The Crisis Report - 37
Anthropogenic Particulate is a form of Geoengineering. We have been geoengineering the Earth's Climate for awhile.
To understand what's about to happen, we can look to the recent past.
As you might expect, I read a lot of Climate news. I also read a lot of Climate articles, papers, reports, and commentary. What always surprises people is that I also read a lot of Climate Denier articles and pieces as a way of understanding how their audience is being “groomed”.
One of the more interesting pieces I came across a few years ago was this one, “What the EPA doesn’t Want You to Know” by David Siegel. Mr. Siegel is a professional Climate Change denier in the sense that he makes his living by writing on that topic full time. He also has a nonprofit organization that gets “dark money” from places like the Koch disinformation machine.
Mr. Siegel writes a lot of Climate Change articles on Medium and a host of other sites. Here’s a sample of his work.
The Great Famine of the 21st Century, A cautionary tale of our future climate
How the Sun Affects Earth’s Climate, Part I: Milankovich Cycles
How the Sun Affects Earth’s Climate, Part II: Solar Flux and Cosmic Rays
Carbon Dioxide Has Reached a Point of Diminishing Returns: The Greenhouse Effect Explained
This one is a personal favorite. Here’s a sample:
“People like Al Gore think the greenhouse effect is like a blanket, where the atmosphere, which in 1960 had 3 molecules per 10,000 of CO2 and now has 4 out of 10,000, smothers the earth, preventing heat from escaping. In their view, the extra CO2 and methane somehow cause the atmosphere to store all this extra heat and unleash it in the form of storms, drought, heatwaves, snowstorms, fire, flood, pestilence, melting glaciers, killer bees, etc.
Climate scientists know this isn’t true. As I have explained in one of my more popular posts, the atmosphere can’t store very much heat. On a long-term basis, it can’t store any heat at all. So today I want to give you a three-minute explanation of how the greenhouse effect actually works in plain English, with no technical jargon.”
It’s deceptive. There’s a barb here. Do you see it?
Here’s a clue, atmospheric CO2 levels are normally expressed in terms of “parts per million” or ppm. Why would you ever express them as “parts per ten thousand”?
Here’s the increase in CO2 levels Siegel is describing.
For perspective, here’s the ice core record of CO2 levels over the last 800,000 years.
Siegel is not lying though. Do the math.
There are 100 units of 10,000 in a million. So, 300ppm of CO2 is actually 3 CO2 molecules per 10,000 other molecules in the atmosphere. Just like he says. Sounds pretty harmless when you put it that way, right?
Plus, it lets you describe the climb of atmospheric CO2 from 320ppm in 1960 to 420ppm in 2020 as an increase from “three molecules per every ten thousand to four molecules per ten thousand”. Which is technically true, but extremely misleading.
When you notice that, is when you see just how skillful a manipulator Mr. Siegel can be. Mr. Siegel isn’t stupid. Everything he says, every number he uses, every bit of data he includes, and everything he leaves out is significant.
Mr. Siegel is a shill for the Fossil Fuel Interests. He is part of their disinformation campaign. Minimizing the effects of CO2 emissions in the minds of his readers and spreading as much “Climate Disinformation” as possible is what he is paid to do.
In the “Climate Change Culture War”, Mr. Siegel is the enemy.
Mr. Siegel is extremely good at telling “true lies” or “paltering”. Which is a new word I recently learned from the “Heated” stack here on SubStack.
In analyst speak, “true lies” are lies that are “factually true”, but are so misleading and deceptive as to be a lie.
Since most people have no context for judging the accuracy of Mr. Siegel’s numbers, most people are likely to accept them uncritically. Particularly if they agree with Mr. Siegel politically. Mr. Siegel relies on most of his audience being too lazy or busy to “check his references” and just accepting what he says as “true”.
Professional Climate Deniers do this frequently. They “blitz” an audience with links to “real science” climate papers and articles. Then they add streams of “techno-babble” jargon that looks impressive and gives the impression that they “analyzed the science”. Finally finishing with a batshit crazy conclusion that they present as something that “should be obvious” to everyone who isn’t brainwashed.
Which brings us back to this, “What the EPA doesn’t Want You to Know”. I want you to take a moment and give it a glance. It won't take long, it's very short.
It provides a real-life example of the “Geoengineering Trap” we are in.
Let’s break it down.
Mr. Siegel cleverly gives you a link to the EPA website so that the source of his data should be acceptable to everyone. His intent is to “prove” that the official EPA data on Climate Change actually shows that it’s bogus if you really look at it.
He starts by “cherry picking” what he shows you by only using the “Heat Wave Intensity” portion of this graphic from the EPA site.
Since he doesn’t discuss what the chart actually says, it’s clear that he chose that one because it’s the least threatening and the most confusing of the four.
It’s easy to see from the “Heat Wave Season” graph that the “hottest part of Summer” has increased from about 20 days per year in the 60’s to about 70 days per year by the 2010’s.
It’s easy to see that the average number of heat waves (defined as periods when the temperature is above 85% of the temperatures recorded for that date) has increased from about 2 per year in the 60’s to about 6 per year in the 2010’s.
It’s easy to see that the average duration of a heatwave has increased from 3 days in the 60’s to 4 days in the 2010’s.
He doesn’t show you those because he doesn’t want you to realize that the number of “heat wave” days in the US has increased from an average of 6 days per year in the 60’s, to an average of 24 days per year in the 2010’s. That’s too easy to understand and for most people that would be proof that Global Warming is actually happening. So, he leaves out those graphs.
He shows you the one that is misleadingly labeled “Heat Wave Intensity” because he knows that it seems to show that “Heat Waves” since the 60’s have barely gotten hotter at all. It’s the graph that looks like very little warming has happened in the last 60 years.
This is deceptive.
Because, what the EPA set of data actually says.
Is that while temperatures during heatwaves have increased slowly, from about 2F over 85% of the temperatures recorded for those days to about 2.5F over 85% of the temperatures recorded for those days, the total number of “heat wave days” has increased dramatically from 6 in the 60’s to 24 in the 2010’s.
That doesn’t fit his narrative, so he simply doesn’t show you that information or discuss it. What’s important to him is that the graph starts in 1960. He states:
“But wait — look at the dates on those bar charts. When do they start? 1960? Do you think they have any data from before 1961?”
What are they hiding! What don’t they want you to know!
Since the information is right on the EPA site it isn’t difficult to find. He does it for you:
He then goes on to state:
“Does that put the climate crisis in perspective? If you wanted to show the public how hot it was getting, rather than how hot it wasn’t getting, which date would you pick to start your slide show? I’ll just add a little hint:”
There it is, EPA busted!
According to Mr. Siegel this seems to prove that Global Warming is a “nothing burger” because look at how high the Heat Wave Index was in the 30’s. Since he provides no discussion of how this “proves” anything I am forced to guess at what he is saying.
What he seems to be saying, is that the huge spike in the Heat Wave Index that happened in the 30’s shows “human caused Global Warming” is relatively minor to what he is implicitly asserting is “natural variance” in the global climate. This argument is common in Climate Denier circles.
Natural Variance according to David Siegel.
“No one speaks for natural variance.
A few people do, but we are not listened to.
Jim Steele does. I love spending time on his web site: Landscapes and Cycles, because he’s constantly digging into the details to explain that what you are being told is simply wrong and that natural variance is the driver.
Correlation is not causation.
How many times do we have to say this? A lot, because people at NASA and other government agencies are intent on telling a mistaken story of human intervention, greed, and future suffering.
Read his piece on how CO2 cools the atmosphere to get an idea of his thinking.”
Burn the term “Natural Variance” into your brain. You are going to hear a lot of it from the Climate Deniers over the next few years, as it gets rapidly warmer.
“Natural Variance” is how Trumpublican voters are being groomed to view the Climate Crisis that is unfolding.
This is the foundation of the disinformation campaign that Mr. Siegel and the Fossil Fuel interests are engaged in. The idea that the heatwaves, famines, and disasters that are about to unfold are just “natural variance”.
Here's what Mr. Siegel is saying in this chart.
Why is this important?
The 1930’s was “off the charts” bad in Climate terms.
If you include it in your dataset and cherry pick the specific items you look at, you can “prove” that the current warming is nothing to worry about. That it’s well within the natural variance of the earth’s normal climate fluctuations. Just look at the graph, the data seems to proves it.
Every part of this argument is completely wrong, and this graph doesn’t show what Mr. Siegel seems to think that it does. What it actually shows is the massive temperature spike that happens when you stop geoengineering the climate by injecting massive amounts of anthropogenic particulates into the atmosphere.
To Understand Global Warming you need to be clear that Global Warming, as we think of it, actually started around 1850.
Our effect on the planetary Climate System over the last few thousand years has been complicated.
For example, the exploration and colonization of the “New World” brought diseases to the indigenous Native Americans that killed around 90% of the population. Around 100 million people rapidly died in less than 100 years. So many died, that the regrowth of forests over their fields and farms, pulled enough CO2 out of the atmosphere to cool the planet.
European colonization of Americas killed so many it cooled the Earth’s climate.
This “large-scale depopulation” resulted in vast tracts of agricultural land being left untended, researchers say, allowing the land to become overgrown with trees and other new vegetation.
The regrowth soaked up enough carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to cool the planet, with the average temperature dropping by 0.15C in the late 1500s and early 1600s, the study by scientists at University College London found.
“The great dying of the indigenous peoples of the Americas resulted in a human-driven global impact on the Earth system in the two centuries prior to the Industrial Revolution.”
The drop in temperature during this period was the coldest of the “Little Ice Age”. During this period the River Thames in London would regularly freeze over, snowstorms were common in Portugal and disrupted agriculture caused famines in several European countries.
Global Temperatures started climbing around 1750.
This warming was slight in comparison to today's rapid warming but the signal is clear. As global population levels began to recover from the catastrophic plunge in the population of the Americas, the Global Mean Temperature began to inch up.
More people meant more land cleared, more wood burned, and slowly increasing CO2 levels. Some Climate Scientists argue that the baseline for measuring Global Warming should be 1750 instead of 1850. Eighteen fifty was chosen because it marked the start of the “Industrial Age” and the large-scale burning of fossil fuels.
Not everyone agrees with 1850, the Fossil Fuel industry prefers 1880.
1850 was an arbitrary choice — The debate exists in part because the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) did not define preindustrial when setting the targets. What does “preindustrial” mean anyway? You can make an argument that it should be 1740, or 1820, or 1880. Each of these dates shifts the goalposts. We should pick a date all of us can agree on.
-Earl J. Ritchie University of Houston Energy Fellow
Exactly How Much Has the Earth Warmed? And Does It Matter? - 2018
However, 1850 was set as the baseline that our Climate Models work from and it's the baseline used when calculating how much warming will occur if CO2 levels are doubled to 560ppm. We use 1850 because that's when CO2 levels were about 280ppm, the highest “natural occurring” level for millions of years.
CO2 levels have been below 300ppm for millions of years.
Additional research showed that “natural” CO2 levels have been below 300ppm for at least 2.1 million years.
Carbon Dioxide Higher Today Than Last 2.1 Million Years - (2009)
“The low carbon dioxide levels outlined by the study through the last 2.1 million years make modern day levels, caused by industrialization, seem even more anomalous” -Richard Alley, Glaciologist
More recent research has established that it has been 23 million years since “natural” CO2 levels were as high as they are now at 420ppm.
A 23 m.y. record of low atmospheric CO2 - May 2020
Current atmospheric CO2 concentration is known to be higher than it has been during the past ∼800 k.y. of Earth history, based on direct measurement of CO2 within ice cores. A comparison to the more ancient past is complicated by a deficit of CO2 proxies that may be applied across very long spans of geologic time.
These data suggest present-day CO2 (412 ppmv) exceeds the highest levels that Earth experienced at least since the Miocene, further highlighting the present-day disruption of long-established CO2 trends within Earth’s atmosphere.
We measure Global Warming from 1850 because that's when the CO2 level was approximately equal to the “highest” natural level that had occurred in millions of years. Everything after 280ppm is the result of “human action”.
Global Warming started in 1850.
Anyone who tries to tell you that the climate before 1950 was “natural” is either lying to you or doesn't know what they are talking about.
Which do you think is true of David Siegel?
End of Part One.
This is my analysis.
This is what I see.
This is my “Crisis Report”
-rc 04242023
It's extremely disturbing to be forced to deal with slick climate change deniers. It takes time and can't be dealt with in a "soundbite." I had to do it, too, when I was presented "Climate: The Movie, which relied on retired, well-credentialed physicists. No reputable climate scientist would touch this stuff, but hey, if it's a physicist, that's impressive, must be the truth. https://geoffreydeihl.substack.com/p/noxious-disinformation-climate-the
And when/if natural variability ever lines up again the way it did for the US in the 1930's the heatwave intensity will be off the chart? Rather than "everything is normal" the evidence of extreme natural variability should be something to be more alarmed about because of global warming.