The Urgency of Climate Change

On June 30, at a climate change meeting in Abu Dhabi, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres exclaimed, "Every week brings new climate-related devastation . . . floods, drought, heatwaves, wildfires and super storms." This weekly barrage of unprecedented climate events is believed to be caused by the increasing concentration of atmospheric CO₂ — exceeding a hellish 400 ppm in 2017. The world must “act now with ambition and urgency,” he implored.

Journalists, liberals, and frightened children agree, as does every one of the more than 20 Democrat candidates who have entered the 2020 presidential race. They adamantly believe that climate change is an “existential threat” that is already hitting key tipping points. Climatologist Michael Mann (the inventor of the famous Hockey Stick curve) “has urged governments to treat the transition to renewable energy with the equivalent urgency that drove the US industrial mobilization in World War Two”. By some estimates, fossil fuels must be eliminated in 12 years. Sensing a lack of urgency, students in over 100 nations walked out of their classrooms last March, in a global “Student Climate Strike” to protest climate inaction. News anchor Chuck Todd devoted an entire edition of NBC’s Meet the Press to how climate urgency can be explained to the American people.

Not long ago, climate havoc was less urgent. “Change” wasn’t expected to become catastrophic until the latter half of the century. As late as December 2015, when the Paris climate accord was signed, few cared that horrendous polluters, such as China and India, promised only trivial emission reductions. There was ample time for journalists to explain the urgency of climate change. Experts now, however, tell us that the increased frequency and intensity of extreme climate events is already underway, and that only bold, multitrillion dollar programs such as the Green New Deal (GND) can end the weekly assaults.

But why has the frequency and intensity of “floods, drought, heatwaves, wildfires and super storms" increased so much, only recently? The Global Circulation Models (GCMs) that predict global temperature as a function of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have not changed significantly; they are as flawed as they have always been.

Let’s say that a group of economists created an economic model designed to predict future inflation rates. And let’s say that they insisted that all future US monetary and fiscal policy be based on its predictions. But what if every time the model was tested, its predicted inflation rate was three times greater than the observed rate? After a few years of observed failure (if it took that long), most people would tell the economists where they could stick their model. And those who promoted policies based on its predictions would be ridiculed as clowns and morons.

Not so in climate science world. The denizens of that bizarre kingdom are praised for their shoddy tools. Indeed, they have been encouraged, with profligate research grants, to create more and bigger GCMs. Since 1988, when James Hansen first sounded the catastrophic global warming alarm, climate scientists have relied on such models. Hansen’s initial model predicted a warming rate of 0.35^◦C per decade. Other climate scientists jumped into the climate modeling business, and over the ensuing decades built a suite of at least 102 models — all of which estimated temperature increases similar to Hansen’s torrid rate.

The growth of climate temperature estimation science gave rise to climate event attribution science — the blaming of fossil-fuel combustion for any event that climate change fretters believe could plausibly result from the implausible temperatures predicted by the GCMs. And for most major news outlets, both of these sciences are settled, and weekly “floods, drought, heatwaves, wildfires and super storms” are the grist for the mill of climate urgency.

Except that empirical evidence for urgency does not exist. The temperature predictions of the GCMs are no more accurate than those of the fictitious economic model above. The only difference is that the latter model would have been discarded decades ago. The GCMs are still in use, heavy use, despite a gaping discrepancy between the theoretical temperatures that they estimate and the empirical temperatures that are observed. Its existence has been known for years. Many peer-reviewed studies (e.g., here, here, and here) have identified and measured its magnitude. In his 2019 paper Falsifying Climate Alarm, John Christy compared the temperature trends estimated by GCMs (102 of them) to the actual trend observed by satellites and radiosonde balloons. Over the period from 1979 (when satellite temperature measurements first became available) to 2017, the average trend produced by the models was 0.44 ^o C per decade, three times the observed trend of 0.15 ^o C per decade.

One would think that journalists such as Chuck Todd would welcome climate scientists such as Christy to their newscasts. They might discover that climate urgency is, well, not that urgent. Imagine the scoop: “GCMs Exaggerate Global Warming by Factor of 3, Need Fundamental Revisions.” Unfortunately, climate scientists such as Christy are treated as heretics, who should be given no opportunity to disturb the grist. “The Earth is getting hotter. And human activity is a major cause, period. We're not going to give time to climate deniers,” pontificated Mr. Todd. This is tantamount to discovering that the actual inflation rate is 3%, then writing a front-page story based on the rate predicted by the faulty economic model: “Inflation Soars to 9%, Devastating Consumer Purchasing Power.”

And so it goes at the climate urgency mill. Instead of actual climate-related death and devastation, it is imagined climate-related death and devastation that is reported. It is only the attribution of climate havoc (to fossil-fuel consumption) that has increased in frequency and intensity — a development that dramatically escalated with the 2016 election of Donald Trump, nearly rupturing climate urgentometers with the 2017 US withdrawal from the Paris climate accord.

Climate change enthusiasts around the world cringed at estimates of the additional quantity of CO₂ that would spew from the US into earth’s ever-thickening, heat-trapping atmosphere. In a speech at NYU immediately prior to Mr. Trump’s announcement to withdraw, Mr. Guterres warned that the US would suffer “negative economic, security and societal consequences.” Forbes agreed with the assessment, stating, “While the rest of the world moves to invest heavily in renewables, implement carbon reduction technology, and alter consumption habits the United States runs the risk of losing its competitiveness in the global marketplace.” “China, India to Reach Climate Goals Years Early, as U.S. Likely to Fall Far Short,” snarled an Inside Climate News headline. The US became the climate villain. Climate urgency became exponentially more urgent. Climate destruction became weekly.

But is any of this urgent, or even true? Have Chuck Todd and his ilk bothered to check readily available empirical evidence? After all, science can only be confirmed by observation. If, for example, they consulted the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s detailed list of hurricanes, they would quickly discover that there is no upward trend in frequency or intensity. In her June testimony before a US House committee on climate change, climate scientist Judith Curry noted: “Of the 13 strongest U.S. landfalling hurricanes in the historical record, only three have occurred since 1970 (Andrew, Michael, Charley). Four of these strongest hurricanes occurred in the decade following 1926.” She further stated, “Recent international and national assessment reports acknowledge that there is not yet evidence of changes in the frequency or intensity of hurricanes, droughts, floods or wildfires that can be attributed to manmade global warming.”

And let’s not forget climate-related death, the ultimate measure of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming. According to the International Disaster Database, during the last century, the number of deaths from droughts, extreme temperatures, floods, storms, and wildfires has plummeted by more than 90%, from almost 500,000 per decade to less than 25,000 per decade today. Furthermore, when population growth (which quadrupled during the period) and more aggressive reporting in recent decades (to receive more disaster-relief aid) are taken into account, this impressive decline appears dramatically steeper. A time series plot would produce a hockey stick curve flipped over, “proving” that rising levels of atmospheric CO₂ saves lives.

On September 23, the leaders of the rest of the world will come to the UN Climate Action Summit in New York City, “with concrete, realistic plans to enhance their nationally determined contributions by 2020, in line with reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 45 per cent over the next decade, and to net zero emissions by 2050.” Mr. Trump will no doubt be excoriated and nations such as China and India will be praised for their climate leadership, snatched from a derelict US, with its suffering economy.

But the US economy has been booming — with rapid GDP growth, rising wage rates, and historically low unemployment. The “heavy investments in renewables” made by the rest of the world are, thus far, a bust. According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), from 2005 to 2017, global energy-related CO₂ emissions rose by 6,040 million metric tons, an increase of 21%. In stark contrast, and to the dismay of journalists and politicians who have been telling us that America has let the rest of the world down, US energy-related CO₂ emissions declined by 861 million metric tons, a decrease of 14%. And for climate enthusiasts who are placing their planet salvation hopes on early goal attainment, the report noted that “growth in global energy-related CO₂ emissions from 2005 to 2017 was led by China, India, and other countries in Asia.” Perhaps Mr. Todd should explain climate urgency to China and India.

It’s difficult for people other than liberals and schoolchildren to view climate urgency as anything but a hoax. Most people tend to slow down, if not stop, when they sense that they are being deceived — when the stories they are being told do not match what they observe. True, Americans observed the devastation of hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria that struck in 2017; but they also observed the absence of a single major hurricane landfall in the 11 years prior.

If solar panels and windmills were cost-effective, we would see them everywhere. We see them almost nowhere. They supply less than 1% of the world’s energy. They provide this minuscule quantity because, after decades of technological advances (praised and celebrated by the news media) and decades of taxpayer-funded subsidies (currently in the US, $129 billion annually, without which both industries would go out of business tomorrow), they are too costly and inefficient to compete with other forms of energy. The next time a Democrat candidate promotes the GND, he should explain the urgency of replacing our cheapest sources of energy with the most expensive. Or how he expects to get to 100% solar and wind in 12 years, having taken 50 years to get to 1%. When a journalist uses the next flood or drought to explain the urgency of climate change, he should explain how, in those halcyon days of the 1930s, when the atmospheric concentration of CO₂ was less than 300 ppm, floods claimed 436,147 lives. Or how the droughts of the 1920s claimed 472,400.

Climate change urgency has led to the hasty development of schemes to curb the rise in global temperature — currently predicted to exceed 4^◦C by 2100. Controlling the earth’s climate, of course, requires an enormous quantity of money. The GND solution would build a near-zero carbon national electricity grid (115 million acres of solar panels and windmills to eliminate electricity generated by fossil fuels), replace air travel with a high-speed rail system and internal combustion vehicles with electric vehicles, retrofit all buildings to meet high energy-efficient standards, and much, much more. Its total cost has been estimated to be as high as $93 trillion. An exhaustive economic study by Benjamin Zycher of the American Enterprise Institute found that the electricity generation component alone would cost more than “$490.5 billion per year, permanently, or $3,845 per year per household.”

And for the proponents of the GND to believe that it will work, an enormous quantity of conceit and arrogance is also required. But let’s say that the GND succeeds — that it is executed flawlessly and meets all of its emission reduction goals. Then, notes Mr. Zycher, its effect on end-of-century temperature reduction is calculated (by an EPA climate model) to be somewhere between 0.173°C and 0.083°C. That is, $93 trillion of climate urgency will have absolutely no effect. All of that requires an enormous quantity of stupidity.