophic damage is not justified.
As I have shown numerous times there are hundreds of tidal gauge graphs that don’t show obvious or significant acceleration. Even when the rate of SLR is above 2-3 mm/yr, that includes VLM as shown by studies such as this one , which concluded the following
“ Sea level projections rarely accurately account for local land subsidence, contributing to uncertainties in assessing sea level change. For instance, the rates of VLM in the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report of global sea level change projections. use a constant long-term background rate of change estimated from historical tide gauge trends. Estimates of VLM from tide gauges do not account for subsidence in shallow strata and are likely to underestimate VLM or represent only minimum values”
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-37853-7
In many cases the subsidence is significant, such as in Jakarta with periods of up to 320mm/yr and the Mekong Delta with rates over 25mm/yr.
These rates as well as those at hundreds of other locations were partly from groundwater extraction which means a fraction of the acceleration during the 20th century was not from CO2.
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4441/14/20/3197/htm
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2515-7620/ab5e21
George Turner wrote:
And as I’ve mentioned, reversing sea level rise by simply removing water from the oceans is drop dead simple, hardly a challenge for a third year mechanical engineering student.
Where do your engineering students want to put this water?
How much energy is required to put it there?
What is the cost to put it there?
George Turner wrote:
Now if I formed a mass movement of school kids who were going to remove the water bucket by bucket, or power the pumps by running barefoot in giant hamster wheels while wearing tie-dyed frocks proclaiming their absolute devotion to saving the Earth….
Where are you kids going to put this sea water, George?
CKiddie wrote:
You link a crayon graph
Explain why it’s a “crayon graph.”
CKiddie wrote:
Holgate 2007 first half of 20th century larger rate of SLR
You don’t link to any papers (conveniently), so who knows what you’re posting?
You’ve not providing the full spectrum of papers published, are you?
Just the few that support your ideology, right?
And you don’t link to any of them, or even give citations, so no one here can even look at them and check!!
Sneaky & underhanded.
Not how a real intellectual discussion is done.
CKid wrote:
That pretty much blows your theory to smithereens.
Not at all.
And you know that’s not what I wrote.
What is the rate of increase/decrease in housing prices for houses in Florida on the beach compared to houses further inland?
Appell
You tell me the difference in rate for house prices. I know for south Florida prices have not gone down as you contend.
A crayon graph is anything you believe has anything to do with reality.
Of course, I provided papers that demonstrate a counter argument against the hysterical meme that you worship. If you actually read the full array of papers that are out there, like I have, you would already know the literature. Some of those papers have been in IPCC report, so they are part of mainstream science.
CKid wrote:
You tell me the difference in rate for house prices.
I did!
I know for south Florida prices have not gone down as you contend.
I never contended they went down! Read harder.
“In this paper, we explore dynamic changes in the capitalization of sea level rise (SLR) risk in housing and mortgage markets. Our results suggest a disconnect in coastal Florida real estate: From 2013-2018, home sales volumes in the most-SLR-exposed communities declined 16-20% relative to less-SLR-exposed areas, even as their sale prices grew in lockstep. Between 2018-2020, however, relative prices in these at-risk markets finally declined by roughly 5% from their peak. Lender behavior cannot reconcile these patterns, as we show that both all-cash and mortgage-financed purchases have similarly contracted, with little evidence of increases in loan denial or securitization. We propose a demand-side explanation for our findings where prospective buyers have become more pessimistic about climate change risk than prospective sellers. The lead-lag relationship between transaction volumes and prices in SLR-exposed markets is consistent with dynamics at the peak of prior real estate bubbles.”
Neglected No More: Housing Markets, Mortgage Lending, and Sea Level Rise, Benjamin J. Keys & Philip Mulder, National Bureau of Economic Research, WORKING PAPER 27930, DOI 10.3386/w27930
ISSUE DATE October 2020
https://www.nber.org/papers/w27930
Appell
The jumbo-conforming mortgage rate spread increased during that period so may have had an impact since the shoreline properties are higher valued than those inland.
But the bigger issue is not understanding human behavior. Do you really think people are worrying about what might happen in 30-40 years, especially when they are seniors and are in their estate planning stage of their lives? The annual threat of hurricanes has always been a factor in Florida. It is a way of life. Subsidence has been a constant for the last 100 years in the Miami area when there were only a few hundred people. The SLR for those thinking out 10 years is a non factor.
Your data are out of date. My data are current and say things are hopping.
Here you go, David. I’m sure you can afford any of these properties in Miami, the price driven down by fear of sea level rise!
https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-search/Miami_FL?view=map&pos=25.892496,-80.38246,25.641437,-80.05287,11.000000000000004&qdm=true
CKid wrote:
Do you really think people are worrying about what might happen in 30-40 years, especially when they are seniors and are in their estate planning stage of their lives?
The data say many people are worrying about it – enough to influence the market.
Housing prices in south Florida in relative decline due to sea-level rise:
“Neglected No More: Housing Markets, Mortgage Lending, and Sea Level Rise,” Benjamin J. Keys & Philip Mulder, National Bureau of Economic Research, WORKING PAPER 27930, DOI 10.3386/w27930
ISSUE DATE October 2020
https://www.nber.org/papers/w27930
jim2 wrote:
Here you go, David. I’m sure you can afford any of these properties in Miami, the price driven down by fear of sea level rise!
https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-search/Miami_FL?view=map&pos=25.892496,-80.38246,25.641437,-80.05287,11.000000000000004&qdm=true
Jim, this is why I usually automatically divert your comments to my trash folder — you are very unable to understand what’s being discussed.
I’m going to again filter you back there.
Oh noes! Not the Trash Can!!!
Appell
Some things go right over your head. Besides that your data are out of date there is a correlation between price and proximity to the shore and use of jumbo mortgage and the cost of getting a jumbo mortgage. The demand dropped for those high end close to shore properties. Nobody cares about what might happen 30 years from now except those who worship at the altar of AGW church.
CKid wrote:
Some things go right over your head. Besides that your data are out of date
Explain how my data are “out of date”
Appell
What has triggered you and made you so discombobulated is that I cited 3 peer reviewed climate science studies authored by actual climate scientists concluding the uncertainty levels for acceleration in SLR were 0.058, 0.062 and 0.7mm/2, which are huge. That pretty much negates any of your 8th grade home style equation attempts at calculating acceleration. Just like I said before several months ago, the satellite data is undependable and has too many uncertainties because of errors, biases, recalibrations etc.etc. Go back and look at all those hundreds of tidal gauge graphs I provided to you several months ago and you won’t see any signs of obvious and significant signs of accelerations. Your satellite derived crayon graphs are bunkum.
In a lengthy interview with Tucker Carlson, the controversial but rather impressive Andrew Tate suggested that the standard political distinction between Left and Right, liberal-progressivist and conservative, is not in itself the polarity that explains the culture wars we are undergoing or the social divide that is tearing apart our countries. The distinction, he argues, is between people who think and people who don’t, or as he put it, between “the thinkers and the repeaters.” It’s between those who endeavor to acknowledge reality — for example, that there are two and only two biological sexes or that Socialism, as defined by Thomas DiLorenzo in “The Problem with Socialism,” is “the biggest generator of poverty the world has ever known” — and those who merely repeat the ideological sedatives of the day or the tectonic lies that have become the trademark of the so-called legacy media. Tate should know. He is one of the prime victims of rampant and unscrupulous media disinformation.
https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2023/07/18/on-politics-evil-and-stupidity-n1711597
Andy,
You write: “[climate catastrophism] has nothing to do with me, it is the dominant narrative theme of climate change as is propagated by virtually all authority sources (and over a long time), which as a result is measurable as being the primary way in which publics perceive climate change (whether either rejecting or accepting).” Actually the argument you present and your conclusions have everything to do with your own (Andy West’s) personal biases.
The structure of your argument is that
1.IPCC reports are correct and balanced.
2.Some (politicians, media) exaggerate the danger presented by the IPCC, creating a catastrophe narrative.
3. The public then divides itself into those who support the exaggerations and those who are skeptical of them.
You go on to talk about the potential danger of acting on the exaggerations without anywhere addressing the dangers of NOT acting on the IPCC analysis. How much action is too much and how much is not enough is certainly a valid question. But all you have to say is “too much is dangerous”. This is obviously neither a balanced nor unbiased observation. I will not speculate on what motivates you to make such an asymmetric analysis. By your own account it is not the science, since you duck any pointed question with “I am not a scientist”. I will refrain from calling you a tool of the fossil fuel industry, because that would not be helpful.
“The structure of your argument is that:”
Good. You’re getting pretty close now!
“1.IPCC reports are correct and balanced.”
I did not say this. I say I take them as the gold standard, without respect to whether or not they are appropriately balanced (I can’t tell), because they represent by far the majority view of scientists.
“2.Some (politicians, media) exaggerate the danger presented by the IPCC, creating a catastrophe narrative.”
The vast majority of authority sources, and for many years, albeit with odd exceptions like Trump when he was the Pres.
“3. The public then divides itself into those who support the exaggerations and those who are skeptical of them.”
Not quite as simple as that. There are also very many who are supportive in unconstrained scenarios, and not supportive in reality-constrained scenarios (which count regarding policy backing), mainly in more religious nations. And the other way around, mainly in secular nations. All of these positions (as emphasised by their predictability from national religiosity), are not determined by rationality, but are different levels of emotive conviction to or rejection of an emotive cultural narrative. In very religious nations these movements between different scenarios swing from around 58-62% unconstrained (depending on the strength of emotive alignment to catastrophe narrative), to 3-17% reality-constrained (depending on the strength of the constraint), so potentially more of the population has this shifting characteristic than have fixed attitudes.
“You go on to talk about the potential danger of acting on the exaggerations without anywhere addressing the dangers of NOT acting on the IPCC analysis. How much action is too much and how much is not enough is certainly a valid question.”
It is not a question of too little or too much! Because ALL of the positions above are cultural, which is to say NOT rational, and it is also clear that nations enact policy in proportion to their national attitudes – then the majority of policy implementation is essentially irrational at the moment. What is the point of having a great deal more of something, if due to irrational motivation it is satisfying a cultural goal and NOT an objective goal of combating the effects of climate change? This is why, for instance, there is such heavy resistance to nuclear in green movements and CC activism. If policies came along that would solve the issue, this would kill the culture, so the culture selects heavily against them, and can do so via the strong & *subconscious* coordination of potentially billions of people. For the same reason, renewables are selected FOR, because no amount of them on their own could ever address the issue, if we also want civilisation to carry on. And renewables suck tons of resource and effort and money into the culture’s sphere of influence, which is to its benefit (it is not sentient or agential, so this is just a turn of phrase to represent its PoV) and not ours, either to address climate change objectively or indeed for the general health of society and the environment generally. Renewables would not exist as a primary option without the culture, but nuclear pre-existed the culture, is not a solution that stems from cultural motivation, and has the potential to wipe out the culture.
Andy,
Believe me, I have argued the nuclear issue with others many times. I agree some have an irrational fear of it. But the issue is complicated and I am not willing to say that those opposed are soley attempting to preserve “renewable culture” though that may conribute. (There may be some movement: see discussions of “Green Nuclear Deal” and US politician AOC’s possible endorsesment.)
You failed to address my main point. You highlight potential harms of irrational climate activism, but make no mention of the potential harms of irrational skepticism. Of course the skeptics not only attack exaggerations of IPCC reports, they attack the reports themselves. The so-called “science” of many of the attacks is deeply flawed. One can bemoan the fact that 22 years separated Al Gore’s making the issue prominent and the first constructive US legislation, the “Inflation Reduction Act”. Inaction can be harmful too. I repeat: your analysis shows bias by ignoring that.
Irrational scepticism is every bit as bad as irrational belief; they are both irrational! This is made clear in the book. Not to mention that a huge swathe of of publics have irrational support and resistance simultaneously, but within different scenarios. All of this is bad! Yet policy nevertheless reflects cultural attitudes 0: Those in publics who resist climate catastrophism, or do so at least within reality-constrained circumstances, do NOT attack the IPCC reports – that would require rationalism and knowledge upon which it is based, but they have no clue what these reports say, and they are reacting emotively. They attack catastrophism, and because the UN leadership also incessantly propagates catastrophe narrative – in contradiction to the IPCC working group science they sponsored – then the IPCC as a body is indeed attacked, because the only public perception of the IPCC (an UN sponsored body) science, *is* the catastrophe narrative that the UN leadership promotes!
p.s. or rather more subtly, inapt innate scepticism, which has misfired (perhaps falsely thinking a scientific consensus is a cultural one), is bad. But apt innate scepticism, is good in the sense that it has detected a culture, and cultural narratives are always wrong. This doesn’t mean innate scepticism can detect the truth, it can’t, or have any rational substitute for that which it has detected as being wrong due to being cultural. Both apt and inapt scepticism occur in the domain. But innate scepticism of climate catastrophism is not bad, because it has correctly detected a false narrative (whether or not the people who have done so, then propose something sensible or bonkers instead).
David, I caveated the 10.21 answer, but it I think this is stuck in moderation…
Climate Doomer’s may have political momentum, but their unreliable energy “solutions” are failing.
RI Energy ends plan for 100MW offshore wind project
Video
Jul 18, 2023 / 10:29 PM EDT
The state’s largest utility company has decided not to move forward with a massive offshore wind project in Rhode Island, arguing that rising costs have made the deal too expensive for ratepayers and out of line with state law.
https://www.wpri.com/video/ri-energy-ends-plan-for-100mw-offshore-wind-project/8829973/
They should try using this new geothermal horizontal drilling tech. Each drill site would produce 3.5MW with a small footprint, closed loop system and long life.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/fervo-energy-announces-technology-breakthrough-140000512.html
“Fervo is the first company to successfully drill a horizontal well pair for commercial geothermal production, achieving lateral lengths of 3,250 feet, reaching a temperature of 191 °C, and proving controlled flow…
By applying drilling technology from the oil and gas industry, we have proven that we can produce 24/7 carbon-free energy resources in new geographies across the world.”
comment in moderation.
Artificial Intelligence is an oxymoron. Garbage in -garbage out according to the predilictions of whoever is running the program.The real problem is that people want to act on what comes out of the black box with no knowledge of the range of input data or the algorithms involved.
Agree that different regions (eg; USA vs. Europe or Japan) have different cultural beliefs and politics. In USA I see climate change debate as not so much about climate change but anti-Big Oil/fossil fuels. Also we Americans are huge believers in “snake oil”, that is we see urgency to go with new technology: out with the old, in with the new.
And other cultures news doesn’t feature climate in the headlines on a daily basis. This cultural factor is why West’s timing of his book is critical.
I sample from other nations’ news as often as I can, especially non-Western countries. There’s a lot of non-climate news on people’s minds.
Most Americans don’t see actual news from overseas. So-called “World news” beats, like the BBC, Deutsche Welle, AP, etc. appear to simply be a Western lense filtering on happenings elsewhere.
Here is a rather damning snippet from IOL, a South African based newspaper just yesterday after the SA federal government released its updated energy plans:
“It said there was no debate on the enormous sums of money on the table from the industrialised West to induce developing nations, such as South Africa, to abandon its wealth of natural energy resources to focus on foreign renewable energy sources.
“This pressure on us from international interests, is, in our opinion, short-sighted, counter productive and unaffordable for the foreseeable future, although the appeal for many politicians.”
https://www.iol.co.za/business-report/energy/mixed-industry-reaction-to-south-africas-renewable-energy-master-plan-4783b448-1c13-4cc2-90b2-8558ce649e79
Pingback: The Grip of Culture: The Social Psychology of Climate Catastrophism - The Truth Central
John Kerry got nothing but hot air from his China Climate Doomer Climate Emergency trip. China has probably emitted more CO2 than the US at this point. And before some China apologist chimes in about per-capita emissions, I would remind you that equations in radiation physics don’t contain terms for “per-capita emissions.”
Kerry said the hours of closed-door meetings with senior Chinese officials revealed “things we clearly agreed on,” with both sides committing to regular meetings, including one in the next few weeks. He still expressed hope of achieving breakthroughs that could keep the planet from experiencing disastrous climate change.
“We had a very extensive set of frank conversations and realized that it’s going to take a little bit more work to break the new ground,” Kerry said in a call with the media. “So we’ve agreed that we’re going to meet intensively.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/07/19/kerrys-effort-to-secure-climate-deal-with-china-falls-short-00107022
jim2 wrote:
China has probably emitted more CO2 than the US at this point.
Not even close, it’s still about 2 to 1.
And, yes, per capita emissions matter. Unless you think you, as an individual American, have an inherent right to pollute more than an individual Chinese citizen.
By your logic Australians can mightly complain that the US emits about 13 times the CO2 that Australia does, and about 17 times more cumulatively, even though Australia emits more per capita by a few percent, so Australia doesn’t need to do anything about their emissions. And so on for all smaller countries. The US has to do it first.
That renders hollow your hand-wringing over CO2 emissions. Either emissions are bad and no one should do it, or it doesn’t matter and everyone should do it. I find it odd you would want to let 1/5 of the worlds population emit CO2 at will given your high standing in the Church of Climate Doomers.
Jim, Chinese CO2 doesn’t harm the climate, which is why the West offshored so many CO2 intensive industries like cement and steel production to China to help save the planet.
jim2 wrote:
I find it odd you would want to let 1/5 of the worlds population emit CO2….
Of course I never said that, you just made it up.
Just as (you wrote above) radiation physics doesn’t have a term for CO2 emissions per capita, it also doesn’t have a term for CO2 emissions per country.
It’s a bit odd that CO2 emission charts for China show almost no emissions before 1950. Yet, coal has been used in China for a very long time.
FUXIN, China (Reuters) – Coal has supplied more than 70 percent of China’s energy for the past 50 years and that shows no sign of waning. Consumption, in fact, has increased 10 percent a year the past decade, despite efforts to close inefficient mines, cut pollution and find alternative energy sources. Here’s a timeline showing China’s long history of coal use.
* Scholars say China first began burning coal for heat, cooking and smelting steel during the Han dynasty (beginning in 206 BC).
* 1895: Treaty of Shimonoseki, signed by China after losing a war with Japan, is the first of a number of “unequal treaties” with foreign powers giving overseas enterprises the rights to develop Chinese coal mines. The first mines are used to supply the fleets of foreign navies.
* 1931: Japan invades and occupies northeast China, seizing the region’s coal mines and steel mills. After expanding along China’s eastern coast, Japan eventually takes control of other major coal producing regions.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-coal-timeline/factbox-timeline-of-chinas-long-love-affair-with-coal-idUSTRE70A2EC20110111
jim2 wrote:
It’s a bit odd that CO2 emission charts for China show almost no emissions before 1950. Yet, coal has been used in China for a very long time.
How about we use actual data, and not news articles?
I found a better source than I used yesterday:
PIK (Potsdam Institute for Climate Research in Germany).
https://www.pik-potsdam.de/paris-reality-check/primap-hist
It shows China emitted 2.0 Gt CO2 from energy use from 1750-1950.
The US emitted 95 Gt CO2.
From 1750-2019, China emitted 206 Gt CO2 from energy use.
The US emitted 411 Gt CO2.
However, including all 6 Kyoto categories of GHGs, but excluding land-use changes, these numbers become:
1750-1950:
China: 10 Gt CO2e
US: 109 Gt CO2e
1750-2019:
China: 235 Gt CO2e
US: 450 Gt CO2e
The difference between CO2 emissions and Kyoto6 emissions is mostly methane from agriculture.
“The Kyoto Protocol covers a “basket” of six GHGs: carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, methane, hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFCs) and sulfur hexafluoride.”
NIST: https://t.ly/wi4OE
Lots of other numbers to play with at PIK.
Maybe more later. Maybe not.
One of the “lots of other numbers” is that US emissions are going down, China’s still on a rocket ride. Of course I don’t believe any country should worry about emissions without solid proof that man-generated CO2 will cause a catastrophe. We don’t currently have that proof. Just a bunch of digital tea leaves courtesy of the Church of Climate Doomers.
China emits twice as much CO2 as the US. China, India, Russia, and Iran emit three times as much CO2 as the US.
But that’s okay because non-Western CO2 doesn’t affect the climate.
Worldwide CO2 growth is inevitable. Humanity will adapt to what comes.
George Turner wrote:
China emits twice as much CO2 as the US. China, India, Russia, and Iran emit three times as much CO2 as the US.
I thought you think climate change from CO2 isn’t a threat. So why would you care how much they emit?
Anyway, you’re wrong again.
According to this year’s BP Statistical Review of World Energy, here are 2022 emissions from energy use:
US 4825.8 Mt CO2
China 10550.2 Mt CO2
That’s a factor of 2.2, not three.
Per capita:
US 14.5 t CO2
China 7.5 t CO2
or 1.9 times as much for the US. It’d be more if you consider that we’ve outsourced a lot of our manufacturing to China.
jim2 wrote:
Of course I don’t believe any country should worry about emissions without solid proof that man-generated CO2 will cause a catastrophe.
Define “solid proof.”
BTW George, where is your estimate of the effect of the nonsphericity of the Earth on climate projections?
Does it make them smaller or larger?
jim2: Also, please define “catastrophe.” Thanks.
Rob Starkey wrote:
Worldwide CO2 growth is inevitable. Humanity will adapt to what comes.
All of humanity? Subsets of humanity? Which subsets?
David Appell | July 21, 2023 at 2:59 pm |
jim2: Also, please define “catastrophe.” Thanks.”
Appell – you are an official member of the TEAM screaming catastrophe – why are you bothering Jim2 asking something all your team members already know?
David Appell wrote:
George Turner wrote:
I said China emits twice as much CO2 as the US, not three times as much. Three times as much comes from adding Russia, India, and Iran to China’s emissions.
Those are all countries that don’t give a hoot about the US emissions cuts, and never will.
And without the non-sphericity of the Earth the circumference at the equator would be 60 miles shorter. Disney World would be about 45,000 feet lower. Surely people would notice.
And almost everybody is going to benefit from increased CO2 levels because it improves climate, reduces evaporation from plants (causing deserts to green), and dramatically improves plant growth (which is why greenhouses run CO2 levels from 1000 to 1500 ppm). That means more food and fresh water for all the animals.
Note that glaciation periods are catastrophically bad. Even a slight cooling can cause famine. If even a slight warming can also cause famine, then it implies that God, in his wisdom, happened to bless the world with a perfect climate right when Nixon was bugging the Watergate hotel. The lack of any causal correlation between the Nixon climate optimum and the huge long and short term climate fluctuations driven by the Earth’s orbital cycles and continental drift makes it seem rather improbable that those two events would even occur at the same time.
I would posit that we weren’t at a peak of climate goodness during the break in, and that we were on an upward slope from the horrifying conditions of the last glaciation period to the even better, warmer, wetter, lusher climates we’ll have in the future.
The belief that the Earth is balanced on the edge of knife blade sounds like religious preaching from the 1600’s, not science.
Can we start a go-fund-me page for David? He needs a dictionary.
George Turner wrote:
And without the non-sphericity of the Earth the circumference at the equator would be 60 miles shorter. Disney World would be about 45,000 feet lower. Surely people would notice.
How much does this change model projections, say, by 2100?
George Turner wrote:
China emits twice as much CO2 as the US. China, India, Russia, and Iran emit three times as much CO2 as the US.
I said China emits twice as much CO2 as the US, not three times as much.
Yes, you did. My bad. Please accept my apologies.
George Turner wrote:
China emits twice as much CO2 as the US. China, India, Russia, and Iran emit three times as much CO2 as the US.
But what data says Iran emits 3x USA?
The 2023 BP Statistical Review
https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/statistical-review-of-world-energy.html
gives, for 2022 CO2 emissions from energy consumption:
US: 4701.1 Mt CO2
Iran: 660.5 Mt CO2
Are you using a different data source, George?
George, so you admit you were wrong when you said Iran emits 3x as much CO2 as the US?
George Turner said:
Is there something about that sentence you don’t understand? Do I need to explain it? Those four countries emit three times as much CO2 as the US, and on top of that, the emission increases from China and India are going up and up.
George Turner wrote:
“China, India, Russia, and Iran emit three times as much CO2 as the US.”
Is there something about that sentence you don’t understand?
George, what is the summed population of China+India+Russia?
By what factor is it greater than that of the US??
Now tell me why you comment has any relevance at all?
And why it isn’t comical.
George Turner wrote:
“China, India, Russia, and Iran emit three times as much CO2 as the US.”
George, their collective population is about 3.0 billion.
About 9 times that of the US!!!
So tell me why your comparison of these 3 is at all relevant to the argument, cp US.
George, you constantly try to mislead about the numbers. Until you run into someone who knows they better than you do, and recognizes you for the charlatan you are.
George Turner wrote:
I said China emits twice as much CO2 as the US, not three times as much. Three times as much comes from adding Russia, India, and Iran to China’s emissions.
Why do you think this matters???
These countries have a collective population about 9x that of the US.
And you want THEM to cut back first?
LOL. Why should they when Americans are the clear fossil fuel hogs?
George Turner wrote:
China emits twice as much CO2 as the US. China, India, Russia, and Iran emit three times as much CO2 as the US.
But that’s okay because non-Western CO2 doesn’t affect the climate.
and the US emits more than the sum of
Kuwait
Ethiopia
Czech Republic
Sudan
Turkmenistan
Belgium
Romania
Oman
Chile
Bolivia
Angola
Peru
Morocco
Tanzania
Belarus
Israel
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Chad
Mali
Kenya
New Zealand
Austria
Greece
Myanmar
Ecuador
Serbia
Libya
Azerbaijan
Hungary
Trinidad and Tobago
Ireland
Bulgaria
Singapore
Portugal
Bahrain
Uganda
South Sudan
North Korea
Mongolia
Norway
Nepal
Syria
Finland
Cambodia
Mozambique
Switzerland
Sweden
Denmark
Slovakia
Zambia
Tunisia
Cameroon
Yemen
Paraguay
Ghana
Sri Lanka
Cuba
Guatemala
Laos
Hong Kong, Special Administrative Region of China
Madagascar
Dominican Republic
Uruguay
Afghanistan
Côte d’Ivoire
Burkina Faso
Niger
Guinea
Somalia
Senegal
Jordan
Croatia
Lebanon
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Zimbabwe
Kyrgyzstan
Republic of Congo
Lithuania
Papua New Guinea
Nicaragua
Benin
Moldova
Costa Rica
Panama
Honduras
Equatorial Guinea
Brunei
Gabon
Slovenia
Jamaica
Togo
Botswana
Haiti
Georgia
Malawi
Tajikistan
Estonia
El Salvador
Armenia
Macedonia
Namibia
Latvia
Mauritania
Luxembourg
Cyprus
Mauritius
Albania
Sierra Leone
Central African Republic
Rwanda
Netherlands Antilles
Eritrea
Timor-Leste
Barbados
Liberia
Lesotho
Burundi
Suriname
Guyana
Iceland
Fiji
Guinea-Bissau
Bhutan
Montenegro
Gambia
Macao, Special Administrative Region of China
Bahamas
Eswatini
Maldives
Malta
Belize
Djibouti
Cape Verde
Aruba
Comoros
Vanuatu
Saint Lucia
Palau
Samoa
Antigua and Barbuda
Solomon Islands
Andorra
Seychelles
Saint Vincent and the Grenadines
Grenada
Saint Kitts and Nevis
Dominica
Turks and Caicos Islands
Tonga
Micronesia
Marshall Islands
Sao Tome and Principe
British Virgin Islands
San Marino
Liechtenstein
Anguilla
Kiribati
Cook Islands
Monaco
Nauru
Tuvalu
Saint Helena
Niue
Holy See
So tell me again why your argument is relevant.
Actually ‘strong cultures’ are not defined by creating taboos, what is created then is strong elites who do not wish to experience resistance to their self-serving plans.
The imperialistic cultures were not strong outside the fantasies of those who benefitted from them. The British Empire was primarily financed through being global drug pushers, slave traders and money launderers. Certain families benefitted enormously from them and some still have footprints in places like Hong Kong, the Chinese outpost of the British Empire. There’s nothing strong in a culture that creates mass opium addiction, created centuries of division in the USA as a result of slavery and became the money men of some of the worst criminals on planet earth.
The expression ‘we come to serve God, but also to get rich’ is the seminal summation of how atavistic selfishness and greed was to be painted as divine service.
Strong cultures don’t destroy forests to create deserts. Strong cultures understand the roles of forests, the effect of destroying them. The problem is that living in harmony with them doesn’t tend to promote becoming mass murderers obsessed with building ever more lethal weaponry.
Right now, the reasons that the Western ‘cultures’ are collapsing is that the people who didn’t benefit from their taboos are now exposing the constructs for what they were and are: money making schemes.
Strong cultures don’t seek to create ever increasing inequalities, because they know that such are monocultural. Strong cultures don’t promote psychopaths to lead, because psychopaths don’t lead, they crush and control. Strong cultures respect societal and ecological redundancy, because they know that such redundancy increases resilience to novel external shocks.
Right now, the ‘strong culture’ of the West has less than 1000 psychopaths actively trying to promote World War III and due to their warped control structures and the huge numbers of weak-willed amoral wastrels that work for them, they can exert ridiculous power in the absence of any coherent and logical reasoning.
The commonest denominator between ‘strong but weak cultures’ is that what is absolutely unacceptable to the elites of such cultures is absolutely what should be done to adversaries. Look at what was done to Vietnam, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Serbia and now Russia.
When you have such entrenched racism in terms of human rights in a culture, it’s bound to be broken asunder due to its ridiculous internal contradictions.
Nowhere is that truer than in California, which has the poorest education outcomes and greatest wealth gap of any state, along with by far the highest number of homeless people.
California elites keep passing climate measures that won’t affect the elites of California, but will crush the poor, the farmers, the small business owners, and the working classes, all so California elites can get richer and continue their endless virtue signaling.
They’re going to make electricity and transportation luxury items. They’re going to ban the sale of affordable cars, just as they’ve eliminated affordable energy, cheap water, and basic order and public hygiene. They’re importing millions of Central Americans to serve as a perpetual underclass, throwing away all the hard-fought gains that California’s workers fought for across a century.
And it is definitely a strong culture, with only poorly organized an ineffectual opposition to any new tenets and directives that bubble up. California will proudly lead the way in saving the world by utterly destroying what was once a beautiful and revered state.
Trying to pin slavery on white people is a racial slur. Slavery was practiced pretty much everywhere in the world by all races. White people have been enslaved. Slavery is still a problem today. You need to study history more closely.
Ah, and there’s much more to unpack but it’s probably a loosing battle, and for cultural reasons.
It sounds like rtj’s rant about ‘strong culture’ is based on critical race theory. And maybe a dash of Doctrine of Dominion for good measure. British slave trade is just the superficial manefistation of a flawed overgeneralization and reinterpretation of past events. The challenge with smashing all of Western capatialistic history into a blurb is for rtj to realize the criticism itself should be critiqued.
Critical theory was applied to race. Racism is revealed as a systemic foundation of the West. OK. Now let’s use critical theory to critique critical theory itself. Ah, that won’t be done. It uncovers dirty laundry about the academics in institutional ivory towers who find Boogeymen under every rock, are anti-capitalist, and loathe when people of differing backgrounds find common ground.
How does this relate to the culture of climate adaptation?! Well, a (sub?)culture has emerged that believes racism is everywhere, capitalism corrupts everyone, and religions are absolute immorality. So that cultural belief form the basis that the only climate solutions are atheistic, communistic or socialistic, and based on affirmative action. There’s little common ground from a cultural view of which adaptions to consider.
I wouldn’t worry too much Jim. This cultural view will unravel itself. Just yesterday I read an article about a climate change panelist in South Africa rejecting renewable energies without more funding because intersectionalism in the energy market has made her demographic — black women — suffer the most. She doesn’t want solar panels without more money. Money … capitalism. Ah, the irony.
jim2 wrote:
Trying to pin slavery on white people is a racial slur.
We can certainly pin US slavery on white Americans.
What you probably don’t picture are Cherokee slaveholders, foremost among them Cherokee chief John Ross. What you probably don’t picture are the numerous African-American slaves, Cherokee-owned, who made the brutal march themselves, or else were shipped en masse to what is now Oklahoma aboard cramped boats by their wealthy Indian masters. And what you may not know is that the federal policy of Indian removal, which ranged far beyond the Trail of Tears and the Cherokee, was not simply the vindictive scheme of Andrew Jackson, but rather a popularly endorsed, congressionally sanctioned campaign spanning the administrations of nine separate presidents.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/how-native-american-slaveholders-complicate-trail-tears-narrative-180968339/
On top of that, Africans sold other Africans into slavery. There were many other players of many other races. Take a breath and read up on it for a change.
Slavery in the US must be examined in context of slavery around the world and in times before the US was even a thing. Slavery in the US was antithetical to the founding principle of individual freedom. Even when slaves are treated well, slavery violates that principle, so even under those conditions, slavery is horrible. It is worse when slaves are treated badly.
The US is one of the few countries that elevates personal freedom. It has served everyone in the US well. It was a guiding light that eventually brought equal treatment under the law to all citizens.
Slavery in the US is complex, but I’m not seeing the connection to culture of climate.
The complex story in the US should not ignore that white Americans both enslaved blacks and others were abolitionists. And then the complexity of First Nations enslaving other tribes as Jim mentions, and I’ll add to that black slaveholders and West African leaders who participated in the Atlantic slave trade.
Slavery is an ancient part of culture. It’s appearance in the British colonies and first States is not surprising. Attempting to blame a particular racial or ethnic group for causing slavery in the US is a gross re-interpretation that ignores millennia of slave history. Whites, for example, are just as much a monolithic racial culture as blacks are a monolithic racial culture; which is to say neither race holds a single view. Abigail Adams, the 2nd First Lady, was an outspoken early abolitionist; and Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad were assisted by white Quakers in Maryland who believed slavery was a sin. Critical race theory makes arguments that are too broad and conflict with historical events to be useful in mending bridges.
But again, what has this to do with climate culture?! I’m waiting to hear a social justice claim about climate policy enforcement …
jim2 wrote:
On top of that, Africans sold other Africans into slavery
Well I guess that justifies Confederate slavery and racism, right?
jim2 wrote:
On top of that, Africans sold other Africans into slavery.
Talk about relative morality…. I’m old enough to remember when Republicans & conservatives warned and complained about that.
I guess no more, huh? Extreme US racism is OK as long as someone else did it too.
jim2 wrote:
Slavery in the US must be examined in context of slavery around the world and in times before the US was even a thing.
Why?
Why?
Isn’t slavery in and of itself a horrible thing, regardless of whoever else was similarly terrorizing human beings?
Where were you raised, Jim?
Show me anywhere I said racism is “OK.” You are simply making things up as you go – per usual.
And as far as “empires” go, that isn’t unique to white cultures. There have been hundreds. It is wrong to belittle white cultures for possessing a ubiquitous human behavior.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_empires
Andy,
You argue that green policy is culture-driven and irrational because of the purported gap between it and IPPC science. While you are agnostic on the accuracy of IPCC science, you acknowledge it as “The gold standard … representing by far the majority of scientists”. In your view and mine, it is the most rational and therefore best source of information to guide policymakers. That suggests that we should look at rhe non-technical Summary for Policymakers contained in the updated 2023 IPCC Report https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/ . Following are some excerpts:
“A.2 Widespread and rapid changes in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere and biosphere have occurred. Human-caused climate change is already affecting many weather and climate extremes in every region across the globe. This has led to widespread adverse impacts and related losses and damages to nature and people (high confidence). Vulnerable communities who have historically contributed the least to current climate change are disproportionately affected (high confidence)….”
“B.1 Continued greenhouse gas emissions will lead to increasing global warming…Every increment of global warming will intensify multiple and concurrent hazards (high confidence). Deep, rapid, and sustainable reductions in greenhouse gas emissions would lead to discernable slowdown in global warming within around two decades…(high confidence)”
“B.2 For any given future warming level, many climate-related risks are greater than assessed in AR5, and projected long-term impacts are up to multiple times higher than currently observed (high confidence)…”
“B.3 Some future changes are unavoidable and/or irreversible but can be limited by deep, rapid and sustained global greenhouse gas emissions reduction. The likelihood of abrupt and/or irreversible changes increases with higher global warming levels. Similarly, the probability of low-likelihood outcomes associated with potentially very large adverse impacts increases with higher global warming levels. (high confidence)…”
“B.4 Adaption options that are feasible and effective today will become constrained and less effective with increasing global warming…”
“C.1 Climate change is a threat to human well-being and planetary health (very high confidence.) There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all (very high confidence)…”
I could go on, but you get the gist. I don’t know if you consider these points as “catastrophic alarmist” or not. Nowhere is the extinction of our species mentioned, but the “business as usual” approach is certainly not recommended. What gaps do you see between green policy and this IPCC Summary?
I can see a rhetorical advantage to a social scientist with an agenda in arranging his argument to attack policymakers instead of physical scientists. They are easier targets, and you can claim to be defending science. I still do not understand the motivation of your agenda.
David, the book is wholly one of social psychology, not climate science, and it is not attacking anyone! It characterises and measures a cultural entity that dominates cultural attitudes across the globe (whether emotive acceptance, rejection, or both within different scenarios), which entity has a principle narrative of ‘imminent global climate catastrophe’ that is also propagated by virtually all authority sources (Chapter 5). The culture and the attitudes it causes manifestly exist, whether we like it or not, and as is demonstrated in Chapter 12 it is also the case that policy commitment per nation corresponds to its cultural attitudes. As the latter are not rational, then for better or worse neither is the policy.
Your science points may be fantastic for all I know; I don’t pursue the arguments about who is right on the physical science. But they’re completely irrelevant to the above. Publics are (in vast majority) climate science illiterate; they perceive the whole topic only culturally, as is clear from their responses. And policy makers must be proportionally (not necessarily absolutely) reflecting the cultural attitudes of the countries that they operate in, otherwise commitments wouldn’t match the cultural pattern across nations. It is not in any way, shape or form an attack on policy makers to say that this is happening; its just a reality, and we will get nowhere if we don’t acknowledge realities and then consider what they imply and we do about them. [Just one odd outcome of this irrationality in policy implementation for instance, is that there is far more commitment on average to solar power in countries with low annual sunshine, than there is in countries with high annual sunshine].
“I still do not understand the motivation of your agenda”
Perhaps you haven’t considered the rather obvious possibility that I’m just investigating / understanding the social psychology of the domain, and I don’t have a climate-change related agenda! I did not come to this through climate, but through the study of cultural entities. If people from anywhere in the spectrum of conflict over climate-change / climate-science either use, or indeed abuse, my findings, that is their business. I guess you’d be right to say I don’t think letting a cultural entity be in charge is a good thing at all, from either a climate-concerned or climate-sceptical PoV, but opposing a cultural entity is essentially opposing a thing rather than identified individuals, and in any case I’ve been too busy measuring the thing to actually oppose it anyhow.
“ Publics are (in vast majority) climate science illiterate; they perceive the whole topic only culturally, as is clear from their responses.”
Absolutely correct. I hope everyone can agree on that statement, irrespective of everything else.
Andy West wrote:
David, the book is wholly one of social psychology, not climate science, and it is not attacking anyone! It characterises and measures a cultural entity that dominates cultural attitudes across the globe….
Measures how???
What exactly are you measuring? What is your metric? What are your numerical results?
Those questions are so interesting that Andy West actually wrote an entire book about them!
Indeed, George, too funny. David, if you read it you will find out 0:
George Turner wrote:
Those questions are so interesting that Andy West actually wrote an entire book about them!
But I searched through Andrew’s PDF and I couldn’t find where he defined “climate catastrophism.”
Maybe I overlooked it?
If so, can you please help me out?
Andy West wrote:
Indeed, George, too funny. David, if you read it you will find out 0:
Andrew, I searched through your PDF.
On which page did you define “climate catastrophism?”
And “climate catastrophe.”
Thanks.
See July 24th 6:54am
And the answer way above that you completely ignored re climate catastrophe. You are so funny.
One should consider that a Summary for Policy Makers will be differently motivated than an overview of the published science. Even the science that gets published can be truthful about its covered part of the subject matter but cause misdirection by what other parts of the subject are not investigated, much less published.
Absurd. Cleaning the air of the products of combustion is absolutely necessary, but that does not include CO2, which is not a pollutant.
In fact it is colorless, odorless, tasteless, and makes crops grow bigger and faster and resist drought. Humans exhale about 5 lbs of it per day. Plants use that and then we eat them. The US Navy submarines do not take measures against CO2 until it reaches 8,000 ppm, a level perhaps last seen in the Cambrian era, when animal life first appeared across the earth. Those alarmists deliberately ignore the historical and theoretical evidence that CO2 at these levels is not in control of climate and that we are not in control of CO2.
This is evidenced in history, since in the last million years we have had 8 glaciations and 8 interglacials including this current, none of them preceded by a CO2 change. Indeed, in the last 550 million years, there has never been a temperature reversal preceded by a CO2 change. The Holocene Optimum 9,000 years ago, about 2 C higher (CO2 280ppm), was not preceded by CO2 change. Cooling since then has been interrupted by the Minoan Warm, the Roman Warm, the Medieval Warm, and the current. Nor was the Little Ice Age preceded by CO2 change, in or out. Yes the correlation of temperature and CO2 is very good, about as good as that of sex with marriage. No causation in either case (unless you wish to posit that temperature changes cause CO2 changes, for which there is at least some evidence).
Nor is there any theoretical evidence for AGW, following the discovery of the exponential decline of the GHG effect of CO2 by Arrhenius (50% of its GHG effect in the first 20 ppm), and the modern calculations (MODTRANS, U of Chicago) are now correct, predicting that the next doubling to 800 ppm will increase its GHG effect by less than 3%. The nine major forcings, including CO2, make the changes as a vector force, with CO2 not a dominant factor at this time.
Nor are we in control of CO2 (we produce less than 5% of the annual contribution to the atmosphere), and we note no effect on CO2 rise for 1929-1931 and for 2020, despite our decreases in output (30% in 1929-1931 and perhaps 17% of a much higher production in 2020). No, not the slightest effect on the languid rise of CO2.
That latter greatly disappointed Arizona State University climate scientist Randall Cerveny who, unaware of 1929-1931, expressed his disappointment: “We had had some hopes that, with last year’s COVID scenario, perhaps the lack of travel and the lack of industry (that 17% drop in output) might act as a little bit of a brake. But what we’re seeing is, frankly, it has not.”
This is as discouraging as those parades of self-flagellants in the 14th century hoping to stop the progress of the Black Death.
Ckid
The public become very aware of climate science when they are directly affected by it. As with the additional ‘pollution charge’ In London, which yesterday enabled the Government to hold on to a By election Parliamentary seat unexpectedly, as the electorate revolted against the green issues involved, or where they are inconvenienced, as with just stop oil protestors.
I have talked with similar protest groups several times. They are generally nice, middle class sincere people who talk in slogans and are profoundly ignorant of Climate science.
So we need to differentiate between science, ideology and politics.
Awareness (and typically net resistance) to ULez (and similar), is not in any way an awareness of climate science 0: It is an awareness of policy responses that hit wallets and lifestyles. How much publics approve of such things or not, depends upon their cultural attitudes. But because cultural entities always give way proportionally to reality once it is revealed (their ‘preference’ is for things not to be revealed), then in all nations and for any cultural view, there is less and less support as the reality bites harder and harder.
Andy West wrote:
then in all nations and for any cultural view, there is less and less support as the reality bites harder and harder.
Andy, explain how reality is biting “harder and harder?”
Be sure to take into account the record temperatures we’re seeing right now.
And the sea level rise. The ice melting. The extreme weather. The increasing acidity of the ocean.
As far as I can see, you ignore ALL THE SCIENCE. You only assume a certain point of view, without any proof or reason at all, and go from there, whether your POV is true or not.
Appell
You are using the lowest form of reasoning In trying to convince anyone that CO2 is the cause of this and that we are going to have catastrophic warming with the attendant consequences. Because these events occurred prove absolutely nothing about the role of CO2.
What lame logic.
‘Reality’ in the context above is referring to the reality of policies implemented to execute Net Zero, in that the attitudes of publics to potential policy have been dictated wholly by culture (acceptance or rejection, and which is completely disconnected from mainstream [and any other] science). But as policies get implemented, the attitudes of publics shift to take account of their reality, for instance hitting their wallets and lifestyles, or conflicting with other priorities. This does not mean cultural effects completely yield, they yield only as much as they absolutely have to for each policy, to try and keep as many people still sympathetic to the culture as possible. Yet they lose more and more sympathy as policy becomes harsher. One must remember that cultural beliefs are not at all rational, they don’t stay as expressed in one scenario, when that scenario changes.
CKid wrote:
You are using the lowest form of reasoning In trying to convince anyone that CO2 is the cause of this
Cause of what?
and that we are going to have catastrophic warming
What do you mean by “catastrophic?”
I have never used that word in my life.
Andy West wrote:
‘Reality’ in the context above is referring to the reality of policies implemented to execute Net Zero, in that the attitudes of publics to potential policy have been dictated wholly by culture (acceptance or rejection, and which is completely disconnected from mainstream [and any other] science)
In what way is “culture,” whatever that means, “completely disconnected” from mainstream science, Andy?
How? Explain please.
David, the book explains how – you could try reading it! However, if you chart international public attitudes to climate change on a purely cultural axis (I use national religiosity, which is inarguably cultural), you get a characteristic set of patterns that are typical of a culture, and are very difficult to explain by any other possibility (this is covered), because (for instance), the climate-change most-endorsing responses to unconstrained questions, dramatically differ from the climate-change most-endorsing responses to reality-constrained questions, and both vary dramatically across the purely cultural axis (neither of which would occur in anything like this degree if responses were largely rational). No more on this until you read! The basic measurements are covered in Chapter 8, explanations for these in Chapter 9 (including showing the same pattern for a different culture), and many extra / nuanced measurements are in Chapter 10.
Andy West wrote:
David, the book explains how – you could try reading it!
Andrew, I have searched through your PDF. I didn’t not find a definite of “climate catastrophism.”
Did I miss it? If so, please let me know what page that definition appears on.
PS: I’m unlikely to read your book, unless I can get a free copy. (Contact me for mailing: david.appell@gmail.com) Books like this, where an author refuses to define his terms, and loaded with social science buzzwords, seem to me to be word salad with no real meaning. I was trained in the physical sciences. Sorry.
David:
Climate catastrophism is a culture (or cultural entity), as is Christianity or Communism too.
Introduction:
Page 2: “Nevertheless, a narrative of climate catastrophe still dominates public discourse, a fact that indicates a potent culture is operating throughout society. This book characterises that culture – the culture of climate catastrophism, or simply ‘climate catastrophism’ – details some of the mechanisms by which it works, and explains its roots in human evolutionary history. At the book’s centre is a set of measurements that demonstrate its existence, and which in turn can accurately predict, across nations, real-world phenomena such as the
level of deployment of renewable energy or the prevalence of climate activism…”
Clarification of terminology:
Page 7: “There are many definitions of ‘culture’ or ‘a culture’ used in academia, and still more in common usage. My own definition does not mean ‘a night at the opera’ or ‘a traditional activity’, say, but a ‘cultural entity’: a social movement or group bound by strong beliefs. Religions are common examples. I could have used the term ‘ideology’ rather than ‘culture’, but this tends to be used primarily for political movements (so only secular, not religious ones)…”
If you want to know where cultures came from and what are their main features / modes of operation, Chapter 3 covers this.
“I’m unlikely to read your book, unless I can get a free copy.”
What? You claim to have searched the *free* PDF, and then say you won’t read it unless it’s free? How did you search it then?
I seems to me you’d not read it if it was the last book on Earth. Your entire approach here seems to be geared around being as trivially vexatious as possible, while ignoring any answers. I’m curious, what do you think this achieves? How do you think that readers (from anywhere in the spectrum of views on CC) will regard this as anything but negative?
Native Americans were enslaving native Americans long before white people arrived
climatereason wrote:
Native Americans were enslaving native Americans long before white people arrived
Oh. The Confederate slavery was just fine. Good to know.
Please read up on the subject. The smithsonian has a good article on the subject. Nothing to do with white people but native Americans of North and South America enslaving each other years before white people arrived. Unfortunately a culture that many communities around the world had.
Tony Brown wrote:
Please read up on the subject. The smithsonian has a good article on the subject. Nothing to do with white people but native Americans of North and South America enslaving each other years before white people arrived.
This is nothing but a sordid & racist attempt to justify the horrendous slavery that southern Americans imposed on their black slaves.
Saying “others did it too” is never an excuse for terrorist activity.
>This is nothing but a sordid & racist attempt to justify the horrendous slavery that southern Americans imposed on their black slaves.
Stating the history of enslavement of peoples does not make a person racist. Nobody denied that slaveholders were legal in the US, nor did anyone justify it.
And what does this have to do with climate policy?
rtj started this rant about ‘strong culture’ in the context of climate culture and injected a reference to British imperialism: “There’s nothing strong in a culture that creates mass opium addiction, created centuries of division in the USA as a result of slavery and became the money men of some of the worst criminals on planet earth.”
You replied: “We can certainly pin US slavery on white Americans.”
Extra historical details were added that many peoples were slaveholders or traders in slavery. Nobody acquitted southerners of being slaveholders. Either you’re on a failed mission to label everyone who disagrees with your misrepresentation of history as racist, and / or you’re trolling this post.
So, again, what does your position have to do with the culture of climate?
Ah, another clang conclusion unjustified by the premise! You don’t accept facts without fanciful extrapolations. If it weren’t for that and straw man arguments, you’d have nothing to say.
Andy,
With all respect, you did not answer my main question. I guess it was somewhat buried, so I will repeat it here with more focus:
What gaps do you see between the “culturally-driven” green decarbonization policies of western Europe and the US, and the IPCC Summary for Policymakers? I am not saying that the IPCC has everything correct; there are of course uncertainties. But I do not believe either of us could name a better basis for decision making.
1) The SPMs are considerably different to the underlying working group outputs. How do I know which are right? I don’t; while I am not investigating physical climate change in any way, a definite mark somewhere is very useful to employ as a secondary confirmation that strong cultural narratives are wrong (because they are necessarily wrong to fulfil purpose, so they should contradict the science). I use the working group output because this comes from all scientists, whereas the SPMs are formed from a majority non-science group (and the forming of consensuses is a social not a scientific process, so giving more opportunity for bias and especially so with many non-scientists involved).
2) But in practice, it matters little what the IPCC says and perhaps even the difference between the working groups and the SPMs! The dominant cultural narrative is effectively one of planetary apocalypse and salvation via dramatic Net Zero, exactly because this is the most emotive narrative, and it is this entirely cultural fairy-story that is driving policy, which is why we can see for instance that the commitment to renewables across nations follows a clearly cultural pattern, which is not relatable to the climate or climate exposure of said nations, or any technology factors or even rationality.
3) Cultural narratives are not meant to be interpreted literally, we have *subconscious* decoding in our heads that means while adherents sign-up to it in principle, they don’t actually act as though it is true. Their subconscious knows it’s just a cultural membership card, leaving their conscious to still think its true but in principle negating collateral damage. (This is what frequently leads to accusations of personal lying, but these are not typically true, people are just ‘believing’). We are very familiar with this from the religious narratives of hell and damnation, which even most religious believers don’t at all take to be literally true, they absolutely don’t live their lives avoiding sin like eternal damnation is the real cost of this (it is quite well researched).
4) However, for a cultural narrative that claims a complete backing by science, which the catastrophe narrative falsely does (many examples ref’d from Chapter 5) much more tends to be enacted by society as a whole as though it is true. This happened for instance with eugenics, which was a strong element of a particularly bad early/mid 20th century culture, with terrible consequences. But it’s also true that ONLY culturally approved things are allowed to happen. So you end up with complete irrationality; some policy strands are implementing the ‘culturally approved’ renewables frenetically, as though apocalypse is truly around the corner (a fairy story!), but even this with some major dislocations such as the solar thing noted above. While other policy strands, which the culture selects against because they would damage or kill it, are heavily suppressed despite that they could help tremendously, so indeed nuclear power (which would likely dwarf any renewables aid if properly pursued). And because cultures are blind (they work only on selection of narratives and have no foresight or caution), there is an overall lack of consideration that jumping into the largest change in civilisation since the industrial revolution, and possibly since the invention of farming, by only 2050, might represent more of a threat to humanity, and indeed via bio-fuels / renewables deployment the environment too, than the issue being addressed. Yet the moral imperative of imminent global climate catastrophe *emotively* trumps all arguments for publics and public authorities alike, and covers up the yawning irrational chasms between the various actions. In short, it’s a complete mess, and only dissolving the culture would allow science and reason to properly engage with the issue. I can’t see how anyone, from the highly sceptical to the deeply climate concerned, could think for a moment that it is better to leave a cultural entity in charge than to engage rationally – the culture is a no win for anyone, except the culture itself, and it’s not even alive to enjoy its success 0:
The IPCC “conclusions” are written by agenda-driven administrators, not scientists (yes, there are still some worthy of the name.) The ones quoted are not at all scientific.
David my reply to you landed in the wrong place. Native Americans were enslaving each other long before white people arrived. Unfortunately slavery is endemic in many cultures including tribes in Africa and the Arab nations amongst many others.
Andy,
Once again you fail to answer the question. I must assume that you concede that there is no gap whatsoever between green policies to decarbonize and IPCC reports, whether Summaries for Policymakers or Working Group outputs.
Your narrative about irrational carastrophism is an abstract strawman wrapped in psycho-babble. I don’t buy it for a minute. .The need to decarbonize is not a fairy-tale. It is real and based on science. It is not a “cultural entity”. You don’t duck questions of science because you don’t understand them. You duck them because they have substance. You offer no basis for rationality other than science (or any “alternate science” as some like to do), only abstract generalizations. Science ruins your story, a story motivated by an agenda not in the public interest.
The need to decarbonize is based on digital tea leaves, David A. It’s not science. Models are not falsifiable. Neither are a host of climate hypotheses.
jim2 wrote:
The need to decarbonize is based on digital tea leaves, David A. It’s not science. Models are not falsifiable. Neither are a host of climate hypotheses.
Look at this graph and tell us again why CO2 isn’t a warming factor:
https://assets.weforum.org/wp-content/uploads/141203-Wed-cumulative-CO2-carbon-emissions-from-1870-chart.png
“Your narrative about irrational carastrophism is an abstract strawman wrapped in psycho-babble.”
Well, David Andrews, that says it better than what I was going to say. Thanks for that.
David, I answered your question comprehensively. In summary, policy implementation, which is proportional per nation to its attitudes on climate change, is unsurprisingly irrational, because those attitudes are irrational, aka emotive and cultural. This may lead to some things you think are good, and some things you think are bad, but in both case it has nothing to do with the (mainstream) science of climate change. The pattern of renewables commitment across nations, for instance, is clearly cultural.
Maybe you don’t like the answer, fine. As I said, I am not judging where the science stands in the range of argument, but have used the IPCC science as the gold standard; I am most certainly not questioning the existence of such a gold standard!
And the fairy-tale narrative, that we can see propagated by virtually all authority sources, and via measurement we see dictates public attitudes across the globe, bears no resemblance to some measured and objective need to decarbonise. It is a primitive existential narrative of the most emotive kind possible, and indeed we can see from public responses that is is ONLY perceived emotively, not rationally.
“Science ruins your story…” you say. But science *is* my story, the social science of what is actually happening in publics across the globe, where it is that both resistance to and support of climate change both come from (and indeed both are cultural). As it says in the very first paragraph of the book, repeated in the head post, the social psychology is entirely independent of (any) climate science, and the physical climate system too, and the book makes no judgement upon these.
And then you say: “Your narrative about irrational carastrophism is an abstract strawman wrapped in psycho-babble. I don’t buy it for a minute.” You don’t buy it for a minute, and here was me thinking that you were engaging to try and understand it, not to mention that you haven’t read the book and you haven’t perused the measurements in light of the knowledge that reading it would give you. Science in action huh?
David Andrews said:
The working groups just say what they think the science shows about temperature and sea level given and a few other measurable parameters given a range of assumptions about future carbon emissions and to what extent CO2 might affect climate.
Decarbonizations is a completely different topic, based on how society values certain things. Perhaps the only science in decarbonization implementation would be the social science of how groups of people tend to think and react, whether logically or emotionally, when they set goals (how much should emissions be cut?), and the engineering science of bang for the buck (nuclear, advanced gas turbines, improved fuel efficiencies, etc) of how to best meet those goals at the lowest cost or inconvenience.
The latter question is one of finding the best way to meet some arbitrary goal. Engineers and financial folks are good at optimizing a solution under a set of constraints. It’s what they do. They are less likely to ask whether the goal makes any sense, or to examine the trade-offs in pursuing one goal versus another societal goal. If you tell them to reduce the amount of annual dryer lint per capita, they will go and do that.
Weighing the value of different goals is a question for the public at large, and in many cases the public will approach such questions in a completely irrational manner. Often rationality hardly even applies to questions of public priorities. The people of Tiny Town want more churches and a new sewage treatment plant, but can’t afford both. Good look finding a coherent way to even approach that question. Perhaps there’s an ideal God to poo ratio?
Andy West didn’t wade into the science side of the IPCC reports, so he doesn’t bother with questions about whether their estimates of the ECS is high, or low, or poorly supported. He focuses on the question he’s asking by not wading into a completely different set of questions. It’s similar to a lawyer in a pre-trial hearing conceding all of the prosecution’s arguments and evidence, simply to point out that even if everything the prosecutor alleges is true, it doesn’t matter because what’s alleged isn’t an actual crime. That’s not an admission that the prosecutor is correct, it’s putting aside the truth of the allegations (“Even conceding all that…”) to address a different question. It’s akin to listening to a teenage daughter go on for five minutes about all the bizarre and unlikely reasons that she really needs to borrow the car, and the parent saying “Even if everything you say is true, you don’t have a driver’s license, so no.”
What he’s saying is “Given whatever the IPCC reports say, what’s actually happening to set public policy and frame debate is this…”
David Andrews said:
It’s a cultural entity.
The world needs to get CO2 levels up to at least 800 ppm to improve plant growth, increase the length of growing seasons in the major agricultural areas, and reduce the number of severe weather events by lowering the polar to tropical temperature gradient.
That too is supported by science, and so now you have two positions, one saying we need to decarbonize to keep the climate from getting worse and one saying that we need increased carbonization to improve the climate.
Science supports both views, because what’s being compared is two different future states of a complex system. Science can explain how those states differ, but which state is “better” is a much more complex question based on which parameters are valued above others, and for whom. This is the norm for public policy questions. The Fed can make the state of the economy different, and has to weigh lots of questions because the change will benefit some and harm others.
And this gets into how parts of climate science, as practiced, are completely irrational. Too illustrate, we are told that slight warming will be harmful, if not catastrophic, to virtually everybody, and almost everywhere. That’s not only irrational, it’s not even mathematically sound.
It assumes there’s some ideal temperature Ti that is optimal for people. But it also assumes that Ti is the same for everybody, and it assumes that everybody currently lives at temperature Ti. That is so false that it’s not even wrong (as the saying goes).
For indoor temperatures we can at least put some good bounds on Ti based on general recommendations, and it’s probably somewhere from the mid 60’s to the mid 70’s. So that’s a 7C spread, just for indoors.
So what about an ideal outdoor temperature? Would that ideal be the same in Bismarck North Dakota as Miami Florida? If not, why not? The people in Bismarck aren’t genetically different from the people in Miami. Yet climate alarmism holds that both Bismarck and Miami must not be allowed to change because the temperatures in both places were ideal sometime around 1970, or perhaps in the pre-industrial era. But North Dakota and Florida have average temperatures that are 16 C apart. If both are at an ideal temperature then there is no such thing as an ideal temperature. If there is no ideal temperature then there’s nothing to run an optimization problem on, and one climate state can’t be said to be “better” than another climate state.
“Better” is purely a value judgement, based on what differences are prioritized. North Dakota is “better” because it has less insect pests. Miami is better because it has more women in bikinis. Science can’t produce an ideal insect to bikini ratio.
But lets go further and note that if there was some ideal temperature for people, then as a guess people probably distributed themselves around it in a bell curve, with most people near the mean, and half living below the ideal temperature and half living above the ideal temperature. For small shifts of temperature, then, half would be harmed and half would benefit, since half the people would become closer to the ideal temperature and half would move farther from it. Only with very large shifts would a clear majority of people (55%?) be harmed rather than helped.
But what climate alarmists and the IPCC implies is that for the vast bulk of the population, warming causes harm. That reveals a bias. Perhaps the bias reflects the irrationality of how people process risk and rewards, which is a very well studied topic. People are more averse to potential losses, and will avoid those at the expense of equal gains. When that natural but irrational bias gets amplified in an echo chamber, what results from a slight random change (with equal winners and losers), is horror stories about how everyone is going to lose big.
Remember, if humans have centered themselves around an ideal temperature, then the number of winners and losers in a small temperature shift should be approximately equal. And note that the temperature shift is small, 2 C or 3 C versus the 7 C range that we debate regarding the ideal indoor temperature for an office building, or the 20 + C range of average outdoor temperatures in the lower 48.
So if we’ll have equal winners and losers, why is there an overwhelming need to decarbonize, to the extent of radically altering the economy and taking away people’s cars? That would seem quite irrational. You say science supports this but science doesn’t really even address it. It’s a public policy question, like other public policy questions, and one in which there are winners and losers in almost equal numbers. It requires finding an ideal God to poo ratio. And there are people who would vehemently weigh in on that ratio, and those people are often called “religious zealots.”
You feel that a somewhat warmer climate would be very bad for almost everybody on the planet, whereas I’ve pointed out that such a view is almost certainly false. You might argue that even though humans aren’t well adapted to the climates where they live, the plants and animals are. But the current interglacial shows that’s largely false as well, since the end of the ice age wrought changes that are orders of magnitude larger than the slight shift that has people so upset, and yet you never see people demanding we return to a glaciation period. In fact, they use the threat of glaciation as another reason to purse policies that are supposed to prevent warming, which is quite ironic, and another illustration that fears of catastrophic warming are a fairy tale.
In fact, I would argue that a warmer climate would actually be a boon for almost everyone because mankind didn’t evolve in a temperate climate, we involved in a brutally hot climate, to the extent that we shed our fur and converted most of our hair follicles into sweat glands. The majority of humans moved to temperate and even sub-arctic climates where we’ll very poorly adapted. All the humans living outside the tropics are living in temperatures that are far below what our species is adapted to. We can only live there because our big brains let us master fire, make clothes from furs and textiles, learn to store food through the winter, and of course build shelters from wood, stone, mammoth hides, and even blocks of ice.
Warming would ease the burden of survival for the bulk of mankind, as the temperate regions warm up, while the tropical regions are only slightly affected because the tropics have very powerful negative feedbacks that keep the tropics at nearly constant temperatures despite huge overall shifts in climate. People in Africa or Central America likely had no idea that the Earth was in an ice age, and then wasn’t. The case that warming will be catastrophic is essentially the same one early man might have made during the last glaciation period, and having 400 feet of sea level rise is certainly vastly more dramatic than anything envisioned in any IPCC report.
By the catastrophists “scientific” view, early man should have done anything possible to prevent the current interglacial period, since the effects of the collapsing ice sheets was truly dramatic, completely rearranging landscapes in unimaginable flash floods, forever sinking all the world’s coast lines under hundreds of feet of water, and no doubt killing large numbers of humans along the way. And yet would science say that our interglacial period is a worse climate than the ice age? By all measures the IPCC uses, the answer would have to be “Yes, infinitely worse.” and that tells you something about the built in human biases in what they’re valuing.
David Andrews wrote:
Your narrative about irrational carastrophism is an abstract strawman wrapped in psycho-babble.
Bingo.
Andy West wrote:
In summary, policy implementation, which is proportional per nation to its attitudes on climate change….
What does this even mean??
Where is your measure of “attitudes?”
What is your metric for “policy implementation?”
With them, how can you possibly conclude they’re “proportional?”
Andrew is just trying to throw around scientific terms that he hasn’t defined, hasn’t measured, and can’t make conclusions about.
Such sloppy writing.
Andy West explained all that in a book he wrote. I kid you not!
As it turns out, pollsters have been asking questions that address people’s attitudes about climate change and policy implementations, and publishing their poll results.
Those. along with lots of other poll results and surveys that have been conducted frequently for many decades now, allow one to compare all the numbers using a wide variety of statistical tools. These tools tell things like the Pearson correlation coefficient, r values, and p values.
If none of those tools work, then not only can we through out any research about how people view climate science, we can through out any research about how people view anything at all.
>>Where is your measure of “attitudes?”
>>What is your metric for “policy implementation?”
Too funny. George is right. A whole book describes these things!
George Turner wrote:
The world needs to get CO2 levels up to at least 800 ppm to improve plant growth
George, how much warmer will the GMST be at 800 ppm, cp 1850?
On what day of the year? It matters!
As for the average annual temperature, everybody would just have to wait and see what it was, and then they’d argue about the measurements for a couple of years, and given the arguments over measurements and measurement errors, they would likely produce an estimate within 2 C of the actual value. If they’re good, maybe within 1 C. But the actual value will vary by about 5 C, because annual temperatures vary by almost that much, year to year. 1921 was 3.4 C hotter than 1932. How could someone possibly predict that?
And the vast bulk of the public could not tell you what the annual GMST is now to within about 20 C, because no one actually cares, and as a corollary to that, they don’t know what their local average temperature is to within 20 C.
As it turns out, the world is still about 2 F below the standard air temperature. 2 F of warming would get us to the standard temperature. Aviation calculations are based on standard temperature, so it’s an important number.
Andy,
We agree that rational policies are better than irrational ones. Your pessimistic world view has policy based on cultural values alone, whether for or against carbon mitigation. In the first paragraph of your recent response: “policy implementation… is irrational …[and] has nothing to do with the (mainstream) science of climate change.” [I have taken the liberty of deleting some of your elaborations, without modifying your thrust.] I believe that I effectively rebutted that by listing excerpts from IPCC Summary Reports. I argue therefore that mitigation policies are very much based on IPCC recommendations and are therefore rational. Isn’t the variability in mitigation response you correlate with religosity a secondary effect?
You might wish to argue that IPCC recommendations are themselves irrational, but to say why they are irrational you would have to get into the climate science that you avoid. Others posting here will probably take a shot at that. Do you agree that for opposition to carbon mitigation policy to be rational, it also needs to be based on good climate science? I am familiar with a lot bad climate “science” that attempts with no credibility to counter IPCC positions. One of my problems with your analysis is my feeling that, in the end, what makes a policy rational is the science behind it, but that discussion is off the table with you.
In paragraph 3 you say: “the fairy-tale [catastrophe] narrative … dictates public attitudes across the globe [and] bears no resemblance to some measured and objective need to decarbonise.” I am delighted that you acknowledge there may be an objective need to decarbonize, and we only need to argue about how much is not enough, how much is “measured”, and how much is too much. But why focus on public attitudes if they are contaminated by irrational cultural values, especially since we have perhaps agreed that mitigation policies are rational? Public attitudes don’t drive interest rates in the US, the Federal Reserve does. Let philosopher kings rule. Of course in a democracy, the public has to be on board in the long run.
Apologies for using the pejorative term “psycho-babble”. Please don’t let my wife know, or I will be sleeping in the guest room. She is a PhD psychologist.
“I believe that I effectively rebutted that by listing excerpts from IPCC Summary Reports.”
Ignoring any difference between the SPMs and Working Group outputs, this would still only be a successful rebuttal if we knew that the end result of policy implementation, faithfully reflected a rational approach that took these as input, or indeed any rational approach (that may have somewhat differing inputs). But this is simply not the case. Regarding the big policy area of renewables, for instance, commitment to them across nations clearly follows a cultural pattern, out of which comes seemingly rather bizarre characteristics such as there is far more commitment on average to solar in countries with low annual sunshine, than in countries with high annual sunshine, and that far and away the best single social predictor of commitment to renewables (at the national level), is national religiosity, which is a purely cultural variable. These things are simply not rational, but they are actually expectations from a model of cultural causation (and stem from the fact the the culture of climate catastrophism interacts with the older culture of religion). These are not secondary effects, they are undoubtedly primary regarding renewables commitment. The next level of effect down the scale, is that there is some secondary variance about the trend with religiosity that matches the GDPperCapita of religio-regional groups (or in other words, NOT absolute GDPpC, but the average GDPpC for a local group of nations that share similar religiosity – the model of cultural causation also explains this secondary). I do not know what is tertiary or lower, but even the secondary effect is small compared to the primary, and in some cases can’t be seen. Also both primary and secondary do not just predict the renewables commitment, but also many different attitudes to climate change, which again is an expectation from cultural causation.
I make no judgement on the IPCC recommendations, whether they are good, bad or indifferent. But neither these, or the climate or climate exposure of nations, or any technology factors can explain these patterns, or indeed still more challenging characteristics, such as that the climate-change most-endorsing responses to unconstrained survey questions always correlate with national religiosity, whereas the climate-change most-endorsing responses to reality-constrained questions always anti-correlate. I think this is impossible for any candidate explanation except cultural causation, for which it is an expectation, and I do not think that we could call this rational. But in any case if you have a better candidate explanation, then offer it up! I don’t get into climate science or any expectations about what we should do about it, my focus is purely on the social psychology of the domain, how people and indeed nations (so policy) are reacting. But yes I think it goes without saying that any objective policy, whatever it is, must be executed rationally if it is to achieve its stated goals.
“But why focus on public attitudes if they are contaminated by irrational cultural values…”
Because, as explained above, policy such as the commitment to renewables across nations, clearly tracks the (cultural) public attitudes. This is not really a surprise, cultural attitudes, over a sufficiently long time, tend to drill into all social institutions, even including the law and even the moral landscape upon which the law stands. Hence, eventually, policy will likely reflect cultural attitudes in a domain, if these are dominant. The enemy of cultures and the attitudes they foster, is ultimately reality, as is championed by ‘objectivity at scale’, such as democracy, the law, and science. But as already noted above, culture constantly tries to undermine these, while they at the same time work constantly to defeat cultures or at least limit their effects. I think something like interest rates in the US are far too close to reality for culture to get much of a grip, but also we must bear in mind that all the commitment to renewables is funded, and hence culture must be having a major effect on budget allocations, at least within the domain of climate change. It may well be the case that as climate policy generally (which is still relatively young in social terms), is subject to more and more of the realities of implementation, then the cultural aspects might slowly be ground out. However, this is clearly nowhere near the case at the moment.
Don’t worry, your sleeping arrangements are safe ;)
David,
I’ve read this dialogue with Andy for days and had to chuckle at your latest reply because it exemplifies the cultural point.
Why be delighted that Andy supports decarbonization? This should be no surprise. He already said he supported the scientific evidence from the IPCC very early on, and the premise of the IPCC is decarbonization.
If the “psycho-babble” point in Andy’s book upholds scrutiny, the cultural point is that your views on policy and belief that others disagree with your views could be predicted within a group based on cultural factors. I don’t like be reduced to a data point within some “psycho-babble” analysis, and I’ll be the first to call myself a statistical outlier, but population studies are the scientific method being turned to gaze on each of us. Just because there exists a black Christian living in Connecticut who denies climate change doesn’t mean studies are very good at predicting that it’s more likely that I’ll find a white atheist in Connecticut who believes in climate catastrophe, and my datapoint fits (though I just made that study up). If we don’t like the results, it’s naive to simply reject the results as not hard science.
Section 10 in Andy’s book is this cultural study about our views on climate. I’m still processing Section 10 — it is rather dense Andy! :) There are studies cited to support similar claims in the “psycho-babble” book. I’ll add a study that is relevant to this presumption of disagreement about climate change.
Leviston, et al. in 2013 found pluralistic ignorance in those who affirm human caused climate change. The study found pro-climate change adherents overestimate the population of climate denialists by 4-fold error (a ~20% estimate compared to ~5% actual). This type of misperception is a fear of the improbable, like finding Boogeymen where few or none exist, etc. We could waft this aside but the study’s findings are demonstrated in this dialogue. I assume you affirm human-caused climate change, and this dialogue with Andy appears to be pluralistic ignorance — believing many people, like Andy, reject climate change when they do not. This is an example of the scientific method being turned on each of us to study our beliefs. Other studies find that most people do affirm human cause climate change. I take Andy’s book to be an extension of these types of studies, with an interesting premise about cultural factors (– and religion?! :O –)
The potential consequences of basing policy on a culture worked up into a frenzy of fatalistic end-world prophecies are immense. History is a great teacher of what religious zealotry is capable of doing. You would hand off decisions to a Platonic philosopher-king from a solid foundation in scientific method and rational thinking. Let’s hope this philosopher-king actually does remain rationally skeptical and doesn’t revert to papal bulls about climate policy.
Anyways, carry on with the dialogue.
Jp
“I’m still processing Section 10 — it is rather dense Andy! :)”
Yep, sorry. In fact my editor made it a lot more accessible / readable than my original, but working through all the nuances (which must be done for a comprehensive view that doesn’t have any holes) and comparing with the literature, was never going to be a lightweight exercise. However, Figure 15 and 17 in Chapter 10 might bring you a little amusement :)
It’s interesting data is missing from Canada on emissions. I wonder how such a sophisticated country can’t supply such a simple data set?
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map
Hmmmm … this looks relevant …
The Los Angeles Times published an op/ed Friday in which it perhaps unintentionally poses the central proposition of the mythical energy transition: “whether our expectations should evolve in the name of preventing climate catastrophe.”
https://dailycaller.com/2023/07/22/opinion-climate-alarmists-are-finally-saying-the-quiet-part-out-loud-in-their-agenda-david-blackmon/
More on that …
The op/ed is appropriately titled, “Would an Occasional Blackout Help Solve Climate Change?” It is a headline that tacitly admits a truth about the transition that boosters of renewable energy have been careful not to publicize: That the notion that generation sources with extremely low energy density like wind and solar cannot hope to be viable alternatives to generation with extremely high energy density like natural gas, nuclear and coal. It is a notion that defies the laws of thermodynamics and physics, and those are laws, not suggestions that can be discarded as a matter of convenience or, as in this case, in pursuit of a hyper-political agenda.
This kind of propaganda is designed to condition readers to accept the lowering of their own living conditions in the name of saving the climate, or, as this writer poses is, “preventing climate catastrophe.” It is the kind of propaganda Americans and citizens around the world have been bombarded with as we have experienced the current hot summer. (RELATED: DAVID BLACKMON: A Backlash Against Net-Zero Policies Is Finally Beginning To Take Shape)
Jim2,
David Blackmon’s “science” is nonsense. The low energy density of wind and solar is not a problem. Renewables are very viable and competitive. But there is a problem that is not at all hidden, and very much out in the open. Renewables are not “dispatchable”, i.e, they cannot be switched on at will. At present, fossil fuel plants fill in the gaps when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun has set. Energy storage (batteries and other) and expanded transmission may ultimately fill those gaps, but I personally think we need nuclear for that role. Nuclear is not ideal as a fill-in, since like renewables it is high capital cost, low running cost, so if you build a nuclear plant you want to run it 24/7. But we do need to decarbonize, with some combination of nuclear, renewables, and energy storage..
I agree we need nuclear. But wind and solar aren’t viable without subsidies. It varies a lot by the grid system in question, but typically large wind and solar installations make money by selling Renewable Energy Certificates and getting Production Tax Credits given to them. Without those subsidies, and more, they wouldn’t exist.
jim2 – who pays for all the negative externalities of oil, gas and coal?
Do you have a number for their total?
David Appell | July 23, 2023 at 10:38 pm |
jim2 – who pays for all the negative externalities of oil, gas and coal?
Appell – Who pays for all the negative externalities of renewables? The environmental damage?
Who pays for all the negative externalities of renewables when they dont provide electricity ? Who pays for all the deaths during a winter freeze when there is no wind?
Who pays for all the winter deaths (200k+ ) that would have occurred during the Feb 2021 freeze when there was little or no wind across the entire north american continent for 4 days ?
David Andrews | July 23, 2023 at 8:24 pm | Reply
Jim2,
David Blackmon’s “science” is nonsense. The low energy density of wind and solar is not a problem. Renewables are very viable and competitive.
Andrews – Lazard’s LCOE does show that renewables are viable and cost effective – Though it omits substantial portions of the costs associated with using renewables. Factor in all the costs and renewables are more costly than fossil fuels.
A good place to start is to read Jacobson’s 2022 study on the 100% renewable plan. One of the great reasons to start with his study is that it provides an opportunity to spot the multitude of distortions, misrepresentations needed to make 100% renewables viable – on paper – but not viable in reality.
I have read Jacobson’s book. Indeed I disagree with lots of it, for example his claim that a renaissance in nuclear can’t happen fast enough. Better energy storage would be a boon to renewables. As utility scale energy storage is a fairly new market I am hopeful for innovation, not only in batteries.
What puzzles me is those who seem to think there is no problem with business as usual.
Joe,
I pulled up Jacobson 2022 and Jacobson’s reply (PDF) to a comment by Goudriaan, and just started at a random paragraph.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen such garbage.
So I went to Wiki to look at Denmark, and the wiki is a mess. It says the Danes get the majority of their power for wind, but also says wind provides 1,218 kWh per person per year, the highest of any country. Well, US average residential electricity use is 10,623 kWh per year per person, and overall the average US electricity consumption is 12,656 kWh per year per person.
So instead of figuring out what’s wrong in the Wiki (surely Danes use more electricity than that) I looked at Kenya. As best I can tell, Kenya has the installed capacity to produce 0.5 kWh per year per person, which is hardly enough to charge a cell phone (56 Watts per person at constant output). An American uses 10,000+ kWh/yr, and a Kenyan uses 0.5 kWh/yr, but mostly renewable. I guess renewables are great if you don’t actually use much of any electricity at all.
So on to Uruguay, which has a lot of wind. Along coastal areas it has about 600 W/m^2 of available wind energy, so wind works well there, and they get about 1,434 kWh/year per person from wind, which would be 11% of US per capita electricity consumption. And that’s in a small coastal country in the South, where wind is very strong.
Looking at the global wind power map, when switched from mean wind speed to mean power density, you can see he focuses on the few countries that are the Saudi Arabias of wind power, with mean wind power of 600-1000 W/m^2. Almost all of subsaharan Africa, India, China, and Southeast Asia would come in at 15-100 W/m^2. In most of the world, the installed costs would be the same but the generated power would only be 3 to 10% as much, making wind a non-viable solution for the vast vast majority of countries.
George Turner
thanks for the link to Goudriaan .
unfortunately I could only obtain the abstract – the actual doc is behind paywall.
However, Jacobson response is distortion upon distortion. As you noted, jacobson’s list of 31 countries with 50% of energy from renewables is pure distortion. Those 31 countries either have very high geothermal and/or hydro or they very low electric usage due to poverty (kenya bhutan, etc). Jacobson is intentionally dishonest when he uses percentage %s while omitting actual electric consumption as you noted.
George T –
thanks for the link of the Gourdiaan response.
Your link highlights one of issues with the google search engine.
google jacobson critique, or junk science , errors etc – the only hits criticising his study is the 2016 critique, but no hits for the critique of his subsequent studies.
Same with the gas stove asthma study. google junk science gas stove asthma – there will 200+ postive hits promoting the accuracy of the study , yet only 2-3 hits pointing out the faults of the study (a study that is laden with academic fraud)
George Turner – my prior response got stuck in moderation. Thanks for the link to jacobson’s response to goudrian’s critique of jacbsons 100% renewable stuck.
My first observation is that Jacobson resorts to a lot of misrepresentations and deceptive distortions in his response.
for example Jacobson’s comment about batteries ” That just means that storage duration of longer than 61 hours at the peak discharge rate is not useful since it prohibits the ability of batteries to provide the full peaking power that is actually needed. It says nothing about how many hours of storage in a row concatenated batteries are providing energy or power for.”
Concatenated batteries are essentially a chain or series of batteries. His 2022 makes the claim (or implies that) there is only a need for 4 hour battery backup (and the related costs) since if more is needed, a concatenated battery system of those 4 hour battery backup will work.
George Turner – following up with my second comment and complaint about the biased Google search engine –
I google several variations of ” Goudriaan critique of jacobson 100% renewables’
numerous google hits for jacobson 100% renewable study and jacobsons response to Goudriaan , but no hits on Goudriaan critique..
Similar results with other google searches
Joe,
It is indeed odd that the comment Jacobson responded to isn’t available, like only one side is allowed to talk.
But as for Jacobson’s analysis, I suspect it’s underpants gnomes all the way down, the kind of thing that gets someone in trouble if put into quarterly reports, or that causes an unfolding disaster like Sri Lanka, where they banned chemical fertilizers and pesticides and collapsed within a year.
“underpants gnomes “?
Were you cured?
(no snark intended)
Underpants gnomes became famous from a Southpark episode (season 2, episode 17). Their business model was
1) Collect underpants
2) ???
3) Profit!
Most of the green energy models are similar, dependent on dramatically increasing the price of conventional energy sources, so people end up paying 25 to 35 cents a kWh, whereas clean, beautiful coal generates electricity at about 2 to 4 cents a kWh, and can be stockpiled by dumping it in giant heaps on the ground.
The electricity produced is exactly the same, but there’s no way for renewables to compete on cost, so they use emotional arguments to rig the market.
George Turner wrote:
Most of the green energy models are similar, dependent on dramatically increasing the price of conventional energy sources, so people end up paying 25 to 35 cents a kWh
You have data showing that?
I get 100% renewable energy from my electricity provider, at, currently, a price of 7.6 cents/kWh.
The book reminds me a lot of Adorno et al: The Authoritarian Personality – which I remember as a reading in Soc Sci class in the 1959-60 academic year. Broadly similar in motivation – trying to understand the attraction for large numbers of people of mind-sets that from the outside appear distinctly non-functional.
Thanks to all who commented, and especially to Andy West for his generous participation. Makes the book much more accessible for a non-specialist.
If you’re reading the book I recommend you hang in all the way to the end. Many of the punch lines are in Chapter 15. (I had forgotten about the Red Guards!)
Thanks, Pwelder, much appreciated.
Given the booming success of wind and solar, I’m sure all savvy investors’ money is going to that sector.
Warren Buffett’s multibillion-dollar purchases of oil and gas investments early in the pandemic paid off when the sector cranked out record earnings in 2022. But instead of selling out for a huge profit this year, the Oracle of Omaha wants more.
Berkshire Hathaway Inc. is using this year’s dip in commodity prices to load up on some of Buffett’s favorite oil and gas investments, showing that history’s most famous investor sees opportunity in a sector long disfavored due to its volatility and effects on the climate.
Earlier this month, Berkshire agreed to spend $3.3 billion to boost its stake in a liquefied natural gas export terminal in Maryland. This year it has also increased its holding
in Occidental Petroleum Corp. by 15% and bought more stock in five Japanese commodity traders
. Meanwhile, Berkshire’s energy division is lobbying hard for a bill that would see Texas spend at least $10 billion on natural gas-fired power plants to back up its grid.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-07-25/buffett-lifts-fossil-fuel-bets-as-global-esg-push-mints-bargains
Time to have a discussion with your legislators.
The difference between the Republican ballot operation and that of the leftists is that the leftists manufacture ballots, whereas Republicans only collect them.
…
Ballot-manufacturing appears pretty easy at first but has lots of little complexities. Mastering those complexities gives our leftist pals unlimited numbers of ballots to handle any surging MAGA candidate.
…
Addresses and voters have fundamentally different characteristics.
…
Addresses conveniently have the world’s singularly most accurate, current database maintained in every county in America — the real estate property tax record. These records are consulted daily by real estate agents doing comps. Tax authorities review them monthly, ensuring they squeeze every dollar from the citizen for any improvement.
Addresses, dear reader, are the key to stopping ballot-manufacturing.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/07/the_achilles_heel_of_mailin_ballot_fraud.html
@ jim2 | July 26, 2023 at 8:03 am in suspense.
A new study on the possible collapse of the AMOC reminds us of what is really important in climate science today, feeding the cultural beast. This study was highlighted in USATODAY this morning.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-39810-w
Any time a study with an overtone of catastrophe comes out, it has everything that any body wants. A little more reason for the nihilistic junkies to fret, another way to get eyeballs for the media, another notch on the publication totem pole for the authors and another chance for those same authors to remind the world of the necessity to act against AGW, and a chance for the old guard, go to guys to pontificate about their wisdom on climate science.
Given that none of the stories got the details completely correct about the study or about what the IPCC said of the potential collapse of the AMOC, we should be reminded that climate science is no longer about advancing knowledge about climate. Rather, it’s just about what agenda you have and how you can exploit these studies on your own behalf.
It’s also a lesson on how to perfect the art of talking out of both sides of one’s mouth.
Michael Mann, as quoted in USATODAY “ I’m not sure the authors bring much to the table other than a fancy statistical method. History is littered with flawed predictions based on fancy statistical methods; sometimes they’re too fancy for their own good.”
While in Axios, Mann said he questions some of the methods the new study uses. Nevertheless, he finds its conclusions plausible.
“I think the authors in this case are on to something real,” he told Axios via email. “We could be talking decades rather than a century.”
Just another day at the office of climate catastrophe hustling.
Yeah. Scientists shouldn’t be allowed to conduct studies like this.
Or if they are, one should he allowed to discuss the findings.
Or if they are, no one should be able to talk about what they think of the implications of the findings.
Censor them all, dammit. Kid should determine what people get to study or talk about.
Joshua
Was the study simply deeply flawed or was it written as intentional propaganda?
J
Good to hear from you. The comment was about cultural aspects of climate science. Nothing derogatory about the findings. Just that there are social and maybe psychological dynamics that have evolved separate from the actual science, with a little humorous dig at Mike at the end.
I see your boy DJT, is knocking it out of the park in the polls. Not too long before the primaries. Can he expect your support?
> The comment was about cultural aspects of climate science.
EXACTLY!
(I’m guessing that went over your head.l
> I see your boy DJT, is knocking it out of the park in the polls
But all that matters is the crowd size.
J
And I thought my comment went over your head.
Classical rhetorical exaggeration and putting words in people’s mouths from Josh, Can you ever make a technically interesting comment? Why don’t you read the paper and comment on it? Oh I forgot, you can’t.
That AMOC study claimed that the Gulf Stream could collapse as early as 2025. Fortunately knowledgable experts in the area have weighed in with context and perspective at Science Media Centre: Expert reaction to paper warning of a collapse of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation.
For example: The RAPID programme (see diagram at top) measures daily flows of water at several depths between the North Atlantic and Arctic oceans, and its scientific coordinator, Prof Meric Srokosz, National Oceanography Centre, University of Southampton, said:
While the possible collapse of the AMOC with significant climatic impacts is a concern, providing a warning of its collapse is problematic as a long set of observations is required. In this paper the warning depends on using proxy AMOC data (here based on sea surface temperature, SST) as direct continuous AMOC measurements are only available since 2004. The warning comes from applying statistical techniques to a long time series (over a century) of proxy AMOC data, but the warning is only as good as the proxy data are in representing the true AMOC. So, this warning needs to be treated with caution as there is no consensus as to which proxies can accurately capture the behaviour of the AMOC over the long term.”
Prof. Dr. Jochem Marotzke, Director of the Department Ocean in the Earth System, Max-Planck-Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg, Germany, said:
“The work provides no reason to change the assessment of the 6th IPCC Assessment Report: ‘There is medium confidence that there will be no abrupt collapse before 2100′. The statement so confidently made in this paper that collapse will occur in the 21st century has feet of clay. The maths are solid, but the starting point is highly dubious: the essential equation – marked with (1) in the paper – relies on the simplified models representing bifurcation – i.e. AMOC collapse – also being correct. But the more comprehensive models do not show this very bifurcation. In this respect, the paper does not live up to its self-imposed claim: ‘The strategy is to infer the evolution of the AMOC solely on observed changes in mean, variance and autocorrelation.’
The interpretation relies to an enormous extent on the authors’ theoretical understanding being correct, and there are huge doubts about that.
“It must be added that there is considerable doubt as to whether surface temperature measurements are a valid proxy for the AMOC. Again, the paper addresses these uncertainties inadequately.
“When reporting about this study, it is important to include the key aspects in which this paper fails to include the scientific uncertainties.
https://rclutz.com/2023/07/26/no-cnn-gulf-stream-is-not-collapsing/
We are not talking about an “abrupt collapse”, and bringing it up is just a red herring. It cannot be disputed it has already slowed. Most of you do not understand the importance of that current which dredges up nutrients from the seafloor and takes them up to the base of the food chain. It also carries the heat which keeps Europe from freezing over. Without that the Atlantic becomes a dead pool, devoid of much of the life now in it.
Once again: We are not talking about an “abrupt collapse”, and bringing it up is just a red herring. It cannot be disputed it has already slowed. Most of you do not understand the importance of that current which dredges up nutrients from the seafloor and takes them up to the base of the food chain. It also carries the heat which keeps Europe from freezing over. Without that the Atlantic becomes a dead pool, devoid of much of the life now in it.
George, of course the gulf stream is vital, which is why it’s a target for raising fears. The slowing of the AMOC is debatable.
Prof Penny Holliday, Head of Marine Physics and Ocean Circulation at the National Oceanography Centre, and Principal Investigator for OSNAP, an international programme researching AMOC processes, variability and impacts, said:
“Confidence in the validity of the conclusions are undermined by our knowledge that sea surface temperature of the North Atlantic subpolar gyre is not a clear indicator of the state of the AMOC, and that there is no evidence that the AMOC has dramatically weakened in the past 50-75 years. A collapse of the AMOC would profoundly impact every person on Earth but this study overstates the certainly in the likelihood of it taking place within the next few years.”
Holy smokes that’s bad! I’ve seen a movie about this. The Earth’s temperature plunges several hundred degrees within hours and people are just frozen where they stand! Within weeks all of North America and Europe are buried under hundreds of feet of ice.
We must do everything we can to stop the glaciation! We need to massively increase CO2 output, and methane, and especially soot, which contains dark carbon that will help melt the ice by increasing its light absorption. Most importantly, we need to manufacture huge quantities of sulfur hexafluoride, which as a greenhouse gas is 23,000 times more potent than CO2, because CO2 alone isn’t going to thaw out mile thick ice parked on Atlanta or Houston.
And everybody needs to walk around in parkas like they were on an Arctic expedition, or at least keep the snow suits in their car, because the cooling even happens in hours and they won’t have time to go home and put on their winter gear. And get rid of the Golden Retrievers and Basset Hounds and buy a dozen Siberian Huskies and a sled. Store it in the garage until it’s needed. Stockpile seal meat and whale blubber. The crisis is imminent!
A ship full of electric vehicles is on fire off the Dutch coast. One person is dead. Yep, that electric car idea is pure genius! Can’t wait until hydrogen is in wide use. That will be even more fun.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/26/cargo-ship-fire-off-dutch-coast
Human error for sure. I think most EV batteries can’t be drained to zero volts because it will damage the battery. Solid state batteries don’t have that problem but it will be years till they replace Li. The sunk cost in Lithium-Ion might be a mistake in the long run.
Did you see who they had for a crew on that ship?
Oil is still the king and will be come 2030 also.
In this age of climate crisis, the world is consuming more crude than ever. Peak oil demand? Not yet. Maybe one day, perhaps even soon, around 2030. For now, however, the global economy still runs on oil.
It will take a while before governments certify it, but every piece of data points in the very same direction: In the past few weeks, global oil demand has surpassed the monthly peak set in 2019 before the Covid-19 pandemic.
Expressed in barrels a day, the fresh record high in global oil consumption totals about 102.5 million, likely hit in the last few weeks in July and above the 102.3 million of August 2019. Picture this: We use enough crude to fill about 6,500 Olympic-size swimming pools every day. More than a third of those swimming pools would be needed to quench the thirst of two countries: the US and China.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-07-27/the-harsh-truth-is-we-ve-never-consumed-this-much-oil
“GASOLINE SURPLUS
With gasoline consumption having topped out in the U.S., the world’s top gas guzzler, in 2019 and China set to peak around next year, global gasoline markets could move into a surplus from 2025.”
– Reuters
@ jim2 | July 27, 2023 at 7:45 am in suspense.
Have none of you been outside?
Are you aware of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation?
Politics stop at reality.
It’s summer, the AMOC is perfectly normal, and some folks see portents of doom and apocalyptic omens in every cloud. But at least this year they aren’t trying to predict the future by looking at frogs and toads, which is progress.
No, it’s not. Cold fresh meltwater from the melting of Greenland is diluting the warm saltwater, slowing the AMOC.
Do you really know what it is?
George J Kamburoff | July 28, 2023 at 3:28 pm |
No, it’s not. Cold fresh meltwater from the melting of Greenland is diluting the warm saltwater, slowing the AMOC.
Do you really know what it is?
George – you are talking as an activists by repeating activists talking points without demonstrating any actual knowledge on the subject.
The highly touted study published in nature – is based heavily on speculation. Far too much is unknown to reach any level of confidence
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-39810-w
Joe, I have been spreading alarm about this for two years now. It ain’t new to me.
AMOC collapse was the basis of the movie “The Day After Tomorrow” (2004), so it’s not new to anyone. Earth’s temperatures plummeted far below absolute zero!
But that was almost 20 years ago, so I guess they’ve decided to recycle the trope, hoping that the public has largely forgotten how silly the movie was.
I do not watch movies.
George K
TS 2.4 IPCC6
“ There is low confidence in the quantification of AMOC changes in the 20th century because of low agreement in quantitative reconstructed and simulated trends, missing key processes in both models and measurements used for formulating proxies, and new model evaluations. Direct observational records since the mid-2000s are too short to determine the relative contributions of internal variability, natural forcing and anthropogenic forcing to AMOC change (high confidence)”
You can relax. Just another myth.
I just looked it up.
What it really says is “The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation is very likely to weaken over the 21st century for all considered scenarios (high confidence), however an abrupt collapse is not expected before 2100 (medium confidence). “
I just watched a segment on PBS about climate anxiety. They spoke about people having sleepless nights and panic attacks and a burgeoning field of climate anxiety therapy. Of course, those who are the worse off are also those who know the least. I wonder if they saw these graphs if it would ease their minds.
https://bobtisdale.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/figure-gd-1-10.png
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FMhXoEaXIAYb1Yf?format=png&name=900×900
https://climatlas.com/tropical/global_major_freq.png
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ftz-BILWcAIMIrT?format=jpg&name=large
Maybe if they realized that the climate wasn’t the problem, it was the climate hysteria hustlers that were creating the anxiety. Let’s tell them the truth will set them free.
https://i0.wp.com/wattsupwiththat.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/us-state-decade-records-max-temperature.png?w=1494&ssl=1
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fv-IGzbWwAUb8YL?format=jpg&name=4096×4096
https://i0.wp.com/wattsupwiththat.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/ScreenShot2021-10-19at5.18.49PM.png?w=1500&ssl=1
https://joannenova.com.au/s3/s3.amazonaws.com/jo.nova/graph/storms/billion-dollar-disasters-storms.png
And for those living in LA, Honolulu or Sydney fearing runaway sea level rise, we can tell them relax, kick it back and have another beer.
https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/plots/9410660_meantrend.png
https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/plots/1612340_meantrend.png
https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/plots/680-140_meantrend.png
We can tell them cold is the bigger threat
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E44yV55XIAAfkrU?format=jpg&name=medium
And tell them the truth about losses
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Floo-WnakAErmEO?format=jpg&name=large
And we can tell them 40 years ago EPA said we were on our way to 12 feet of SLR. It’s been 4 inches since.
https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/2019-02-15190822_shadow.jpg
And they don’t have to lose sleep over the trend in tornadoes
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FgF3UyeWAAAJMnM?format=png&name=medium
A little history might help them with those sleepless nights.
100 years ago seals found the water too warm in the Arctic
https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Screen-Shot-2016-08-22-at-7_shadow-1.png
The Arctic was warming up
https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Screen-Shot-2017-02-01-at-6.48.38-AM-down.gif
A GREENLAND glacier started thinning in 1850.
https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/PaintImage415.png
Glaciers in Glacier National Park losing ice 100 years ago
https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/2017_12_21_12_16_32.png
CKid | July 30, 2023 at 6:34 pm |
I just watched a segment on PBS about climate anxiety. They spoke about people having sleepless nights and panic attacks and a burgeoning field of climate anxiety therapy.
Ckid – I recall from the Montana climate trial the term Pre traumatic stress disorder . Judith (or someone else) came up with that term.
Another graph to fight the fear mongering about the end of the world.
https://archive.ph/WfDJh
“ Climate Change Obsession Is a Real Mental Disorder-
Alarmist stories about the weather, not the warm air itself, are behind the left’s anxiety and dread.”
Wall Street Journal July 30, 2023
“Facts don’t cease to be facts because they are ignored.”
Aldious Huxley
“Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends up in bullying.”
Aldious Huxley
CKid wrote
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FMhXoEaXIAYb1Yf?format=png&name=900×900
Convenient your graph ended a decade ago.
Ckid wrote:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ftz-BILWcAIMIrT?format=jpg&name=large
This link doesn’t go to the hurricane frequency graph you displayed.
02
The forest fires for 2021 and 2022 were ~7 m acres, both below 2020.
The hurricane graph and the link you included are not related.
Any alarmist worth their salt and who was paying attention would have seen all these graphs hundreds of times. Of course, some would prefer not to see the facts.
Is the Atlantic Ocean current system nearing collapse? Probably not
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/atlantic-ocean-current-system-amoc-collapse-study/
With the mass of all that water and its momentum, it is slowing down, which is what it has to do before it eventually stops.
I see that Antonio Guterres is now talking about global boiling. I feel sad that people are using this kind of language because children, in particular, are getting very frightened about the dire predictions that are being made.
They are being made by scientists, not politicians.
Who would you trust of the two?
Angela, I earned Master of Science in Environmental Management in1982, and have watched as politicians lied to you. It is worse than you know.
Sorry.
Hmmm an ex-spurt, eh?
George – a quick google search of your name lists numerous posts from you with a heavy taste of Trump derangement syndrome, Desantis derangement syndrome, Bush derangement syndrome, republican derangment syndrome,
On the flip side, lots of praise from dan rather, and any leftist/woke policy. Curious if you have addressed the bias when evaluating the reasonableness of your conclusions along with your responses and posts here.
I shouldn’t have to do that, since my education in this field should stand by itself. You do not like my educated opinions for political reasons. Just say it.
George
No one is impressed by your MS. You haven’t demonstrated any knowledge of the actual scientific literature. The stuff you repeat sounds more like it comes from the Better Homes and Garden magazine.
I doubt if you could tell he difference.
George J Kamburoff | July 29, 2023 at 6:52 pm |
“I shouldn’t have to do that, since my education in this field should stand by itself. You do not like my educated opinions for political reasons. Just say it.”
George – your education in this field should stand by itself – However, you repeat discredited left wing/woke talking points because you have allowed woke pseudo science to override normal objective evaluation of the data.
As I pointed with the multitude of red flags, the gas stove/asthma study is near academic fraud level junk science.
The $5,trillion fossil fuel subsidies is likewise a highly discredited claim.
All you have done is demonstrate that you are an activist that in unwilling to evaluate the science and/or economics on an objective basis.
I will repeat my final comment – Curious if you have addressed the bias when evaluating the reasonableness of your conclusions along with your responses and posts here with any level of objectivity. honest objectivity.
Angela
The fact that you are reading this blog indicates you have spent some time researching the issue. Ignore the fanatical and hysterical pleadings of those who have spent very little time reading the actual science. The uncertainties of past and current warming are endless.
I’ve noticed there is a correlation between belief in catastrophic warming and oversimplification of the factors involved. That is what makes the control knob theory so popular.
There is no crisis. We should all be sad that those who have a global following use such irresponsible rhetoric.
“I’ve noticed there is a correlation between belief in catastrophic warming and oversimplification of the factors involved. ”
Oversimplification? I had to bring the AMOC here for you to learn, and you still do not know the difference between a Hadley Cell and a KAUST Cell.
Want to talk more? Like to fish? Sportsfish like Trout need 10 ppm of O2, but that goes away when water warms to 60 F. The warm waters around Florida are anoxic from the heat.
Parts of the Middle East and Asia are becoming too hot and humid for human habitat.
Enjoy your Summer because next year will be much worse. Those without significant education rely on political prejudice.
But even they sweat.
@ David Appell | July 29, 2023 at 6:26 pm |
Funny. When I’ve asked you about the costs of adaptation, you ignore the question entirely.
***************
Of course I can’t predict the cost of adaptation, just like you can’t predict the cost of mitigation. But one thing is for sure, trillions are already being spent on mitigation, and that based on digital tea leaves.
The cost of mitigation is mind-boggling. There is no way the cost of adaptation will be this much.
The sums needed to virtually eliminate global emissions by mid-century, which would give the world a chance of staying within 1.5C of warming, are head-spinning: $196 trillion in total spending, according to BloombergNEF, or almost double the size of the global economy in 2022.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-07-28/our-planet-is-warming-fast-and-needs-extreme-climate-solutions
Guess why!
Members of the Church of Climate Doomers are responsible for this nonsense.
Enjoy your Summer.
I am, thanks. And you too!
Well gosh, let’s cook to death or get washed away in floods instead.
Good alarmism, there. I see you have been practicing.
It is a cooling gas. — ~600 words: citations omitted.
Evidence is that CO2 is overall a coolant. First, it radiates incoming solar energy and outgoing terrestrial heat away to space. This is visible as cooling on both Mars and Venus (!) and in satellite images of Earth.
As an “infrared radiation active” gas, it absorbs and emits radiant energy from the sun – but not the entire spectrum. Like any molecule reactive to radiant energy, it absorbs only “spectral bands” of energy that “resonate” with its “quantum number,” a measure of the energetic space between its nucleus and electron rings, as conceived and developed in the early 20th Century by Max Planck and Albert Einstein.
A resonant band of energy from a radiant emitter causes the molecule’s energy to jump to a higher electron ring then fall back in a fraction of a second. Energy does not increase in its passage; the molecule is merely a conduit.
Any “delay” of the energy in passage is unlikely to raise temperature. The mean free path of a quantum wave before it collides with a near-surface atmospheric CO2 molecule is about 33 meters, covered in about 0.0001 second. This wide a chasm between collisions casts serious doubt on the chances of its creating a warm CO2 “blanket.”
Finally, observation in an Antarctic winter and recent experiment have shown that CO2 interacts with solar radiation overwhelmingly at 80 Celsius degrees below water’s freezing point, 193K or -80°C ( -112°F).
Usually omitted from the discussion, too, is a study in 1971 by two NASA scientists on whether burning fossil fuels for more CO2 could stave off a then perceived ice age threat. They concluded, no. First, warming by CO2, if any, would be offset by the more familiar product of burning fossil-fuel – smoke and soot – aerosols. These tiny particles cool the atmosphere by screening out solar energy (sunlight), reflecting it back to space, and providing nucleides for water vapor to condense on to make cooling fog and clouds.
People contribute about 30% of aerosols to the air annually. The NASA scientists advised against using fossil fuels to warm the planet in 1971 because they were “atmospheric coolants” with an alarmist’s potential, for triggering an ice age. They are still coolants today.
Also, while aerosols from combustion cool in direct proportion to their increase, CO2’s warmer (but still tardy) emission bands would quickly “saturate,” damping off any temperature increase. All later studies and the IPCC agree on this, and it means no “runaway warming.”
Recent research shows more critically that, because CO2 concentrations follow temperature change on all time scales their rise or fall is an effect, not cause, of temperature change. In the Antarctic’s Vostok Law Dome fossil record CO2 levels follow temperature change by 800 years on average. Seven recent studies, including one intended to prove the reverse, reveal a current months-long lag. The only result of a rise or fall in atmospheric CO2 levels would be a tardy and neutral changed presence.
Ironically, of course, fossil fuels are the paramount “green” energy choice. Plants need and absorb CO2, and cannot survive without it. Satellites show plant growth has increased from higher global CO2 levels. A greener Earth is a cooler Earth, and added moisture evaporated from more plants increases water vapor and with it global cloud cover – two more ways the gas keeps on cooling.
A trace gas, CO2 is about 400 parts per million of today’s atmosphere, that is 0.04%. The IPCC estimates that humans generate about 5% of CO2 annually. In money terms, 0.04% of $1,000 is 40ȼ ($0.40) with people’s share 2ȼ ($0.02) – of an innocuous and beneficial coolant.
Period.
You have it wrong. It warms the planet, just not enough to be a dire problem. Humans will adapt.
Because you say what you want to believe?
Wait until September.
Pray tell us GJK. What awaits come September?
Heat.
You will love it. Go outside for it.
What’s your local average temperature now? As I’ve pointed out upthread, the average temperature in the lower 48 states already covers a range of over 20 C. It would take 2.7 C to move a shade on the USDA’s plant hardiness maps.
In the temperate zones, on average, you can decrease or increase the temperature by 2 C by driving north or south about 120 to 180 miles. The temperatures of your dreaded climate apocalypse is already being experienced by the people living about two hours south of you. Maybe you know someone who lives there. Perhaps you should call them and arrange for their dramatic rescue, putting them up in your spare bedroom.
Of course they most likely live in a large urban area, and already have a couple degrees C of heat island effect, so they might be okay just as soon as they get out of suburbia.
If warmer temperatures are so bad, why did all of the alarmists move into the big cities where they get as much artificially induced warming as possible? Wouldn’t it make more sense if they did the exact opposite and moved to rural areas?
And if 2 C is a catastrophic change in temperatures, how is it we’re living in states whose average temperatures span more than 20 C? How is it that Canadians, who might as well be from another planet, keep shuttling back and force between Edmonton and Phoenix or Montreal and Florida? How come everybody flies toward the equator for vacation, going to Mexico, the Caribbean, or southern France or Spain, instead of flying up to Alberta or Finland for vacation?
It’s like blazing hot temperatures are a nice vacation from the rigors of modern life for all the folks who live in temperature zones, throwing on some shorts and some flip flops and kicking back with all the tropical folks who party all day because they’re bathed in heat. Then the temperate folks return home, going back the grind of putting on three layers of thick clothes to go out and scrape ice off their windshields for half an hour.
It’s odd how the powerful narrative of mankind’s gluttony and sin have convinced so many that an arctic wasteland is paradise and a tropical paradise is a scorching hellscape.
I honestly thought there were no more climate deniers.
GJK
It is called hot weather in the summer. Humans used to live without