The Crisis Report - 79
When it comes to Climate Change, what you SEE depends on who you listen to.
What does this chart mean to you?
When you look at it, what do you see?
Do you see “DOOM” and “Collapse”, or do you just see the global oceans warming up more rapidly than before?
Something to be concerned about if it continues for a few more years. But, probably just the sort of natural variation we can expect in a “charged up” climate system.
According to the “best” General Climate Models this level of warming isn’t sustainable at this level of atmospheric CO2. So, the consensus among mainstream Climate Scientists is that this “spike” in warming cannot last.
“On its own, one exceptional year would not be enough to suggest something was faulty with the computer models. Your default position has to be, ‘The models are right.’”
— Dr. Dessler in an NYT interview in Dec. 2023 about the “unprecedented” warming in 2023.
Right now, that explanation is “holding”. Right now, people are still believing the Moderates in Climate Science. This week I saw an article in the Washington Post that captures the current moment perfectly.
Extreme heat should inspire urgency, not doom
On climate change, both denialism and fatalism are mere postures, not serious points of view.
It’s by Eugene Robinson, a political and social commentator that I have tremendous respect for. Unfortunately, Mr. Robinson does not appear to have a deep understanding of Climate Science. This is regrettable, because his “opinion” in the Washington Post will reach millions of readers globally. For A LOT of people, he is a “trusted voice” that they can have faith in, a voice they can “believe”.
Here’s what he tells them.
On climate change, as we swelter through this heat wave, both denialism and fatalism are mere postures, not serious points of view. With evidence of human-induced global warming all around us, hopeful realism is our only choice.
GOT THAT?
Deniers and Doomers are both “not serious points of view”. You can safely IGNORE what they say. Or require extraordinary proof from them for any claims they make.
Climate Change is “serious” since, “evidence of human-induced global warming (is) all around us”.
BUT.
“hopeful realism is our only choice.”
What “exactly” does that MEAN?
How would you define “hopeful realism”?
Mr. Robinson continues;
A relentless and punishing heat dome has settled over the Midwest and Northeast, roasting half of the country, day after day.
The first named storm of the hurricane season made landfall in Mexico on Thursday morning and is bringing heavy rain and flooding to Texas.
Florida is struggling to recover from record-setting rains that caused widespread flooding.
New Mexico and California are battling to contain huge wildfires. And all of this is happening in June — before summer even begins.
First with a litany of Climate Disasters that Americans might be experiencing or have noticed on the news.
It is true that no single weather event, including this oppressive heat, can be definitively blamed on climate change. But it is also true that no single case of lung cancer can be definitively blamed on cigarette smoking — yet the percentage of U.S. adults who smoke has plummeted from 45 percent in 1954, before the deadly correlation between smoking and cancer was widely understood, to just 12 percent today, according to Gallup. Anyone who claimed there is no link would be dismissed as a dangerous crank.
This is an interesting analogy.
It's basically saying that,
“While you cannot blame any individual case of lung cancer on smoking. People's understanding of the correlation between smoking and lung cancer caused the percentage of smokers in the population to fall from 45% to 12% and anyone who claims there is no link between smoking and lung cancer is viewed as a dangerous crank”.
Which equates denying the reality of “Climate Change” with denying that smoking causes lung cancer. Mr. Robinson clearly feels that either failing makes you a “dangerous crank”.
Mr. Robinson then applies this to Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis sounded like an ad for Marlboro cigarettes last week when he claimed the “rain bomb” that dumped up to about two feet of precipitation on parts of his state was nothing out of the ordinary. Like most Republicans, he seeks political points by pretending climate change does not exist. In May, he signed legislation to ban offshore wind turbines, which supply clean energy, and to weaken rules on natural gas pipelines, which do not.
“We don’t want our energy policy driven by climate ideology,” DeSantis said Friday. But that is exactly what he’s doing.
Only blind ideology — plus personal ambition — could lead a public official to willfully ignore the link between fossil fuels and climate change.
One of our two major political parties has chosen, disgracefully, to posture on an issue that is already changing the way we live.
I am totally in agreement with this. Ron DeSantis is a fucking LIAR. So are almost all Trumpublicans, particularly on the subject of Climate Change. They have been since the 2000 election.
The “problem” for our democracy is that Trumpublicans don’t seem to pay any electoral penalties for their lies. Ron DeSantis was elected by a MAJORITY of Florida voters.
SO how do we make sense of this next part?
People get what’s happening, though.
Gallup reports that 62 percent of U.S. adults worry “a great deal” or “a fair amount” about climate change, and 61 percent understand that the planet is warming primarily because of “pollution from human activities.”
The Pew Research Center has found that 67 percent of Americans believe the nation should prioritize developing alternative energy sources, such as wind and solar, while just 32 percent would prioritize expanding production of oil, coal and natural gas.
IF THAT’S TRUE, WHO IS VOTING FOR TRUMPUBLICANS?
I mean, these numbers are bad enough. Even if you take them at face value it means roughly 33% to 38% of the population “don’t know”, “don’t care”, or “deny” the basic reality of the changing climate system.
This is a social failure of MASSIVE CONSEQUENCE. On an issue that LITERALLY is “life or death” we have allowed this level of polarization and dishonesty to poison the debate over what to do.
Climate Change and the Climate Crisis aren’t the issues that people are actually voting about. So, whatever these polls show about people’s anxiety they are meaningless politically.
We are NOT UNITED when it comes to Climate Change.
Now here’s an INFURIATING part. Mr. Robinson clearly does not understand that 8% for whom the “Climate Crisis” is the “most important” issue. Look at what he leads with when he is trying to “build up” Biden as a “leader” on the Climate Issue.
Mr. Robinson states:
President Biden is doing both.
The United States is producing more fossil fuels, including crude oil, than ever before — no matter what lies Donald Trump tells about his administration having been more oil-friendly.
Biden is appeasing “oil and gas” White voters.
Meanwhile, Biden’s signature Inflation Reduction Act included the biggest-ever investment in the transition to clean energy and making the country carbon-neutral by 2050 — a goal supported by more than two-thirds of Americans, according to Pew.
While telling “Green” voters how much money he has thrown at “Green” projects to buy their vote.
I’m sorry, this doesn’t make me “excited” about Biden in any way shape or form. I have sympathy for the man. I understand the constraints he is working within.
But this just makes him look like a typical “two faced” lying politician. It’s “lets make a deal Joe” who is still selling out his allies to “get a deal” and promising “I’ll make it up to you later”. The politician he has been his whole career.
Someone who gets projects funded and deals made, but leaves anger and bitterness in his wake. For all that Mr. Robinson is pushing him, Biden has not been a “Green Friendly” President.
Mr. Robinson continues…
But for now, what is the deal with this heat? Why was it hotter near Burlington, Vt., on Wednesday (94 degrees) than it was in Miami (89 degrees)?
That’s where uncertainty and the jet stream come in.
Michael E. Mann, director of the Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania, is the climate scientist that climate deniers love to hate.
Deniers HATE him, so he has credibility.
He was lead author on the 1998 paper that produced the famous “hockey stick” graph showing how the Earth’s temperature has risen sharply since the Industrial Revolution. That was when humans started burning fossil fuels on a large scale, spewing vast amounts of heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Here are his ‘credentials’ and why he is a ‘trusted source’.
Mann is careful and cautious in his analysis. While some on social media reacted to a spike in sea surface temperatures with sky-is-falling alarm, Mann attributed the phenomenon to a rare and transient combination of factors — not some headlong rush toward the end of the world.
Umm…Mr. Robinson. Dr. Mann just lied to you. He said “rare and transient combination of factors” and you are assuming he is talking about “natural factors”. What he is actually saying is that this was a transient event because it was due to the “termination shock” in the Climate System from the change in the sulfur content in diesel fuels.
Mann is NOT lying, but see how misleading his statement is. He doesn’t actually explain the cause of the warming in 2023. He just makes it seem like it was a “rare” event that is going to pass.
“Not some headlong rush toward the end of the world.”
In fact, Mann told me this week, global temperatures are rising at the rates climate scientists predicted decades ago. But these extreme weather events reflect an important uncertainty, Mann said, and “uncertainty isn’t our friend.”
Umm…Mr. Robinson, that’s another “sorta” lie. The “models” Dr. Mann is referring to, those are the Alarmist models. So, yes, it is true that “global temperatures are rising at the rates climate scientists predicted decades ago”, BUT not Dr. Mann’s faction of Climate Science. He carefully doesn’t say “that James Hansen predicted decades ago”.
He doesn’t take credit for these predictions. But he gives the impression that “nothing alarming” has happened and that, “global temperatures are rising at the rates climate scientists predicted decades ago”. Implying that the Rate of Warming has not accelerated and Climate Science KNOWS what’s going on.
This is master class spin.
Dr. Mann continued:
He explained that the polar jet stream, which circumnavigates the globe from west to east, is driven by the contrast in temperature between colder air to the north and warmer air to the south. What climate scientists didn’t anticipate was that the Arctic would warm much faster than more temperate latitudes. Some parts of Alaska and Canada were 7 degrees warmer last summer than during an average summer in the 1990s.
THIS IS WHERE THINGS GO “SIDEWAYS”.
Mr. Robinson is referring to “Arctic Amplification”. However, he clearly does not understand what it is or what its implications are. So, when Michael Mann refers him to this NOAA report,
Warmest Arctic summer on record is evidence of accelerating climate change. — NOAA press release December 2023
He simply takes this report at face value and allows Mann to “explain” it to him. Because it is from NOAA, the most “compromised” of the Climate Agencies, it is deliberately confusing and “minimizes” warming. Here’s the NOAA statement about Arctic Amplification.
“The average surface air temperature in the Arctic this past year was the sixth warmest since 1900 at 20 degrees Fahrenheit (-7 Celsius).”
Since 2023 started with a GMT of just +1.2°C over baseline and then started spiking upward in late March. The “average” temperature for the year made it ONLY the sixth warmest since 1900. — Minimizing
“The summer Arctic average temperature was the warmest on record at 43 degrees Fahrenheit (6.4 Celsius).”
Whatever the average for the year was, the summer of 2023 was “the warmest on record”. Wait, was it the 6th warmest or the warmest? — Confusing
“Data shows that since 1940, annual average temperatures have risen .45 of a degree Fahrenheit (.25 of a degree Celsius) per decade and average summer temperatures have risen .31 of a degree Fahrenheit (.17 of a degree Celsius) per decade.”
Whoa, there's a FLAT OUT lie. It’s telling you that temperatures in the Arctic have risen +2°C since 1940. This is NOT “true”. That temperature increase wasn’t “since 1940”. They “imply” that, but the +4°C of warming in the Arctic has happened since 1979 at a rate of about +1.0C per decade.
Because the Arctic is warming a LOT faster than the rest of the Earth.
The Arctic has warmed nearly four times faster than the globe since 1979
Communications Earth & Environment volume 3, Article number: 168 (Aug 2022)
“Here we show, by using several observational datasets which cover the Arctic region, that during the last 43 years the Arctic has been warming nearly four times faster than the globe, which is a higher ratio than generally reported in literature.
We compared the observed Arctic amplification ratio with the ratio simulated by state-of-the-art climate models, and found that the observed four-fold warming ratio over 1979–2021 is an extremely rare occasion in the climate model simulations.
Our results indicate that the recent four-fold Arctic warming ratio is either an extremely unlikely event, or the climate models systematically tend to underestimate the amplification.
When Michael Mann says,
“What climate scientists didn’t anticipate was that the Arctic would warm much faster than more temperate latitudes.”
That’s also a LIE.
Arctic Amplification was predicted in the first General Climate Models in 1974/1975. It has ALWAYS been known that warming would be magnified in the Arctic. The question was by “how much?”
NASA/GISS did a MAJOR study on this back in 1998.
Latitudinal temperature gradients and climate change
JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH, VOL. 103, NO. D6, PAGES 5943–5971, MARCH 27, 1998
They found.
“Doubled CO2 equilibrium simulations from different atmosphere-mixed layer ocean models show different degrees of high-latitude climate warming amplification; in the GFDL model, the temperature response at high latitudes is 3–4 times that at the equator, while in the GISS model, it is only close to a factor of 2 [Rind, 1987a].”
Got that?
There were TWO models in 1998. An Alarmist one and a Moderate one.
“in the GFDL (ALARMIST) model, the temperature response at high latitudes is 3–4 times that at the equator”
“while in the GISS (MODERATE) model, it is only close to a factor of 2"
When Michael Mann says the “global temperatures are rising at the rates climate scientists predicted decades ago” those Alarmist models are the ones he is talking about. The ones we have been using in the IPCC models are the “lowball” GISS numbers.
When he says what, “climate scientists didn’t anticipate was that the Arctic would warm much faster than more temperate latitudes”. He is lying. The Alarmist Climate Scientists were “spot on”.
Mr. Robinson challenges Dr. Mann on none of these points. Leaving an uninformed reader to believe everything Dr. Mann has stated must be true.
Mann goes on to say.
Some parts of Alaska and Canada were 7 degrees warmer last summer than during an average summer in the 1990s.
Another “true lie”. Mann makes it sound like this was “just last summer” and some sort of temporary thing. The High Arctic has warmed up +4°C on average since 1979.
That means there is less temperature contrast between the Arctic and moderate air masses, which disrupts the jet stream. Normally, it looks like a wavy line. Now, more often than in the past, it forms big loops that dip far to the south.
That’s Michael Mann’s explanation for the current heat wave. An “abnormally” hot winter in the Arctic has “temporarily” disrupted the Jet Stream and made it form “big wavy loops” dipping “far to the south”.
“Those patterns tend to get locked in place,” Mann said. “Some of the greatest outbreaks of extreme weather in the U.S. and Europe are due to that phenomenon.” He included the heat dome that’s currently locked above our perspiring heads.
Again, master class spin. Mann has literally explained nothing, been misleading, and flat out lied about some things. Mr. Robinson challenges him on not one point.
Because polar regions are warming more rapidly than the rest of the planet, ice caps and glaciers are melting faster than scientists anticipated, and the rate of sea-level rise has surpassed expectations.
No duh. If Arctic Amplification is 4X when you predicted 2X then ice caps and glaciers will melt “faster than expected”.
“We are seeing the warming of the planet that was predicted,” Mann said. “But what is true is that some of the impacts of that warming are exceeding what the models predicted.”
Again, way to minimize the urgency of the situation. Carefully say that “some impacts” are exceeding “what the models predicted”. Acknowledge that the models were off but ONLY about “some” impacts.
Mr. Robinson understands enough to know that “unexpected things” are happening in the Climate System. He accepts Mann’s explanation that there is now more “uncertainty” in the forecasts.
Mr. Robinson states:
In other words, the road toward a warmer world got bumpy quicker than scientists anticipated. Now, it is uncertain what’s around the next bend.
Mann believes “we’ve sort of moved beyond denial,” despite the GOP’s performative rhetoric, because people can see that climate change is happening. But now he has a different concern.
Now that people can see that Climate Change is happening a LOT of them aren’t buying the Moderate version of Climate Science that Michael Mann is selling. Michael Mann calls those people “Doomers”.
“Doomism is becoming a real threat to action,” he told me, noting that “bad actors are fanning the flames” behind the idea that it is already too late to do anything and that they point to these weather extremes as evidence.
Doomers are now WORSE than Deniers. Because Doomers don’t agree with Michael Mann on what kinds of ACTION are needed. Mann is lying yet again when he characterizes “doomism” as “do nothingism”.
“The idea that we’re in some kind of runaway feedback loop — that’s just not happening,” Mann said. “I want to communicate the urgency, but at the same time I want to stress the agency we have.”
This is the Moderate messaging right now. Hannah Ritchie, Michael Mann, David Wallace Wells, Zeke Hausfather, Christiana Figueres, and a host of others are ALL pushing this “it’s not too late” message.
Humans have already raised the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by a full 50 percent. The more fossil fuels we burn, the worse the effects of climate change will get. But there is still time to make the transition to clean energy, and we should see the task before us not just as a duty but as an opportunity.
Robinson ends with this.
I’ve been following the fight against climate change since I covered the first U.N. Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. I agree with Mann: We haven’t lost this battle — not yet, not by a long shot. Keep in mind how Stephen Schneider, one of the legendary pioneers of climate science, used to dismiss fatalism: “The truth is bad enough.”
Sir, “the TRUTH is far worse than you suspect”. AND, as long as you keep allowing people like Michael Mann to lie to your face, you are part of the problem.
Eugene Robinson is read by millions. He is a “trusted voice” and he has given his credibility to Michael Mann. Because Eugene Robinson has vouched for him, millions of people will listen to what Michael Mann is saying and will FEEL reassured that things aren’t desperate and there is still time to find “solutions” for Climate Change.
I am read by a few thousands. I am NOT respected and have no awards for my writing. I am a ‘fringe’ voice.
I am the “BAD ACTOR” that Michael Mann says you shouldn’t listen to.
I think things are about to get MUCH, MUCH WORSE. Very rapidly now.
In two years, Michael Mann will be discredited or I will be proven wrong. That/s how close the “Crisis” is now.
This is my analysis.
This is what I see.
This is my “Crisis Report”.
rc 062324
Richard, fantastic read here. Thank you.
I can’t argue with any of it, but I do want to mention Mann. I’m not a denier, I’m a collapsenik. I certainly understand MSM’s addiction to him because he keeps people from panicking. The funny thing about him though, is that since his ‘hockey stick’ in 1998, he’s produced essentially nothing. He’s riding the hockey stick into the sunset with book deals and prime time appearances. Mr. Mann, in my opinion, is simply in it for himself.
Richard,
It is all just as insane as you suggest. We are long past the point of no return and careening out of control on our way to catastrophe. Meanwhile "reasonable" people are claiming it isn't so bad. They are blind, deaf, dumb and simply nuts. Worse they are utterly ignorant of reality and the meaning of all of these things.
Welcome to the end of the world we knew. Welcome in terms of the world we knew to hell. We've passed through the gates. And the "excitement" is about to really ramp up before the main events.
In terms of mother earth, yeah this is a rough patch, but she has seen much worse. She will muddle through. And just wait for it. Following this period of dying and mulching of all that was, the evolutionary explosion that comes after this to fill all those new vacancies will be glorious.
Sure, the primates will be gone. But they were a careless messy lot that liked to throw feces at each other and at everyone and everything else. Good riddance. Just wait until you see what mama has in store to replace them.