Continuing from Opinions and Perspectives – 1 – The Consensus a friend said to me a little while back, “Oh, you don’t believe in climate change do you?”
Ye gods, where to start?
At some exhibition which included a questionnaire that visitors were encouraged to take, one of the later questions was “Do you believe in climate change?”. My uncle remarked, “A question that reveals more about the questioner than about the respondents”. I wish I had his gift.
Let me outline some propositions required for basic climate literacy. That is, whether you agree or not with these propositions, you should know that they are distinct, and important:
1. Before “climate change” there was lots of climate change. That is, before humans began emitting large quantities of CO2 (and other GHGs) by burning fossil fuels the climate experienced large changes on time scales ranging from decades to centuries to millennia and longer.
2. Burning fossil fuels like coal and natural gas adds CO2 to the atmosphere.
3. More CO2, methane and a few other inappropriately-named “greenhouse” gases in the atmosphere increase the surface temperature of the earth.
Items 2 and 3 above can be summarised with the term “anthropogenic global warming” or AGW.
4. Just because there was lots of climate change before AGW doesn’t mean that humans can’t alter the climate.
5. AGW will lead to catastrophe for our planet (perhaps we can call this CAGW).
Each one of these propositions is distinct. And proposition 5 could be broken down into a number of different propositions (which we will look at).
For example, many people “believe in climate change” while refuting even AGW. Their argument is sometimes, “The climate was changing long before we started burning fossil fuels, that’s why I don’t believe in AGW”.
I don’t share that point of view. But wrapping causes around catchy phrases can, of course, backfire.
It is possible to believe in proposition 2 and not proposition 3. It is possible to believe in AGW (2 & 3) and not proposition 5.
Most people, after at least a decade and a half of the media blaring at them (from whatever ideological position), don’t realize that these propositions are not all: “Do you believe in climate change?”
It’s almost as though the media is completely counter-productive for grasping complex issues.
Note to commenters – if you want to question the “greenhouse” effect post your comment in one of the many articles about that, e.g. The “Greenhouse” Effect Explained in Simple Terms. Comments placed here on the science basics will just be deleted.
The Science of Doom 
There is a significant subset of people who deny AGW beause of religious reasons. The Wikipedia article on the “Cornwall Alliance” quotes that group’s statement of December 2, 2009:
” We believe Earth and its ecosystems – created by God’s intelligent design and infinite powerand sustained by his faithful providence – are robust, resilient, self -regulating, and self-correcting, admiribaly suited for humam flourishing, and displaying his glory. Earth’s climate system is no exception. Recent global warming is one of many natural cycles of warming and cooling in geologic history. We deny that the Earth and its ecosystems are the fragile and unstable products of chance, and particularly that the Earth’s climate system is vulnerable to dangerous alteration because of miniscule changes in atmospheric chemistry. Recent warming was neither abnormally large nor abnormally rapid. There is no convincing scientific evidence that human contribution to greenhouse gases is causing dangerous global warming”
Signatories of this declaration include Richard Lindzen and Roy Spencer.
To me, the sentence beginning with “We deny…” and ending with “atmospheric chemistry” is equivilant to “God made the world with a negligible sensitivity of climate temperature to changes in CO2 concentration.”
“An Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming”. Is this An Evangelic Joke”? What is it to discuss when it is God`s will and blessing? Thank you for pointing out how belief systems are manifested in “climate war”.
And the counterpart is to believe in James Hansen and his use of climate models and his paleoclimate evidence. As it seems that many scientist-activists do believe in.
Yawn. Why is this relevant?
Curiousdp: I think the existence of ice ages driven by negligible change in external global forcing provides strong evidence that the Earth’s climate is unstable – at least in the temperature range from typical glacial to interglacial state. This instability exists (at least in part) because of very slow changes in ice cap albedo and outgassing of CO2 from the deep ocean – phenomena that develop too slowly to be considered feedbacks than contribute to ECS. However, they do contribute to the overall climate feedback parameter (W/m2/K) which must be negative based on the absence of evidence for a runaway GHE in the Earth’s past. IMO. the existence of these slow response places places a upper limit on ECS (without these very slow phenomena).
These considerations lead me to conclude that climate sensitivity is not constant over a longer period of time.
There is nothing special about CO2 – except that the consensus idiotically chooses to report climate sensitivity in units of K/doubling of CO2 rather than K/(W/m2 of any forcing).
I Think you are pointing to some central issues, Frank.
As you probably know ECS is not so scary as it was in earlier days (model`s sensitivity of about 4,5 degC in the first models). So how to keep up the pressure?. We just develop the consept of Earth System Sensitivity (ESS), and use the difference between Ice Age Maximum and Holocene warming as the start point. Or some climate change during the last two million years. Then we can begin to sweat. Hansen found that the earth will be 6 deg C warmer with doubling of CO2. Snyder found that it would be 9 deg warmer. Is it possible to get high on science?
Curiousdp: In cosmology, the (strong or weak) anthropic principles are used to explain why we live in a universe where the parameters of the Standard Model are such that the observed universe could develop over a period of 14 billion years and our sun and a planet where evolution of a thinking species was possible. The necessary combination of parameters appears unlikely to have occurred by chance, but physicists usually don’t consider this evidence for intelligent design. For similar reasons, thinking humans would be unlikely to evolve on a planet whose climate is too unstable, but that doesn’t imply a need for intelligent design.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
Point 5. If AGW effect is tiny then it will not be catastrophic. So far as I can tell this is the case because warming at the height where CO2 can impart temperature is ’80C and 10km up. Warming to -79.9C has zero effect on the surface.
” the height where CO2 can impart temperature is ’80C and 10km up. ” Where in the world did you get this from? None of it is correct.
What is the point of these artilces? It is only about the science and the views exoressed here are completely meaningless without it. I was recently told about a BBC Newsnight discussion a few months agoi which I found on YouTube, The presenter has two guests in the studio. All three believed we were causing climate change, a guest in the USA was a sceptic. Not one of the four knew what they were talking about because they had no scientific knowledge between them. This is typical of the 21st century. We should all be well informed but we seem to be heading back to the trees.
Well, the real crisis is the growing realization of the unreliability and bias of science and scientists. Until that is addressed, there is little hope for laymen ascertaining the truth about any scientific controversy.
There is science and there is politics. Unfortunately “climate change” has been usurped by politics and is no longer good science. It is now dominated by a political agenda and is couched in terms that either you believe (implying CAGW and a need for dire cuts to anthropogenic CO2 emissions at any cost) or you deny (as in denial of the supposed scientific “truth”). Political agendas often benefit from scary motivations and an “us versus them” mentality to succeed. Everyone who denies the “truth” is thus a disgusting unbeliever much like a religious “infidel” or “heathen” and thus they deserve consternation or worse. Furthermore because the unbelievers are supposedly wrong, there is no need to even debate them … very much like religious extremism.
““climate change” has been usurped by politics and is no longer good science” Who says? You?
Climate Freak: Converting “global warming” caused by rising GHGs into “climate change” has provided the opportunity to scare the public by blaming many more phenomena on rising GHGs than unusual warmth. This is especially true of extreme weather, whose “normal” frequency is impossible to accurately characterize. Climate scientists do use AOGCM’s to determine the frequency of extreme weather events, but since models disagree about the regional climate change associated with rising GHGs and lack the resolution and ability to properly represent many extreme weather events, one could argue that AOGCMs aren’t validated tools for reaching quantitative conclusions about extreme weather.
However, “climate change” does include changes in precipitation, as well as temperature. Natural variability in precipitation is about +/-50% of normal precipitation and far larger than variability in temperature. About 4,000-6,000 years ago, the African Humid Period ended and the grassland, rivers and large lakes that were once there are now desert and salt flats. Apparently seasonal monsoon rains (like those in India) gradually stopping penetrating as far north as they formerly did. This might be the clearest example of “catastrophic climate change” since the last ice age. This change may be associated with the same changes in the Earth’s orbit that drive ice ages. In the western US, proxy records are consistent with century-long droughts far more severe than the shorter droughts any experienced in the past two centuries. Almost all the water flowing in the Colorado and many other rivers in the Western US, China and elsewhere is used before it reaches the ocean. If rising GHGs can drive changes in precipitation similar to the variation known from the past, “climate change” is a more appropriate term than “global warming”. However, different climate models make different projections about how precipitation is going to change regionally. Some models project that the Amazon basin will become a grassland due to diminishing rainfall and other project an increase in rainfall. There is no consensus about the Western US.
SOD, Welcome back. It is true as you say that the media is hopelessly imprecise about anything scientific. We are lucky when they don’t mislead us.
On another topic, Don’t know if you have posted on this paper or not but I was not aware of it until this week.
https://www.pnas.org/content/104/21/8709#ref-30
It interested me because it contained evidence that using different (but credible) discretization methods can cause significant differences in long term behavior of a dynamical system.
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Bryan
“Furthermore because the unbelievers are supposedly wrong, there is no need to even debate them … very much like religious extremism”
I’ve spent a lot of time in such debates and agree with you about the analogy to religious fundamentalism.
Living in Northern I regularly encounter Free Presbyterions who are convinced by Usher’s date for the Creation in 4004BC. Ther response to any evidence to the contrary is “My mind is made up; don’t confuse me with facts. ”
Arguing the science with an unbeliever thus tends to be unproductive. They tend to reject scientific data and lack solid data of their own.
Arguing policy is equally difficult. The unbelievers tend to be from the libertarian right. Proposals to mitigate climate change tend to run counter to their principles of minimum government and individual freedom.
I am a biologist myself, and dont like the word belief. I accept the evidence for AGW, but would love to be shown to be wrong. Unfortunately, as more evidence comes in, previous estimates of the damage are looking conservative.
What do I do? The science increasingly says “We’re doomed”. The electorates will not give up their bread and circuses.
I’m an old man. Perhaps I should just enjoy civilization while it lasts!
We are not doomed because human civilization is an adaptive organism. Change is always scary but not always bad on balance.
entropicman,
Cite please.
The recent US government multi-agency report has estimates of damage that are smaller than the error in the estimate of future gross global product. The numbers look big when compared to today’s GGP, but even relatively slow growth will make the GGP in 2100 much larger than in 2018. How about the damage from extreme mitigation which would consign a large portion of the world’s population to perpetual grinding poverty?