The Crisis Report - 47
What went wrong. A Climate Paradigm Postmortem. Part Two
Understanding our Current Climate Paradigm.
Where it came from and why it gained ascendancy.
So,
Let's talk about “Climate Science”. If you are like 99 out of 100 people, you probably have a lot of misconceptions, misinformation, and outdated ideas in your head. You probably think understanding the Earth’s Climate System is too difficult for a regular person to fathom. If you are like 99 out of 100 people, you rely on expert “trusted voices” to tell you what “the scientists” think and how it will affect you.
This is normal.
Being INFORMED has a cost. Even in an age of “free” information, being INFORMED about a subject costs you TIME. For most people, time is precious.
None of us can “know everything”. We all have to rely on expert “trusted voices” throughout our daily life. Not just scientists. We rely on plumbers, mechanics, lawyers, contractors, doctors, teachers, priests, and a host of others to advise us and help us make sense of topics we are unfamiliar with.
Most of us do the same when it comes to understanding “Global Warming” and the Climate Change it causes. We rely on “trusted voices”. We rely on “the scientists” to tell us the dangers, the risks, and the urgency of the situation. We TRUST them to guide us and warn us.
If the science objectively demonstrated it was too late to limit warming below catastrophic levels, that would be one thing and we scientists would be faithful to that (#and tell people#). But science doesn’t say that.
-Climatologist Michael Mann 2021 (Guardian)
In the case of Global Warming and Climate Change, this has produced CATASTROPHE.
Even if Michael Mann won't admit it.
UN Report Finds Global Temperature Increase Getting Closer To 1.5C: Planet Earth will likely experience a significant global warming milestone in the coming years, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). The WMO — The United Nations’ weather agency — says there’s a 2 in 3 chance that before 2027, the planet will register a year in which the global air temperature will be 1.5°C or more above pre-industrial levels, temporarily.
4 out 5 Climate Scientists say they expect to see “catastrophic impacts of climate change in their lifetimes”.
Of the scientists who responded to the poll, 88% think global warming constitutes a crisis and nearly as many said they expect to see “catastrophic impacts of climate change in their lifetimes”.
Just under half said that global warming has caused them to reconsider major life decisions, such as where to live and “whether to have children”.
More than 60% said that they experience anxiety, grief, or other distress because of concerns over climate change.
This information should concern and scare you. These are the most informed people on the planet on the topic of global warming. You should want to know why they think this is the most likely future. What do they know, what do they see, that the rest of us don’t?
Why is there so much difference between the 20% who think warming will be +2C or less by 2100 and the 80% who think it’s going to be +3C or more?
What's going on in Climate Science?
Who's voices should you be listening to?
The “Climate Moderates” who have dominated Climate Science for the last 40 years.
Or the “Alarmists” like Hansen, who concluded in 1981 that “carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would lead to warming sooner than previously predicted”.
At the end of the 80’s we decided to listen to the MODERATES.
Let's talk about why and what they got wrong.
Because things aren't supposed to be this hot according to their paradigm of the Climate System.
Let's go back to the beginning.
In 1977 there was “official” concern over the possibility of increasing CO2 levels causing “a climatic fluctuation of such rapidity” that it “could be catastrophic”. What elevated the issue to ‘National Security” level of discussion was “the growing weight of scientific support which raises the CO2-climate impact from speculation to a serious hypothesis worthy of a response”.
There had been scientific discussion since the 30’s that “doubling” the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere would cause the Earth’s Global Mean Temperature to increase +4C. Additional research had suggested that the temperature increase could be as large as +5C. Based on the projected increases in fossil fuel usage Frank Press thought levels of 1.5x-2x the 1850 level of 280ppm could be reached in 60 years.
Frank Press was a little off, we hit 1.5x in just 46 years. The atmospheric level of CO2 is now at 420ppm. Exactly 1.5 times larger than the 1850 baseline.
Carter needed to make a decision about how to respond to this information. While many in the scientific community were concerned about the increasing levels of atmospheric CO2, others were concerned about the possibility of a natural cooling trend affecting the climate.
This wasn't a stupid idea in 1977. The Earth had recently been colder.
People in their 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s could remember savagely cold winters from their childhood. In 1963 the Thames in London had frozen for the first time since the 1814 Frost Fair.
People were deeply concerned that another Ice Age was about to start.
Particularly since the first climate science studies of the Greenland Ice Cores suggested that Ice Ages happened roughly every 100,000 years.
So, was the Earth cooling or warming?
In 1977 that wasn't clear. But, there was a LOT of money riding on the answer to that question.
If we needed to stop burning fossil fuels, the entire global economy would have to be restructured. It would literally be, “the end of life as we knew it”.
Here were the players “in the room where it happened” and “at the table”.
The Federal Government - The watchdog that is supposed to protect “the people” and ensure they have a future. The only player charged with considering “the long term” and acting on that charge.
The People - They wanted CHEAP ENERGY and continuation of the consumer culture that had been developing since the end of WWII. NO ONE wanted to go back to a “scarcity economy”. Many remembered childhoods during the Great Depression.
The Fossil Fuel Interests - Not just the Fossil Fuel companies, the most profitable industries in the history of the human race. This includes the Global 1%, because most of their wealth is derived from investment of the continuous stream of profits thrown off by the Fossil Fuel companies. Particularly the Oil and Gas industries.
America’s Global Allies - Having finally rebuilt their economies after the devastation of WWII they would be extremely reluctant to sacrifice those gains by giving up fossil fuels. Also, the Cold War was still raging. If the Soviets and the Chinese didn't give up fossil fuels going off of them would be suicidal.
The Global Population - The Third World, The Global South, The Global 80%. Whatever you want to term the rest of the world. Everyone, everywhere wanted to modernize and develop their nations. Everyone wanted economic growth. Europe and the US were the models and their success was built around burning fossil fuels.
The Scientists - They were expected to be NEUTRAL and DISPASSIONATE. To look at “the best evidence” and like Oracles pronounce fossil fuels as “safe” or “unsafe”. Deciding the economic structure of the planet and the shape of future human society.
Can you see the INTENSE pressure there was for the Scientists to say that burning fossil fuels was “safe”?
We know that Carter acted on the “Press Memorandum”. Remember the “Age of Malaise”, the hated “double nickle” speed limit, and the solar water heating panels on the White House roof.
Carter also favored greatly expanding America's nuclear power capacity. He was a nuclear power expert who had actually worked on cleaning up a reactor meltdown in 1952.
A nuclear reactor was melting down. Jimmy Carter came to the rescue.
As a 28-year-old Navy lieutenant, Carter was one of the few people on the planet authorized to go inside a damaged nuclear reactor
In the 70’s the only realistic alternative to fossil fuels was nuclear power. Carter hoped to rapidly grow the number reactors in the US. Much like the French were doing.
Then Three Mile Island happened.
The Three Mile Island accident was a partial meltdown of the Three Mile Island, Unit 2 (TMI-2) reactor on the Susquehanna River in Londonderry Township, Pennsylvania, near the Pennsylvania capital of Harrisburg. It began at 4 a.m. on March 28, 1979, and released radioactive gases and radioactive iodine into the environment. It is the worst accident in U.S. commercial nuclear power plant history. On the seven-point International Nuclear Event Scale, it is rated Level 5 – Accident with Wider Consequences. -Wikipedia
The accident crystallized anti-nuclear safety concerns among activists and the general public, and led to new regulations for the nuclear industry. It accelerated the decline of efforts to build new reactors.
Carter tried to strike a balance between continuing fossil fuel use, while transitioning towards renewables. In conjunction with promoting the idea of a cultural shift away from a “culture of consumption” to one of sustainability.
However, Carter never spoke out about the CO2 levels. He never said directly that the rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere created a “potential impact on the environment of a climatic fluctuation of such rapidity (that it) could be catastrophic”.
He tried to get Americans to “do the right thing” but he never told them why. He was not honest about about the information informing his policy choices.
Here's how this all played out in the 80’s when our current “Climate Science Paradigm” was born.
Because we like cheap electricity, cheap air travel, cheap food, the freedom of our own personal automobiles, and cheap plentiful consumer goods. “We the People” were not going to ask very many questions about how this miracle was being accomplished.
The American Public didn’t want lectures on “sustainability”. They wanted CHEAP ENERGY.
They elected Reagan, and one of his first acts was the symbolic removal of the solar heating system from the White House roof.
The “people” overwhelming backed Reagan and his promise that it was “Morning in America”. This influenced the Federal Government and its Agencies like the EPA and the Bureau of Land Management. It also influenced how it allocated research grants and monies to fund studies of the Climate System.
In the emerging field of Climate Science, this political climate favored the “Climate Moderates”. Scientists who saw the planetary climate system as being resistant to change, strongly self correcting, and reactive only on centennial or millennial timescales. Scientists who felt that it was “safe” to keep burning fossil fuels while we developed alternatives like Fusion, Solar, and Biofuels.
In doing this, the US signaled to the world that it intended to maintain the existing economic and geopolitical world order. The “World”, like the American Public, was very happy with this choice. Stability was essential to further economic growth and the economics of the new form of international shipping using standardized containers was sparking an EXPLOSION in World Trade.
Continuing to use Fossil Fuels meant prosperity for the World. No one wanted to shut that down on a theory that excess CO2 in the atmosphere, MIGHT warm the planet and change the weather.
The Fossil Fuel Interests decided what they wanted the public to believe.
They had “secret knowledge” that they didn't share.
It's always tempting to dismiss accounts of “secret knowledge” as “conspiracy talk”. However, in this case it's true.
Exxon’s Own Research Confirmed Fossil Fuels’ Role in Global Warming Decades Ago
Top executives were warned of possible catastrophe from greenhouse effect, then led efforts to block solutions.
More Exxon Documents Show How Much It Knew About Climate 35 Years Ago
Documents reveal Exxon's early CO2 position, its global warming forecast from the 1980s, and its involvement with the issue at the highest echelons.
Exxon’s Oil Industry Peers Knew About Climate Dangers in the 1970s, Too
Members of an American Petroleum Institute task force on CO2 included scientists from nearly every major oil company, including Exxon, Texaco and Shell.
Italy’s Eni Faces Lawsuit Alleging Early Knowledge Of Climate Change
Newly-unearthed document seen by DeSmog shows the oil and gas company was warned of the “catastrophic” risks of burning its products in 1970.
Lost Decade: How Shell Downplayed Early Warnings Over Climate Change
Newly discovered documents from the 1970s and early ’80s show that Shell knew more about the “greenhouse effect” than it let on in public.
Coal Knew, Too
A newly unearthed journal from 1966 shows the coal industry, like the oil industry, was long aware of the threat of climate change.
Even the automakers did climate studies that predicted rising CO2 levels would cause planetary warming.
GM, Ford knew about climate change 50 years ago
Researchers at both automakers found strong evidence in the 1960s and ’70s that human activity was warming the Earth. A primary culprit was the burning of fossil fuels, which released large quantities of heat-trapping gases such as carbon dioxide that could trigger melting of polar ice sheets and other dire consequences.
In the following decades, both manufacturers largely failed to act on the knowledge that their products were heating the planet. Instead of shifting their business models away from fossil fuels, the companies invested heavily in gas-guzzling trucks and SUVs.
At the same time, the two carmakers privately donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to groups that cast doubt on the scientific consensus about global warming.
In hindsight it's easy to want to scream, “What were they thinking, how could they not understand the dangers and risks of what they were doing?” Their own studies were unequivocally warning them that increasing the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere would cause planetary warming. How could they continue promoting the consumption of fossil fuels when they knew what it could do?
Why didn’t they seem to care?
They didn't care because they weren't seeing the “whole picture”. They didn't know about the cooling effect of Sulfur Dioxide (SOx) particulate. They didn't know that a lot of the heat caused by the increased CO2 levels was being “masked”.
This was the first flaw in our current Climate Paradigm. It shaped everything that came afterwards.
In the 70’s/80’s we didn't understand the power of sulfur particulates on the planetary climate system. We didn't know that we weren't seeing the true effect that the increased levels of CO2 were having.
Estimates indicate that aerosol pollution emitted by humans is offsetting about 0.7 degrees Celsius, or about 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit, of the warming due to greenhouse gas emissions. This translates to a 40-year delay in the effects of climate change.
Without cooling caused by aerosol emissions, we would have achieved 2010-level global mean temperatures in 1970.”
Climate effects of aerosols reduce economic inequality. Nature Climate Change, 2020; DOI: 10.1038/s41558–020–0699-y
This seems almost impossible now, but in the 70’s and 80’s the science around atmospheric particulates didn't exist. We really didn't start thinking about them until it was proven an asteroid killed the dinosaurs.
One of the ideas that came out of that line of research was that the impact “flash burned” the planetary biosphere and put enormous amounts of ash and soot into the atmosphere. Suddenly the idea of a “Global Winter” coming after the impact seemed possible.
#This idea got a lot of popular attention. First the blast, then a plunge into freezing conditions. No wonder everything over 20lbs in size went extinct on the land. It made sense to people.
Now we know that the “Impact Winter” probably lasted only a decade at most. It was then followed by SAVAGE warming as all of the CO2 put in the atmosphere from the flash burn-off of the biosphere caused +8.0C to +10.0C of rapid Global Warming.
This “Climate Whipsaw” was what proved lethal to the animal life on the planet. In just 10,000 years a jungle had regrown in the area around the impact crater.#
A few years later Carl Sagan applied that idea to nuclear war and proposed that we could create a “nuclear winter”.
Nuclear winter is the term for a theory describing the climatic effects of nuclear. war. Smoke from the fires started by nuclear weapons, especially the black, sooty. smoke from cities and industrial facilities, would be heated by the Sun, lofted into. the upper stratosphere, and spread globally, lasting for years. -Climate Change Journal 2010
Even then, we still weren't thinking about the cooling effect our “normal” industrial pollution might be having on the planet. This isn't that surprising. There aren't any natural sources of SOx pollution on a planetary scale. We didn't have any examples in front of us to show us what we weren't seeing.
The only natural source of SOx particulate on the scale necessary to cool the Earth is a volcano.
In June, 1991 Mt. Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines.
That's when we really grasped the effect SOx particulates could have on the Climate System. In the mid-90’s. After we had committed our entire civilization to being powered by the burning of fossil fuels.
That's when we started to consider how much “masked” heat there might be hiding in the Climate System. By 2001 James Hansen was publishing papers arguing that we might be underestimating warming by dangerous amounts.
However, we have had no way to directly measure the amount of SOx particulates in the atmosphere. So, getting a handle on this warming has been difficult to quantify.
Hansen “shepherded” the construction of a satellite specifically designed to measure this particulate and the amount it was cooling the planet. It was launched in 2009 and crashed into the ocean around Antarctica.
This was “unfortunate”.
As Hansen wrote in his 2021 paper “July Temperature Update: Faustian Payment Comes Due”
Specifically, the CERES data show that most of the increased imbalance since 2015 is due to an increase of absorbed solar energy, i.e., a decrease in Earth’s reflectivity. That is consistent with the expectation that the largest effect of aerosols on Earth’s radiation balance and climate is via their effect on clouds.
Such consistency is hardly a substitute for actual aerosol and cloud measurements.
It is possible to measure from space detailed microphysical information (particle size, shape, refractive index) for aerosols and cloud particles. Extraction of full information in reflected sunlight — including opacity of the aerosol layer and aerosol single-scatter reflectivity — requires observations of a given area from a wide range of scattering angles, in several spectral bands over the solar spectrum from the near-ultraviolet to the near-infrared, and with polarization of the reflected light measured to an accuracy of the order of 0.1 percent.
NASA once launched a mission with that capability, but it ended up on the floor of the Southern Ocean near Antarctica rather than in space, when satellite failed to separate from the launch vehicle. No replacement satellite was built — that’s a sad story for another time.
For now, we can only infer that Earth’s energy imbalance — which was less than or about half a watt per square meter during 1971–2015 — has approximately doubled to about 1 W/m2 since 2015. This increased energy imbalance is the cause of global warming acceleration.
We should expect the global warming rate for the quarter of a century 2015–2040 to be about double the 0.18°C/decade rate during 1970–2015 (see Fig. 2), unless appropriate countermeasures are taken.
We still don't know for “sure” how much we have warmed the planet since 1850. A new satellite has finally been completed by NASA to take the measurements necessary to settle this essential question.
It will be launched in 2024.
Hopefully, this one won't crash or blow up.
In the 70’s and 80’s they didn't know how HOT it was getting. They thought they were seeing ALL of the heat being caused by the increasing level of atmospheric CO2. They were off by about 40%.
The importance of this cannot be overstated. It affected EVERYTHING about our understanding of the Climate System.
It made it seem safe to keep burning fossil fuels for decades. Perhaps as long as 2100.
What they could OBSERVE in 1990 was that CO2 levels had gone up by 70ppm from 280ppm in 1850 to 350ppm.
Temperatures had gone up about +0.6C.
How much warming would you predict from the next 70ppm increase of CO2, and the next 70ppm after that?
Everyone understands that Climate Sensitivity declines as CO2 levels increase. So, if 70ppm caused +0.6C of warming by the late 80’s, the next 70ppm should cause a smaller immediate response, right?
So, in 1990 with the entire economic system of the world being powered by burning fossil fuels. Would you feel OK with the idea that you could put another 70ppm of CO2 into the atmosphere? If you thought it was only going to warm the planet by another +0.6C. #which is about what we are feeling right now#
Would that seem like a reasonable trade-off to you?
Or would you try and make a “hard crash” transition to nuclear, hydro-power, geothermal, wind, and solar? Because fusion still wasn't ready.
That’s the underpinning of our current Climate Models. That’s how they generated a +1.2C warming level for CO2 levels of 420ppm and a +1.8C warming for CO2 levels of 490ppm. By looking at ‘Immediate Warming’ and ASSUMING that the Thermal Equilibrium will happen VERY SLOWLY over hundreds or thousands of years.
What would you have done?
That’s “the scam” at the heart of the current Climate Paradigm. The way we could “have our cake and eat it to”. By ASSUMING that Immediate Warming would be around +0.6C per every 70ppm increase in the atmospheric CO2 level and that the “followup warming” would take centuries/millennia to happen.
It's basically a “buy now” and “pay later” understanding of the Climate System. One where we can safely pollute as much as we want and have centuries to clean up the mess. Let the Future take care of the FUTURE. Who knows what kind of science they will have in 100 years.
In this paradigm of the Climate System, warming by 2100 should be no worse than +1.8C as long as CO2 levels didn’t exceed 500ppm.
We didn't get a vote on this decision.
The Climate Scientists, the one's who weren't “crazy Alarmists” like this guy.
They decided for us.
The majority of them declared it safe to keep burning fossil fuels and that became the “Climate Moderate” paradigm.
People liked this position because it “felt right” to them. You hear people say all the time, that in a debate over the future of something, reality will probably be somewhere in the middle between the best case and the worst. People assume reality is probably “somewhere in the middle”.
The Climate Moderate position, that Global Warming was real but would happen slowly and could be managed, seemed like middle ground between the Deniers and the Alarmists. Most importantly, it allowed everyone to do what they wanted and keep burning fossil fuels to power economic growth. It quickly became the mainstream paradigm in Climate Science.
Unfortunately the paleoclimate data agrees with the Alarmists. It indicates that atmospheric CO2 levels around 400ppm will increase the Global Mean Temperature by +4C.
We are already at somewhere between +2.0C and +2.5C when measuring warming from 1850 and factoring in the “masked warming” that we know exists. Now the only question is, “how fast are we going to get to +4C?”
At +0.36C per decade, it won't take long.
This is my analysis.
This is what I see.
This is my “Crisis Report”.
— rc 05222023
