Ah, how I love it when readers send in superb and informative Comments of the Day when I am strapped for time and have ProEthics deadlines to meet! This post in particular has generated several COTD-worthy responses. I may re-post them all.
But first, here’s Michael R.’s Comment of the Day on “From The Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: The State of Certainty And Reliability of Climate Change Forecasts And Analysis”:
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One of my big problems with the whole ‘climate change’ agenda is that the people who are pushing it don’t believe it, either. If they believed it, they would push agendas that would further the goal of counteracting global warming, but they don’t. They push agendas that are outrageously expensive, damaging to the economy and the well-being of people, and don’t do much, if anything, about the warming of the planet.
(1) Electric vehicles. This is an easy one. The demand to eliminate cars and trucks and replace them with electric vehicles is a high-profile and telling example. First of all, electric vehicles are not capable of replacing many of our vehicles, such as semis. Secondly, we probably lack the resources to replace even most of our cars (alone) with electric vehicles, especially since we oddly won’t allow the mining required to obtain the materials. Thirdly, of electric grid is completely incapable of powering this massive addition to the electric load, especially since we are making it more unreliable with renewables. Most importantly, however, THEY DON’T REDUCE CO2 emissions significantly or at all. Their increased energy involved in production and the battery replacement cycle makes them worse or marginally better than today’s gasoline powered cars (depending on your assumptions). For my use, my gasoline powered cars are better for the environment.
(2) Meat. There is a big push to eliminate meat from our diets for ‘global warming’. However, anyone with half a brain realizes that the ‘fake meat’ they are creating takes vastly more energy to produce than a cow does. Lets take a large vat of rhizobium and extract a few hundred milligrams of leg-hemoglobin so we can make our soybean patty taste like meat? Sure, that’s so much more efficient than a cow or chicken. Of course, a lot of our beef is grown on western grazing lands where you are ONLY allowed to graze cattle. Removing the cows from that land, without opening it up to other agriculture (as the Biden administration has done) only reduces the amount of food produced, increasing the world starvation we are facing.
(3) Electric grid. The biggest thing we have done to reduce CO2 emissions from electricity generation is the cogeneration with natural gas. In cogeneration, the natural gas is burned in a gas turbine, and the hot exhaust from the gas turbine is piped into a steam turbine. This results in a thermal efficiency of over 60% for the generation of electricity. Gasoline cars are about 25% and diesels about 35% for comparison. I didn’t even know it was possible to get thermal efficiencies that high until I investigated the claim that our CO2 reductions were due to natural gas. Why aren’t we celebrating that? Why are we building thorium reactors instead of letting the Chinese use our designs to do it? Instead of using these technologies that really make a difference, we are building wind farms in places without wind and pushing solar energy in Michigan and Wisconsin.
(4) Petroleum and Natural Gas. Too much here to even go into, but we want to ban the use of these as fuels, but we want to use MORE of them for plastics, and we won’t allow the refineries to be modified to change their mix of products to favor the plastic producing fractions over the fuel fractions. So, if they are successful, we will produce a lot of hazardous waste that we will burn in the air instead of burning in our cars or to produce electricity. Makes sense.
So, the big things the ‘global warming’ people want will make life miserable, but not affect global warming much. So, why don’t they focus on the things below?
(1) Efficient transport. If you want to use less energy, use less energy. A big, heavy, electric vehicle is not an energy-efficient way to take a letter to the post office. Shifting from a 3000 lb gasoline powered car to a 4500 lb electric car doesn’t necessarily save energy. Why not a motorcycle? Why not an electric bicycle? Why not a small, lightweight car? Why aren’t these being pushed? Why aren’t the safety regulations being changed to allow more fuel-efficient vehicles, instead of putting breathalyzer interlocks on them or making them weigh 8000 lbs with batteries? Why not make dedicated bike lanes (or roads) to encourage this? Why not make the stoplights and traffic flow more efficient? Why not encourage people to live close to where they work. I don’t mean make new ’15 minute cities’ by massive construction projects, I mean revive housing in areas near workplaces and revive small towns that already exist.
(2) Legislate lighter-colored roofs and pavement. Lighter colored shingles save a lot of energy and don’t cost any more than dark shingles. Why wasn’t this the first thing done?
(3) Store water underground. Over 2/3 of the greenhouse effect is water vapor. Water vapor is the MOST important global warming gas. Over the last 70 years, we have been building vast reservoirs to provide water to our cities. Half of this water is lost every year to evaporation and leads to humid cities that don’t cool down at night. The higher night-time temperatures are the #1 effect of global warming and it is mostly due to these reservoirs. Pumping the water into the ground is cheaper, yields more usable water (little lost to evaporation), and eliminates this humidity-induced warming. The temperature monitoring stations in the cities have been emphasized more and more over rural ones in the climate models, so this warming is over-represented in temperature reports.
Why aren’t we addressing this if we actually care about the problem? I asked one of the leading researchers in this field why he doesn’t apply for global warming grants when he complained about having trouble finding funding for his research. The entire room (of experts) laughed at the idea and he said that his research was not considered relevant to global warming by the global warming community.
I could go on, but you can see that what the global warming proponents are NOT doing is as important as what they ARE doing. They aren’t really trying to slow or eliminate global warming. They are just trying to control YOU.
Ethics Alarms 
Yeah, this COTD was wholly, completely, and in many other adverbs-that-end-in-ly deserved.
My new campaign promise: If I am elected President, Michael R and Sarah B will be part of my administration dealing with environmental issues/solutions.
Absolutely right.
It also doesn’t help that the same people who screaming about carbon emissions take private planes to conferences, or that those who scream about rising sea levels are buying beach-front property, or that nuclear isn’t being taken more seriously for electric generation.
When the “experts” don’t act like they should change their ways, why should the rest of us? There’s an issue of credibility. Most people could, if they so desired, greatly educate themselves on the problems of climate change and come to their own conclusions, but most people don’t have the time to sort through all the data (much less the time to develop the background needed to accurately assess the data), and so rely on experts. But in order to rely on experts, we have to trust them. If the experts adopt a “Do what I say, not what I do” attitude, the reason to trust them, and thus whatever message they preach, disappears. The message could be absolutely right, but if you can’t get people to listen to you, then you’ve failed at your mission.
Unless your mission to bilk a gullible population into sending you gobs of money. Because you can fool some of the people some of the time.
Why aren’t our elected leaders commuting to work on these? They get 180 mpg, go 50+ mph, are only $5000 brand new, and are made of less than 250 lbs of materials.
https://powersports.honda.com/motorcycle/minimoto/super-cub-c125
Or what about this? It’s electric.
https://cscmotorcycles.com/rx1e-electric-motorcycle/
I want John Kerry and everyone on his staff riding something like this to their offices every day. As for foreign conferences, they can use Zoom like the rest of us!
Michael R., if I understand your argument correctly, you are not disputing that man-made global warming is happening and that it poses a danger to the quality of life of humans, only that the solutions pushed by the most vocal and powerful climate change activists aren’t working?
If so, I take no issue with that. I will point out that some of your claims here are controversial. For example, the EPA says that CO2, not water vapor, is the most important greenhouse gas. They also have a fact sheet arguing that the claim that the construction of EVs produces more energy than is saved is a myth. I’ve also seen conflicting studies on whether the same is true of fake meat.
I do not have any scientific background and thus don’t feel qualified to weigh in on which of you are correct. But in my view, this is exactly the debate we should be having–not whether climate change is real, or whether it poses dangers to society, but what we need to be doing about it. I take no issue with any of your proposed solutions, but I will note that I have heard a lot of talk about more efficient transport (especially public transport) among climate activists, as well as the lighter colored roofs and pavement (as well as using different types of paint on houses generally).
Masked Avenger,
There is no dispute that the climate does change, and there is some evidence that there are anthropogenic sources of some current changes we’ve seen. The problem is threefold. How much current climate change is driven by man-made sources? What are the ramifications of allow “business-as-usual” approaches to dealing with climate-influencing man-made activities? What solutions exist to limit the impact of human activity on the climate? The implication stated in this post is that if the answers to the third question are absurd, contradictory, or at least hypocritical, then the answers to the first two questions are perhaps not as solid as some would believe.
Indeed, the question of how much human activity has influenced the climate is far from settled. Our best guesses, coming from models that can only scratch the surface of the complexities of our world, continue to overshoot observational data. Our media continues to hype every weather event, often to the chagrin of the scientists who continually warn that every day brings climate anomalies, and no one weather event itself can be attributed to climate change. Horror stories of fires, floods, droughts, storms, and heat waves fill the newspapers and their websites, but a clinical analysis of the historical data shows that fires are not burning and greater amounts of land (and over all, the number of fires has been on the decline); floods, droughts, and storms are no more frequent now than a hundred years ago; and heat waves are not happening with any greater frequency, intensity, or duration.
What we do see is that a warm globe tends to push the temperate and artic zones warmer over time, which is actually great for life. It allows for longer growing seasons, and lesser cold temperatures lead to few cold deaths. At this time, annually cold deaths outnumber heat deaths by something like a factor of 8 to 1. Rising global temperatures could lead to more heat deaths, but they could also lead to far fewer cold deaths. We also see areas of the world greening from additional CO2, so there are two factors here to consider. More CO2 and a warmer climate means more vegetation, and more vegetation means two things: decreased famines, and more CO2-removing factories.
This leads to the second question, which is to what extent humans influence the climate. The earth is a gigantic buffer system. There are many mechanisms that handle excess emissions. Too much water vapor falls back as rain. CO2 gets sequestered in the oceans and is consumed by plants. Gasses that tend to remain for a very long time, like CFCs, are far more concerning because they influence, per ppm, the greenhouse effect far more than water vapor or CO2. Even methane is far more powerful than CO2, and we can rightly ask if the methane emissions that are man-made are worse than any contributions through CO2. But we can also ask if it is greenhouse gas emissions that are really the problem, or if deforestation plays a greater role, or our urbanization which has turned wide swaths of land into heatsinks. The thing is, we don’t have solid answers to these questions. Even less do we have any answer as to whether there are any limiting factors. Is there a point where dumping more and more CO2 into the atmosphere has such minimal additional warming effect that the climate would stabilize at, to pick a random number, 5 degrees warmer than current conditions?
These are questions that are largely being swept under the rug, with anyone who dares ask them being labelled as climate deniers who will not follow in step with “settled science”. Never mind the fact that science is never settled — it is always open to new data that might revolutionize our understanding of the world — if there is a realm of settled science, then climate science does not fall in that category. There are still too many unknowns, and the consequence of some of the efforts we’re making to combat climate change could be far worse than not making the effort at all. If you want a concrete example of that, consider that taking the entire world to solar and wind would lead to an unstable grid that would mean you couldn’t rely on electricity to keep ICUs in hospitals going. You couldn’t guarantee air conditioning in summer or heating in the winter. (And no, batteries cannot back up electricity generation worldwide. There is not enough raw materials to make and replace the quantities of batteries needed.) It basically condemns the entire world to developing nation status, which would definitely result in the deaths of millions of people.
Ryan,
If you are interested, consider taking a look at the Irreducibly Simple Climate Model. This is not a model to predict future climate, rather it tests such models against real world data. It shows that a) these models all run too hot, and b) they do not accurately fit climate conditions that existed in the past. One of the key things to take away from this is that climate sensitivity, i.e. how much average temperature changes in relation to CO2 concentration, is about 1.3 Kelvin. As you observed, there seems to be a point where increasing CO2 has a negligible impact on further warming, and that point is much lower than most people predicted.
“At this time, annually cold deaths outnumber heat deaths by something like a factor of 8 to 1.” (bolds mine)
That figure may be a tad low.
STUDY: Cold Kills 20 Times More People Than Heat
Paul,
I will admit that I only conduct a 6-second Google search that put the annual heat death count at about 600,000, and the annual cold death count at 4.5 million. That’s where I got my quick and dirty 8:1. If anyone wants to quibble, I could be convinced to amend what I wrote to 7.5:1…
I’m not surprised that a more rigorous study would place the toll closer to 20:1, but even the 7.5:1 as a lower bound is sufficient to question the hysteria about a warming climate.
The cold deaths thing has an oddity… winter deaths are pimarily associated with warmer local climates. Increasing average temperatures may increase deaths eventually. Which is counterintuitive and poorly explained. Astral Codex Ten had a post about it that I vaguely recalled reading when I saw your comment.
I think he missed a fairly obvious factor, survivorship bias. Generally cold climates have already killed off low IQ people who adapt poorly. They REQUIRE forward thinking to plan for the winter. Warm climates are easier to survive in normal conditions, and have growing seasons year round, so more stupid people are around when unusual weather conditions hit. This can accumulate over generations. There is a known correlation between latitude and IQ.
Masked Avenger, water vapor is responsible for over 65% of the greenhouse effect. Think of a desert. How can the desert cool off from 100 degrees at the end of the day to 50 degrees at night? Why doesn’t the city cool off much at night? The desert is DRY. If the EPA said that, the EPA is lying to you.
As for anthropogenic global warming, the best numbers I have seen put the warming due to CO2 increase at about 0.2 degrees C for the entire 20th century (don’t let them pick and choose a few decades, make it for the entire century). The global warming crowd has hand-waving arguments about CO2 causing extra cloud formation and that will cause more warming, but that seems to have not happened, probably because the mechanism proposed makes no sense. Most temperature change is not due to greenhouse effect changes. Solar output is responsible for a large amount of that variation. Some recent physics models strongly suggest we are about to enter a period of extended cooling due the magnetic field lines of the sun becoming parallel. You can look up the Maunder minimum to see what the effect of that is.
There is nothing I can see that indicates that warming temperatures is necessarily a problem. Temperatures on earth have been higher in the past and those times are recorded in history as being prosperous. Temperatures have also been lower and those times have been recorded as tragic. I see no imminent risk from warming temperatures worthy of drastically impairing people’s standards of living (which impairs their health and wellbeing). Remember, the Vikings FARMED Greenland. We can’t farm Greenland today. Why not? It is colder today.
I said more efficient transport, not public transport. Let’s not change the subject. Injecting public transport as a substitute for more efficient transport is like trying to reduce healthcare costs by getting everyone insurance. They are not really the same thing.
I am not an expert in the field, but I am in a field close enough to understand the arguments and the underlying science. I have been monitoring this movement for decades.
“ There is nothing I can see that indicates that warming temperatures is necessarily a problem…I am not an expert in the field,”
Then you disagree with the vast majority of experts in the field, and as a non-scientist, I have little choice but to take their word over yours.
“Then you disagree with the vast majority of experts in the field”
Dr. Richard Lindzen, UN IPCC lead author and reviewer resigns abruptly:
“Controlling carbon is kind of a bureaucrat’s dream. If you control carbon, you control life.” –
2005: Dr. Christopher Landsea resigns abruptly, withdraws from participation in the UNIPCC AR4,
”(it uses) a process that I view as both being motivated by pre-conceived agendas and being scientifically unsound.” Landsea claimed the IPCC had become politicized and the leadership ignored his concerns.
2011: UNIPCC Lead Author Ken Caldiera resigns abruptly. “it is not clear how much additional benefit there is to having a huge bureaucratic scientific review effort under UN auspices...”
2014: Dr. Richard Tol (UNIPCC AR5 Working Group II) resigns abruptly from the writing team for the SPM/AR5– September 2013, disagreeing with the profile of the report which he considered too alarmist and putting too little emphasis on opportunities to adapt to climate changes
“The Panel is directed from within the environment lobby and not from within the science.”
Sensing a damning trend, here?
Didn’t think so.
There’s more: Guess what Drs. David Legates, Timothy Ball, Will Happer, Murray Salby, Judith Curry, Joanne Nova, David Whitmore, James, Annan, Hans Von Storch, Bob Carter, Garth Paltridge, Willy Soon, Peter Ridd, William Gray, Nils-Axel Mörner, Freeman Dyson, Bjorn Lomborg, Myron Ebell, Kiminori Itoh, Ivar Giaever, Ian Plimer, etc., etc., etc. have in common.
In his comically inept schlockumentary slide-show, Fat Albert breathlessly predicted a future ~ 20’/~6 meter SL rise.
Funniest thing; right around that time, he purchased a SF Bay Area condo which (and this is where it gets GOOD!) sits a mere 10’/~3 meters above SL.
In the immortal words of Delbert McClinton: If You Can’t Lie No Better Than That You Might As Well Tell The Truth
Brrr!
Masked Avenger wrote, “Then you disagree with the vast majority of experts in the field, and as a non-scientist, I have little choice but to take their word over yours.”
Then you’re a fool to swallow the narratives these “scientists” have presented without using any critical thinking.
I could go into the science of all this, but I think there has been enough of that over the past 40 years that everyone on either side of the argument has something that “proves” them right by now. A personal favorite of mine is pointing out newspaper articles from the 1970’s about global cooling, and how we might need to dump soot on the ice caps to melt them and prevent another ice age. And this was over a hundred years into the industrial revolution!
Anyway, none of that is relevant to the number one problem facing the anthropogenic climate change crowd: reality. There are something like 330 million people living in the U.S., out of a global population of around 8 billion. That number is going to keep increasing until leveling out at around 10 billion by 2100, if currently developing countries follow the same demographic patterns of birth rates decreasing as prosperity increases. Are the current populations of these developing countries and their future billions of citizens going to kneecap their economies for the sake of climate? No, especially as every currently developed country on the face of the Earth already went through industrialization without climate constraints. Is China, with its 1.4 billion people, going to do so? No, they are building coal plants as fast as they can get them online.
Anyone with a basic understanding of human nature, history, or game theory can clearly see that the efforts of the West to mitigate carbon output is pointless in the face of the rest of humanity. A system that relies on everyone toeing the line when doing so incurs a significant cost and anyone defecting ruins it for every single member is not a system that can exist in reality. Anyone who genuinely believes otherwise is at best delusional or stupid. The actual reason for climate politics is it provides a lever to control the energy, agriculture, and transportation sectors. This gives a lot of unscrupulous people a lot of power and makes them a lot of money.
Great Comment of the Day!
When you get right down to the nitty gritty of climate change, it’s all about controlling the activities of the individual to conform with the goals of the perceived vocal “majority”.
About (1) Electric vehicles.
I dove deep into atmospheric carbon data and how electric vehicles will help to “fix” the problem and I found out that the propaganda is basically lying to the public – big surprise!
There’s a lot of technical data and calculations in that blog post.
Climate change is real; the climate is always changing, it always has and it always will, period. The issue is global warming and whether man can effectively control global warming. I think there are some pretty arrogant God-like human scientist (I’m using that word very liberally, they’re actually propagandists) out there that think they can control the ever changing climate by controlling what you can and cannot do.
“Great Comment of the Day!”
Remember the old madison.com days? The best way to get some fur flyin’ (The Gotch’s, leastways…) was to post anything whatsoever about Bikers (the non-motorized type) and their legendary arrogance.
Here, it’s Climate Change.