There is no "Climate Catastrophe"

Have a look outside. Nice, isn't it? But wait! We're told we're in the midst of a grand "climate catastrophe". What gives?

This topic is more in my husband's area of expertise. It was the first "red pill" I ever swallowed. I had no reason to disbelieve the standard narrative, and back in 2016 when I mocked Trump for saying the climate crisis was a made up thing, my husband said, "myeh, you may want to have a look at that for yourself." I pressed him on it and got the whole download that I give you here.

This thing is based on the following chain of reasoning

1. Man burns fossil fuels (FFs).
2. Burning FFs emits carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere.
3. The emitted CO2 causes the parts per million (ppm) of CO2 to rise significantly.
4. The Earth is warming at an unprecedented rate.
5. The increased ppm of CO2 due to FF burning directly causes this warming.
6. The amount of that warming is so large that it constitutes a "catastrophe" for mankind.
7. Extreme weather, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, draughts and fires are all getting worse as a result.
8. Replacing FFs by wind and solar is a practical response.

Number 1 and 2 are trivially true, but big questions exist on all the rest. This whole hypothesis is called "Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming". Anthropogenic means caused by man. It's shortened to CAGW.

We are told that "97% of scientists agree", like "9 out of 10 dentists recommend Crest" but MORE certain than that. There was never any poll of "scientists". If you think about it, the entire statement is an absurdity. How do they define "scientist". What is the question they put to them? It never happened. The 97% is based on two sloppy studies that asked the wrong question of the wrong people. It is true that various Associations and Academies of Science have come out in favour of CAGW, but it is not put up for a vote amongst the members, it is a political statement by the Directors. Besides, science is not done by political consensus anyways.

Let's take the parts in order.

1. Man burns fossil fuels (FFs).

You bet we do! It's been responsible for a vast decrease in poverty. Very little of modern-life can be done without FFs. No cars, airplanes, tractors, trucks. No plastics, cement, no steel. No manufacturing. No food therefore. And so on.

At one time in the history of the earth, CO2 was much more plentiful in the atmosphere. Ten times higher than it is now (and, no, there was no runaway Greenhouse effect, obvi). During that time the plants and little animals thrived. Over time, these plants and animals got buried deeper and deeper and squeezed harder and harder. These carcasses of dead plants and animals, these fossils, are in fact our Fossil Fuels. All that CO2 that used to be plentiful on Earth is now locked away in the FFs deep underground, and yes, we are releasing it slowly now.

Burning of FFs used to be a very dirty thing, emitting real pollutants into the air. However, modern technology combined with responsible regulation has reduced pollutant emissions to negligible levels. That is true for oil, natural gas, and clean coal. The air we breathe in North America and Western Europe is clean and clear. The same cannot be said for other parts of the world that have not yet caught up. THAT is where we should be making a fuss and helping out if we want to improve things.

2. Burning of FFs emits carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere.

Yes, absolutely. But important for people to understand the CO2 is not a pollutant. It is essential to all life on earth. Do not confuse with carbon monoxide (CO) which can kill you. And do not call it "carbon" - that's a sooty black powder (or a diamond, depending on how you take it). We breathe in and out CO2 constantly, and we create CO2 as a by-product of living. Plants use CO2 to grow. Greenhouses inject extra CO2 into the air to make the plants grow better.

The earth has been greening due to more CO2 in the atmosphere. A paper from NASA Goddard Earth Sciences analyzing changes in satellite imagery shows this (Carbon Dioxide Fertilization Greening Earth, Study Finds). From 1981-2015 the greening represents an increase in leaves on plants and trees equivalent in area to two times the continental United States.

3. The emitted CO2 causes the parts per million (ppm) of CO2 to rise significantly.

This is where the first doubt starts creeping in. It certainly seems logical, but the amount of CO2 emitted by burning FFs is a drop in the bucket compared to the total CO2 exchanged in and out of the atmosphere daily.

The above is the Carbon Cycle showing all the exchanges of CO2 between earth and atmosphere. It shows the earth putting 217 billion metric tons per year of CO2 into the atmosphere, of which human activity accounts for 5.5 of that, or about 2.5%, with FF burning even less than that. Note, however that the above was an older diagram and no longer up-to-date. More modern analysis suggests that fossil fuels emit about 1/20th of the total exchange per year, still small.

The biggest things that sets the atmospheric level of CO2 is the balance between the ocean and the air. CO2 dissolves into the ocean. The higher the ocean temperature, the less CO2 it can hold, and the more CO2 will be held in the atmosphere as a result. Therefore, if the ocean warms, for whatever reason, you would expect to see more CO2 in the atmosphere. This raises the interesting question, does more CO2 cause warming, or does warming cause more CO2?

Despite all of that tonnage exchanging, CO2 makes up only a tiny amount of the atmosphere. It is currently just over 400 parts-per-million. That's 0.04%. No typo. That is WAY LESS than 1%. Earth's atmosphere is mainly Nitrogen with a bit of Oxygen mixed in. Very little of anything else. Yet CO2 is vital to life.

The ppm of CO2 in the air has been reliably measured at the top of Mouna Loa in Hawaii since 1960. This is what it looks like.

Here we see a zoom on the last few years.

What is interesting is that the global pandemic, now on for over a year that ostensibly reduced economic output and hence FF burning considerable, seems not to register at all. Also, we do not see great accelerations in atmospheric CO2 corresponding to the acceleration in our use of FFs.

In fact, in the past CO2 rise has always lagged temperature rise. We can tell this by looking at ice core samples from the Antarctic. You put a big drill down and pull up a very long tube of ice. The deeper the ice, the further back in time it represents. Scientists can tell what the temperature and atmospheric CO2 was back then. And it turns out that changes in CO2 lag behind changes in temperature, throwing doubt on the claim that CO2 causes temperature to rise.

It is definitely a combination of man-made emissions, and warming oceans that pushes CO2 up, but how much is due to each is a bit of an open question (hint: it's very hard to know how much the ocean has warmed - the ocean is a very big thing and we have very few measurements of it by comparison).

4. The Earth is warming at an unprecedented rate.

When you think about it, it is remarkably hard to know the average temperature all over the earth at any point in time. So difficult that it may in fact be a somewhat meaningless concept.

We can observe the temperature at any one place consistently over time if we are very, very careful. But over the whole earth? Including every square foot of land, every cubic foot of soil, every cubic foot of ocean, and every cubic foot of atmosphere, and average them all at one instant point in time? Hard. The best we have are some very rough approximations.

What makes most sense to my little brain is looking at individual well-maintained, rural weather stations over time. A good one is run in Ithaca New York, by the scientists at Cornell University.

This is a plot derived from the daily min and max temperatures recorded each day of the year. The min and max were averaged each day. Each day of the month were then averaged together to get a monthly. And then each month of the year was averaged together to get the above plot. The years from 1916-1927 had a lot of missing months so they were excluded.

The reason to choose Ithaca is because it has a long history, was very well-calibrated, well-maintained, and zealously measured throughout its history, and it's away from airports and big cities which are subject to the "Urban Heat Island" effect (air above concrete and around buildings is hotter).

So where exactly is this climate crisis? We see no net warming over the period. I know you'll say we cherry-picked, but the only thing we "cherry-picked" for was a well-maintained rural station where we could access the raw data online.

Here is another chart for North America of unadjusted data for a consistent set of stations with a long history and where no TOBS adjustment was needed. (TOBS stands for "time-of-day bias" and refers to a change in practice at some stations where the time of day at which the min and max were reset was changed at some point in the station's history - it is is unclear if TOBS has any impact at all, but it has been used to justify an adjustment that warms the present and cools the past, so I would prefer to avoid those stations impacted by it).

We see the pattern very consistent with the Ithaca data.

• The earth was warming up out of the so-called "little ice age" from 1900-1930. Of course, during that time there was very little man-made emission of CO2, and yet the warming slope is quite steep. By the way, nobody can explain that warming.
• From 1930 to 1980 there was a long period of cooling. During this period, use of FFs exploded, so that's a point against CAGW. There were even worries over the "next ice age" coming in round one of "climate catastrophe, the game".
• Form 1980 to 2000 the temperature went up, supposedly due entirely to FF usage.
• From 2000-2015 there was a "pause" in temperature rise, while FF use was still exploding.

Why "cherry-pick" North America? North America has the most extensive set of weather stations over the longest period of time, so it has the best directly measured temperature data. Also, you can still get raw unadjusted data for it. Japan and UK are pretty good also, and they also show no long-term warming when the unadjusted data is looked at in the same way. And if "Global Warming" were truly happening, it would be very, very, odd indeed if the entirety of North America was totally skipped over.

The best source of data that approximates a global average is from satellites that measure radiative emissions from near the surface across the entire earth. This has ben going on since about 1980. Here is the latest from the University of Alabama at Huntsville assembled by Profs Christie and Spencer.

We again see the rising temperatures from 1980 to 2000, the pause from 2000 to 2015, then a rise after that due to a very strong double El Nino (ocean current thing - same as in 1998) which we are just coming off of now.

So in conclusion, yes the earth has warmed since 1980 in my opinion, but it's nothing special. It was just as warm in the 1930's.

So if you say to me, but the ice caps, but the polar bears, but this, that, and the other, then hey, we agree. The earth has been warming since 1980. But is it due to man-made CO2, or is it more due to natural causes, such as what happened up to 1930 which is not explainable by man-made CO2, and what about 1930-1980 when the Earth cooled? Lots of questions. No "catastrophes".

To put global temperature in a bigger context, we can use Greenland ice core data to get a good picture of how temperature varied over the last 4000 years (with a bit of temperature station grafted onto the end in red).

We are in what is called the "Modern Warm Period". Previously there was the Medieval Warm Period, the Roman Warm Period, and the Minoan Warm Period, all of have been written about historically, and which we can see on the ice core temperature proxy data from Greenland. Burning of FFs sure did not cause those. The cause of those is not well understood.

We can go even further back in time, and see the entire extent of the current interglacial period we are in.

This is showing us warming up from the previous glacial period (colloquially called the "ice age", but in fact the ice age is a bigger thing that we are now in). The axis is in "Years Before Present". 15,000 years ago we were deep into the glacial period. The ice was over a mile high above my hometown of Toronto. Suddenly it came to an end. The "double ending" we see here is particularly mysterious. Some believe, based on good evidence, that a big asteroid hit the earth to cause the sudden rise and then decline before the rise into the interglacial period we now enjoy.

On an even longer scale than this, we can see the glacial and interglacial periods of our current ice age. Here is the last 700,000 years.

Notice how sharp the peaks are. Those are the nice toasty warm interglacial periods in our current ice age. The long descent down seems to be more business as usual on a 100,000 year cycle. The peaks last around 10,000 years or so. We are 11,000 years into our current peak. We have a lot more to worry about regarding the next glacial period that is for sure coming than we have about any dubious global warming.

5. The increased ppm of CO2 due to FF burning directly causes the Earth to warm.

Getting back to the subject at hand, the next contention is that the warming we have seen since 1980 is directly due to man-made CO2, but does science back that up? So it doesn't look good that previous unexplained warming cannot be due to CO2, and global cooling while a lot of CO2 was being emitted cannot be explained either, but we are for sure to trust that since 1980 more man-made CO2 correlating with increasing temps is for sure due to this? Right.

The entire question about global warming centers around the temperature of the air near the surface of the earth. The overall "temperature" of the earth as seen from space is only dependent on one thing, the amount of solar energy incoming. Energy out exactly balances energy in. The near-ground temperature that we experience is the net effect of many different heat transfers and heat reservoirs.

The sun directly warms the surface of the earth without much warming the atmosphere on the way down. Clouds tend to bounce the sun's energy back out into space without warming up too much themselves. So more clouds generally mean a cooler earth (you have experienced this first hand, no doubt).

What is warmed by the sun is the top little bit of earth or of water. On land that heat conducts down into the earth where it gets slowly stored in the summer and slowly released in the winter. In the oceans that heat conducts down into the water where wind and waves and ocean convection take over to move the heat in some cases way down into the ocean where it might circulate for literally thousands of years before popping up somewhere at the surface as a warm current.

These ocean currents have a long-term impact on the temperatures we feel. There are currents such as the El Nino and the La Nina which operate on sub-decadal time scales. There there are longer time scale current such as the Atlantic Multi-Decadal Oscillation (AMO) and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO). When these current decide to turn around and do their thing is very largely a chaotic and random process, and this injects a lot of random noise into the temperature record that is hard to separate out from any longer-term trends over less than a 50 year period (i.e., the entire time the earth has been recently warming).

To see this, below are four separate plots of randomly generated "pink noise" which is the sort of thing that happens with these random and chaotic ocean currents of various periodicity.

To my eye, they all look pretty similar to those temperature records that I showed you above. The point is, are you really seeing a cause-and-effect CO2 sort of thing, or does the chaotic randomness of the ocean current explain it all, and how do you separate out the one from the other?

So, heat from the sun hits the land and water and the heat is stored away to re-appear much later. On a more daily timescale, heat conducts up into the atmosphere mainly by moist and dry convection.

Dry convection is the earth heating a little parcel of air in contact with it. That little parcel gets warmer and gets lighter as a result (hot air rises). As the air rises it gives off its extra heat to its surroundings and then stops rising. This is what conducts heat up into the atmosphere and away from the ground.

The other major mechanism is moist convection or evaporation. Water that is on the ground (or on the surface of the water) is evaporated and turned into water vapour continuously. It takes a fair amount of heat energy to convert water from its liquid state to its vapour state with no accompanying rise in temperature. Once it's been evaporated and mixed in with the air, it rises because moist air is less dense than dry air. Once the moist air rises high enough where the surrounding air is colder, it releases its energy to the surrounding air and the water vapor goes back to a liquid droplet state, which is clouds. When there's too much water up there for the clouds to hold, it drops as cool rain.

Those are the two major ways of moving heat up into the atmosphere, and based on that alone you would expect a temperature change from cold up there to warmer down here that is very predictable and is called the "lapse rate" - the rate at which temperature changes with altitude, and its mainly due to the pressure being more on the surface and less high up. That is the main thing that keeps us warm at night and not boiling during the day (like on the moon).

There is one more way that heat is exchanged up into the atmosphere from the ground. It is called "radiative transfer".

Anything that is warm emits radiation. Some of that radiation is light, and we can see it (think of a red hot coal). But a lot of that radiation falls into the infrared. We can feel it against our skin. It is actually light that is too long-wave for us to see, but can heat things over a distance, even across the vacuum of space. The light from the sun that heats up the earth is mainly shorter-wave infrared radiation (SWIR). SWIR passes straight through water and CO2 and heats solid surfaces. The earth radiates heat away at a longer wavelength, called Long-Wave Infrared, or LWIR. All of the energy that hits the earth from the sun is eventually radiated back into space, a lot of it from LWIR.

LWIR typically does not travel too far off the surface of the earth before being absorbed by either water vapour or CO2 (or methane to a lesser extent). The LWIR is absorbed and heats up these molecules. These molecules both bounce into other molecules to transfer their energy, or re-emit more LWIR in all directions (up, down, and sideways).

We can compare the relative strengths of these mechanisms with reference to the following chart taken Roy Clark's The Dynamic Greenhouse Effect.

This is data taken from a sophisticated weather station in a dry part of California. The vertical axis is energy moving per unit area per unit time. Positive numbers are movements down (including down beneath the surface), and negative numbers are movement up.

• We can see the sun providing all of the energy during the daylight hours, peaking at around 900 Watts per meter squared at high noon. Offsetting that is everything else in the diagram.
• A big portion, peaking at around 250 is the subsurface flux, which moves the heat down into the earth during the day, and releases some of it back at night.
• The biggest one at around 450 is dry convection, or hot air carrying the heat away from the surface.
• Because it is dry location, latent heat (evaporation) carries relatively little away here, but it would get much bigger in a wetter place.
• Then there's the net LWIR radiative transfer, which netly transfers around 200 away from the earth. By net, it means that LWIR is both transferring energy into the earth, and the earth is transferring it out at the same time. We see the net effect here.
• We also see on this scale, the tiny impact that a 200ppm change in CO2 has. ~1.7 W/m2 (this is the change in CO2 from pre-industrial times until now'ish).

Clarke judges any contribution from a change in CO2 in the atmosphere to be negligible and to impact temperature by only a fraction of a degree when properly averaged out over the day and over the seasons.

This may fly in the face of other things you may have heard. Let me try to reconcile it for you.

There is no question that, all else being equal (key phrase that), that more CO2 in the atmosphere would increase the surface temperature of the Earth by around 1C from pre-industrial times to now. There is good physics behind this. It is computed using a simulation called MODTRAN that models a column of gas like our atmosphere, provides an energy source like the sun shining in at the top, and computes what the temperature of the gas mix near the bottom would be. The simulation assumes only radiative transfer is present, no other types of heat exchanges that we have discussed above, only radiative. When you increase the amount of CO2, MODTRAN computes that the air at the bottom of the column would get about 1C hotter as a result.

That is cut and dry science. No question there in our opinion. So if you say, "but the physics says CO2 warms the earth" I say, yes, all else being equal.

But all else is certainly not equal, and it is the biggest challenge in climate science is to compute the "Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity" (ECS). ECS is defined as the change in global surface temperature resulting from a doubling of CO2 from pre-industrial times.

All else being equal, and considering ONLY radiative energy transfers, a doubling of CO2 would raise the temperature by 1.7C according to MODTRAN. If there are feedback effects that amplify this, then the net might be +5C. If, on the other hand, the feedbacks are negative, the net effect may only be +0.2C. In either case the ECS would be 5C or 0.2C.

Here is what science currently has to say about ECS.

We see that over time, scientists assessment of the ECS has been going down and down and down as the earth has not been warming catastrophically according to their expectations. If you think "the science is settled" on the key question of what is the ECS, you sure have another think coming now.

All of these estimates though are quite bogus in our opinion. They are based on models called General Circulation Models (GCM), which are similar to weather modelling but done on a much larger scale and on a longer time frame. They make all sorts of assumptions about initial conditions and simplify all manner of the problems, such as the impact of clouds, to something pretty trivial. These models also need to be calibrated based on the past. The calibrations assume that any unexplained warming since pre-industrial times has been due to CO2. So that's a big flaw, and that's why ECS has been dropping as they re-calibrate to the actual world.

In fact, taking all the heat transfers into account, not only radiative, creates a giant system with many variables of non-linear equations (equations with lots of powers and roots in them). Such systems are known to be chaotic. That is to say the answer depends very sensitively on the starting conditions. This is how a butterfly can flap its wings in Africa and you can get a hurricane in Florida as a result. The GCMs are therefore doomed to failure for this purpose, but it's very useful in advancing the art of weather prediction, which has a similar problem and is solved in similar ways.

Roy Clark's approach is to use observation from sensitive weather stations to figure out the ECS. And he thinks its 0.1C at most. We're going with that.

6. The amount of that warming is so large that it constitutes a "catastrophe" for mankind.

So we think the ECS is small, but the United Nations Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (the UN-IPCC) thinks it's higher than that, around 4C. We could go on a lot about the hyper-political nature of the UN-IPCC and the dirty tricks they play to get the results the politicians want in order to keep hyping the "crisis' and to keep their funding going, but I won't bother here.

Even if it is 4C, then so what? It will stave off the next ice age for a few thousand of years. It will create more arable land. Food will grow better, and the climate will get more pleasant for us all around.

Ocean levels would indeed rise, and previously occupied places might become unlivable, but that will happen very, very, slowly, over a time period longer than the time people live in one place, so mankind will adapt.

A Danish economist called Bjorn Lomberg computed the GDP impact of the UN IPCC's ECS. He computed it to be negligible on the timescales we are talking about, and suggests there are other problems that can be solved with all the money being directed to climate change, such as child poverty, that would make a much greater impact. His latest book is False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet.

Moreover, Bjorn reminds us that the "cure" would result in increased energy prices that would have a devastating effect on the poorest amongst us.

7. Extreme weather, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, draughts and fires are all getting worse as a result.

So this is an entirely false narrative and even the UN-IPCC agrees with that. As the earth has warmed since the 1980's the frequency and strength of hurricanes and tornadoes has decreased. Floods have caused more economic damage than ever before but are less severe in real terms. Draughts have not been getting more severe. Forest fires are more due to forest management practices than to very slight changes in temperature. They all seem worse because of the breathless reporting on the news channel, but if you look at actual data, it is not the case.

8. Replacing FFs by wind and solar is a practical response.

Windmills and solar panels are the most foolish reaction you can find anywhere. Countries such as Germany who have tried it have become utterly dependent on their neighbours for reliable electricity. 

And they absolutely do not cost less. If they did, you wouldn't need government subsidies to keep these things afloat.

A big problem is that with an electrical system that does not use batteries you need to instantaneously match the electricity generated with that consumed. The only reliable way to do this is with either hydro, nuclear, or fossil fuels, all three of which methods the "Greens" discard out of hand. Battery technology is nowhere near being able to keep up, and is a very eco-unfriendly technology to boot.

Here in Ontario for example, we have subsidized wind and solar. we guarantee that whenever these ventures produce any electricity we will turn down our other sources and pay them a ridiculously high fee to use theirs. Guaranteed for 20 years! It does not save us a cent, as there are frequent times when wind and solar produces nothing and so we need to build and maintain all the hydro, nuclear, and FF anyways. The incremental cost of turning up those sources a slight bit to make up for the lack of wind and solar is tiny, whereas the cost to the taxpayer of that wind and solar is astronomical by comparison. As a result, our electric bills have doubled in Ontario.

And who gets hurt most by that? Rich people who maybe pay 0.1% of their income on electricity, or poorer people where the electric bill is significant? It's f'ing evil and unscrupulous people are getting rich off of this thanks to government subsidies and crony capitalism.

And to try to spend ridiculous sums to reduce CO2 emissions when China, India, and Africa continue using them is pure folly, as the net impact of something like the Paris Accord, even if fully implemented, would be almost nothing.

The right answer is more nuclear. Our Canadian Cando reactors have proven to be a very safe design. 4th Gen nuclear is even safer, can burn the waste from old nuclear reactors, and leaves no nuclear waste of their own. They also don't emit CO2, but we consider that a bad thing. As the next ice age approaches, we will need to develop nuclear tech to keep us warm.

So what about this climate catastrophe thing? Is this a grand conspiracy to fool us? I don't believe in grand conspiracies. I believe in selfish people getting rich and powerful off lies.

I believe that the left, starting with Al Gore, have made this a huge issue to scare us with so that we will vote for them and put them into power. One is more shameless than the next, with current winner being the $75 Trillion "Green New Deal". Yeesh.

I believe that scientists have gone along with this without objecting strongly as their grant money depends on them toeing the government line. And most of them are only peripherally impacted. You can keep studying your butterfly reproduction so long as you say it is a paper about climate change's impact on butterfly reproduction. Need to say that to get the grant.

I believe the businessmen see government subsidized get rich quick schemes building wind and solar.

The weather is actually quite nice outside. Enjoy it before it takes a turn to the colder.