Category: In the News

“I never understood wind. You know, I know windmills very much. I’ve studied it better than anybody I know.”

President Donald Trump, remarks at Turning Point USA Student Action Summit, West Palm Beach, FL, December 22, 2019

[Frog comments: Windmill n. a structure, generally wooden, driven by the force of wind acting on a plurality of sails or vanes to create rotational motion to grind grain or pump water.

Wind turbine n. a structure, generally constructed of lightweight composite materials, for utilizing the wind’s kinetic energy to drive a turbine to generate electricity.

Not to nitpick, but it seems relevant to the nature of the devices the President has “studied better than anybody.”]

“But they’re manufactured tremendous — if you’re into this — tremendous fumes. Gases are spewing into the atmosphere. You know we have a world, right? So the world is tiny compared to the universe.”

President Donald Trump, continuing remarks

[Frog comments: “You know we have a world, right?” True-ish. The existence of a world is widely acknowledged; it’s debatable whether it will continue to belong to us if we don’t take care of its attributes that make our lives possible.

“…the world is tiny compared to the universe.” TRUE! That definitely checks out.]

“So tremendous, tremendous amount of fumes and everything. You talk about the carbon footprint — fumes are spewing into the air. Right? Spewing. Whether it’s in China, Germany, it’s going into the air. It’s our air, their air, everything — right?”

President Donald Trump, continuing remarks

[Frog comments: Writing in the International Journal of Sustainable Manufacturing, scientists in 2014 determined that a 2.0 MW wind turbine with a working life of 20 years, operating in the American Northwest, offsets the carbon emissions of its own manufacture within about the first 6 months. Thus, for the following 19.5 years, such a wind turbine powers about 500 U.S. homes with effectively carbon-free electricity.

By contrast, a coal, oil, or gas based power source with a working life of 20 years would be expected to generate “fumes … spewing into the air” for, well, 20 whole years. Whether in China, in Germany, or, really, anywhere. Yes indeed, our air, their air, everything. Just to talk about the carbon footprint.]

“They kill the birds. You want to see a bird graveyard? You just go. Take a look. A bird graveyard. Go under a windmill someday. You’ll see more birds than you’ve ever seen ever in your life.” (Laughter.)

President Donald Trump’s speech, according to the official White House transcript

Yeah, well, that’s not actually a thing. At least, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (who, it just turns out, has gone to take a look):

https://youtu.be/PpNmFKXXeqQ

On Monday, September 23, 2019, Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish climate activist who began demonstrating alone in front of the Swedish parliament in August, 2018 and now leads a global youth environmental movement, made an impassioned speech to delegates at the UN Climate Summit. Watch the complete speech above.

As detailed in the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report, released Oct. 6, 2018, every factual and forward-looking statement Greta made in the speech is consistent with the best available scientific consensus.

Donald Trump, “leader” of the free world and president of the nation credited with the greatest cumulative historical greenhouse gas emissions, was not present for Thunberg’s speech. He did pop in at the UN Climate Summit for about 14 minutes, during which he listened to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s speech before applauding and then leaving without making any remarks. While other national leaders were speaking about their specific plans to meet their commitments under the Paris climate agreement, the U.S. leader was silent.

It was a striking juxtaposition between the bravery and moral authority of a teenager who, after starting her own global youth movement by herself, had crossed the Atlantic Ocean to demand action from all the world’s leaders; and the cowardice and intellectual and moral vapidity of a president who can’t face a 16-year-old and clapped emptily at another leader’s speech while working to remove his own country from the Paris agreement and roll back sundry existing environmental regulations, from auto standards to methane emission controls.

disinformation (noun)
dis·​in·​for·​ma·​tion  |  \ (ˌ)dis-ˌin-fər-ˈmā-shən \
: false information deliberately and often covertly spread (as by the planting of rumors) in order to influence public opinion or obscure the truth
–Merriam-Webster

zombie (noun)
[zom·​bee]
: the body of a dead person given the semblance of life, but mute and will-less, by a supernatural force, usually for some evil purpose
–Dictionary.com

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Since I’ve been writing the Frog Blog, a number of friends have encouraged me to create a section to debunk false claims and arguments about climate change. So far, I have not done that. I’ve found the prospect exhausting. Using a strategy straight from the playbook used earlier by the tobacco industry, the fossil fuel industry generously funds nonprofit organizations, like The Heartland Institute, which employ people in the wicked pursuit of writing and disseminating superficially scientific-sounding disinformation with the express purpose of sowing confusion and division in our collective efforts to understand and deal with the climate crisis, efforts which clearly threaten the fossil fuel industry. I’ve written about this elsewhere. Also read this nice paper and this one.

There’s an aspect of asymmetric warfare to the tactic behind climate disinformation. Institutional liars are employed by fossil fuel companies (effectively untraceably, thanks to our opaque financial disclosure laws) to write devilish hit jobs on climate science, which are probably easy to write since (as we’ll see) they usually don’t bother to provide much in the way of data, references, or context. Debunking them requires data, references, and context, the assembly of which are time-consuming. This blog is funded entirely by my free time, and I help my wife support my family with my day job. I’m outgunned, if my strategy were to try to debunk every nefariously false blog post created by these well-funded writers. Certainly, it’s been much more straightforward and satisfying to simply report on the science conducted by actual scientists, which is backed up by data and citations, and communicated with the intention to educate.

But two things happened. First, I was asked to debunk a particular article by a person I respect a great deal when it comes to the climate: Steve O’Neil, CEO of REC Group. He’s in my Facebook feed, by which I see REC Group’s busy activities supplying solar silicon wafers, cells, and modules for giant solar installations, at a feverish pace, all over the world; seeing photos of these beautiful installations is among my most hopeful moments each day. Second, having read over the past couple years quite a lot of actual climate science, as well as quite a few of these climate hit pieces, I can now see that the hit pieces have common attributes I think we can all learn to recognize. By debunking one, and using that as a template to illustrate these attributes, I think I can provide value by helping others recognize disinformation when they see it. Maybe I don’t have to debunk them all.

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So here we go. The following article was the assigned homework from Steve, Mighty Wielder of Photovoltaics:

NASA admits that climate change occurs because of changes in Earth’s solar orbit, and NOT because of SUVs and fossil fuels
-Author Ethan Huff, published August 30, 2019, NaturalNews.com

It’s a relatively short read. Read it, but promise to come back before it eats your brain. Then, we’ll get to work.

The first 3 paragraphs set out an introductory narrative that the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has known for 60 years that changes to our Earth’s climate are “natural and normal,” but “for whatever reason” has “chosen to sit silently back and watch” as the human-caused climate change “hoax” has persisted.

(What would motivate NASA, the American organization that won the Space Race, brought us the moon landings, explored the solar system —and beyond — with the Voyager probes, and is currently exploring Mars with robot cars, to “sit silently back” while we all totally misunderstood our own planet is baffling to me. But “for whatever reason,” I guess.)

By a link in the first paragraph, we learn this article is derivative, as it references an earlier and very similar article posted on August 8 on the website of the Hal Turner Radio Show.

The first verifiable fact of the article appears in the first sentence of paragraph 4, a reference to an article published by NASA on its Earth Observatory website (among my very favorite websites; never stop looking at it!) in the year 2000:

“In the year 2000, NASA did publish information on its Earth Observatory website about the Milankovitch Climate Theory, revealing that the planet is, in fact, changing due to extraneous factors that have absolutely nothing to do with human activity.”

-Claim on NaturalNews.com that is both true and total B.S. (I’m about to prove)

Briefly, the article then goes on to recount how NASA has been outclassed by a Serbian astrophysicist, Milutin Milankovitch, who discovered prior to his death in 1958 that changes in our Earth’s climate occur due to periodically shifting eccentricity, obliquity, and precession of our Earth’s orbit around the sun.

(At which point in the article, incidentally, I encounter the following embedded advertisement:

This would appear to be an advertisement for the “extraordinary benefits of turmeric gummy bears” embedded within our purportedly scientific article, buying of which help “support” the owner of NaturalNews.com. Real science articles don’t feature these.)

Well, I did some research, and Milutin Milankovitch (a serious scientist) was exactly right. His findings have been verified, and NASA has helped do that. It’s just not remotely the whole story.

To start out, I found that NASA did indeed publish information about the Milankovitch Climate Theory on its excellent Earth Observatory website in the year 2000. I found this out by going to Earth Observatory and typing into its search bar, “Milankovitch Climate Theory.” The first hit in that search is this article published by NASA on March 24, 2000.

The article recounts how Milutin Milankovitch (1879-1958), a Serbian mathematician, astronomer, and climatologist, formulated a theory that Earth’s periodic glacial periods have been a result of subtle, repeating changes in our Earth’s orbit about the sun. His theory was mostly ignored for 50 years. But then, in 1976, a study in the journal Science described how analysis of deep-sea sediment cores showed major climate variations over the past 450,000 years did indeed correspond to the variations in Earth’s orbit calculated by Milankovitch.

Having referenced this year 2000 NASA article, Ethan Huff goes on to reproduce a number of complicated-looking diagrams illustrating periodic variations in our Earth’s orbit. Then, he rushes to conclude:

“If we had to sum the whole thing up in one simple phrase, it would be this: The biggest factor influencing weather and climate patterns on earth is the sun, period.”

-Ethan Huff, rushing to a conclusion

Here’s the thing. That search I did on NASA Earth Observatory, “Milankovitch Climate Theory,” yielded the following 5 hits, all in the same list:

• Mar 24, 2000 — Milutin Milankovitch (the article we’ve been talking about so far)
• May 9, 2006 — Paleoclimatology: Examining the Evidence
• Nov 5, 2007 — Earth’s Temperature Tracker
• Jun 14, 2009 — Climate and Earth’s Energy Budget
• Jun 3, 2010 — Global Warming

The 2006 article contains a link at the bottom to another article entitled, “Explaining Rapid Climate Change: Tales from the Ice.” This article basically recounts what I’ve written about in detail in Episodes 5-7 of my Brief History of Climate Change: how recent, rapid changes in both global temperature and atmospheric CO₂ concentration could not be explained by Milankovitch’s theory.

The 2007 article recounts how, around 1970, Milankovitch’s theory would have predicted our Earth was headed for another cooling trend, but other scientists (including the famous James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies) instead predicted and observed a warming trend due to fossil fuel emissions, which appeared to be overwhelming our Earth’s previously natural climate variations.

The 2009 article contains an excellent introduction to the greenhouse effect, as well as a section entitled “Climate Forcings and Global Warming” that includes the following explanatory sentences:

“Natural climate forcings include changes in the Sun’s brightness, Milankovitch cycles (small variations in the shape of Earth’s orbit and its axis of rotation that occur over thousands of years), and large volcanic eruptions that inject light-reflecting particles as high as the stratosphere. Manmade forcings include particle pollution (aerosols), which absorb and reflect incoming sunlight; deforestation, which changes how the surface reflects and absorbs sunlight; and the rising concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, which decrease heat radiated to space.”

–2009 NASA article, placing natural Milankovitch cycles within the greater context of all the other mechanisms that can alter Earth’s climate

The 2010 article again lists natural sources of climate change, including Milankovitch cycles, before going on to say,

“In Earth’s history before the Industrial Revolution, Earth’s climate changed due to natural causes not related to human activity … These natural causes are still in play today, but their influence is too small or they occur too slowly to explain the rapid warming seen in recent decades. We know this because scientists closely monitor the natural and human activities that influence climate with a fleet of satellites and surface instruments.”

–2010 NASA article, further clarifying that natural causes of climate change, including the well-understood Milankovitch cycles, do not explain rapid warming of the Earth’s surface over recent decades

It would seem that a discussion of Milankovitch Climate Theory alone lacks critical context when discussing the overall observed global warming trend in the decades since the Industrial Revolution in the mid-1800’s.

But all of the above NASA Earth Observatory references, including the earliest one referenced by Ethan Huff of NaturalNews.com, contain the following disclaimer right at the top of the article:

They appear to be old, static pages. Scientific knowledge is ever evolving and improving. If we really want to understand the current state of climate science, it makes sense to look for a more recent publication.

One such reference is the Fourth National Climate Assessment, the most recent of periodic climate assessment reports prepared by the U.S. government every 4 years since the early 1990’s. Published in November, 2018, the Fourth National Climate Assessment was prepared by over 300 climate scientists and policy experts spread across 13 departments and agencies of the federal government. In Volume II, Chapter 2, we find the following set of graphs:

In all 3 graphs, the black line is the actual measured global temperature since 1880. (This measurement has been performed by 4 independent groups in 3 different countries, with very similar results, as I’ve detailed here.) The top graph shows the modeled (mathematically predicted) temperature accounting for 3 natural influences in isolation, as well as all 3 of those combined (yellow). Milankovitch cycles are included! Calculations based on the Milankovitch Climate Theory appear in the top graph as the brown line labeled, “Orbital.” Milankovitch cycles occur on a time scale of thousands of years and, as can be seen in the graph, haven’t accounted for much of a change in temperature over the relatively short time since 1880.

The middle graph shows the modeled temperature according to 4 human influences in isolation, as well as all 4 of those combined (red). It’s clear that human influences, especially greenhouse gases, best explain the observed temperature increase. The bottom graph shows, in orange, the modeled temperature summing all the human and natural influences together. The modeled temperature matches the measured temperature very closely, suggesting modern climate science has developed quite a refined understanding of the climate.

So, the Milankovitch Climate Theory is accounted for in our understanding of the climate, and it matters. With respect to global warming since the Industrial Revolution, it matters just exactly as much as shown by the brown line in the top graph. Indeed, the calculations of Milutin Milankovitch have contributed substantially to our understanding of the climate by explaining the periodic cycling of the Earth’s climate between glacial periods and interglacial periods that occurs approximately every 100,000 years. These represent significant natural changes in Earth’s climate, for sure, but it’s important to note that human beings have already lived through two such natural cycles, during which the atmospheric CO₂ concentration never left a range between 184 and 287 ppm.

(Earth’s temperature and atmospheric CO₂ concentration move together during these natural cycles, due to a series of feedback loops between them. For example, a warming ocean caused by a warming phase of the Milankovitch cycle releases CO₂ into the atmosphere because the solubility of CO₂ in water falls with increasing temperature. This extra CO₂ then causes more warming by the greenhouse effect. And so on. But when the Milankovitch cycle again enters a cooling phase, both temperature and CO₂ again drop via the same feedback loops.)

Thanks to our greenhouse gas emissions since the Industrial Revolution, the atmospheric CO₂ concentration reached 415 ppm this past May, so we are deep into uncharted territory for our species. And, as I recently wrote about, we see glimmers of multiple of those feedback loops by which rising temperature and CO₂ could reinforce one another in ways we cannot control.

In short, the graph above shows the Milankovitch Climate Theory not to be a significant factor explaining the recent, rapid increase in global temperature. And Ethan Huff’s super rushy conclusion that climate change has nothing to do with fossil fuels is certainly not supported by the data.

But the conclusion of Huff’s article is not simply wrong. It’s impossible to escape the conclusion that it’s a clever and very intentional lie. As I summarized above, the very same web search that yields the year 2000 NASA article Huff references — the one based on which Huff reproduces a bunch of complex diagrams illustrating details of Earth’s orbital cycles — also yields four additional NASA articles that place the Milankovitch Climate Theory in context and unambiguously explain how human-induced greenhouse gas emissions have dwarfed the effects of the Milankovitch cycle in recent decades. Surely, Huff must have run across those articles as well. Why not mention that content?

Huff has selectively advanced a zombie argument — a once real scientific investigation that has long been settled science. He has wickedly re-animated poor Milutin Milankovitch’s dead mouth to say something Milankovitch, a serious scientist, would certainly never have said, had he lived past 1958 (the year when, coincidentally, direct atmospheric CO2 measurements began).

So there it is. Lying article rebutted. Drop the mike.

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So how do we recognize climate disinformation when we see it? Or at least, what clues should make us suspicious?

1. Like all good lies, they contain a kernel of truth. But the kernel may seem too simple.
   If you read my Brief History of Climate Science, you’ll see that the climate has been studied in detail for over 100 years now. After this substantial research, our knowledge about the climate has been built up by a massive number of interwoven threads of knowledge from multiple scientific disciplines — geologists, atmospheric scientists, astronomers, oceanographers, physicists, chemists, biologists, meteorologists, statisticians, computer scientists, and so on. (Good examples of the interwoven — and self-correcting — nature of scientific inquiry appear in Episode 3 of my Brief History.) Many threads of independent scientific inquiry agree, creating an understanding of human-caused climate change that’s like a thick, braided rope. This is why over 99% of scientists have the consensus opinion that climate change is real and caused by us, a consensus that has itself been studied scientifically. Someone wishing to assert that human-induced climate change is not real would need to unravel and explain in a different way this entire rope of agreeing data. In this example, Huff produces one single truth, the Milankovitch Climate Theory (which, as I’ve summarized above, is already braided into the rope) and then tries to use that to argue against this whole rope made up of the individual contributions of countless independent scientific conclusions. It’s pathetic, really. Huff would have to explain, for example, how the rising CO₂ concentration (which is a measured fact) has somehow not resulted in a temperature increase, even though we know CO₂ absorbs infrared sun radiation reflected from the Earth.
   
2. Fake science writing often lacks context and fails to reference other scientific work.
   Click on any real scientific article from my Bibliography, or embedded in my Brief History of Climate Science, and you’ll see that any one of those articles is replete with citations to other related scientific work. Real scientists consider it part of their job, whenever writing about scientific findings, to reference related scientific work that puts their communication in context and serves to support any conclusions or arguments they make. Like many “fake science” articles, Ethan Huff’s references only (1) a similar — in fact, almost identical — earlier article on the website of the Hal Turner Radio Show (we’ll get to that in a moment), and (2) a single, old, archived NASA web page (which, as I’ve discussed above, is used selectively without regard to other references that appear in the same search). There is no effort to place Milankovitch’s theory in context with other readily available scientific knowledge about the climate. And, other than that, it’s all opinion.
   
3. Fake science often ignores the accepted scientific practice that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
   Ethan Huff asserts that all of mainstream climate science is wrong. Overturning an established theory in science is certainly possible, and has occurred. For example, Einstein’s theory of relativity superseded the previously well-accepted Newtonian theory of mechanics (at that time 200 years old). The burden of proof on Einstein was extremely high, requiring multiple publications and pages and pages of mathematical proofs. Einstein showed how Newtonian physics were an extremely good approximation of his new theory under most circumstances, but how they broke down in other situations (involving large objects and high speeds). This explained how Newtonian mechanics had been so successful for so long. Ethan Huff offers up one bit of “evidence,” then asserts that all of a 100-year-old body of scientific knowledge about the climate is wrong. He offers no explanation for how all the world’s scientists have collected various bodies of evidence with which his conclusion starkly disagrees. Sorry, that’s just not good enough.
   
4. Research and consider the credentials of the source.
   It’s not elitist to say the expertise of a person making a scientific claim matters. Would you have a dentist fix your car? Would you have an auto mechanic fix your teeth? If your answer to those questions is “no,” then probably you should rely on scientists for your scientific understanding of the climate. I could not find any specific reference to the training of Ethan Huff, author of the article debunked herein. He reports himself to be “a freelance writer and health enthusiast.” The founder and owner of NaturalNews.com, the blog on which the article appears, is Mike Adams. Mike Adams’ education is described as follows on his own website: “Mike Adams has a four-year bachelor of science degree from a prominent university in the Midwest. He has minors in mathematics and economics.” His website has been widely panned within the real scientific community for spreading false information and conspiracy theories. At various times, NaturalNews.com has been de-listed by Google, YouTube, and Facebook for violation of their terms of service. The article we’ve been discussing appears to be a moderately modified re-print of an earlier article on the website of the Hal Turner Radio Show. Besides climate denialism, Hal Turner has also publicly espoused views of Holocaust denial and white supremacy, and he has called for the assassination of government officials. He spent 2 years in prison for making threats against a federal judge.

Let’s contrast the above credentials with those of an actual climate scientist. Just because her name comes to mind, I’ll choose Dr. Katharine Hayhoe, one of over 300 authors of the recent U.S. National Climate Assessment. Katharine’s credentials are detailed on her website. She has a Bachelors Degree in physics and astronomy (University of Toronto), and both a Masters Degree and Ph.D. in atmospheric science (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign). Aside from multiple U.S. National Climate Assessments, she has authored or co-authored over 125 peer-reviewed papers, abstracts, and other publications, most based on original climate research results. She is a professor at Texas Tech University. I found no evidence she has spent time in prison.

Who do you believe?

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One last thought. In the regrettable era of “fake news,” we must consider the ethical implications of forwarding or promoting information we are unsure about. Lot’s of content we forward around on social media is harmless. When it comes to climate change, though, I would argue that the content we promote has a compelling moral dimension. The future our kids inherit — not abstract future kids, but the children and grandchildren we are reading bedtime stories to right now — depends on the actions we will take over about the next decade. And the correct actions depend on all of us agreeing on some basic facts.

Don’t be a zombie.

Early in the morning on Saturday, coordinated drone strikes on the world’s largest oil processing plants in Saudi Arabia shut down nearly half of that nation’s oil production, about 5% of global supply. Repair was expected to take “weeks, not days”. This sparked immediate fears that oil prices could spike $5-$10 per barrel on Monday, and analysts predicted crude might rise from the current price of about $60 per barrel to as much as $100 per barrel if Saudi Arabia is unable to compensate with alternative supply.

Yemen’s Houthi rebel group claimed responsibility for the drone attacks, but U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo blamed Iran. (Houthi insurgents have been rebelling against the internationally recognized Yemeni government since 2015 in what is widely regarded as a proxy war between Saudi Arabia, which leads a coalition backing the government, and Iran, which backs the Houthi rebels.) Iranian officials dismissed the allegations and stated that Iran “was ready for ‘full-fledged’ war”, warning, “All American bases and their aircraft carriers in a distance of up to 2,000 kilometers around Iran are within the range of our missiles”. Thus, the threat to the world’s oil supply was further ratcheting up tensions in a region already embroiled in a simmering regional war.

Global Energy Economy 2.0, which we are building (though, I would argue, not quickly enough) will not be prone to such threats.

Our current energy economy features highly centralized and vulnerable operations:

• Concentrated oil production facilities, like the ones just attacked in Saudi Arabia, often located in parts of the world plagued by regional conflict.
• Coastal oil refineries vulnerable to our intensifying levels of catastrophic weather, like the ten refineries in the Houston and Corpus Christi areas damaged and shut down in 2017 following the landfall of hurricane Harvey.
• Offshore oil drilling platforms subject to all sorts of disasters, like the Deepwater Horizon, which dumped an estimated 210 gallons of oil into the gulf of Mexico over a 6-month period in 2010 amid a desperate international effort to contain it.
• Oil transport through vulnerable waterways, like multiple oil tankers that were attacked this summer in the Strait of Hormuz. The U.S. blamed Iran, contributing to earlier escalation of global political tensions related to our current energy economy.

Moreover, our current energy economy exacerbates the very political instabilities that threaten it. It encourages concentration of wealth among the governing elites of resource-rich nations that lack the diversified economies necessary to adequately support their poorer populations. It supercharges the potential for both regional and global conflict among various groups for control of those centralized resources.

Energy Economy 2.0 will have none of these destabilizing vulnerabilities.

Our energy will be provided by a diffuse network of regionally distributed solar and wind installations with battery storage, like regional solar arrays and farm-based wind turbine networks, augmented by end-load installations, like rooftop solar panels on individual houses and businesses. Regionally connected by new electricity microgrids, the energy produced within these distributed networks will be efficiently utilized by new artificial intelligence technology, which will automatically adapt to changes in weather patterns and any localized disruptions in supply to send electricity efficiently where it’s needed.

Thanks to Xcel Energy’s Renewable*Connect program, my family’s home in western Wisconsin now receives the equivalent of 100% of its electricity from a renewable mixture of solar and wind installations nearby in Minnesota. In a future Energy Economy 2.0, in which 100% of energy will be so provided, someone would need to bomb multiple sites in Minnesota to disrupt my energy, and the damage would be highly localized in my area. Moreover, I might still have access to some energy provided by rooftop solar panels on my house.

In short, disrupting the entire world’s energy supply, as someone (Houthi rebels? Iran?) did this weekend will be a fool’s errand under Energy Economy 2.0.

Further, renewable energy is already raising the living standards of many of the world’s poor, by providing them locally produced electricity not reliant on centralized operations maintained by their governments.

More solar energy falls on the Earth’s surface each hour than is used by all of us on Earth every year. Energy Economy 2.0 will be capable of providing it more equitably and reliably to everyone on the planet, without the centralized operations that currently result in so much risk, conflict, and human oppression.

Oh, and it will also enable us to head off the looming climate catastrophe.

Price parity between renewables and fossil fuels has been reached in many regions. Thus, Energy Economy 2.0 will be built. The question is how quickly, and how much further climate-related suffering we will allow to be loaded into our future before we complete the transition. According to the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), we have just a little over a decade to make an unprecedented transition in our global energy infrastructure to avoid the worst consequences of climate change.

Reflecting on the events of this past weekend, it would seem that those of us who value national security and those of us who value the environment have common cause in the expeditious pursuit of this transition.

July, 2019 was officially the hottest month ever recorded by humans, according to scientists at both the Copernicus Climate Change Service, a program of the European Union, and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). It narrowly edged out the previous record month of July, 2016.

This is concerning, as the July, 2016 temperatures occurred at the peak of a strong, cyclical El Niño event that accentuated global temperature. This year’s record occurred in the absence of such a strong El Niño.

June, 2019 was also the hottest June in the 140-year record, according to the NOAA.

Some selected events that have attended our record hot summer:

A weather station North of the Arctic Circle recorded a whopping 94.6 degrees Fahrenheit, and millions of acres in the Arctic — from Siberia to Greenland to Alaska — were consumed by an unprecedented extent of Arctic wildfire. People reported difficulty breathing in a number of Siberian cities that were blanketed in smoke. The most concerning of the fires, which emitted more carbon dioxide in June than Sweden does for an entire year, were peat fires resulting from drier than usual conditions in these usually water-logged areas. These are concerning because, unlike typical wildfires that burn presently growing trees (which is bad enough), peat fires burn in soil containing fossilized trees. If a growing tree burns, its carbon can be taken back out of the atmosphere, at least in theory, by growing a new tree to replace it. Not so with peat, the concentrated and fossilized remains of millions of years worth of vegetative carbon. And peat fires can smolder for months, years, or decades. Arctic peat fires represent a vicious possible feedback loop, holding the potential to return to the atmosphere fossil carbon much as human fossil fuel emissions do, but in a manner we don’t benefit from and can’t control. This could lead to yet warmer and drier conditions in the Arctic, favoring more peat fires, and so on. In Arctic peat fires lies the potential for a tipping point, a positive feedback that could reinforce our Earth’s transition to a warmer climate, independent of human control. If you’ve read Episode 9 of my Brief History of Climate Change, such a tipping point might be capable of putting human civilization on a trajectory of “Collapse With Resource Change,” even if we start doing everything right with respect to our own emissions. To what extent an extended range of peat fires can be tolerated without triggering such a tipping point is uncertain.

“These are some of the biggest fires on the planet, with a few appearing to be larger than 100,000 hectares [380 square miles] … The amount of CO₂ emitted from Arctic Circle fires in June 2019 is larger than all the CO₂ released from the Arctic Circle in the same month from 2010 through to 2018 put together.”

–Thomas Smith, Assistant Professor of Environmental Geography, London School of Economics

Europe was gripped by twin, record-shattering heat waves during June and July. The following all-time heat records and events occurred:

• France: more than 50 cities exceeded their previous record highs, including Vérargues with a temperature of 114.8 degrees Fahrenheit on June 28. Ten deaths were reported in June and July as a direct result of the heat wave. Two nuclear reactors were shut down, and 6 others were operated at reduced power, because the rivers they use for cooling water were too warm.
• Belgium: 104.4 degrees Fahrenheit, town of Angleur, July 24. Passengers on a broken down Eurostar train were evacuated as many became ill. At least one person died.
• Finland: 92.7 degrees Fahrenheit, Porvoo, July 28.
• Germany: 108.7 degrees Fahrenheit, Linen, Lower Saxony, July 25.
• Luxembourg: 105.4 degrees Fahrenheit, Steinsel, July 25. Several fires broke out and a fire truck exploded.
• Netherlands: 105.3 degrees Fahrenheit, Gilze-Rijen, July 25. Train delays occurred as some trains had to be taken out of service. Thousands of chickens and pigs died in transit or due to ventilation failures. 400 extra people died compared with a typical summer week.
• Norway: 95 degrees Fahrenheit, Mosjøen Airport, July 27.
• United Kingdom: 100.6 degrees Fahrenheit, Cambridge, July 25. Widespread train delays occurred in July due to high track temperatures and damage to overhead lines. Rail tracks were painted white to prevent buckling.

Disconcertingly, new scientific research published in July in Geophysical Research Letters indicates Europe is warming more quickly than predicted by the European climate models on which, for example, the IPCC reports are based.

“Heatwaves are a silent killer; while for many people a heatwave just means a few hot days in the office, or even a nice day at the beach, heat is literally life-threatening to vulnerable groups like the elderly and chronically ill … Contrary to, for instance, storms and floods, these casualties usually do not even make the news. We only see them later in the statistics … no death certificate says ‘heat wave’ as the cause of death, even if the heat is actually a key factor in mortality.”

–Maarten van Aalst, Director of Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre

Sea ice extent in the Arctic ocean reached the lowest July value ever recorded, according to the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center. Sea ice surrounding Alaska disappeared 6-8 weeks earlier than usual, and there was no sea ice within 125 miles of the state’s shores. Partly due to the warm water, Alaska set a new record monthly high mean temperature in July nearly 1 degree Fahrenheit higher than the previous record set in July, 2004. Another potential source of positive feedbacks to our Earth’s climate, melting sea ice exposes dark water, which absorbs solar radiation rather than reflecting it like ice does.

“It looks like the worst case scenario put forward by the IPCC could be an underestimate because we are seeing ice melting now that we expected 30 to 40 years from now. It’s alarming because it’s very fast-paced and the consequences are hard to predict.”

–Marco Tedesco, climate scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory

Fires in Brazil’s Amazon forest burned in August at a record rate, according to the Brazil National Institute for Space Research, which began tracking the fires in 2013. There have been 72,843 fires in Brazil this year, 80% more than last year.

The Amazon forest produces 20% of the oxygen in our Earth’s atmosphere, and additionally provides a substantial carbon sink for the planet. (The atmospheric oxygen content we are used to is a result of our Earth’s bacterial and plant activity; before the Great Oxidation Event about 2 billion years ago, there was no oxygen.)

Every minute of every day, more than 1.5 soccer fields worth of the Amazon rain forest were being destroyed by fire. Many of these fires were set purposefully, to provide pasture for cattle.

The Amazon rain forest creates its own weather; transpiration from the plants’ leaves creates the rain. It also creates a vast, atmospheric river of water vapor that carries moisture as far as the American Midwest. Beyond a certain point, deforestation of the Amazon could cause it to lose its ability to create the weather necessary to preserve its current state. It could revert to a dry savanna with vastly less carbon sequestration ability. A 2018 study published in the journal Science Advances estimated that a tipping point to eventual savannah could be reached at 20-25% deforestation.

About 17% of the Brazilian Amazon is currently deforested, according to the World Wildlife Fund.

This is yet another potential positive feedback to the climate crisis we need to be aware of.

“We worry that we will soon cross a threshold of forest loss, a point of no return, after which the water recycling pump will be insufficient to maintain the system and we will see forest collapse independent of further human depredations.”

–Scott Saleska, a University of Arizona professor who first began studying the Amazon more than 20 years ago

A July 22 report by the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative found that, across 5,301 government web pages, ranging from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to the U.S. Geological Survey, the terms “climate change,” “clean energy,” and “adaptation” have dropped 26% under the Trump administration.

(Fortunately, third party organizations have cloned many of the original sites — look for them. Also look for NASA Climate, which has managed to remain remarkably excellent.)

This reflects our brilliant federal government strategy with respect to the climate: if we don’t talk about it, it will just go away. Right?

Right.

A January 8 analysis of 2018 U.S. energy data by the Rhodium Group, an independent economic policy research provider, concludes that U.S. CO₂ emissions increased 3.4% in 2018. This follows an earlier December report by the Global Carbon Project that projected an increase of 2.7% for 2018.

This reverses 3 consecutive years of decline and a general declining trend averaging 1.6% per year since 2007. The pace of emissions decline had slowed since 2016 prior to the strong reversal in 2018.

Continuing a trend in previous years, power generation from coal declined significantly in 2018, as an estimated 13.7 gigawatts of U.S. coal-fired capacity was retired. Most of this retired power generation capacity, as well as a significant increase in power demand in 2018, was provided by natural gas combustion.

During the first 10 months of 2018, gas-fired power generation increased by an amount three times as large as the decline in coal-fired generation and four times as large as the combined increase in solar and wind generation (left graph above).

Progress relative to targets

The 2018 increase in CO₂ emissions will make it more difficult for the U.S. to meet its emissions targets according to international agreements, which are based on target reductions relative to a 2005 benchmark level. After the increase last year, the U.S. ended 2018 with energy-related emissions 11.2% lower than the 2005 level.

Under the Copenhagen Accord, the U.S. has a target of reducing all greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 17% by the year 2020, relative to 2005 levels. Assuming non-energy related GHG emissions reductions are proportional to energy-related reductions, the U.S. will need to reduce energy-related emissions by an average of 3.3% per year in 2019 and 2020 to meet this target. (Non-energy related GHG emissions reductions have historically lagged energy-related reductions.)

Under the Paris Agreement (from which the U.S. has announced its intention to withdraw, but from which it cannot formally withdraw until November 4, 2020), the U.S. has a target of reducing GHG emissions by 26-28% by 2025, relative to 2005 levels. This would require emissions reductions averaging 2.6% per year over the next seven years.

As reported by both the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and a consortium of 13 U.S. federal agencies, scientists widely agree emissions targets under the Paris Agreement are inadequate to that agreement’s stated goal of limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius, or better yet 1.5 degrees Celsius, above pre-industrial levels to avoid the most calamitous consequences of climate change. Instead, scientists say global GHG emissions need to be cut in half by about 2030 and reach net zero emissions by no later than about 2055 to meet those stated goals, as shown in the lower left panel below.

Of the possibility that the U.S. can meet its Copenhagen and Paris emissions targets, the Rhodium Group report concludes,

“It is certainly feasible, but will likely require a fairly significant change in policy in the very near future and/or extremely favorable market and technological conditions.”

Meeting the more difficult stated global warming targets under the Paris Agreement will require a concerted, global effort characterized by political and technological boldness and a commitment to placing a price on carbon emissions, which are externalized in the current global economy.

Very sad day & night in Paris. Maybe it’s time to end the ridiculous and extremely expensive Paris Agreement and return money back to the people in the form of lower taxes? The U.S. was way ahead of the curve on that and the only major country where emissions went down last year!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 8, 2018

The first half of this tweet by President Trump, referencing “yellow vest” riots in Paris in late 2018, has the effect of insulting a NATO ally and a recent partner in the U.S. fight against ISIS. The second half, as we have seen above, has the defect of being totally unrelated to facts.

Facts

• Far from going down last year, U.S. emissions increased by 3.4%.
• European Union emissions in 2018 were about flat compared to the year before (i.e., the EU outperformed the U.S. in CO₂ emissions reductions).

Indeed, the difficulties in France result partially from popular opposition to its government’s implementation of an intensifying carbon tax in efforts to meet its ecological targets. These are real challenges. They are complex challenges. They should be discussed and debated with an intention oriented to solutions.

But our current discourse in this country is inadequate to the challenges and not oriented to solutions. Consider the state of our discourse:

• In response to a UN report commissioned by 195 nations, years in the making, and citing over 6,000 separate peer-reviewed scientific studies, regarding the steps necessary to avoid the worst consequences of climate change, the U.S. President says (48 hours after its release), “I can give you reports that are fabulous, and I can give you reports that aren’t so good.”
• In response to a consensus report by 13 agencies of his own government, basically corroborating and making specific to the United States the conclusions of the UN report, the U.S. President says, “I don’t believe it.”
• The U.S. President announces his decision to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, citing his concern for coal miners’ jobs. But this is obviously disingenuous because, as we’ve seen above, coal has been on the decline for a number of years and has continued declining while Trump has been in office. Why? Because natural gas, wind, and solar have become cheaper (link to facts, link to facts, link to facts). Mainly natural gas has become cheaper, as we further see above, because there is no price on carbon emissions even though all scientific evidence indicates those emissions do great economic damage.
• The U.S. President routinely tweets word salads, like the one above, that are totally divorced from facts.

Climate change is a solvable, complex problem. To solve complex problems, we must first deal in facts.

#rescuethatfrog

“We think that this is the most extreme version and it’s not based on facts … It’s not data driven. We’d like to see something that is more data driven. It’s based on modeling, which is extremely hard to do when you’re talking about the climate.”
–White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, speaking at a White House press briefing on Nov. 27 about the Trump Administration’s assessment of the Trump Administration’s recently released climate report

The publicly available report she’s talking about:

• Volume I (2017)
• Volume II (Black Friday, 2018)

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12/11/2018

OK, let’s talk about the modeling.

Well, the folks writing the report were asked to make projections about the impacts of climate change on American life, depending on various policy choices we might (or might not) make now. You can’t make a forecast — in any aspect of life — without some sort of modeling. You might forecast how much money you’re going to have at the end of the month. Even if you do this in your head, you will be using something we could call a model. Typically, models involve two main ingredients: (1) relevant data from past experiences, and (2) knowledge or assumptions about how future conditions will likely evolve. You will probably factor into your monetary forecast what you usually spend per week on groceries — that would be (1) data. If it’s December, and you use typical monthly data to make your forecast, you might come up short if you end up spending a lot of money on the Holidays. That would represent a deficiency in part (2), knowledge and assumptions.

Generally, a model is only as good as the data, knowledge, and assumptions on which it’s based, so judging the quality of a model means judging the quality of those.

The recent climate report uses, yes, modeling to project future living conditions in the United States based on various assumptions about policies we might select now. As I pointed out in my last post, this is necessary. If our objective is to ensure we don’t select policies that will result in hundreds of billions of dollars in costs to our economy, the deaths of thousands of Americans, and the displacement of millions more, we can’t just wait and see what happens. That’s because many of the changes caused by climate change, under the worst scenarios, will be irreversible on any time scale of interest to us. If the entire Greenland ice sheet were to melt, for example, sea level would rise an estimated 23 feet. This might make us regretful of the policies we chose which led us to that result. If, learning the error of our ways, we then set about reducing our greenhouse gas emissions, it’s pretty easy to understand the ocean wouldn’t just slither back uphill onto Greenland and re-freeze. The Greenland ice sheet we have now (the one that’s melting) is the result of gradual past snowfall accumulation over millions of years.

So, when Sarah Huckabee Sanders represents that the climate report is not trustworthy because it’s “based on modeling” and “not data driven,” she’s setting up a false choice. We have no alternative but to use modeling! That is, unless the alternative is to bury our heads in the sand and pretend we don’t know anything (which would seem to me outrageously irresponsible). She’s also setting up a false comparison, because the modeling is rigorously derived from past data, as we’ll see below.

And, when she says modeling of the climate is “extremely hard to do,” we should feel gratitude for the wisdom of the many folks who have funded, sponsored, advocated for, and conducted climate research for years — decades!, as summarized (with links to original references) in my Brief History of Climate Change Evidence — who have given us very well developed knowledge and capabilities with respect to climate modeling.

Here’s the crux of the modeling used in Volume II of the climate report. It’s in Chapter 2:

The black lines are data — known fossil fuel emissions (left) and measured temperatures (right). (For details on how the temperature measurements were done, see here.)

The red, blue, and green projections in the left panel are 3 different assumptions about our future carbon emissions, called Relative Concentration Pathways (RCPs). These have been standardized, and their numbers represent the change in radiative forcing in the year 2100 in Watts per square meter of the Earth’s surface. Thus, RCP8.5 (red line) means the “future storyline of fossil fuel emissions” that would result in an additional 8.5 Watts per square meter of energy across the Earth’s surface in the year 2100. Yeah, it’s technical. But, basically, RCP8.5 is the “business as usual scenario.” The one in which we pretend climate change is a hoax, talk about “clean coal” as if burning coal doesn’t produce carbon dioxide (it does, it always does), just go on doing like we’re doing.

The blue and green projections are scenarios in which we act like we give a crap about future humans.

It’s critical to understand that the red, blue, and green lines in the left panel are not yet modeling. They are 3 different assumptions about how we might behave in the future. They represent different policies and actions we might select. For more detailed information about RCPs, see Volume I of the new climate report, Chapter 4.

The modeling appears as the red, blue, and green projections (and the shaded plume associated with each) in the right panel. But, here’s a critical fact. Each one is not just one model. Modeling in the new climate report relies on the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, Phase 5 (CMIP5). The Coupled Model Intercomparison Project was organized by scientists in 1995 to aggregate and compare the results of the world’s best climate models. Under the administrative leadership of the U.S. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, it’s been through 5 refinement phases since, Phase 5 starting in 2010.

If you have a climate model and you want to get it in CMIP5, here’s the price of admission. (1) Your climate model has to mathematically account for physical climate processes in a way that can stand up to scientific scrutiny according to the peer review process. (2) Your climate model needs to fit past historical measurements well. As I touched on in my last post on the new climate report, here are the CMIP5 models (orange cross-hatched band) fitting the past data (black line):

Pretty decent, right?

Here’s how those projections in the top graph are made. Many, many CMIP5 simulations are run. Here’s what that looks like:

On the right panel of the graph at the top, the plumes around the red and green lines are not just artistic renderings of uncertainty. They are the regions within which 95% of the CMIP5 models fall for each scenario.

So, when Sarah says, “It’s not data driven,” I strenuously dispute that claim. It is extremely data driven, in the sense that the climate models being used accurately fit our historical temperature data. And that is a result of decades of data gathering and analytical work refining our ability to understand account for the physical processes that influence global temperature.

When Sarah says, “this is the most extreme version,” I strenuously dispute that claim. The colored plumes around each of the projections in the right panel in the graph at the top represent all of the versions. That’s the range of outcomes predicted by all the world’s climate models! Ok, let’s say we choose “business as usual” (RCP8.5). The “most extreme version” says the average surface temperature of the Earth will increase by almost 10 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100. The least extreme version says the average increase will be around 5 degrees Fahrenheit.

Both of these outcomes, and any of the more probable ones in between, would be terrible! And would be attended by ever more hurricanes, wildfires, droughts, coastal floods, and refugee crises.

…as shown in the rest of the new climate report. More to come.

#rescuethatfrog