Hot News on Global Cooling

A young man from Africa who went to study in the Soviet Union, back when there was a Soviet Union and young men from Africa did that sort of thing, was asked about the winter in Russia.  He replied that the green winter wasn’t so bad but the white winter was terrible. 

As much of the world, including my part of it, is currently enjoying a green winter, I chanced to listen to an episode of This American Life devoted to global warming: Hot In My Backyard.  TAL is one of my favorite podcasts.  I rarely miss and episode.  While I expect quirky and entertaining fare and occasionally something that challenges my biases, what I don’t expect is manifest stupidity.  That is what I got from Julia Kumari Drapkin’s contribution to the episode. 

Colorado, we learn, got an early spring last year and a very dry summer with lots of fires.  While Drapkin’s story acknowledges the obvious caveat that no single year tells us anything about long term climate trends, the whole point of it is that we ought to ignore that caveat.  Colorado’s bad summer is what every summer will look like, pretty soon, according to climate models.  We learn that Colorado’s State Climatologist, Nolan Doesken, changed his mind about climate change because of what happened to a neighbor’s daughter. 

Probably, because of the pump clogging, probably because of the ash from the wildfire in their irrigation system, the young girl was electrocuted.  That was about as painful as anything from that fire season, knowing that their daughter was lost to a situation beyond their control. 

That is a tragedy, to be certain.  A state climatologist ought to have a solid grasp of what abstract concepts like “wildfire season” mean to real human beings.  That chain of possibilities doesn’t mean that an irrigation pump failure tells us anything about the climate. 

The TAL episode resolutely insists that we face the facts while remaining oblivious to the facts.  This year, spring came late across the northern hemisphere.  Does that tell us that global warming is on hold?  No.  What tells us that is the fact that there has been no significant warming for the last fifteen years. 

Despite recent increases in global CO2 emissions, world temperatures have been steady rather than warming.  As Peter Ferrara explains at Forbes, recent winters across the globe have been colder than any on record.  Ferrara presents the case that climate trends are much better explained by cyclical forces and that CO2 is a weak factor in climate. 

I recommend his piece but I have to say that I hope he is wrong.  If CO2 emissions can really heat up the globe, that is a very good thing.  It means we have a lever on global climate.  Sooner or later we will get control of our emissions and can ratchet them down if we need to.  Likewise, sooner or later, the world will enter another cooling period as it has many times before.  Wouldn’t it be nice if we could mitigate or even cancel the next ice age just by leaving our cars running all night?  Maybe the rise of industry across the globe will keep us from shivering as we drive our carts across frozen rivers. 

If, on the other hand, Co2 is a weak force, then what are we going to do when the next little or big ice age begins? 

Global Warming Flatlines

I have been blogging about global warming for years and I have been consistently right.  I have argued that the world’s governments are not going to pursue policies, individually or collectively, that would have a significant effect on global greenhouse emissions.  That certainly has been confirmed.  The Kyoto treaty, modest as it was, was not even a modest success.  No follow up treaty has been achieved or is on the horizon. 

I have recognized the evidence that we have seen significant global warming over the last century and I have taken seriously the proposition that human activity is in part forcing this warming.  I also pointed out that it is very difficult to know how much of a factor this has been. 

That the evidence has been kinder to me than to the climate alarmists is evident from the recent bombshell in the London Economist.  The Economist has beating the climate alarm drum for many years.  They once pushed hard for a global treaty that would have put a heavy burden on industrial production, on the grounds that something had to be done quick to avoid an ecological catastrophe. 

So it is a milestone that they are now trimming their sails on the issue. 

OVER the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth’s surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to soar. The world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO₂ put there by humanity since 1750. And yet, as James Hansen, the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, observes, “the five-year mean global temperature has been flat for a decade.”

I have been skeptical of world climate modeling projected into the future for the same reason as I am skeptical of anyone who claims to have discovered a formula that will predict the next winner of the World Series.  It is possible to build a formula that corresponds to what has happened so far; it is another thing to guess what will happen next. 

The Economist admits what is patently obvious: the climate isn’t following the script. 

The mismatch between rising greenhouse-gas emissions and not-rising temperatures is among the biggest puzzles in climate science just now. It does not mean global warming is a delusion. Flat though they are, temperatures in the first decade of the 21st century remain almost 1°C above their level in the first decade of the 20th. But the puzzle does need explaining.

The mismatch might mean that—for some unexplained reason—there has been a temporary lag between more carbon dioxide and higher temperatures in 2000-10. Or it might be that the 1990s, when temperatures were rising fast, was the anomalous period. Or, as an increasing body of research is suggesting, it may be that the climate is responding to higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in ways that had not been properly understood before. This possibility, if true, could have profound significance both for climate science and for environmental and social policy.

In other words, we don’t understand the collection of forces that is responsible for the climate history that we observe and we don’t know what is going to happen next. 

Does this mean that we should relax and forget about climate change?  I am tempted to say that we might as well because that is what we are going to do anyway.  China and India aren’t going to hobble their economies and neither are the governments in Europe or the U.S. 

What I do say is that we should continue to pay close attention to what the climate does while doing what we can to deal with it.  The U.S. has made considerable progress when it comes to moderating its greenhouse emissions, but all of that progress owes to new technologies designed to extract fossil fuels.  The various green technologies that Western governments have invested heavily in have contributed nothing. 

One thing that we cannot project into the future is the nature of technological development.  New sources of energy under the ocean floor will be exploitable very soon and it may be possible to put some of the carbon back when we got the energy.  If we really want to solve the problems that our environment poses, the only hope lies in new technologies.  The only way to get those is to promote economic growth.  This is a lesson that the environmental left desperately wants not to learn. 

Global Warming Leveling Off

I have been blogging about climate change for several years.  My general view of the issue, stated early on, is as follows:

1.       Global warming has been real over the last century. 

2.      Human activity may have been a significant factor in forcing that warming. 

3.      It is very difficult to tell what the causes of the warming are and how much of an impact human activity actually had. 

4.      It is not at all certain whether the effects of warming have been or will be, on balance, good or bad for human beings. 

5.      There is no reasonable chance that global treaties or nation-specific policies will have any impact on human carbon emissions. 

I think I am right on all five counts.  The global treaty initiatives have come a cropper.  Nations committed to reducing carbon emissions have, for the most part, failed to achieve that aim.  Actual reductions in carbon emissions have come from economic distress and from the application of new technologies such as fracking. 

Now comes a finding from The Research Council of Norway that pokes a hole in the climate change balloon.  

After Earth’s mean surface temperature climbed sharply through the 1990s, the increase has leveled off nearly completely at its 2000 level. Ocean warming also appears to have stabilized somewhat, despite the fact that CO2 emissions and other anthropogenic factors thought to contribute to global warming are still on the rise.

This, in scientific terms, is what counts as a negative finding.  Despite increased carbon emissions, warming has leveled off.  The Norwegian project used the same framework as the IPCC.  What would be the effect of doubling carbon emissions from pre-industrial levels? 

Uncertainties about the overall results of feedback mechanisms make it very difficult to predict just how much of the rise in Earth’s mean surface temperature is due to manmade emissions. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) the climate sensitivity to doubled atmospheric CO2 levels is probably between 2°C and 4.5°C, with the most probable being 3°C of warming.

In the Norwegian project, however, researchers have arrived at an estimate of 1.9°C as the most likely level of warming.

This confirms my points 3, 4, and 5.  We don’t really know how much human activity is contributing to climate change and we don’t have any good reason to suppose that the current trajectory of climate change will be bad.  If the Norwegians are right, we will at worst achieve a level of climate change that the IPCC thought we should aim at without any help from global treaties. 

Climate change should be taken seriously.  Science can tell us a lot but much of what it tells us is ambiguous.  Just right now, climate change looks to be something less than a crisis.  It certainly doesn’t justify hobbling our economies, which is something we weren’t going to do anyway.