Is it really happening?
I am not qualified to say if global warming is happening or not.
I wouldn't be surprised if it was,
and there are certainly
heavy-duty scientists behind it,
but it is funny how conveniently it meshes
with left-wing, anti-capitalist, anti-consumerist ideology,
and westerners' post-religious need to feel guilty
about their fantastic prosperity and consumer riches.
It may be just a coincidence.
But it's quite an amazing coincidence.
How bad will it be?
It's not enough to say that changing the climate is scary. I agree.
It would be better not to do it.
But how bad will it really be?
Maybe it will just be a problem that we can adapt to,
and that can be reversed as technology (e.g. of cars) changes in the future.
We need to compare the cost of global warming with the cost of the solution,
and then make a rational decision as to which one is worse.
In particular, the proposed "solution"
to global warming seems to be to reduce development
and to keep the
third world
undeveloped (i.e. starving and poor).
It seems to me that is worse than global warming.
In short, if global warming is happening,
the greens need to tell us how we can be rich, developed,
consumerist, drive cars,
and still avoid global warming.
If the choice is between poverty and global warming, then
any sane person should choose global warming,
as the price we reluctantly have to pay for prosperity.
If the greens don't like that, they have to give us another choice.
The movie The Day After Tomorrow (2004)
rather makes my points for me.
They obviously felt that showing a slightly warmer planet would not be very scary,
so they claimed that
what would actually happen would be
global cooling.
The movie thus
tacitly admits that:
Global warming may not be armageddon.
That's why they didn't show it - because it's not scary.
Global warming theory is rather new and speculative
- otherwise how could they get away with showing global cooling
and still be applauded by their fellow greens?
In truth,
scientists have difficulty predicting whether climate will
warm,
cool,
not change at all, or just change locally.
Why?
Because climate is practically the definition of a complex, chaotic system.
You can try to simulate such a system,
but you do not really know what will happen
short of trying it out.
Global warming theory is new and speculative, and
hardly has the same status in science as, say, the theory of evolution.
The movie
Don't Look Up (2021).
A satire of how the world reacts to climate change.
In this movie, a comet is headed towards earth and no one cares.
The movie is entertaining.
But why does no one care? It makes no sense.
It is bad drama.
It makes no sense that no one cares they are going to die in 6 months time.
Russia and China do not care either.
They let the US make the running on stopping the comet,
and only bother with a plan when the US aborts.
In real life, Russia and China would have launched missions against the comet on day 5, and day 10,
and never stopped launching.
They would have thrown hundreds of billions at it.
Everything they had.
The US sabotages Russia and China's plan to stop the comet.
In real life, Russia and China would nuke the US if they did that.
Another issue is that the media and corporations and politicians are sceptical of the threat for some reason.
And lonely outsiders are sounding the alarm.
In real life, the media and corporations and (most) politicians never shut up about global warming and climate change.
It is taught to children in schools.
Sceptics of the threat are the lonely outsiders - ignored, mocked and silenced.
Another issue is why did they make a movie about a comet?
Why not a movie about the world getting warmer?
Is it because the world getting warmer is not very scary?
Isn't that the same reason they made an ice age in
The Day After Tomorrow?
Because the world getting warmer is not very scary
and would not make a good film.
The lack of a track record of successful predictions:
To repeat, global warming theory is one of the more speculative theories of science.
There is a long history of
failed predictions
in this kind of field.
I am old enough to remember, for example,
the great fear in the 1970s
of the world population explosion.
The predictions made about this turn out to have been nonsense
(Europe, for example, is facing a population crash),
so it is hard to take the green doom-mongers seriously about a new topic.
I agree people should be cautious,
and I agree that we should be looking at new technology that impacts less on the environment.
But I'm just explaining why I'm not very worried so far.
If global warming is happening,
then technology, not rustic poverty, will be the answer:
If global warming is happening, the only solution that will
actually work
will be a technological one.
That is, new technology to stop (and reverse) global warming,
yet still let us be rich, own houses and drive cars.
No solution based on returning to rustic poverty will work.
The third world must become rich like us, and own
houses and cars like us.
It's up to us to invent technology to ensure that can happen without
ruining the environment. I'm sure we can do it.
UK temperature
since 1659.
Are we simply warming up after the
Little Ice Age
(16th cent to 19th cent),
and returning to something like the
Medieval Warm Period
(10th cent to 14th cent),
or is it something more sinister?
Temperature in C from
Greenland ice core.
It does show a recent warming,
but one that started in the early 19th century,
and also a modest one compared to the
Medieval Warm Period,
which itself is modest compared to earlier historical warm periods.
Temperature in C from
Greenland ice core.
Years in AD along bottom axis.
Modern warming compared to
Medieval Warm Period.
Note however: The Medieval Warm Period may have been just a local event (in the North Atlantic region).
Looking at the actual figures for average global temperature may give you a surprise.
The GISTEMP
figures at the
NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS)
show average global temperature.
See table.
More here.
The head of GISS,
James Hansen,
is a leading global warming activist.
This makes one wonder whether global warming models have not influenced their figures -
especially since their figures are not raw data (see below).
It might be better to just have an organisation compiling figures
without being involved in activism.
Anyway, NASA GISTEMP first published results in 1981.
They give the following:
Average for 1951-80: 14.00 ° C.
1981: 14 + ("J-D") 0.39 = 14.39 ° C.
1982: 14.06 ° C.
1983: 14.32 ° C.
1984: 14.14 ° C.
1985: 14.11 ° C.
1986: 14.19 ° C.
1987: 14.34 ° C.
1988: 14.41 ° C.
1989: 14.27 ° C.
1990: 14.47 ° C.
1991: 14.42 ° C.
1992: 14.14 ° C.
1993: 14.17 ° C.
1994: 14.30 ° C.
1995: 14.44 ° C.
1996: 14.36 ° C.
1997: 14.38 ° C.
1998: 14.70 ° C.
1999: 14.42 ° C.
2000: 14.41 ° C.
2001: 14.56 ° C.
2002: 14.68 ° C.
2003: 14.65 ° C.
2004: 14.59 ° C.
2005: 14.77 ° C.
2006: 14.64 ° C.
2007: 14.74 ° C.
2008: 14.56 ° C.
2009: 14.71 ° C.
These look like simple temperature readings at the time,
but this is not the case.
All figures, past and present, are constantly adjusted according to some model.
See
here
how the temperature given for years in the past
used to be
different.
Anyway, let us plot the figures above.
The most dramatic way to plot the data would be with the narrowest Y-range:
But you could also of course graph it with a wider Y-range:
This plot is perfectly accurate too:
Average global temperature in ° C
since 1880.
Graphic from
here.
Data is
the Dec-Nov ("D-N") averages from NASA GISTEMP above.
At no point since 1880 did average global temperature
go down to 13 ° C
or up to 15 ° C.
Changing the Y-range
You can obviously mislead with the Y-range.
Set the Y-range too wide
(e.g. from 0 to 100 ° C)
and then
you would not notice even apocalyptic
warming or cooling.
But likewise, you can always pick a narrow Y-range to make any change look dramatic.
If there is any warming or cooling trend, no matter how modest,
a suitable narrowing of the Y-range can make it look dramatic.
For instance, if the above figures ran not from 14.0 to 14.8,
but rather from 14.00 to 14.08,
we could still make it look dramatic:
So is the actual temperature variation terrifying?
Or surprisingly small?
In the correct chart,
the climate change scientists are worried by the absolute size of the variation,
and we should certainly take that seriously.
But the modest size of the variation may still come as a surprise to people
seeing this for the first time.
The last decade
There was a record high in 1998, and since then temperature has stayed around this level
rather than rising further.
So no matter how you plot the last decade, it doesn't look like much change.
Whether with a narrow Y-range:
So is it worrying?
The climate change scientists are worried that temperature has stayed at the record 1998 level,
and we should certainly take that seriously.
But the lack of any rise in the past decade
may still come as a surprise to people seeing this for the first time.
A final question is:
If the earth is actually warming a little bit, would that be bad?
It's obviously hard to make a scary movie about it.
That's why
The Day After Tomorrow
decided to show global cooling.
Obviously some kind of runaway warming would be terrible.
But a modest warming would probably be good for humans
and good for life.
Matt Ridley
thinks humans are causing some global warming,
but thinks this will be good for the world, not bad.
One problem I have with this
is that surely the warming will carry on forever?
(As long as humans carry on using current technologies.)
How Fossil Fuels Have Greened the Planet, Matt Ridley, 4 Jan 2013,
says the earth is getting greener.
He references the NDVI
satellite imagery of vegetation:
"Between 1982 and 2011, 20.5% of the world's vegetated area got greener, while just 3% grew browner".
Ridley says humans are causing this, and it is good:
"The inescapable if unfashionable conclusion is that the human use of fossil fuels has been causing the greening of the planet in three separate ways: first, by displacing firewood as a fuel; second, by warming the climate; and third, by raising carbon dioxide levels, which raise plant growth rates."
Isn't he missing
urbanisation
and the decline of mass farming?
At least in developed countries.
Urbanisation
and the continued decline of mass farming
has resulted in a massive re-growth in forest cover in Europe,
and the dramatic return of large animals.
See full size.
From Our World in Data.
Obama asserts that climate change
is already causing disasters:
"the threat from climate change is serious, it is urgent, and it is growing. ...
Rising sea levels threaten every coastline.
More powerful storms and floods threaten every continent.
More frequent drought and crop failures breed hunger and conflict in places where hunger and conflict already thrive.
On shrinking islands, families are already being forced to flee their homes as climate refugees."
The evidence for all these confident assertions is
pretty weak.
Some data in response to Obama's UN speech above
notes that deaths from storms, floods and droughts have not increased.
If the Greens lie about this, it is hard to totally trust them on more opaque topics
such as temperature and sea level.
Fewer people than ever are dying from climate-related catastrophes.
From Bjørn Lomborg,
who says:
"Notice that the reduction in absolute deaths has happened while the global population has increased four-fold.
The individual risk of dying from climate-related disasters has declined by 98.9%."
