What I Learned about Climate Change

What is your position on the climate-change debate? What would it take to change your mind?

If the answer is It would take a ton of evidence to change my mind, because my understanding is that the science is settled, and we need to get going on this important issue, that’s what I thought, too. This is my story.

1 Weather is not climate. There are no studies showing a conclusive link between global warming and increased frequency or intensity of storms, droughts, floods, cold or heat waves. The increase in storms is simply a result of improved measurement methods. There has been no real increase.

2 Natural variation in weather and climate is tremendous. Most of what people call “global warming” is natural, not man-made. The earth iswarming, but not quickly, not much, and not lately.

3 There is tremendous uncertainty as to how the climate really works. Climate models are not yet skillful; predictions are unresolved.

4 New research shows fluctuations in energy from the sun correlate very strongly with changes in earth’s temperature, better than CO2 levels.

5 CO2 has very little to do with it. All the decarbonization we can do isn’t going to change the climate much.

6 There is no such thing as “carbon pollution.” Carbon dioxide is coming out of your nose right now; it is not a poisonous gas. CO2 concentrations in previous eras have been many times higher than they are today.

7 Sea level will probably continue to rise — not quickly, and not much. Researchers have found no link between CO2 and sea level.

8 The Arctic experiences natural variation as well, with some years warmer earlier than others. Polar bear numbers are up, not down. They have more to do with hunting permits than CO2*.

9 No one has demonstrated any unnatural damage to reef or marine systems. Additional man-made CO2 will not likely harm oceans, reef systems, or marine life. Fish are mostly threatened by people, who eat them. Reefs are more threatened by sunscreen than by CO2.

10 The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and others are pursuing a political agenda and a PR campaign, not scientific inquiry. There’s a tremendous amount of trickery going on under the surface*.

Could this possibly be right? Is it heresy, or critical thinking — or both? If I’ve upset or confused you, let me guide you through my journey.

I won’t present all the science. Instead, my goal is to give you a platform for investigating the other side of the debate, so you can form your own opinion. I have noted important and quick reads with an asterisk* — if you have time for further study, start with those videos and documents. Here are the sections:

1. Critical Thinking
2. Four Hard Questions
3. The Climate Consensus
4. Manufacturing Consensus
5. Who Can We Believe?
6. What Should We Do?
7. Summary
8. What Do You Think?

This nine-thousand-word essay represents over 400 hours of research boiled down into a half-hour reading experience, with links to 250+ carefully chosen documents and videos. I’m building the argument from the bottom up, so take your time and see if it makes sense. Along the way, I’ll list five “smoking guns” that I think make the argument for decarbonization unsupportable. Before we dive in, I want to talk about …

My journey into critical thinking has taught me to hold strong opinions loosely. I’ve been more wrong in my life than I thought was possible. Now I try to put my reactions aside and look at all the evidence before coming to a conclusion.

Policy always involves politics. Governments often make policy decisions by starting with a social objective and then bring in the “facts” to justify the goal (think of the Vietnam war, the Iraq war, Prohibition, the War on Drugs, and others). We shouldn’t be surprised to find social agendas driving at least some of the “science” of global warming.

In addition, studies show that political beliefs cloud our ability to process information. Strong political beliefs can cause us to look at one side of an issue and ignore the evidence. We should try to avoid shortcuts and look directly at the data.

Forecasts are mental constructs; they are not properties of the physical world. Forecasts are tools, not truth. In most cases, the size of the error bars (uncertainty) around the number is more important than the number itself.

Consensus is not an argument for any scientific principle. Many important scientists toiled alone to make discoveries that were less than popular. One key paper can be worth more than thousands of papers reinforcing a myth. The claim that 97 percent of scientists believe in man-made global warming is one such myth. Almost all scientists expect a small man-made contribution to warming, so the claim is misleading.

Metastudies are important. One key paper can be a breakthrough, but there are very few of those. A better source of information is properly done metastudies (reviews of all the literature on a topic) conducted by qualified statisticians. They help find the signal in the noise.

There is a big climate conference coming up in Paris in December, 2015. Diplomats will debate the merits of an agreement that promises to steer hundreds of billions of dollars toward reducing carbon emissions, mostly in large developing countries. Is it based on sound science? Let’s ask four hard questions and see what we can learn …

1. What are the natural drivers of temperature and its variability?
2. What does the projected natural increase in temperature mean for the environment and people?
3. What does the increase in greenhouse gases from human activity mean for oceans, environment, animals, habitats, and humanity?
4. Is Decarbonation the Right Solution?

Let’s look with fresh eyes and see what we can learn.

1. What are the natural drivers of temperature and its variability?

Incoming solar radiation is the primary driver of temperature. A second factor is the atmosphere, which traps heat and reflects some of it back to earth. Other factors play smaller roles. I’ll start with the familiar greenhouse-gas model and then present a more accurate picture based on solar activity.

The Greenhouse Effect
In this section, I focus on CO2 because it’s regarded as the main greenhouse gas after water vapor. Looking at the 750-million-year graph below, we see some extreme cold periods, then warm epochs punctuated by ice ages, all while CO2 (yellow) was far above what it is today. There is almost no correlation between temperature and carbon dioxide until about ten million years ago.

Starting around a million years ago, the curves start to sync up, and we see a pretty definitive supercycle of about 100,000 years for both:

Think about that: CO2 had no correlation with temperature for more than 2 billion years, and now it’s causing temperature to rise? Something’s going on, but what? Let’s zoom in:

Notice that temperature generally changes first, and CO2 changes some 800+ years later. Blue line to the left, red line to the right. This is called the temperature lag — an inconvenient truth for CO2-warming enthusiasts; it’s well known but not well understood. It could easily be a complex relationship, but CO2 changes do not initially cause historical temperature changes.

On a shorter time scale, we start to get some perspective:

At this scale of 11,000 years, it doesn’t seem like CO2 is “driving” temperature. We are in the middle of an upswing coming out of the Little Ice Age, but there is also an overall cooling trend.

Before the twentieth century, there was plenty of temperature variability, and it continues today. If you have heard about the hockey-stick controversy, it’s about whether this graph created by Michael Mann, which Al Gore likes to stand in front of on a scissor lift, represents reality:

It doesn’t. Despite what you read on Wikipedia, this graph was manufactured by carefully cherrypicking the data from tree rings. Looking at tree rings is about the least accurate way to measure ancient temperatures. Better methods involve looking at drilled ice and sediment cores. Using those methods, we see a pronounced period warmer than today from 1000 to 1300 AD, called the Medieval Warm Period, and then the Little Ice Age about 400 years ago (same time period as above):

This single issue invalidates many of Al Gore’s claims* and undermines the IPCC’s predictions of man-made CO2 catastrophe. (You’ll find a list of relevant studies at CO2Science.org*.)

Read the full article at medium.com