Arguments
Explaining climate change science & rebutting global warming misinformation
Scientific skepticism is healthy. Scientists should always challenge themselves to improve their understanding. Yet this isn't what happens with climate change denial. Skeptics vigorously criticise any evidence that supports man-made global warming and yet embrace any argument, op-ed, blog or study that purports to refute global warming. This website gets skeptical about global warming skepticism. Do their arguments have any scientific basis? What does the peer reviewed scientific literature say?
2021 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #7
Posted on 13 February 2021 by John Hartz
Editor's Choice
EPA to jettison major Obama climate rule, as Biden eyes a bigger push
The Clean Power Plan had been tied up in litigation, then replaced by President Donald Trump
The Biden administration indicated Friday it will not try to resurrect the Clean Power Plan, a controversial Obama-era policy that set climate pollution targets for every state’s electricity sector and gave officials flexibility on how they would make those reductions by the end of the decade.
Instead, the Environmental Protection Agency said in a federal judicial filing, the Biden administration is seeking a court’s blessing to propose a new rule aimed at limiting greenhouse gas pollution from the nation’s power plants, which represent the second-largest source of emissions.
“As a practical matter, the reinstatement of the [Clean Power Plan] would not make sense,” Joseph Goffman, the acting assistant administrator for the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, wrote in an accompanying memo to the agency’s regional offices. He noted that the deadline for states to submit their plans had passed and that “ongoing changes in electricity generation” mean the goals of the Obama-era regulation already had been met.
Click here to access the entire article as originally published on the Washington Post website.
EPA to jettison major Obama climate rule, as Biden eyes a bigger push by Brady Dennis and Juliet Eilperin, Climate & Environment, Washington Post, Feb 11, 2021
Scientists sceptical of new bat study linking climate change to Covid-19 emergence
Posted on 12 February 2021 by Guest Author
This commentary, authored by Ayesha Tandon, was originally published on the Carbon Brief website on Feb 5, 2021. It is reposted below in its entirety. Click here to access the original article and comments posted on Carbon Brief.
Photo by James Wainscoat on Unsplash
A new study suggests that climate change is enabling the evolution of new coronaviruses by creating “hotspots” for multiple bat species.
The study, published in the journal Science of the Total Environment, finds that Yunnan province in southern China, as well as neighbouring regions of Myanmar and Laos, have become global hotspots of bat species “richness” over the past century.
Around 40 species of bat have moved into the region, the authors say, bringing roughly 100 additional types of coronaviruses with them. This is due to climate change-induced changes in vegetation, they argue, adding that the “bat-borne ancestors” of SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2 – the latter being the virus that causes Covid-19 – are thought to have originated there.
However, many scientists not involved in the study say they have concerns about the data used in the study and the conclusions it draws. One tells Carbon Brief that the study makes “too many assumptions…to conclude that climate change could have increased the likelihood of the pandemic occurring in this way”.
Investors flee Big Oil as portfolios get drilled
Posted on 11 February 2021 by Guest Author
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Karin Kirk
While climate advocates have long had science on their side, Big Oil has relied on leveraging its financial might and political clout to cast doubt on the practicality of moving the global economy away from fossil fuels and toward a more sustainable path of renewable energy. But that financial might has been eroding for a decade, and in 2020 it took its biggest hit yet.
As the coronavirus pandemic prompted lockdowns, work-from-home arrangements, and curbs on travel and recreation, fuel demand tanked and oil prices collapsed. Traditional energy companies suffered staggering losses and their stock prices slid. Producers walked away from exploration and drilling projects, and banks and portfolio managers looked elsewhere for sound investments
The traditional energy industry has been the worst-performing sector on Wall Street for a decade even before the pandemic hit. In 2020, its backslide was historic. The Energy Select Sector SPDR Fund, whose holdings include ExxonMobil and Chevron, lost more than 50 percent between January and October. By some measures, Big Oil’s downturn, compared to the broader market, was the worst performance of any sector going back to before the Great Depression.
Financial hits are coming from several directions at once, with investment firm Goldman Sachs deciding for the first time to allocate more toward renewables than fossil fuels; automakers following the lead of Tesla and pouring money into developing electric vehicle technology to replace internal combustion engines; and the prices of solar and wind coming down as improvements in batteries and storage technology make them ever more practical.
As more movers and shakers begin to agree with climate advocates for financial as well as environmental reasons, a permanent shift within the energy industry seems to be taking shape.
Skeptical Science New Research for Week #6, 2021
Posted on 10 February 2021 by doug_bostrom
The myth of "temporal independence?" 
Nordhaus 1992 hs been a fat target for disagreement, perhaps especially because the resultant DICE was an early entrant and certainly the most ambitious effort of its day, hence highly conspicuous, widely adopted, possibly prone to oversights especially given its underpinning "school" of economics. Michael Grubb et al 1992 pointed out some static features built into DICE that might not pan out. 25 years have passed since those observations. Now, Grubb et al 2021 explore how certain features baked into DICE have been propagated in community "wisdom" and have cemented themselves into educational and policy settings despite their being essentially mythological, unsupported, and yet having profound effects on how our future will unroll:
Twenty-five years ago, Grubb et al. (1995) argued that an important issue for such assessment could be the dynamic characteristics of energy systems. They suggested that energy systems had potential to adapt to emission constraints, but in ways constrained by their very long-lived and path-dependent nature. A quarter of a century on, we review the accumulated evidence and modeling developments concerning these issues and their implications for assessing the global costs, benefits, and optimal trajectories of climate change mitigation—the main objective of DICE and other “aggregate cost-benefit analysis” (Weyant, 2017) models (hereafter, termed “DICE and related stylized models”).
Our point is simple. Across the now huge and diverse literature on DICE and related stylized models, the vast majority share one common structural assumption: that the cost of cutting emissions in a given period is unrelated to the previous pathway, and does not affect the subsequent prospects. This we term an assumption of temporal independence. Our review explores three main characteristics of “dynamic realism” (inertia, induced innovation, and path dependence) which demonstrate this to be a “myth”—a common and convenient assumption which is contradicted by the evidence.
Modeling myths: On DICE and dynamic realism in integrated assessment models of climate change mitigation fully walks readers through the implications of "getting it right" for economic models of dealing with climate change, and how attachment to myths may foreclose desirable future outcomes or at least make them far more expensive to realize. It's a large and complicated topic but the paper is remarkably digestible. Open access and free to read.
Housekeeping
Additional article info: Most articles appearing in New Research now sport primary author and journal attributions. In some cases this information is not available via our automated assistance.
Notable authors: A lot of money changing direction is necessarily part of systematically dealing with anthropogenic climate change. As with similar other events, there's strong incentive to help steer public policy in ways more favorable to legacy recipients of such money. Although rare, sometimes such activities become visible in academic publications. In New Research listings, an additional link denoted as "(author information)" may appear in a given article listing. This link is supplied for papers involving authors with a track record of serious conflicts in connection with their research on climate change, or bearing an outstanding debt in terms of having published papers with identified but unaddressed faults. This supplementary link will read to further reading on a problematic author's background information.
Environmentalists' Climate Change Myths
Posted on 9 February 2021 by Guest Author
Climate change is finally receiving the attention it deserves, but is it getting any clearer?! For those fighting climate change, it can often feel like a fight to get clear facts on the situation. So I'm here to put straight some common myths you might have come across on the way!?
0:00? Intro
1:24? Committed Warming?
2:24? Feedbacks?
3:19? Aerosols?
3:45? Methane?
4:55? Experts?
6:22? Causes?
7:12? Solutions?
8:08? Too late?
9:08? Conclusion
Support ClimateAdam on patreon: http://patreon.com/climateadam
How long might the Arctic's 'Last Ice' area endure?
Posted on 8 February 2021 by greenman3610
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections
Picture a logjam made of ice. And a bottleneck.
The large blocks of ice dam up a narrow passage. And prevent other large blocks of ice from passing through, while allowing smaller ones passage.
The longer that ice stays in place, the less time the ice upstream has to proceed southward.
That sums up the real-life situation on the upper edges of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago and Greenland, home to the world’s oldest and thickest sea ice. Canada in 2019 designated the area the Tuvaijuittuq Marine Protected Area. To scientists and others it’s simply called “the Last Ice area.”
The story of that critical ice – critical because of its age and thickness – is the subject of independent videographer Peter Sinclair’s current “This is not Cool” video for Yale Climate Connections.
2021 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming Digest #6
Posted on 7 February 2021 by John Hartz
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Story of the Week...
Why call recent disasters ‘natural’ when they really aren’t?
Wildfires, storms, and viruses now are exacerbated by climate change. Perhaps we should call them what they are: disasters of our own making.
At a news conference in mid-August of last year, California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, announced that there were 367 “known” wildfires burning in the state. “I say ‘known’ fires,” Newsom said, “but the prospect of that number going up is very real.” A couple of days later the number did, in fact, increase, to 560. A few weeks after that, many of the blazes were still burning, and one—the Doe fire, north of Santa Rosa—had grown into the largest conflagration in California history. The smoke from the state was so bad that it veiled the sun in New England. By the time most of California’s flames had been put out in late November, at least 31 people had been killed and tens of thousands evacuated.
Even as more than 15,000 firefighters were battling the California wildfires, Hurricane Laura was bearing down on Louisiana. As it passed over the Gulf of Mexico, it strengthened at a near-record rate. In just 24 hours it zoomed from a Category 1 to a Category 4 storm. By the time it hit Cameron Parish, early in the morning of August 27, it was the fifth fiercest hurricane to make landfall in U.S. history. The storm caused at least 16 U.S. deaths and up to $12 billion in damages.
Twenty years ago, crises like the Doe fire and Hurricane Laura could have been described as “natural disasters.” Thanks to climate change, this is no longer the case. Right around the time of Newsom’s press conference, the mercury in Death Valley hit 130°F, the highest temperature ever reliably recorded on Earth. A hotter, drier California is much more likely to burst into flames. The Gulf too is heating up, with dangerous consequences. Hurricanes draw their energy from the warmth of the surface waters and so are becoming stronger and more apt to intensify. I’ve been reporting on climate change for almost two decades, and I’ve come to think that we need a new term to describe these events. Perhaps we should call them “man-made natural disasters.”
Click here to access the entire article as originally published on the National Geographic website.
Why call recent disasters ‘natural’ when they really aren’t? by Elizabeth Kolbert, The Big Idea, National Geographic, Feb 2, 2021 (March 2021 Print Edition)
2021 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #6
Posted on 6 February 2021 by John Hartz
Editor's Choice
Got Climate Anxiety? These People Are Doing Something About It
Distress over global warming is increasing, but formal and informal support networks are springing up, too.
Hoi Chan
After Britt Wray married in 2017, she and her husband began discussing whether or not they were going to have children. The conversation quickly turned to climate change and to the planet those children might inherit.
“It was very, very heavy,” said Dr. Wray, now a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. “I wasn’t expecting it.” She said she became sad and stressed, crying when she read new climate reports or heard activists speak.
Jennifer Atkinson, an associate professor of environmental humanities at the University of Washington, Bothell, became depressed after students told her they couldn’t sleep because they feared social collapse or mass extinction.
There are different terms for what the two women experienced, including eco-anxiety and climate grief, and Dr. Wray calls it eco-distress. “It’s not just anxiety that shows up when we’re waking up to the climate crisis,” she said. “It’s dread, it’s grief, it’s fear.”
Click here to access the entire article as originally published on the New York Times website. The remaining portion of the article contains many embedded links to available resources.
Got Climate Anxiety? These People Are Doing Something About It by Susan Shain, Climate & Environment, New York Times, Feb 4, 2021
Deadlines loom for Capitol Hill action on Trump-era climate issues
Posted on 5 February 2021 by Guest Author
This commentary, authored by Gary Yohe, Henry Jacoby, Richard Richels and Benjamin Santer, was originally published on the Yale Climate Connections website on Jan 26, 2021. It is reposted below in its entirety. Click here to access the original article posted on Yale Climate Connections.
COMMENTARY
Deadlines loom for Capitol Hill action on Trump-era climate issues
As with the new Biden administration, Congress too faces a deadline for acting on Trump-era 'eleventh-hour' regulations.
by Gary Yohe, Henry Jacoby, Richard Richels and Benjamin Santer
Much ink has been spilled in recent weeks, figuratively speaking, on what the Biden/Harris administration’s first 100 days in office reveal about its making climate change a top priority. Those words have flowed both at this site and many other venues.
The Washington Post’s January 22 posting of “Tracking Biden’s environmental actions” is notable. Written by Post Pulitzer Prize winners Juliet Eilperin and Brady Dennis, with graphics editing by John Muyskens, the piece compiles Trump administration environmental, conservation, and energy regulations and policies that the Biden team hopes to overturn or “unwind.”
“Biden can overturn some of them with a stroke of a pen,” they write. “Others will take years to undo, and some may never be reversed.”
Listing 64 air quality and greenhouse gas initiatives, they count one (stepping back into the Paris Climate Agreement) as having been overturned and another 21 as being “easy” to reverse. They score another 27 Trump actions as “medium” – requiring rewriting a regulation or pursuing a successful court action; and 15 as “difficult” – requiring lengthy rule-making process, legislation, or involved court action.
Biden's climate executive orders are a mini-Green New Deal
Posted on 4 February 2021 by dana1981
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections
Imagine a deployment of federal investments to curb U.S. greenhouse gas emissions from various sectors including electricity, transportation, and agriculture, with the goal of creating millions of jobs and an eye on correcting environmental injustices in the process.
It sounds just like what was outlined in the February 2019 House Green New Deal Resolution, but also describes President Biden’s new Executive Order on Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad. Although he disavowed the Green New Deal on the presidential campaign trail, Biden’s latest climate executive order adheres closely to its framework.
Though smaller in scale, given that executive orders only apply to federal agency actions rather than the nation as a whole, this effort could reasonably be described as a mini-Green New Deal.
Targeting clean electricity and EVs
To curb greenhouse gas emissions, the climate crisis executive order targets the electricity and transportation sectors, combined responsible for more than half of American carbon pollution. The order calls on federal agencies to use “all available procurement authorities to achieve or facilitate:
i) a carbon pollution-free electricity sector no later than 2035; and
(ii) clean and zero-emission vehicles for federal, state, local, and tribal government fleets, including vehicles of the United States Postal Service.”
The executive order, applicable only to federal agencies and properties, also notes, “the plan shall recommend any additional legislation needed to accomplish these objectives.” EPA can use the order to justify regulating fossil fuel pollution, but given the legal challenges to EPA’s previous power plant greenhouse gas regulation efforts under the Clean Power Plan first launched by the Obama/Biden administration in 2015, reaching the goal of zero emissions from the electricity sector by 2035 may require legislation from Congress. That’s a plausible but challenging prospect.
The directive for government fleets to transition to zero-emissions vehicles may be one of the most consequential components of President Biden’s climate executive orders. The transportation sector accounts for the largest chunk of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions at 28%. Unlike in the electricity sector, where emissions have steadily declined over the past decade as coal is replaced by cheaper and cleaner alternatives, transportation emissions remain stagnant at 2005 levels. Electric vehicles over time are expected to substantially reduce the transportation sector carbon footprint, especially when fueled by a steadily cleaner electric grid. But for now, EVs and plug-in hybrids account for just 2% of new U.S. vehicle sales. The average lifespan of a passenger car is close to 12 years, so turnover to cleaner alternatives will take time.
However, the federal fleet includes nearly 650,000 vehicles. There are currently 1.4 million EVs (including plug-in hybrids) in the U.S., so electrifying the federal fleet would increase that number by nearly 50%. The order did not stipulate a timeframe for the transition, or whether federal vehicles will be replaced by EVs once they have reached the end of their lifespans or sooner. Regardless, this federal procurement will create a stable boost in demand for the EV industry and will thus help reduce the costs of the vehicles and key components like batteries.
California Governor Gavin Newsom similarly signed an executive order in September 2020 mandating that all new passenger cars and trucks sold in the state must be emission-free by 2035. (Large freight-carrying trucks are regulated by the California Air Resources Board.) Massachusetts Republican Governor Charlie Baker set the same 2035 target just over a month ago in his state’s Clean Energy and Climate Plan. The auto industry appears to have received the message: Two days after Biden signed his climate crisis executive order, General Motors announced its intent to offer only zero-emissions vehicles by 2035, and GM has begun hiring over a thousand workers at two U.S. facilities to make batteries and EVs.
Skeptical Science New Research for Week #5, 2021
Posted on 3 February 2021 by doug_bostrom
BAMS Extreme Events of 2019
The Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society has published its annual retrospective on 2019's extreme weather events and their connection to climate change, "Explaining Extreme Events of 2019 from a Climate Perspective." The entire collection of articles is available here, (pdf) or as separate pieces down below. Open access, fascinating.
Research productivity
The BAMS 2019 report's author country constituency leads us back to the mission of Skeptical Science, in an elliptical way.
Once we've gotten past straight climate science denial in the slice of a general population hoping to duck primary responsibility for the accidental mess we've made of Earth's climate, a fork in the road presents itself, with one major path signed as "Solutions Denial." Down that road can be found various novel rhetorical gambits and other creative shirking methods, the destination being "I don't have to do anything about my mess." One favorite technique is to point to somebody else's imperfections and lean on those as an excuse to avoid self-improvement.
China is a favorite shiny object to employ for "but what about them and if they don't change, why should I?" This "argument" is about as nonsensical as pointing to another vehicle full of children not wearing safety belts as an excuse to let one's own offspring be unrestrained and ready for launch through the windshield. However (and more pertinent to Skeptical Science New Research), China is in fact paying scrupulous attention to scientific research of anthropogenic climate change, climate change mitigation, decarbonization and the swath of public policy necessary to get the country past its heavy dependence on hydrocarbons ("mitigation" is "I own it and I have to fix it," for the rest of us).
This is amply apparent with a glance at the BAMS 2019 report, or any edition of New Research. China is richly equipped with supercomputer horsepower and is deploying those petaflops to perform climate modeling integrated with reanalysis at a prodigious scale, with a noticeable concentration in regional climate effects on agriculture, megacities and hydrology, these of course being special preoccupations for the country context. Policy research is very active in attempting to identify how to thread the needle of maintaining economic growth at historically high rates while rapidly decarbonizing. There is a notable level of intent for application to this collective research effort highly suggestive of urgency. China isn't going to do a perfect job in dealing with anthropogenic climate change of course (which nation is?) but neither is the country running away from the problem. China seems to fully understand the potential cost of failure to deal with climate change and appears to be engaging in a concerted effort to deal with the problem.
So, those hoping to exploit China as an excuse to dodge local responsibility may increasingly expect to hear an invitation for comparison thrown back: "OK. What are you doing about the problem?" To the extent that question goes unanswered, we're hearing hypocrisy draped on a scapegoat framework, with the scapegoat being not particularly guilty. There are in fact unfavorabe discrepancies visible in the research streams of various countries with adequate resources to drive research, these not being reflective of lack of talent but in the nature of funding priorities. Those priorities are where we're able to tell the difference between one nation and another, when it comes to assessing credibility of effort.
Next self-paced run of Denial101x starts on February 9
Posted on 2 February 2021 by BaerbelW
The next iteration of our free online course, Making Sense of Climate Science Denial, starts on February 9 2021 and it will be the 14th run since the very first one in April 2015. Since then, more than 40,000 students from over 180 countries have registered for our MOOC which has been running either as a 7 weeks long paced or a longer running self-paced version like the upcoming one. The next run will again be available troughout the year until December 14 2021, giving you ample time to work through the material at your own pace. Click on the graphic below to open an interactive PDF file which lets you explore our MOOC in detail. It was created for a conference presentation in 2019.
A Climate Bet Impossible to Lose
Posted on 1 February 2021 by Rob Honeycutt
Ten years ago I was just doing what I often do: following various links and conversations online where people are denying man-made climate change. I ended up on the German website NoTricksZone where I got caught up in a discussion related to climate projections. I made an off-handed comment saying something like, “Why is it those who reject AGW will never put their money where their mouth is and make a bet?” Lo and behold, the owner of NTZ, Pierre Gosslin, sent me an email suggesting that we do just that. And with that, the “Climate Bet for Charity” was born.
As of January 2021 the bet has concluded. I’m sure no one is in doubt about who won. For that matter, there was never any doubt about which side would win this bet from the start. Someone in New Zealand with the website kiwithinker.com started tracking the data with some interesting adjustments along the way. I also kept my own version of a tracking system that works differently but ends up with the same results. Here, I’m going to lay out the structure of the bet, how the data tracked, why the results are what they are, and where we are moving forward.
2021 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming Digest #5
Posted on 31 January 2021 by John Hartz
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Story of the Week...
Tracking Biden’s environmental actions
The new president is unwinding Trump’s legacy while forging his own
President Biden has placed climate change squarely at the center of his White House agenda, using his first hours in office to rejoin the Paris climate accord and begin overturning more than 100 environmental actions taken by the Trump administration.
He has in the past week made it clear he will go well beyond reversing former president Donald Trump’s policies. On Jan. 27 he signed an executive order that elevated climate change as a national security issue; instructed every agency to take climate change into account when formulating its policies; directed the government to buy clean and zero-emission vehicles for federal, state, local and tribal government fleets; established a new civilian conservation corps; and ordered a plan for conserving 30 percent of America’s lands and waters by the end of the decade.
“In my view, we’ve already waited too long to deal with this climate crisis. We can’t wait any longer,” Biden told reporters. “We see it with our own eyes. We feel it. We know it in our bones and it’s time to act.”
Click here to access the entire article as originally published on the Washington post website.
Tracking Biden’s environmental actions by Juliet Eilperin, Brady Dennis & John Muyskens, Climate & Environment, Washington Post, Updated Jan 29, 2021
2021 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #5
Posted on 30 January 2021 by John Hartz
Editor's Choice
Informing the New Administration: Action on Climate Change for a More Sustainable, Resilient Future
As the COVID-19 pandemic quickly engulfed the nation and the world, a slower-moving crisis — but potentially even more damaging — has been unfolding for decades. The effects of climate change are already being felt by millions. In the last year alone, the western U.S. experienced the worst wildfire season on record, there was historic flooding in the Midwest, and the Atlantic had a record-breaking hurricane and tropical storm season. Given current and projected global greenhouse gas emissions, more extreme events of this kind are inevitable. And just as with the COVID-19 pandemic, the impacts of climate change are being disproportionately borne by society’s most vulnerable — racial and ethnic minorities and the poor.
President Biden has called climate change “the existential threat of our time” and has signaled his commitment to a unified, coordinated national and international response from the United States. On his first day in office, Biden signed executive orders to reenter the nation into the Paris Climate Agreement and to reestablish federal efforts to estimate the social cost of carbon — the cost of damages, in dollars, caused by each ton of greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere — to be informed by recommendations in a 2017 report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
Indeed, the National Academies have an extensive body of work to inform the new administration’s efforts to fight climate change, transform the economy, and build a more resilient, sustainable society.
“The effects of climate change are cascading far beyond the environment and include serious implications for the economy, human health, and national security,” said National Academy of Sciences President Marcia McNutt. “Building on lessons learned from the pandemic, our institution is developing a coordinated, cross-cutting effort to mobilize expertise across the sciences, engineering, and medicine to address the climate crisis on multiple fronts. Our goal is to provide decision-makers at all levels with the types of actionable advice and information they need to respond.”
Click here to access the entire article as originally published on the NAS website.
Informing the New Administration: Action on Climate Change for a More Sustainable, Resilient Future, Feature Story, The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Jan 22, 2021
Note: For more information on the projects, reports, and activities discussed in the article, go to the NAS Climate Resources collection.
Refining the remaining 1.5C ‘carbon budget’
Posted on 29 January 2021 by Guest Author
This article, guest authored by Dr Kasia Tokarska and Dr Damon Matthews was originally published on the Carbon Brief website on Jan 19, 2021. It is reposted below in its entirety. Click here to access the original article and comments posted on Carbon Brief.
The remaining “carbon budget” specifies the maximum amount of CO2 that may be emitted to stabilise warming at a particular level – such as the Paris Agreement’s 1.5C target.
Carbon budgets have played an important role in national and international climate policy – not least being a key rationale for adopting net-zero emissions targets.
Yet, there are many sources of uncertainty that make it challenging to estimate the remaining carbon budget in real-world conditions – especially for the most ambitious mitigation targets.
In our new study, published in Nature’s Communications Earth and Environment journal, we present an integrated approach to quantifying these uncertainties and incorporating them into estimates of the remaining carbon budget.
For the 1.5C target, we estimate a range of 230-440bn tonnes of CO2 (GtCO2) from 2020 onwards, which corresponds to a two-in-three to one-in-two chance of not exceeding 1.5C of global warming since pre-industrial times.
This is equivalent to between six and 11 years of global emissions, if they remain at current rates and do not start declining.
However, we emphasise that the remaining carbon budget is not a single number, but rather a distribution that reflects the probability of meeting a target – that is, the greater the chance of meeting the budget, the smaller amount of CO2 that can be emitted.
There is also an approximately one-in-six chance that the remaining carbon budget for 1.5C has already been exceeded.
If emissions decline, the budget would last longer. In the context of net-zero targets, our 230-440bn tonne range would be consistent with a scenario where CO2 emissions decrease linearly from 2019 levels to net-zero by between 2032 and 2042.
The 7% drop in emissions caused by Covid lockdowns in 2020 is in line with this rate of decrease. This emphasises that it is more important than ever that economic recovery efforts are targeted to drive emissions down further to keep the 1.5C target within reach.
Case study - identifying myths and fallacies in Climate Science (Mis)Information Briefs
Posted on 28 January 2021 by BaerbelW
This short blog post and the linked PDF document is the result of a collaborative effort by Anne-Marie Blackburn, Dana Nuccitelli, Bärbel Winkler, Ken Rice and John Cook.
When the climate change (mis)information briefs pushed by David Legates and others started to make the rounds in January 2021 we wondered whether or not they would be worth spending any time to debunk. This is sometimes a bit of a toss-up as, on the one hand, you have to debunk misinformation often and properly, while on the other you don’t want to give it undue publicity while doing so. This is illustrated by this chart from the recently published Debunking Handbook 2020 outlining the strategic landscape for debunking:
Figure 1: The strategic landscape of debunking (The Debunking Handbook 2020)
Eventually the urge of some of our team members to debunk these briefs won out and Anne-Marie Blackburn, Dana Nuccitelli, Bärbel Winkler, Ken Rice, and John Cook collaborated to put together a document for easy reference to point people to as and when needed. Instead of providing detailed explanations of all that is wrong in the flyers, we decided to quickly identify the most obvious examples of long-debunked myths. These are shown in the document as screenshots (Figure 2) from the flyers followed by a link to the relevant rebuttal and a short explanation of why the assertion is wrong:
Skeptical Science New Research for Week #4, 2021
Posted on 27 January 2021 by doug_bostrom
Diaspora: perception departs from reality
In this collection of articles are two papers currently captivating the attention of people following the science and emergence of climate change, especially the rapid variety we've accidentally unleashed and which is now unfolding around us. The synthesis and review article Earth's Ice Imbalance by Slater et al arrives in the same week as Ocean forcing drives glacier retreat in Greenland, Wood et al. Less of a splash was generated by Greenland Ice Sheet mass balance (1992?2020) from calibrated radar altimetry by Simonson and others, a bit surprising given its dire message commensurate with the other two papers. Together the three might be termed a dense, slushy snowball to our collective ear, an unmistakable signal. We're losing ice at a terrific rate, with our expectations of speed showing signs of being underestimations. All of these publications are open access and free to read.
Despite the growing abundance of increasingly refined theoretical description amply supported by increasingly obvious evidence such as "ice melts when it gets warmer," there's yet a group of people with perceptions quite outside of what we know, in a state of denial. These folks come in various styles. Analogizing to gravitation, denial comes in a range of extremity from "there is no gravitation" through "big G isn't known," all the way to "yes, but the sign of G is opposite." All of these claims of course fail in the face of dropping a bowling ball into an arrangement of glassware. We might not be able to predict the exact vectors of all resulting shards, but the general effects are perfectly foreseeable. We have a good grasp of the kinetic energy of the ball delivered to the glassware, thanks to our understanding of gravitation. We know about the fracture mechanics of glass well enough to predict that stemware will be broken. It's fairly obvious that the glassware won't be better after the impact.
People in a state of professed scientific denial supported by alternative perceptions are arguably more interesting and mysterious and thus attractively curious than plain old physics. Human nature remains a puzzle manifesting itself in unsolved problems. Why would somebody insist that "2+2=3.5," despite all evidence to the contrary? Thus it's not surprising but rather inevitable that science deniers themselves become the repeated subject of scientific investigation.
We might not be able to answer the "why" questions right now, but we can work to characterize and describe the unusual nature of people in a state of denial. This week we find two interesting investigations of this kind.
A team led by Stefano Caserini takes a deep dive into the composition of signatories of an anti-scientific petition in Evaluating the scientific credentials of the supporters of public petitions denying anthropogenic climate change, evaluating signers in a way that fully exposes how generally irrelevant these people are to helping the public to a good understanding of our climate predicament. Among their findings:
When limiting the analysis to the climate change literature in the last 10 years (2010–2019, a very long period in fast-developing fields such as climate science), the numbers change drastically (Fig. 1e). The total output of the promoters and signatories amounts to 24 unique articles, or to 0.026 articles per capita per year. 63% of the promoters have no relevant publications. Only 5 of these 24 articles appear in the top 10 journals for number of published articles or impact factor in categories relevant to climate change. The 24 articles have been cited 652 times, of which 235 (36%) are self-citations.
The article is distinguished by its highly granular and detailed approach. Open access, free to read.
Study: Accounting for value of nature reinforces Paris climate targets
Posted on 26 January 2021 by dana1981
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections
A new study in Nature Sustainability incorporates the damages that climate change does to healthy ecosystems into standard climate-economics models. The key finding in the study by Bernardo Bastien-Olvera and Frances Moore from the University of California at Davis: The models have been underestimating the cost of climate damages to society by a factor of more than five.
Their study concludes that the most cost-effective emissions pathway results in just 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) additional global warming by 2100, consistent with the “aspirational” objective of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement.
Models that combine climate science and economics, called “integrated assessment models” (IAMs), are critical tools in developing and implementing climate policies and regulations. In 2010, an Obama administration governmental interagency working group used IAMs to establish the social cost of carbon – the first federal estimates of climate damage costs caused by carbon pollution. That number guides federal agencies required to consider the costs and benefits of proposed regulations.
Given the importance of the social cost of carbon to federal rulemaking, some critics have complained that the Trump EPA used what they see as creative accounting to slash the government’s estimate of the number. In one of his inauguration day Executive Orders, President Biden established a new Interagency Working Group to re-evaluate the social cost of all greenhouse gases.
IAMs often have long been criticized by those convinced they underestimate the costs of climate damages, in some cases to a degree that climate scientists consider absurd.
Perhaps the most prominent IAM is the Dynamic Integrated Climate-Economy (DICE) model, for which its creator, William Nordhaus, was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. Judging by DICE, the economically optimal carbon emissions pathway – that is, the pathway considered most cost-effective – would lead to a warming increase of more than 3°C (5.4°F) from pre-industrial temperatures by 2100 (under a 3% discount rate). IPCC has reported that reaching this level of further warming could likely result in severe consequences, including substantial species extinctions and very high risks of food supply instabilities.
In their Nature Sustainability study, the UC Davis researchers find that when natural capital is incorporated into the models, the emissions pathway that yields the best outcome for the global economy is more consistent with the dangerous risks posed by continued global warming described in the published climate science literature.
The SCIARA Project – Interactive Time Travel into the Climate Future
Posted on 25 January 2021 by Guest Author
This is a guest blog post by Daniel Tamberg, Potsdam, co-founder and director of SCIARA GmbH. The non-profit organisation SCIARA is developing and operating a flexible software platform for scientific simulation games that allows thousands of players to explore, design and understand possible climate futures together. Decision-makers in politics, business, society can use these games to test climate protection measures for social acceptance in advance, in order to be able to act more quickly and safely to combat global warming.
SCIARA is currently running a crowdfunding campaign to finance the next round of development and refinement after a first Minimal Viable Product (MVP) has been created in the last seven months by a team of software development professionals ten members strong.
Setting the stage
Once the evidence of what was causing the ozone hole had become clear in 1985, it only took a few years to ban the production and use of the responsible chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) after the Montreal Protocol was signed in 1987 and entered into force on 26 August 1989. Replacing the ozone-depleting CFCs was technically easy, and users were not subjected to any significant restrictions as a result of the technological changeover.
Tackling climate change requires global interaction of many complex technical and social solutions. Central industries will be massively affected and are - in some cases - bound to die: first and foremost the fossil energy industry as well as the automotive and aircraft industries, which have provided unprecedented prosperity in the past. And the lifestyle of billions of people will need to change.
Any politician or business leader who takes early and decisive action on climate change risks losing voters, customers, investors, and supporters - see French President Macron’s experience with the Yellow Vests. Those who act too late or too hesitantly, on the other hand, become responsible for the catastrophic effects of climate change in the future.
