Climate Change

Yesterday I posted to social media (Facebook) the following:

Well, here's one of the dumbest things coming out of the Biden administration that I've heard of in a while - https://www.foxnews.com/.../white-house-report-signals...

Let's spray aerosol into the atmosphere to prevent the sun rays from reaching the earth in order to negate climate change. It's called Solar Radiation Modification (SRM). There's a great quote near the end of the article - "SRM offers the possibility of cooling the planet significantly on a timescale of a few years."

Yes, folks, instead of the impact of "global warming" (and there are those who believe it as well as those who don't), we'll just use SRM and bring on the next ice age. Anyone else see the potential for significant downside to these "experiments"?

 

Several hours later, someone responded to this posting:

You only have half the info as this is a fox report. Go read other sources. There is NO plan to do this. It was a federally mandated base research report.

You are a smart man, so use multiple resources to get your information before making claims.

Here is one example of research but there are others as well: https://www.cnbc.com/.../white-house-releases-report-on...

 

I have both friends and relatives who disagree with me, and I have no problem with that. We (myself included) can all learn from each other as long as we agree to be civil about our interactions. So, let me look at some of the aspects of this response. This is too long for a social media posting, so I’m choosing to turn this into a blog entry that I can then refer to.

 

Go read other sources

This is good advice and is something that I regularly do. Beside our local paper, I have three news sources pinned that I read regularly – Fox, CNN, and BBC. I have each of these three for a reason.

Fox – I generally agree with the conservative viewpoints reflected here. However, I avoid reading the opinion articles of Hannity and others as they are designed to inflame rather than to inform.

CNN – In order to balance the definite “right wing” Fox views, I have chosen CNN as a representative of the more “left wing” viewpoints. I could have chosen CNBC (as referenced above), or MSNBC, or something else, but I wanted to have one representative of the MSM (mainstream media) so I can see both sides of any current issues.

BBC – I’ve done enough international traveling that I recognize that both of the above sources are heavily weighted to US news and as a result important things taking place outside of the US are often not covered well. When I got stranded in Europe following 9/11, I greatly appreciated being able to watch the news from the non-US perspective. Again, I could have chosen others, but I regularly check the headlines on BBC to ensure that I don’t get bogged down in the US-centric views of news importance.

When there are important news stories that I really want to get involved in and understand, I will also do further research (thanks Google). So I’m primarily relying on the above three sources to keep me informed about what’s going on and to spur that further research.

As I mentioned, I also read our local newspaper. But I do not rely on it to trigger any further research into non-local issues as it tends to be repeats of what was reported elsewhere the day before.

 

You only have half the info

I disagree. While the article title on Fox is (as is often typical of them) designed to inflame the reader (“White House report signals openness to manipulating sunlight to prevent climate change”), the closing sentence in the article reads:

“In a separate statement, the White House assured readers that ‘there are no plans underway to establish a comprehensive research program focused on solar radiation modification.’”

This parallels a line in the CNBC article which reads:

“The Biden-Harris administration has no plans underway to launch a comprehensive research program into solar radiation modification, according to a senior administration official.”

As a reflection of the way that news articles can be biased, I should note that the above line in the Fox article was at the very end of the article, where the parallel statement in the CNBC article was at the beginning of the article. So the same info was in both but with this perhaps unnoticeable (to most) tweaking of the order that reflects the two organizations support or non-support of the current administration.

 

Climate Change

I have both a science-engineering background as well as a minor in mathematics in my college career. I tend to look at things from those perspectives. There are a few aspects I’d like to mention here that bother me when encountering “scientific” topics like climate change. One is giving too much credit to short-term trends and ignoring the longer-term data. Another is choosing data to fit a pre-determined narrative and ignoring data which does not fit that narrative. And finally is the use of alarmist scenarios. Let’s look at some examples of each in the climate change “debate”.

 

Short-term v. Long-term

Here is a chart from temperaturerecord.org showing temperature variations for the last 1000 years.

[Temp chart]

 

Looking at this chart can cause one to be concerned. The temperature rise in the last 100 years certainly looks dramatic. One could conclude that this is all since the industrial revolution with the burning of fossil fuels, and the result of human activity. And 1000 years seems like a long period of time. But now let’s look at a chart prepared by NOAA (climate.gov) that shows the estimated temperature over the last 500 million years.

[Temp chart]

 

Gives a very different perspective, doesn’t it? Even with the blip in the very end of the data, we are still in a relatively cool period in Earth’s history. And those red areas in our past are definitely not manmade. Let me give an illustration with just four data points.

Consider the data series 4, 3, 1, 2. If I look at the last two points (1, 2), I can exclaim, “the numbers are up by a factor of two!” But if I plot a trendline using all four points I get just the opposite result, “the trend is downward by a factor of two!” There is a saying, “figures don’t lie, but liars figure.” While I don’t mean to imply that the climate alarmists are deliberately lying, one needs to ask what is the basis of their conclusion.

 

Predetermined Narrative

I recently read an article by the president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, Bjorn Lomborg. He stated the following (see https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/thinking-smartly-about-climate-change/):

“U.N. Secretary General António Guterres and many Western leaders, including the current administration in the U.S., tend toward the end-of-the-world point of view: “The world is facing a grave climate emergency. . . . Every week brings new climate-related devastation. Floods. Drought. Heatwaves. Wildfires. Superstorms. . . . We are in a battle for our lives. . . . Climate change is the biggest threat to the global economy.” These claims are echoed endlessly in the media. But are they true?

Consider the supposed rise in “superstorms” such as stronger hurricanes. What do we actually know? The annual number of hurricanes that make landfall in the U.S. since 1900 is slightly declining, not increasing. The same is true for major hurricanes (category three and above) hitting the U.S. We see the same thing if we look at world data for total hurricane energy in the satellite era, 1980-2022. In fact, 2022 was the second lowest recorded year. Did you hear that reported anywhere? No, because it doesn’t fit the dominant narrative.

What about the supposed increase in wildfires due to climate change? A typical example was the media coverage of the forest fires in Australia in 2019 and 2020, which left readers and viewers with the impression that almost all of Australia was burning. Looking at the satellite imagery, however, it was clear that although there were a lot of fires close to where the news crews lived in Sydney and Melbourne, it was one of the lowest levels of burning due to fire on record for Australia as a whole.

As for the amount of burned area due to fire on a global level, satellite data shows a dramatic decline over the past 25 years. Journals like Science and Nature have covered this story, but it’s not what you see on television or read in newspapers. Perhaps the implementation of a strong climate policy might reduce instances of fire, but even if we do nothing, the number of fires will almost certainly continue to decline. In other words, the world is not going to go up in flames, contrary to what you hear from politicians or read in The New York Times.”

 

In both the case of superstorms and fires, the news reports are alarmist and we don’t get the figures that don’t support that narrative. These are just two examples – there are many others.

 

Alarmist Attitudes

In 2007, Al Gore made the following statement.

“Last September 21, as the Northern Hemisphere tilted away from the sun, scientists reported with unprecedented distress that the North Polar ice cap is ‘falling off a cliff.’ One study estimated that it could be completely gone during summer in less than 22 years. Another new study, to be presented by U.S. Navy researchers later this week, warns it could happen in as little as 7 years.”

This was accompanied in the news by pictures of polar bears floating on very small ice floes, getting thinner as they could not move around as before. However, fast forwarding to 7 years later, an article in Commentary magazine was entitled, “Good News for Polar Bears. Bad News for Al Gore.” This article noted:

“…satellite photographs confirm that not only has the ice not vanished, in the last two years it has increased somewhere between 43 and 62 percent since 2012. … since the evidence shows that the ice cap is larger than at any point since 2007, it’s certainly worth noting.”

The article also talks about the “global cooling” that has been going on since 1997. Wait a minute! Global COOLING? Which is it, global cooling or global warming? Since both of these terms keep getting it wrong, why do you think the current term of “climate change” is being used? It’s because no matter whether temps are going up or down it’s still “changing” and so this new terminology is never wrong.

US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claimed in 2019 that the world will end in twelve years if we don’t address climate change! We’re now four years into that twelve year period – and it doesn’t look like the world is ending, Miami FL is not yet under water, the polar ice caps are doing just fine, etc.

But we will continue to get bombarded by alarmist statements. It reminds me quite a bit of the story of the boy who called “wolf”. After a while, no one believed him anymore.

 

Conclusion

I hope that we are not at the point like the boy who called wolf. There are things that we ought to do. History has shown again and again that human ingenuity is good at solving problems. But we need to really think through things and not mandate solutions by government fiat.

The town of Scottsbluff NE had converted to solar power – but they found out last week that one hail storm could wipe out their entire farm of solar panels. Electric cars have their place – but currently they require mining of cobalt by children in Africa and we’re not yet sure how to deal with the problem of old batteries. The power lines on the street where I live do not have sufficient capacity to even support half of the homes putting in fast chargers if we went to electric cars in our neighborhood.

We also need to be careful in thinking that we can “play God”. Humans make mistakes. A slight miscalculation in implementing any solution such as those being researched in the Solar Radiation Modification that I referenced at the beginning of this blog could wipe out mankind instead of being a solution.

In the words of Yogi Berra, “You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you are going, because you might not get there.” Or to quote Elmer Fudd, “Be vewy vewy careful!”