The headline on the Wall Street Journal editorial page this morning read, Climate Change Obsession is a Real Mental Disorder. I confess to not having read this oped. But cut me some slack. Time is short and would you bother with a story whose headline read The Earth is Flat After All or Trump is Innocent or Biden is Young or The Mets Payroll Was Good Investment?
This kind of climate change denial is an obsession in itself with the venerable WSJ. A week seldom goes by when an editorial doesn’t refer to “climate alarmism.” Wild fires obscuring the skies? Heat records broken day after day? Seas about to boil? Well, look folks, it’s summer. It gets hot. Nothing to see here. Just turn up the AC. Stop being so alarmist.
Because I have the occasional conservative point of view and because I have (probably more like “had”) a reputation for being a liberal, I get a little man-bites-dog interest in some places. Now and then a climate denier will stumble on one of my pieces taking issue with some liberal orthodoxy and get excited enough to send me a screed with the theme that climate change is all just a hoax. They compliment me by saying that I seem open minded and then in the next breath they insult my intelligence by suggesting I read some inane paper by some climate denying wack job.
This isn’t about fair-mindedness or science or opinion. It’s not even mostly about politics or the pecuniary interests of big oil or big coal. It’s mostly about culture. Climate deniers deny climate reality because they just don’t like the kind of preachy liberals who lecture them about their lifestyle, often while pouring their own greenhouse gasses freely into the atmosphere.
That much I get. I’ve often railed against that same NPR crowd. But while they may be obnoxious, they’re also right. The evidence is overwhelming and undeniable. Climate change is real. It’s human caused. It’s bad and getting worse. And if there’s a mental disorder, it’s having reality slap you in the face and pretending as if it was nothing but a gentle breeze.
Yellow Stripes & Dead Armadillos 
Again, your commentary is spot on. Climate change is definitely real and we’re responsible for it.
My major complaint is that NPR and other left (and center) news organizations focus on the government’s responsibility, while mostly ignoring personal choice. We’ve become accustomed to, and demand, lifestyles that feature year-round indoor temperatures of 70 degrees Fahrenheit, along with clean, plentiful water. The result is constant use of either air conditioning or the furnace to ensure our personal comfort. So, when Steve Inskeep or Silvia Poggioli are yammering about governmental failure, they’re doing so from comfortable surroundings in hotspots like Washington, DC or Rome (Italy, not Wisconsin). Maybe we should learn to become a bit more spartan. That means sweaters and wool socks in the winter and less air conditioning. Here at Chez Gallo, the indoor winter temp is 56 degrees and we have learned to live without AC. Yeah, we have fans for the hottest days and nights but our MGE bills are acceptably low.
Americans, particularly, demand comfort. Maybe we should wonder why 8 million people live in a hellscape like Arizona, which can not sustainable support anywhere near that many people.
Don’t get me started on obscene water usage in the deserts of Phoenix and Las Vegas….
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As long as the conversation is reduced to referring to those who do not share your opinion as a climate-denier or alarmist we get nowhere, just the creation of a lot of overheated rhetoric.
Climate science makes rocket science look like kindergarten arithmetic. Climate behavior is non-linear, we’re not used to working with non-linearity. Yes, it’s au courant to say look at these wildfires and high temps, how could you possibly think humans aren’t causing climate change. If current events are your guideline, please interpret this chart for me:
https://origin.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/ensostuff/ONI_v5.php
hint – the chart demonstrates the cyclical nature of temperature change in the Oceanic Nino Index.
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See Nate Silver, “The Signal and the Noise,” Ch. 12, A Climate of Healthy Skepticism. I especially liked Figure 12-11, a graph that shows global cooling for 5 separate periods between 1900 and 2010. Despite these cycles, the trend is undeniably upward and the green house gas mechanism is well understood. “The dysfunctional state of the American political system is the best reason to be pessimistic about our country’s future. Our scientific and technological prowess is the best reason to be optimistic.” For that turn to Bill Gates. Silver demonstrates the danger of using any short term events to prove a long term trend. But that’s not the same as saying the long term trend is causing current events. The world is on fire and anthropomorphic global warming is why.
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Thank you Mike M. I refer to you Dave – pANTIFArts – well written post.
120 years, since 1900, is a blink of an eye in climate timeframes. Yes, it looks like there is a clear warming signal since 1900. Blaming it on anthropogenic reasons is where we differ.
I do not have great confidence in our scientific or technological prowess. Gates’, imo of course, ‘solutions’ are one of the main reasons why. I don’t understand people’s fascination with this guy. Anyone use Windows?
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Matt makes very good points about personal responsibility. I am finding myself more and more incensed every time I see someone sitting in an idling car playing on their phone. I work downtown and go for a walk on my lunch hour and I bet I see at least 10 cars a day parked on the side of the road, running, windows up, AC on, face in phone. It’s the same in parking lots across town. Sunday, I even saw a man sitting in his running car, AC blasing, both doors open, face in phone. It takes everything inside me not to say something. I do think some PSAs promoting good habits that don’t contribute to climate change is a good place to start. Mayor? News?
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My name is Dave, as well.
When I was a child my family attended a “Southern Baptist” church. I learned two things there–(1) The Bible, and church doctrine, were irrefutably true, and (2) Atheists and non-believers were “evil”, because they had “the word”, they knew the “truth”, and REFUSED to believe it.
Unfortunately for my “spiritual path”, I developed a ravenous interest in earth sciences while still quite young. The church was unable to answer my questions about the conflict, because they refused to discuss it. I realized then, that non-believers weren’t REFUSING to believe, they were just UNABLE to believe. I had become “evil”. Many top scientists are reluctant to speak out because of similar concerns.
I just see the world differently than you do. People tend to view everything in terms of their own lifetime, as though those few years have some significance, when they don’t. Where you might see years, I might see thousands (or millions) of years. Climate science is still in its infancy. Thermometers,(and daily temp records), only became widely available in the late 1800’s. Things like “heat domes”, polar vortexes”, “nino/nina”, “jet streams”, etc., are all recent discoveries, and there will be constantly evolving theories about their causes and effects. Your grandparents had no clue what the weather might be a week later.
If one is truly alarmed about “climate change”, I urge you to do the most basic research on your own. Rather than reading the “Times”, and articles by those whose grants, notoriety, and incomes are tied to its existence, just research for yourself. Daily temp records for cities all over the world (often back to the 19th century) are available on hundreds of weather sites, look for a pattern.
This isn’t a term paper, so random thoughts on two buzz words–
Carbon– Carbon is very good, all living things are made of it. (you are almost 1/5 carbon) Carbon is not created, nor eliminated, all the carbon today has been here since the formation of the Earth.
Carbon Dioxide (CO2)— We are told that the current level is 420 ppm, and has doubled since the Industrial Revolution. (ppm stands for “parts per million”, a million being one thousand thousands) Your breath is about 40,000ppm. During the Oligocene period, (23 mya), it was hot (greenhouse gasses), it is supposed that CO2 was around 9000ppm, and life flourished.
Re: – “suggesting I read some inane paper by some climate denying wack job. ”
https://earth.org/co2-levels-peak/ (a climate change site condemning the Industrial Revolution that was the greatest innovation since the adoption of agriculture)
https://www.fsis.usda.gov/sites/default/files/media_file/2020-08/Carbon-Dioxide.pdf (a government site listing the dangers of CO2)
The sad thing is I’ll agree with much of what you say, just not on its significance, and the urgency. The climate IS changing, it always has, and will continue to. Greenhouse gasses are necessary for life to exist, but if you want to reduce them, OK with me, not humanly possible I suspect. Increase fuel efficiency, reduce waste (plastic), conservation, etc… – I’m with you. I just can’t join the “faith”.
(as always feel free to delete away, I understand)
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I don’t want to shut you out, but I do need to remind you and everybody else that our (oft ignored) policy around here is to ask people to use their full names.
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Good for you, Dave. The reason that conservatives (active deniers) and most other people (passive deniers) don’t want to deal with anthropomorphic global warming is that it is such a fundamental threat to the way we’ve done business pretty much from the beginning of civilization. Human beings advanced by substituting energy produced by burning carbon for human work with. We are brilliant at this process and now we have something like the energy equivalent of 16 people (instead of horse power) working for us.
I recommend Bill Gates’s, “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster,” 2021. Gates is hardly a long-haired tree hugger. What is it going to take to reverse the current doomsday trend? Everything you got. And everything you suggest (carbon tax, anyone?) is going to get criticized by someone who is going to say it’s a socialist plot, or it won’t work, or there’s a better way. Nonsense. Sometimes the math just sucks!
Sorry, there is no moderate position on this. Global warming hardly shows up in the price mechanism; ask people in Phoenix. The real questions are how are we going to pursue every strategy that Gates writes about. And the funny thing is, dealing with anthropomorphic climate change will make us better and happier. It will provide us with more secure and plentiful sources of energy. Caring for things we care about makes humans happy. Someday fossil fuels will be seen as quaint bridge, like horse-drawn wagons in New York City. Where will put all the horse droppings? Where will we put all the greenhouse gases?
But if you only believe in maximizing profits this quarter and discounting the future; if you don’t care about the bigger, scarier picture because your ideology only requires you to look out for yourself, then yeah, conservatives have a lot to be concerned about. They’re dinosaurs. And we’re toast. Putting on a sweater is a nice idea, but this problem is going to take massive transformation. It will test whether humans have evolved enough to solve the problems we’ve created and it will test our shaky form of government.
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Forgive my anonymity, as others have stated, feel free to delete this post if needed. Or just paraphrase the point.
The uncertainty Pantifarts describes is precisely why we need to urgently stop changing our atmospheric chemistry. If we don’t know what the result will be, it is wiser not to do it!
That life flourished in the Oligocene period gives some assurance, but it also points to how much can change, and how disruptive that will be to human society. A conservative approach is to keep our atmospheric status quo in tact as much as we can, since that’s the paradigm we’re already used to and that out investment in infrastructure is based upon. So sure, perhaps we “could” survive as a species, but it makes little sense to destroy our current coastal and agriculture infrastructure and cause massive social disruption and migration. And to wait until we’re “sure” to appease naysayers is by definition too late. I’m not “sure” my house will burn down in a fire, but I try to take actions to minimize that risk, and if I waited until I was “sure” my house would already be ablaze.
The conditions favorable to life are remarkably narrow. I’d like to NOT change the good thing we have going. It’s bad enough that an asteroid or volcano could mess it up, let’s not do it to ourselves.
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Greenhouse gases are necessary for life to exist, although perhaps not in the way that you think. Contrary to the opinion that climate science is in its infancy, it actually dates back 200 years to Joseph Fourier who knew even then that the Earth was far warmer than it should be based on the solar insolation. In fact, if you calculate what the temperature would be based on the Stefan-Boltzmann equation, one will find that the mean global temperature should be 0 F, below freezing. That is, without greenhouse gases the planet would be one big ball of ice and any life on it would be very primitive. Instead, the mean temperature on this planet is a balmy 60F and the difference is because of greenhouse gases. So yes, greenhouse gases are necessary for (advanced) life to exist.
The advice given above is to do your own research regarding weather sites. Instead, I would advise those who are interested in learning about climate change to learn a little physics, especially something about radiation transfer so that one can understand the significance of the holes in the outgoing long wavelength radiation around the spectral wavelengths corresponding to oscillations in molecules that have a dipole moment like CO2, CH4 and water vapor — the reason the planet is warming. Coupling that with the decreasing solar insolation since the maximum in the 50s, the increasing ocean heat content where 90% of the heat from the greenhouse effect is located, plus the cooling of the stratosphere due to CO2 (in contrast to the warming in the troposphere) — together it presents a solid explanation why the current warming is anthropogenic.
But if you really want to check weather records, I suggest starting with the longest temperature record in existence dating back to 1659, that of Central England. Warmest year on record is …. 2022.
Also, the Oligocene was a period of profound cooling leading to the formation of ice in Antarctica. Perhaps what the poster had in mind was the Eocene just before. In particular, the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum was a period of profound warming due to increasing CO2 in the atmosphere. Life didn’t exactly flourish during the Oligocene — there was an extinction even at the Eocene-Oligocene boundary, most likely due to the cooling.
Finally, the climate does change due to natural variations. Climate scientists were in fact the ones who discovered that. The main reason in the past is due to changes in the orbital variation of the planet — the Milankovitch cycles. Other cycles are due to a large set of ocean/atmospheric interactions such as the present phase of El Nino that we are entering. However, on top of all those natural variations is the secular trend of a warming planet due to the increasing CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. And we know that because it’s been observed in the outgoing radiation from the planet’s surface.
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Mr. Talmadge, I refer you to this link I posted above:
https://origin.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/ensostuff/ONI_v5.php
This is the Oceanic Nino index. I do not see a warming trend, I see a cyclical relationship between heat and cold, with more cold periods than warm. If I’m missing something, please feel free to correct me.
A claim is made that 2022 is the warmest year on record since 1659, in Central England. Without a cite for the source, I will assume it’s coming from wikipedia, which has well-known reliability issues.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_England_temperature#Notes
The 2022 record is 0.2 of a degree over the previous record. There are no confidence intervals or margins of error, but I will assume 0.2 is well within the margin of error. There are also other significant issues with the quality of that data set.
I believe we would all agree that we have significant problems with our relationship to Nature and our profligate usage of her resources. How do we come to agreement on the best path forward to care for the environment that we are an integral part of? For me, I have no confidence in the ‘experts’ on this one. Current climate science is dominated by modeling, not by observation. Until we outgrow our fascination with our mental toys, I do not think the world will be any better for all the exhortations currently being emitted.
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I’m familiar with the link that you supplied. It’s a particular metric used to define when the eastern Pacific is in a neutral, La Nina or El Nino state. This is vital information because it affects temperature, rainfall, crop production etc across a large part of the globe. Notice what it says on the top. This is a “3 month running mean of ERSST.v5 SST anomalies in the Niño 3.4 region (5N-5S, 120-170W)”. This is a small sliver of the global sea surface temperature that encompasses the ERSST.v5 data set. Typically, the trade winds blow from east to west in this region and warm water piles up in the western Pacific. During a La Nina event these winds blow harder, and the eastern Pacific becomes even colder with some upwelling of cold water from the deep ocean. During an El Nino event the trade winds weaken and the warm water in the west sloshes back to the Eastern Pacific. By fixating only on the Nino 3.4 signal you are only looking at 1 region in the oscillation. Over on the west there are oscillations that are out of phase with Nino 3.4. If you want to see the actual climate signal, then you need to plot the entire ERSST.v5 dataset over the entire ocean. Not just one small sliver. You can find this data online. And if you want to see the global climate signal then you need to combine the ERSST.v5 dataset with the land surface dataset. Those are also readily available. It’s strange to me that you wouldn’t point to these datasets, but rather just the Nino 3.4 region.
As for the Central England temperature dataset, you can easily find the data here.
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/ I don’t know why you would assume I got this from Wikipedia. I referred to CET because of the post above — but again, two things are important 1) the actual trend in the data which shows increasing temperature in that region as a function of time and 2) one needs to perform the global average over the land and ocean surfaces to get a more accurate understanding of the warming trend ON THE SURFACE. It’s what goes on below the ocean surface that’s even more important.
The thing to understand, as I tried to write above, is that global warming results from an imbalance between the energy incoming from the sun and the outgoing long wavelength radiation. That difference is because of increasing greenhouse gases. And yes, you can see it in the data of outgoing long wavelength radiation. As I said, 90% of the heat is actually stored in the deep ocean. You can find that data here for example
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/products/climate-data-records/global-ocean-heat-content
You’ll notice that the units are in 10^22 joules, which is a phenomenal amount of heat. As an exercise, if you do a linear regression, you can get the slope of the curve and taking into account the surface area of the planet, you can extract an estimate of what that energy imbalance is in the upper atmosphere. It’s on the order of 1 watt/m^2.
You claim that climate science is dominated by modeling, not by observation. This is an incorrect perspective on science in general and climate science specifically. Modeling and observation go hand in hand. Without the modeling, then one has no clue as to physically why something is happening. Without the observation, one has no clue if the modeling is correct. Science proceeds by constructing models, testing them with data and refining the models. I would suggest reading an actual paper in climate science. It just might change your perspective on this.
As to having no confidence in experts, I would suggest that it’s best to understand climate science before you criticize the science or the people who are actually scientist or make statements that the warming is not anthropogenic. There are some good courses and some good introductory textbooks available that can help you understand what the basic principles are in climate science. As I said above, this is a well-founded field in science that dates back 200 years. Throwing up your hands and saying it’s harder than rocket science doesn’t give yourself enough credit for having the ability to actually understanding fundamental concepts regarding the energy balance for the planet and how that affects the climate.
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