Having just had a commenter casually toss the execrable term “climate denier” into my comment-thread, comparing any dissent on climate policy and other such technically complex, politically charged topics to stubborn belief in a flat Earth, I thought I would draw your attention to a useful resource: a collection of thirty-one pages, each presenting useful information for making up your own damn mind about carbon dioxide and Earth’s ever-changing climate. The information has been gathered and organized by a group called the CO2 Coalition, and I have no doubt that you’ll be able to find them condemned as cranks if you try. But if you are thinking of doing so here, I’ll remind you that excommunication is not in itself an argument, and neither are ad hominem attacks. It doesn’t matter in the slightest whether the author is an oil-company consultant, a paedophile, a worshipper of Moloch, or even, worst of all, a Trump supporter: the only intellectually respectable response to any of the information presented below, and the only kind that I will take seriously here, is a criticism based on methodology or conflicting information, which I will then be happy to discuss with any civil interlocutor. If any of what I will link to below is actually wrong, I would like very much to see it corrected, and to learn something in the process. (It’s no fun being a heretic, and if there is some aspect of my understanding of climate change that is mistaken, I’d be happy to have one less thing to get into arguments about with my liberal friends.)
So! There’s a lot of information here. Let’s get started.
1) 140-million-year trend of dangerously decreasing CO2.
This page asserts that CO2 levels have been decreasing steadily since the Cretaceous era — from 2,500 parts-per-million of atmospheric concentration — and are now historically, and dangerously, low. Why dangerously? Because, despite recent increases, we are still near the “line of death”, at about 150 PPM, below which plants can’t survive. Rather than being in a CO2 crisis, then, we are in fact dangerously close to CO2 starvation.2) The warming effect of each molecule of CO2 declines as its concentration increases.
The idea here is that the change in forcing effect of CO2 is greatest when absolute concentrations are lower, and decrease as they go up. In other words, especially in the presence of other, more powerful greenhouse gases, such as water vapor, there’s a ceiling on the effect that CO2 can have on Earth’s heat loss into space (aka “flux”).3) CO2 is plant food.
Simple enough: plants eat carbon dioxide. (Horticulturalists routinely add CO2 in greenhouses for this reason.)4) In the last four ice ages, the CO2 level was dangerously low.
As noted above, plants die off at around 150 PPM, and during the last Ice Age we got down to 182 PPM — perhaps the lowest ever, and dangerously close to that extinction threshold.5) CO2 emissions began accelerating in the mid-20th century.
6) CO2 increase is enhancing corn production… a lot.
7) Current CO2 levels are near record lows. We are CO2 impoverished.
Already pointed out above, but it bears repeating.9) More CO2 means more plant growth.
More CO2 is better for crops, better for forests, better for animals.10) More CO2 helps to feed more people worldwide.
More CO2 (and warmer weather) makes it easier to feed people.11) Modern warming began more than 300 years ago.
Clearly, CO2 concentrations cannot be the only thing driving warming.12) 11) Melting glaciers confirm modern warming predated increases of CO2.
Key point here: Glaciers don’t shrink, even during warming periods, until a threshold is crossed at which summer melting exceeds winter accumulations. That point was reached around 1800, and the effect really became noticeable in the mid-1800s — long before significant human contributions to atmospheric CO2.13) Rising sea levels confirm modern warming predated increases of CO2.
Unsurprisingly, the effect noted above affects sea-level rise in the same way as glaciers, for obvious reasons. Sea-level rise has been steady since long before the post-war acceleration of CO2 emissions.14) Temperatures changed dramatically during the past 10,000 years.
Clearly, there’s a lot more to the story than anything we’re doing. The idea that Earth’s temperature is somehow entirely under our control is obvious nonsense.15) Interglacials usually last 10,000 – 15,000 years. Ours is 11,000 years old.
Look at the linked chart, and ask yourself if we are really worrying about the right thing.17) The current warming trend is neither unusual nor unprecedented (Part 1).
18) The current warming trend is neither unusual nor unprecedented (Part 2).
During the Medieval Warming Period, people were farming in Greenland. (No SUVs in sight.)19) Earth’s orbit and tilt drive glacial-interglacial changes.
This item is about Milankovich cycles. (There are other astronomical factors involves too, such as variations in solar activity — as I mentioned here.)20) We are living in one of the coldest periods in all of Earth’s history.
And yet we can’t stop bitching about warming. (It’s almost enough to make you think it isn’t really about climate at all.)21) For most of Earth’s history, it was about 10°C (18°F) warmer than today.
Have a little perspective, people.22) IPCC models have overstated warming up to three times too much.
If you’ve been paying attention, you already know this — but again, it bears repeating. (Are you losing trust in these gigantic public institutions yet? I certainly hope so. Snap out of it, for God’s sake, and learn to think for yourself. The information is all out there, and for now at least, still freely available to anyone who bothers to make an effort.)23) For human advancement, warmer is better than colder.
I’ll add that more people die every year from cold than heat.24) Cold periods = crop failure, pestilence, famine, and mass depopulation.
The Little Ice Age of 1300-1800 was not an easy time, and we should be glad to keep clear of another.25) More CO2 means moister soil.
When plants get more CO2, they have to “breathe” less, and reduced transpiration draws less moisture out of the ground. This is a good thing.26) The current warming trend is neither unusual nor unprecedented (Part 3).
Hammering on this again — but it’s true, and it’s important, and all media are yelling in your ear to convince you of exactly the opposite.27) CO2 rose after the Second World War, but temperature fell.
I’m old enough to remember when all the boffins were telling us that the bugaboo we really, really needed to be worrying about was global cooling. Trust the science!28) The only thing constant about temperatures over 600 million years is that they have been constantly changing.
Getting a bit repetitious here, I admit — but this is, after all, probably the most important fact in the entire climate debate.29) Droughts are not increasing in the U.S. (NOAA) (Part 1).
30) Droughts are not increasing in the U.S. (NOAA) (Part 2).
Just in case you missed the item just above.
Well, there you have it: just a smattering of Inconvenient Truths, all from a single website, addressing only a small subset of all the things a person should be taking into account when thinking about climate-change policy. (Not mentioned, for example: the enormous quality-of-life importance of fossil fuels for most of the world’s population; the unreliability and inefficiency of solar and wind power; the titanic economic effects of proposed “green” policies; the consolidation of power and usurpations of local sovereignty and individual liberty that such policies always just happen to entail; the “upsides” of warmer climate, such as making agriculture feasible at higher latitudes; and so on and on.)
Do you think some of these things aren’t actually truths at all — that they are, rather, tendentious falsehoods dressed up in graphs and charts and diagrams? That’s fine; we all want to converge on truth around here, right? — and if you have information to offer that specifically contradicts any of the points that the CO2 Coalition has presented in their list, I’m all ears.
But I’ll warn you in advance: be civil, and stick to facts and data, or you won’t be welcome here.
4 Comments
Number 20 is the heart of the matter. Scientific data does not fit on a bumper sticker or offer a 30 second sound bite of a young girl sniffling about CO2. A forlorn Polar Bear is easy to present as ‘scientific conclusion’.
Climate change is something I can argue point by point with much more ease than I can vaccine misinformation, and therefore serves FOR ME anyway, as a good proxy for how dangerous misinformation can be. Although I don’t have time to address EVERY point, so I’ll be selective.
This is simply false. Per the CO2 monitoring lab at Mauna Loa, current CO2 levels are at 416: https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/
True, but irrelevant. Pizza is human food but too much of it will kill me. And many of the reports on global warming do indeed say that plants will experience increased growth….along with drier deserts, wetter tropics, etc, which will all have an effect on plant growth. It isn’t just a one to one correlation. And if coastal areas are flooded and cause mass migrations to other areas, we got problems. You worried about caravans now?!
Yes, the climate is sensitive to natural drivers as well. But for the 20th Century and onward, radiative forcing has been on the warming side, driving primarily by CO2: https://cdn.britannica.com/67/106467-050-1EF12FB5/concentration-carbon-dioxide-atmosphere-greenhouse-gases-Earth-1750.jpg
So regardless of what natural drivers caused the Earth to warm 300 years ago, what is driving it today is CO2.
But natural drivers caused warming before, including during this period, so this says nothing. CO2 warming took over from any natural drivers of climate in the 20th Century, and continued that warming.
But again, the climate can warm because of natural drivers and manmade. If sea levels were rising before modern warming, then natural warming was the culprit. But since the 20th Century, the main driver of warming has been CO2. Again, as current measurements of radiative forcing prove.
This is almost like saying that even though your roomate turned the thermostat up, it won’t get warmer because the cabin was warm two years ago due to sun coming in the windows. It doesn’t even make any logical sense, much less scientific.
Of course. But no climate scientist says that the climate changes only because of man. An increase in solar irradiance, increase in volcanic activity, water vapor, etc are all natural causes that change the climate.
We completed warming from the interglacial about 8000 years ago, plateaued for a bit, and then slowly started to slip. We should be cooling right now, but instead we are spiking: https://www.realclimate.org/images//Marcott.png
We should “worry,” if that’s how you want to put it, because current radiative forcing from CO2 outweighs all other climate drivers, natural and manmade, and in the direction of warming, and is not going away anytime soon.
The last interglacial was called the “Eemian,” and no, Greenland did not melt all the way, but Scandinavia was an island, and large areas of NW Europe were inundated. The “worry” about modern global warming is how much of human civilization depends on the climate being in a narrow band of temperature. If vast areas of Europe are inundated, can you imagine the mass migrations that will occur?
…continuing in a second part…
…continued from first part…
They link to the sources, but one is broken and the other doesn’t show anything like what the graph shows. When proxy temperatures are plotted alongside direct measurements, the current temperature is clearly way beyond anything in the last 2000 years.
But even if it weren’t, it doesn’t have much relevance. Once again, the current temperature budget shows more radiation coming in than going out, so even if today’s temperature is not unprecedented, it will be at some point.
Again, the linked source does not show what they show in this graph. The only thing the source says is that the Medieval Warm Period was as warm as temperatures before 1990, which is true.
This is true, although I don’t see what relevance it has. There are many variables that cause changes in climate. The point is that today the main driver is CO2, as can be seen directly with satellites.
The “bitching” is because even a relatively little change in temperature outside the range of what human civilization was birthed in will cause mass migrations, as well as food problems. Again, think of the point above that during the last interglacial much of Europe was underwater. How will that affect us humans if that happened within the next 100 years? What do we do with all the people that will have to move? Should they move to the US?
Yes. And again, imagine the amount of migration that would occur if that happened today.
I simply don’t have the time or immediate top-of-my-head knowledge to counter every point, so this one I defer: https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2016/05/comparing-models-to-the-
satellite-datasets/
True to a degree, but again, like too much pizza, too much of a good thing. Again, imagine the MASS migration effects if Europe were underwater like it was during the last interglacial.
Since it’s being hammered on a third time, I have no choice but to respond a third time. As above, the most important point is that it simply doesn’t matter whether today is warmer or not than in the past. As measured by satellites, there is more long-wave radiation coming in than going out, and it is at CO2 wavelengths, and CO2 isn’t going away anytime soon, so it will be unprecedented at some point even if not today.
But secondly, that above graph is from Craig Loehle. I remember addressing this years ago. Note that Loehle’s graph stops in 1949. But most of the recent pronounced warming from CO2 happened since 1980. A blogger took Loehle’s data, email to the writer from Craig Loehle himself, and added on the direct measured temperatures since 1949 to add to Loehle’s proxy reconstructions. He then placed it right alongside all the other famous “hockey stick” reconstructions (not just from Dr. Mann, but multiple others). It really isn’t much different: https://skepticalscience.com/print.php?n=189
You see how dishonest this graph is? It stops in 1949 to give the “at a glance” perception that it’s widely different, but when you add in the modern temperatures and throw it in with Mann et al, it’s pretty close to the same graph.
Mid-century cooling was caused by sulphate areosols, caused by industry during WWII. After that period, pollution control took over and outweighed the effects of the aerosols: https://skepticalscience.com/global-cooling-mid-20th-century.htm
As for warnings about cooling in the 1970s, that was largely a phenomenon of sensationalist media, picking up on what sounded nice and dramatic. Truth is, most peer-reviewed, scientific papers at the time were warning about warming, not cooling: https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/89/9/2008bams2370_1.xml
True, which is exactly how climate scientists know that things can cause the climate to change, both natural and manmade.
Ok, I almost hit all of them after all! I’ll leave the drought one for now, as I find it the least interesting.
Martin,
As for CO2 levels, we’re down from PPMs in the thousands. If you had a tank of oxygen to breathe that was once at 2,500, and was down to 416, and you knew that you would die if it got down to 150, you certainly wouldn’t be tearing your hair about having too much of it. During glacial periods, as noted, it can get dangerously low indeed. I’m glad to have a bit of a buffer. (Not that it will matter in either of our lifetimes.)
As for CO2 being plant food, being able to grow more crops is a good thing, no? (Especially as the world’s population zooms upward.) You make a bald assertion about increased droughts, but as noted in the last two items, that isn’t really happening — and as noted in item 25, higher CO2 means moister soil.
As for your next comment, your page from Britannica demonstrates nothing at all about what’s driving temperature, or, even more to the point, how it has changed. It doesn’t even mention water vapor, which is a vastly more important greenhouse gas than CO2. (The fact that you would present such a non-sequitur as a knock-down argument is not, as they say, a “good look”.)
Nobody denies that we are in a warm period. As for “unprecedented”, though: even extending Loehle’s graph, the MWP — when people were farming in Greenland — certainly qualifies as a precedent, as does the warm period in Roman times. (You can see more about the global extent of the MWP here.) Meanwhile, it is clear that Earth’s temperature is susceptible, often quite sharply so, to cooling episodes, particularly those caused by volcanic activity.
Most important of all, perhaps: altogether missing from the picture you present is what would seem to be the most obvious driver of temperature, namely the Sun — despite the fact that, as Varenholt and Luning have argued in their meticulously researched book The Neglected Sun, solar cycles have an enormous influence on climate, and not just because of blunt variations in total irradiation, but also, and perhaps most importantly, because of variations in the energy proportions in the spectrum of solar radiation, and the effects these have on atmospheric physics.
As for the mid-20th-century hiatus in recent warming, you attribute that to industrial aerosols, with pollution controls accounting for the resumption of warming from the 1970s on. But this does nothing to account for the post-2000 hiatus, at a time when CO2 concentrations were steadily rising.
I do not deny that CO2 is a factor in the Earth’s temperature economy. But you repeat, over and over, the implausible assertion that although the Earth has warmed and cooled throughout its history for natural reasons obviously having absolutely nothing to do with mankind, suddenly all of those natural processes have completely switched off, and the only thing controlling climate now is CO2.
You complain about sea-level rise, although sea-level rise has been almost perfectly steady since 1850. You focus entirely on the disasters you imagine happening, without any consideration of the terrible social, economic, and political tradeoffs that climate proposals entail. You dismiss as irrelevant all of the possible benefits of a slightly warmer world. Implicit in all of this is the idea that the Earth’s temperature, which is actually historically unusually low, must somehow be fixed at its current setting, forever, whatever the cost (because, I assume, that we can’t possibly adapt as it changes), and, moreover (colossal hubris here!) that it is all under our control. As Dr. John R. Christy reported in Congressional testimony, however (as excerpted in a post of mine from a few years ago) even if we reduced US carbon emissions to zero, it would have a negligible effect on global temperature.
Finally, you seem sharply focused on mass migration out of a flooded Europe as the primary reason we must pay any cost to reduce CO2 emissions. (This notwithstanding the fact sea-level rise is not accelerating!) Let me introduce you to what Steve Sailer has called “the most important graph in the world”:
If this U.N. projection is even remotely true, the migration is going to be moving in the opposite direction: away from a stupendously overcrowded Africa toward a First World that will be utterly unable to absorb it. Given that crop yields are sharply increased by higher CO2, we are going to need all the help we can get.
My view, then, is this: what is publicly acceptable to say about climate is wholly one-sided, ignores all the benefits of increased CO2, warmer temperatures, and expansion of arable zones, ignores the enormous costs — social, economic, and moral — of ending fossil-fuel use, ignores our proven technological ability to adapt to changing circumstances, cruelly and unfairly stigmatizes informed dissent, provides a convenient pretext for terrifying, collectivist usurpations of local sovereignty and liberty, and makes false assumptions about the limits of our own power to control the climate. It is also already causing enormous disruptions in our supply of reliable energy, and is making basic necessities vastly more expensive for billions of people. Far from “saving the planet”, climate hysteria is putting us on a ruinous course. May cooler heads prevail.