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Explaining climate change science & rebutting global warming misinformation
Global warming is real and human-caused. It is leading to large-scale climate change. Under the guise of climate "skepticism", the public is bombarded with misinformation that casts doubt on the reality of human-caused global warming. This website gets skeptical about global warming "skepticism".
Our mission is simple: debunk climate misinformation by presenting peer-reviewed science and explaining the techniques of science denial.
2023 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #9
Posted on 4 March 2023 by John Hartz
Story of the Week
10 of the best climate change documentaries to see in 2023
These films screened at the recent Wild & Scenic Film Festival.
What happens when you watch 20 or so documentaries that grapple with climate change and its many impacts — all in a row? I set out to find out at the 21st annual Wild and Scenic Film Festival, held in February in Nevada County, California.
I braced myself for a heavy affair. After all, the climate crisis is exactly that: a crisis. Doom and gloom can be hard to avoid. But as a fest vet, I also knew I could count on the morale boost that comes with seeing great people, doing great things, everywhere, every day.
This year was especially galvanizing as the festival came to life in person again for the first time since COVID, with filmmakers, activists, and people who just like nature converging to watch a bunch of films about the environment and climate change.
“CommUnity” was the festival theme this year, a concept that came roaring to life throughout the nine film venues scattered across downtown Nevada City and Grass Valley, sister towns in the Sierra Nevada foothills. The film selections included a wide range of films focused on people with different backgrounds, and ASL interpreters stood alongside presenters on stage at several screenings.
The sense that we’re in this together reached far beyond the theater walls, infusing activist workshops, environmental vendor booths, and even shops and restaurants where people seemed ready, eager even, to talk about the films they’d seen.
One evening at a popular pizzeria and brewery in downtown Nevada City, I sat with a friend to scarf down a broccoli lemon pizza and an Emerald Pool IPA, named for the local river’s sublimely green waters. The festival was all the talk at our communal table; the couple to my left were retirees who had volunteered as ticket takers at a previous session. They ended up taking our advice on what to watch with their passes that night. And the group to my right included a staff member at SYRCL, the organization behind the festival (making her an obvious VIP in our midst), and a trio of her friends who’d traveled from other parts of the state expressly for the occasion.
Through conversations like those, a few key themes began to take shape. The following are the major takeaways from my time at this year’s festival — with film recommendations to back it all up.
Click here to access the entire article as originally posted on the Yale Climate Connections webiste.
10 of the best climate change documentaries to see in 2023 by Daisy Simmons, Yale Climate Connections, Mar 2, 2023
Skeptical Science New Research for Week #9 2023
Posted on 2 March 2023 by Doug Bostrom, Marc Kodack
Open Access Notables
From this week's government/NGO section, a welcome report from the United Nations: One Atmosphere: An independent expert review on Solar Radiation Modification research and deployment. For many of us— given the report's provenance— the foreword alone may be enough to form policy conclusions. For those who'd like to know more this is a comprehensive synthesis built on 126 key academic papers on the topic. Has SRM's time arrived? Hardly— the open question book is vast: "The review finds that there is little information on the risks of SRM and limited literature on the environmental and social impacts of these technologies. Even as a temporary response option, large-scale SRM deployment is fraught with scientific uncertainties and ethical issues. The evidence base is simply not there to make informed decisions."
Continuing with solar geoengineering but more in the nature of a matter of historical interest, Soviet and Russian perspectives on geoengineering and climate management starts with a brief recap of where the world stands with regard to our ambiguous relationship geoengineering especially with concern to solar radiation modfication, then leads us through a fascinating history of the Soviet Union's and latterly the Russian Federation's arc of scientific work in this arena. Mikhail Budyko and his work feature as what might be termed an intellectual axis of the entire enterprise.
Not a research paper but rather a news item from PNAS richly supported by citations, How to expand solar power without using precious land summarizes research on what's in the title, starting with a sunny lede: "Solar power can be a land-hungry competitor to farming. But deployed in the right way, solar installations can boost crop yields, save water, and protect biodiversity."
What's the cost on international climate mitigation of cargon leakage possibly caused by parochial climate legislation? That's what Eskander & Fankhauser investigate in The Impact of Climate Legislation on Trade-Related Carbon Emissions 1996–2018. They don't consider their findings to be the last word but do offer this encouraging conclusion: "We find that the passage of new climate laws has had no significant impact on trade-related carbon emissions and a negative long-term effect on international production emissions."
Practically speaking, public preferences predicate public policy. Here's a trifecta of papers of special use to poilcymakers guiding citizens through what needs to be a rapid process of modernization— at risk of retardation by various factors of human nature— with useful information on public thinking on these topics:
- Public acceptance of fossil fuel subsidy removal can be reinforced with revenue recycling
- Increasing intention to reduce fossil fuel use: a protection motivation theory-based experimental study
- Fossil fuel divestment and public climate change policy preferences: an experimental test in three countries
Often heard of in the abstract, loss and damage resolves into specific case histories. Nand, Bardsley & Suh lead us through such a story, in Addressing unavoidable climate change loss and damage: A case study from Fiji’s sugar industry. "Despite implementing climate change adaptation measures, Fiji’s sugar industry has faced devastating L&D from frequent and severe cyclones. Much of the climate change L&D to crops, property, and income was irreversible and unavoidable. Non-economic loss and damage (NELD) was found insurmountable in both field sites, including the loss of homes and places of worship, cascading and flow-on effects as well as the heightening of uncertainty, fear, and trauma."
109 articles in 51 journals by 682 contributing authors
Observations of climate change, effects
A spatiotemporal analysis of precipitation anomalies using rainfall Gini index between 1980 and 2022
Sahbeni et al., Atmospheric Science Letters, Open Access 10.1002/asl.1161
Global evaluation of the “dry gets drier, and wet gets wetter” paradigm from a terrestrial water storage change perspective
Xiong et al., Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, Open Access pdf 10.5194/hess-26-6457-2022
Has There Been a Recent Shallowing of Tropical Cyclones?
Lai & Toumi Toumi, Geophysical Research Letters, Open Access 10.1029/2022gl102184
At a glance - What has global warming done since 1998?
Posted on 28 February 2023 by John Mason, BaerbelW
On February 14, 2023 we announced our Rebuttal Update Project. This included an ask for feedback about the added "At a glance" section in the updated basic rebuttal versions. This weekly blog post series highlights this new section of one of the updated basic rebuttal versions and serves as a "bump" for our ask. This week features "What has global warming done since 1998?". More will follow in the upcoming weeks. Please follow the Further Reading link at the bottom to read the full rebuttal and to join the discussion in the comment thread there.
At a glance
This date-specific talking-point is now something of a historical curiosity, but we'll leave it in the database for now because it's such a good illustration of the simplistic yet reckless mindset of the serial climate change misinformer. And indeed, we could (out of sheer mischief) revise this myth by replacing "1998" with "2016" - and in a few years time, by "2023" or "2024". In fact, that's what we are now starting to see in the climate change misinformation stream, © the Usual Suspects.
Anyway, as first predicted over a century ago, Earth's surface, oceans and atmosphere are all heating up due to our increasing greenhouse gas emissions, but over the years the warming has occurred at varying rates. This should in no way come as a surprise, since other physical phenomena periodically act either to offset or enhance warming. A prime example is the effects of La Nina and El Nino, an irregular but often powerful cyclic variation in winds and sea surface temperatures over the tropical eastern Pacific Ocean. This cycle can influence temperature and rainfall patterns right around the world. In a La Nina year, temperatures are suppressed, whereas an El Nino year sees them enhanced. This is noise on the long-term upward trend, something that explains why climatologists work with decades, not just a few years in isolation, in order to get a grasp on what is going on.
The year 1998 featured an enormous El Nino and consequent high temperature spike that was a huge outlier, standing out well above the slower but steady upward trend caused by our emissions. That spike and the subsequent return to a more 'normal' warming pattern lead to numerous media claims by misinformation-practitioners that global warming had “paused” or had even stopped.
You only need to remember one thing here. Those who create and spread misinformation about climate change don't care about reality. Public confusion is their aim. In this instance, the misinformation exercise involved deliberately selecting a limited block of years starting with the massive El Nino of 1998 and using that very warm starting-point to insist that global warming had stopped. They knew this would likely work for a few years and that the public would quickly forget why that was the case. Mother Nature had handed them a gift. It was an irresistible bunch of low-hanging fruit to exploit: little wonder the tactic is known as 'cherry-picking'. More recently, given that 2016 was the hottest on record, a similar opportunity has been spotted by some misinformers, although it’s not really caught on yet.
Talking about reality, what actually happened? Well, as of 2023, a couple of decades down the line, the top ten warmest years have all been since 2000, whatever observation-based dataset you choose, with eight of them being in the 2015-2022 period. 1998 is nowhere to be seen any more. By modern standards, it simply wasn't warm enough.
Please use this form to provide feedback about this new "at a glance" section. Read a more technical version via the link below!
Click for Further details
Which state is winning at renewable energy production?
Posted on 27 February 2023 by Guest Author
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Karin Kirk
Electricity is changing. As states like Minnesota commit to 100% carbon-free electric power, Montana is opting to double down on coal. Some of these developments make headlines, while others go unnoticed – though they’re no less important. Case in point: Can you guess which state generates the largest fraction of its electricity from renewable sources?
The answer: South Dakota. That state produced 83% of its in-state electricity from renewable sources in 2021, the result of its impressive implementation of wind energy. Between 2019 and 2021, South Dakota more than tripled wind energy production.
Bonus data points
- The other leading states on this measure — Vermont, Washington, and Idaho — all derive the majority of their renewable energy from hydropower.
- Texas produces the most renewable energy of any state, but it also generates an outsized amount of electricity from fossil fuels. So renewables only account for 26% of the state’s total electricity production. In 2021, 44% of Texas’s electricity came from fossil gas, also known as natural gas.
- Important note: The map shows electricity production within each state’s borders. Many states and utility companies exchange electricity with other states. So this data may not reflect the energy that is actually consumed — as opposed to generated — within each state.
Data for electricity generation in all 50 states over the past 20 years is available from the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s Electricity Data Browser.
2023 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #8
Posted on 25 February 2023 by John Hartz
Story of the Week
Podcast: Goodbye to blue skies? The trouble with engineered solutions
- Humanity has created a lot of ecological problems, and many of the proposed solutions come with giant price tags — or the things lost can even be priceless, like the sight of a blue sky — with no guarantee of solving the situation in the long term.
- Many such solutions — like Australia’s deliberate introduction of the toxic cane toad, which has wreaked havoc on the country’s wildlife — create new problems.
- Solar geoengineering to slow climate change would have the most visible effect to all, likely making the sky appear white: No more blue skies—but how would this affect the global plant community’s ability to photosynthesize, would it harm agriculture?
- Pulitzer Prize-winning author Elizabeth Kolbert joins the Mongabay Newscast to talk about her latest book, “Under a White Sky,” which examines these interventions, the problems they come with and humanity’s seeming inability to stop turning to them.
From pumping aerosols into the atmosphere to combat climate change to gene-editing invasive species, human beings continue to conjure up technological or “miracle” fixes to ecological ills, many of which stem from previous things society has done. Whether it’s electrifying rivers to prevent Asian carp from entering the U.S. Great Lakes or $14.5 billion levees to keep the city of New Orleans from sinking, temporarily, humanity continually creates mega solutions that often fail, while harming biodiversity.
“We seem incapable of stopping ourselves,” argues journalist Elizabeth Kolbert. Her latest book, “Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future,” explores many of these projects, chapter by chapter, in what she describes as “sort of a dark comedy.”
She joins the Mongabay Newscast this week to talk about what she found while writing the book and why she urges readers to be skeptical of these machinations.
Click here to access the entire article as originally posted on the Mongabay website.
Podcast: Goodbye to blue skies? The trouble with engineered solutions by Mike DiGirolamo, Mongabay, Feb 21, 2023
Also see:
Exclusive: Inside a Controversial Startup's Risky Attempt to Control Our Climate by Alejandro de la Garza, Climate Adaptation, Time Magazine, Feb 21, 2023
Why Billionaires are Obsessed With Blocking Out the Sun by Alejandro de la Garza, Climate Adaptation, Time Magazine, Feb 24, 2023
Filling an editorial policy hole
Posted on 24 February 2023 by SkS-Team
"Mind the gap."
A short while ago we published a blog post discussing the rate of modernization of our energy supply with updated, superior replacements for fossil fuel combustion. Given the point of the piece it attracted a good deal of attention and careful scrutiny. That review process exposed a material error, now corrected. The sequence of events illustrates the virtues of "peer review" (peers here meaning similar range of general competencies) and especially how owning errors and transparently repairing them is the best way forward.
More importantly, the experience exposed an editiorial policy hole. We're not going to let this insight go to waste.
By way of background, our central editiorial policy has been extremely simple: before we publish a new rebuttal or other "just the facts" treatment, we practice an internal review process which is sometimes very arduous and energetic— similar in general features to reviews of academic publications but with the added challenge of everybody being crystal clear on who's saying what.
Our review convention has worked well for us, for the purpose of creating climate myth rebuttals and other writing serving as a straight conduit for conveying "there's the best we know," sourced in peer reviewed academic literature.
The Gap:
But we need a bit more policy. Why? Here's the gist:
- Skeptical Science's main purpose is illumination of "here's the best we know" as reflected in academic research findings, by making densely technical reports digestible for a general readership.
- Given the broad scope of Skeptical Science's view of climate science and climate change, we may also serve a useful role by offering articles including synthesis, putting facts together to help people see and understand larger concepts, emerging progress or lack of it. This follows a general trajectory of improvement in the formal scientific community toward interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary projects.
- Given the passion needed to contribute energy to our work, it is inhumane to expect Skeptical Science authors to behave as though we have no thoughts or opinions or contributions of our own to offer.
- Perhaps most importantly, mixing commentary or opinion with straight delivery of scientific information to our readers— without distinguishing that we're in this mode— will inevitably cost us credibility, whether by error or by losing our usual neutral tone.
How to address these factors, in editorial policy? We need invent nothing new but only emulate what's known to work well elsewhere, farther down the scientific communications food chain where primary producers are found.
Policy outcome:
We'll henceforth be clearly indicating when a blog post is the equivalent of an academic journal's inclusion of commentary or synthesis articles.
Skeptical Science New Research for Week #8 2023
Posted on 23 February 2023 by Doug Bostrom, Marc Kodack
Open access notables
Another update on attitudes and beliefs in of US residents is delivered by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication working in concert with George Mason University's Center for Climate Change Communication. Climate Change in the American Mind February 2023 extends a continuous year-on-year sampling, key information for assessing the United States' capacity to deal with climate, a matter requiring political impetus delivered by a majority of the US population. In this week's dense government/NGO section.
Two interesting and accessible articles this week investigate economic nudges specifically with an eye to informing policymakers. Erik Haite et al. explore ways to tackle mitigation in industries with high associated costs in Contribution of carbon pricing to meeting a mid-century net zero target. The authors describe policy tailored to work in the tough areas of aluminium, cement, chemicals, iron and steel, lime, pulp and paper. Via Carbon taxes and agriculture: the benefit of a multilateral agreement, Torbjörn Jansson et al. report a mixed bag: "We find that a global tax of EUR 120 per ton CO2-eq could reduce global agricultural emissions by 19%, but also jeopardizes food security in some parts of the world." It would be nice if we could snap our fingers to deal with our climate problem, but it's arguably mostly a matter of human nature at this point. Money looms large in our makeup.
Changing temperature profiles and the risk of dengue outbreaks by Imelda Trejo et al. finds an effect we shouldn't wish for: rising temperatures cooking mosquitoes out of the picture in certain regions of the US. Notably, while some are overheated, others thrive in newly warmed places. "To illustrate the role of spatial and temporal temperature heterogeneity, we select five US cities where the primary dengue vector, the mosquito Aedes aegypti, has been observed, and which have had dengue cases in the past: Los Angeles, Houston, Miami, Brownsville, and Phoenix. Our analysis suggests that an increase of 3°C leads to an approximate doubling of the risk of dengue in Los Angeles and Houston, but a reduction of risk in Miami, Brownsville, and Phoenix due to extreme heat."
Gourevitch et al. deliver a bit of a blockbuster with Unpriced climate risk and the potential consequences of overvaluation in US housing markets. A galvanizing extract from the abstract: We find that residential properties exposed to flood risk are overvalued by US$121–US$237 billion, depending on the discount rate. In general, highly overvalued properties are concentrated in counties along the coast with no flood risk disclosure laws and where there is less concern about climate change. Low-income households are at greater risk of losing home equity from price deflation, and municipalities that are heavily reliant on property taxes for revenue are vulnerable to budgetary shortfalls.
The ethics of climate activism by Francisco Garcia-Gibson addresses two questions: do we have a duty to engage in climate activism, and what are our moral boundaries of permissible climate action? Billed as an overview, this article delivers a wide-angle snapshot of surprising complexities found while seeking answers. As well, Garcia-Gibson signposts some newer, emerging ethical questions in connection with climate activism.
Vian, Garvey & Tuohy deliver a comprehensive review of forests' role in carbon sequestration schemes, leading to some firm conclusions, in Towards a synthesized critique of forest-based ‘carbon-fix’ strategies. "This article contributes to a deeper understanding of why relegating forests to a ‘carbon-fix’ function is insufficient to tackle climate change and, rather, poses threats to forest ecosystems and forest-dependent communities. This review ultimately calls into question the use of forests to delay crucial systemic changes, without diminishing the importance of forest conservation, restoration, governance, as well as technological innovation, in mitigating the ongoing harmful effects of climate change."
The title Suppressed basal melting in the eastern Thwaites Glacier grounding zone sounds pleasant but authors Davis et al. arrive here: "Our results demonstrate that the canonical model of ice-shelf basal melting used to generate sea-level projections cannot reproduce observed melt rates beneath this critically important glacier, and that rapid and possibly unstable grounding-line retreat may be associated with relatively modest basal melt rates." A chewy but digestible explanation of controls on basal melt rate here, leading readers to bump their heads into a range of related phenomena.
127 articles in 58 journals by 822 contributing authors
Physical science of climate change, effects
A Cloud-Controlling Factor Perspective on the Hemispheric Asymmetry of Extratropical Cloud Albedo
Blanco et al., Journal of Climate, 10.1175/jcli-d-22-0410.1
Indonesian Throughflow Slowdown under Global Warming: Remote AMOC Effect versus Regional Surface Forcing
Peng et al., Journal of Climate, Open Access pdf 10.1175/jcli-d-22-0331.1
The Problem with Percentages Errata
Posted on 22 February 2023 by Evan
An Error Caught by the Skeptical Science Peer-Review Process
In a recent post (read here) I compared electricity generated from fossil fuels and renewable energy, and incorrectly compared energy into fossil-fueled power plants with energy out of renewable-energy electric plants. I should have compared electricity generated by both fossil-fueled plants and renewable-energy sources. I will explain the effect of this incorrect comparison in the next section.
Skeptical Science is committed to the highest-quality science communication, and leans heavily on sources from respected peer-reviewed sources. The error in my post is a good example of how the peer-review process functions on this site to bring you high-quality science communication. The commenters to my post quickly pointed out my error. Not only are the authors at Skeptical Science professionals in their respective fields, but so are many of the readers and commenters. Between the articles and the comments, Skeptical Science provides information you can trust, even if some mistakes periodically slip through the cracks.
How is the Renewable-Energy Revolution Going?
In my post I incorrectly stated that renewable energy is currently only making up about 30% of the near-term increased electricity demand. In fact, growth in the nuclear plus renewable-energy sector is making up almost all of the growth in electricity demand (read here and here). The International Energy Agency states,
Renewables and nuclear energy will dominate the growth of global electricity supply over the next three years, together meeting on average more than 90% of the additional demand.
This is good news, but means that we are still only supplementing the fossil-fuel industry, and not supplanting it. We may be on the verge of turning the corner and meeting the need for more electricity generation with renewables plus nuclear, but we need increased pressure to more than cover the electricity demand growth.
Remember this when making decisions about how to power your home, car, and other parts of your life. Remember this when you vote. We may have made a turning point in our quest to supplant fossil-fuel use by halting the growth of fossil-fuel power plants, but now we need to begin retiring fossil-fuel plants in service.
At a glance - What were climate scientists predicting in the 1970s?
Posted on 21 February 2023 by John Mason, BaerbelW
On February 14, 2023 we announced our Rebuttal Update Project. This included an ask for feedback about the added "At a glance" section in the updated basic rebuttal versions. This weekly blog post series highlights this new section of one of the updated basic rebuttal versions and serves as a "bump" for our ask. This week features "What were climate scientists predicting in the 1970s?". More will follow in the upcoming weeks. Please follow the Further Reading link at the bottom to read the full rebuttal and to join the discussion in the comment thread there.
At a glance
If you are aged 60 or over, you may remember this particular myth first-hand. For a brief time in the early to mid-1970s, certain sections of the popular media ran articles describing how we were heading for a renewed ice-age. Such silliness endures to the present day, just with a different gloss: as an example, for the UK tabloid the Daily Express, October just wouldn't be October without it publishing at least one made-up account of the impending 100-day snow-apocalypse.
There were even books written on the subject, such as Nigel Calder's mischievously-entitled The Weather Machine (1974), originally published by the BBC and accompanying a “documentary” of the same name, which was nothing of the sort. A shame, because the same author's previous effort, The Restless Earth (1972), about plate tectonics, was very good indeed.
Thomas Peterson and colleagues did a very neat job of obliterating all of this nonsense. In a 2008 paper titled The myth of the 1970s global cooling scientific consensus, they dared do what the popular press dared not to. They had a look at what was actually going on. Obtaining copies of the peer-reviewed papers on climate, archived in the collections of Nature, JSTOR and the American Meteorological Society and published between 1965 and 1979, they examined and rated them. Would there be a consensus on global cooling? Alas! - no.
Results showed that despite the media claims, just ten per cent of papers predicted a cooling trend. On the other hand, 62% predicted global warming and 28% made no comment either way. The take-home from this one? It's the old media adage, “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story”
Please use this form to provide feedback about this new "at a glance" section. Read a more technical version via the link below!
Click for Further details
Climate change is increasing the risk of a California megaflood
Posted on 20 February 2023 by Guest Author
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Jeff Masters
A sequence of nine atmospheric rivers hammered California during a three-week period in January 2023, bringing over 700 landslides, power outages affecting more than 500,000 people, and heavy rains that triggered flooding and levee breaches. On a statewide basis, about 11 inches of rain fell; 20 deaths were blamed on the weather, with damages estimated at over $1 billion.
But the storm damages were a pale shadow of the havoc a true California megaflood would wreak.
The Golden State has a long history of cataclysmic floods, which have occurred about every 200 to 400 years — most recently in the Great Flood of 1861-62. And a future warmer climate will likely significantly increase the risk of even more extreme floods. In particular, a 2022 study found that, relative to a century ago, climate change has already doubled the risk of a present-day megastorm, and more than tripled the risk of a trillion-dollar megaflood of the type that could swamp the Central Valley.
Given the increased risk, it is more likely than not that many of you reading this will see a California megaflood costing tens of billions in your lifetime.
This is the third part of a three-part series on California’s vulnerability to a megaflood. Part One examined the results of a 2011 study introducing the potential impacts of a scenario, known as “ARkStorm,” which would be a repeat of California’s Great Flood of 1861-62 — though the study did not take climate change into account. Part Two looked at how California is preparing its dams for future great floods. Here, in Part Three, we’ll look at the increasing future threat of a California megaflood in a warming climate.
2023 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #7
Posted on 18 February 2023 by John Hartz
Story of the Week
Revealed: The Science Denial Network Behind Oxford’s ‘Climate Lockdown’ Backlash
A traffic filter scheme in Oxfordshire has been “weaponised” by the anti-climate lobby, according to disinformation expert Jennie King.
Not Our Future put leaflets through letterboxes in Oxfordshire.
The “grassroots” backlash to a traffic reduction scheme in Oxfordshire is being boosted by an international network of established climate and Covid science deniers and amplified by right-wing media, DeSmog can report.
The group ‘Not Our Future’ made headlines last month by putting leaflets through Oxfordshire residents’ letterboxes calling them “guinea pigs” in the UK’s first “climate lockdown”. This was a reference to a conspiracy theory about a government plan to curb people’s freedoms.
False claims about the Oxfordshire County Council scheme to cut traffic and pollution went viral online, with one tweet by climate sceptic author Jordan Peterson being viewed 7.5 million times. The claims, which have seen local councillors receive death threats, have been fact-checked and debunked as misleading, and the council has described them as “harmful to public debate”.
Not Our Future’s director David Fleming, an anti-Covid lockdown and vaccine activist, presents his campaign as a people-powered movement opposed to a coming “authoritarian future” imposed by what he calls “The Blob”.
However, DeSmog can report that the group was conceived by Fleming years before the pandemic or the Oxfordshire scheme, and is backed by a network of high-profile climate deniers and conspiracy theorists based in the UK, Canada, the United States and Australia.
It is also the latest sign of a growing alliance between opponents of climate action and anti-Covid vaccine conspiracy theorists. Not Our Future’s founding signatories include Kathy Gyngell, a trustee of Tufton Street think tank the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), the UK’s main climate science denial group.
Gyngell’s website TCW hosted an anti-vaccine event in London last week with climate denial author James Delingpole, anti-vax MP Andrew Bridgen, and 90s pop group Right Said Fred, the public face of Not Our Future.
Experts say fears generated by the Covid pandemic are being exploited to oppose green policies.
“Until 2020, fear-mongering about so-called ‘green tyranny’ had little to point towards, and often felt like an abstract, even lame Boogeyman,” said Jennie King, head of climate research and policy at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) think tank.
“The pandemic was a moment of genuine trauma for millions of people,” she said. “That trauma has been weaponised by the anti-climate lobby, who now condemn any public policy as an ‘infringement on civil liberties’ and draw direct comparisons with Covid.”
Click here to access the entire article as originally posted on the DeSmog website.
Revealed: The Science Denial Network Behind Oxford’s ‘Climate Lockdown’ Backlash by Adam Barnett, Michaela Herrmann & Christopher Deane, Desmog, Feb 16, 2023
Skeptical Science New Research for Week #7 2023
Posted on 16 February 2023 by Doug Bostrom, Marc Kodack
Fossil-captured CCS debunked
Our weekly collection of freshly published research on anthropogenic climate change is a continuation and evolution of Skeptical Science volunteer Ari Jokimäki's AGW Obeserver, started in 2010 and migrated to Skeptical Science in 2012. Over intervening years the format has evolved a bit. Late in 2021 Marc Kodack kindly signed on to add a new feature, our government/NGO reports section. Here we present selected articles featuring many of the characteristics of journal articles but aimed more toward policymakers and the general public, broad situational awareness.
This week's government/NGO collection includes a prime example of its worth. Why Carbon Capture and Storage Is Not a Net-Zero Solution for Canada’s Oil and Gas Sector by Laura Cameron and Angela Carter working on behalf of The International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) is a calm, deliberative and deeply sourced evisceration of the Canadian oil industry's optically-aligned token efforts to simulate a semblance of conscience for an industry fundamentally dependent on imposing external costs. These costs can't be accounted for with carbon capture and storage (CCS); the disparity between CO2 that can be captured and that liberated "downstream" as a side-effect of the industry's outmoded and hazardous monetization scheme is a vast, uncrossable gulf. This report is what real skepticism looks like, and readers needing backup material for "don't be fooled by CCS" can look to it for reliable myth-busting evidence in bulk quantity. Although the authors' work emphasizes data on the infamous Canadian tar sands projects (which bear a striking resemblance to Saruman's industrial plant), the main payload is portable to wherever bogus claims about CCS may be found.
New Research recap
Our "main event" of academic publications this week includes no fewer than 70 open access publications, over half the total listing (look for green in the list for direct links to articles readable by "the rest of us.") As usual there is far too much material for any person to read in a week, or to understand in a month.
Given that it's a firehose tapped from a Niagara Falls, what's the point of New Research? Skeptical Science's foundations lie in "here's the best we know," which is to be found in academic research. Our best information grows and improves hour-by-hour, day-by-day, week-by-week. Fundamentally, the point of this weekly sampling of climate-related research is "do keep up," The reasons for keeping up vary from simple curiosity to "I'm engaged in climate science communications and am obliged to keep my finger on the pulse of climate inquiry." New Research makes this a little bit easier by saving users duplicative effort spent for various purposes.
We hypothesize several use cases for New Research. Readers with a general interest in human-caused global climate change can use this weekly listing as a watering hole for keeping up with the general arc of climate-related research. The "observations" section provides a ready supply of evidence for those who may be engaged in discussion with people claiming "it's not happening." The perennially full "GHG" section hints at our struggle to capture a full, comprehensively reliable accounting for the heat-trapping gases forming the basis of the changes we're seeing. Overall, each week's collation gives a feel for the massive total scope and complexity of the problem we've created for ourselves with fossil fuel combustion. As well, while the volume of reports here is not by any means comprehensive, it provides a strong clue to the urgency the scientific community attaches to our shared challenge.
One other purpose of New Research is to penetrate the veil of institutional press offices, the overall filter function of the foodchain leading from a scientific report to headlines in news sources. A wealth of fascinating and often significant work does not meet criteria rising to writing and circulating press releases. Press releases fall may fall silently. Climate change research is in the daily news as an iceberg floats in water; as with an iceberg's submerged bulk most research warning us of imminent harm isn't visible in popular media. This weekly listing tries to make the unseen mass of climate-related research easier to spot.
We attempt to categorize articles for quick access, such that a person with an interest in biological implications of anthropogenic climate change may easily see a concentration of such works, similarly for GHG sources, sinks and flux, etc. Some items are difficult to pigeonhole, straddle fields of interest; such articles may appear in two sections. Particularly for cryosphere and hydrometeorological research, model projections concerned with those arenas may be found in their respective native topic categories as opposed to the section of general modeling results.
We also include a "nudges" section with opinion, commentary and perspective pieces from academic journals. These are not unhinged from facts in the manner of op-ed pieces in newspapers and popular magazines but can be relied upon as viewpoints of experts, raised hands worth strong attention.
Finally, readers will generally see a "decarbonization" section. Skeptical Science includes "debunkings of discourses of delay" and "solutions denial" in our remit and this section may be useful for that purpose. Mostly— given the generally dire and depressing nature of many of the articles we list— this little section offers some rays of hope while also illustrating the excessive economy of "just" as in "let's just fix our climate problem." A frenzy of effort is going in that direction of remediation of our messy energy habits, most of it not splashy enough to make headlines. This work is intricate and not easy. At least a glancing, minor appreciation of that is helpful in terms of calibrating our ambitions.
134 articles in 54 journals by 869 contributing authors
Observations of climate change, effects
Amplified drought trends in Nepal increase the potential for Himalayan wildfires
Pokharel et al., Climatic Change, 10.1007/s10584-023-03495-3
Changes in marine hot and cold extremes in the China Seas during 1982–2020
Li et al., Weather and Climate Extremes, Open Access 10.1016/j.wace.2023.100553
The Problem with Percentages
Posted on 15 February 2023 by Evan
This paper demonstrates the peer review process that occurs at Skeptical Science. Several commenters in the comment thread pointed out an error in the analysis and made other suggestions. Whereas I suggest that renewables are likely to only contribute 30% of the near-term growth of electric-energy demand, in fact, renewables are likely to makeup all of the near-term growth in electric-energy demand. I will be redoing this paper to correct this error and to refine the analysis. However, the basic tenets of this paper will not change: 1) percentages can be used to hide the actual trend and 2) renewable energy is currently only supplementing, and not supplanting fossil fuels.
At a young age I learned that global population was increasing and worried about whether there would be sufficient resources for all of the new mouths added each year. I was relieved when I learned that overpopulation would be solved within my lifetime because population growth was decreasing. I put that problem out of my mind.
That was when the global population was 3 billion and I was naïve. Whether intentional or not, I had been snookered by the media because they were broadcasting population growth as a percentage of current population, shown in Fig. 1. In absolute terms, however, population growth has been increasing my entire life and we are still nowhere near solving this age-old problem (no pun intended).
This exemplifies how percentages can be misleading.
Figure 1. Annual, global population growth as a percentage of current population (dashed line) and as actual growth (solid line). Data is here.
Our “progress” towards reaching net-zero emissions is being communicated using methods that can similarly cloud our actual progress. We are awash with optimism about how well the energy revolution to renewable energy is going, at a time when global fossil-fuel usage is still increasing. An article in the New York Times (read here) recently noted that Europe already gets 22% of its energy from renewable sources and that globally renewable energy installations grew by 25% in 2022. Seemingly impressive numbers. At 25% growth/yr we might believe that Europe will be fully converted to renewable energy within a matter of years. Although it is unlikely such a revolution will occur that quickly in Europe, what is more important is understanding global trends, because that is ultimately what controls Global Warming/Climate Change (GW/CC) Let’s illustrate the problem using a simple example.
Figure 2 shows electricity generated from renewable energy, Fig. 3 shows trends for energy derived from fossil-fuels, and Fig. 4 compares energy demand over the next 10 years with that likely to be provided by renewable energy.
Skeptical Science News: The Rebuttal Update Project
Posted on 14 February 2023 by John Mason, BaerbelW, Ken Rice, Doug Bostrom
We are pleased to announce that a major new project is well underway at Skeptical Science. The work involves not only updating our popular rebuttals for the most-used climate myths but also adding entry-level sections to each topic, thereby widening the accessibility of the resource to as many folk as possible. And we want you, the readers, to join in with the project.
Some context
Why was Skeptical Science put together in the first place? Because of climate science deniers. Who? Deniers, or denialists, are people motivated to argue against reality. Climate change is just one example of a topic that attracts such attention. Previously, campaigns were run, for example, to gloss over the harmful effects of tobacco smoke. Tellingly, some of the same actors were involved in both campaigns.
What was the root cause of climate science denial? Profit, or more precisely perceived loss of profit. The response of the fossil fuels sector to the perceived changes required to address global warming was to engage in a concerted campaign to play down its seriousness. Climate change thereby became politicised. Creation and circulation of the political talking-points was easy: the pre-existing network of free market and Conservative-leaning think-tanks and media channels was ready and waiting.
Talking-points were carefully crafted and then tested with focus groups to determine their “stickiness” - meaning that a sticky message would take hold in peoples' minds, no matter how untrue it was. They were not messing around. In this game, all that was needed was to spread doubt and confusion.
From this embryonic start, climate science denial spread like a deadly plague. Books, bogus journals, fake conferences and documentaries also played their part as people increasingly fell victim to the onslaught of misinformation. Those actively promoting climate change denialism (Tier 1 deniers) relied on such an effect taking place: they needed a citizens' army to repeat those sticky messages (Tier 2 deniers) and they got one.
Dana Nuccitelli wins environmental journalism award
Posted on 13 February 2023 by Guest Author
This is a re-post from the CCL blog
Dana Nuccitelli was honored this week with the 2022 SEAL Environmental Journalism Award.
In addition to being a valued member of CCL’s research team, Dana writes for Yale Climate Connections. His stellar work for that outlet — including pieces on clean energy permitting reform, the Inflation Reduction Act, and carbon dioxide removal by healthy forests and other methods — earned him this recognition.
“Environmental journalism is an essential public good,” said Matt Harney, Founder of the SEAL Awards in a statement. “Environmental journalists’ work of translating scientific research and policy developments into digestible writing requires real expertise and is under-appreciated. The SEAL environmental journalism award was created to reward journalistic excellence while encouraging news organizations to invest in more climate crisis coverage.”
Dana’s journalistic excellence extends to the CCL blog, where he has helped volunteers make sense of complicated topics such as the IPCC’s take on carbon pricing, the cost of the clean energy transition, and how clean technologies stack up against fossil fuels.
“I’m incredibly honored that the SEAL awards recognized me alongside so many brilliant climate and environmental journalists,” Dana said. “I look forward to continuing to work with my wonderful colleagues and volunteers at Yale Climate Connections and CCL to educate people about the climate crisis and its solutions.”
CCL is proud to have Dana as a part of our staff, and we look forward to continuing to learn from his informative, inspiring writing.
2023 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #6
Posted on 11 February 2023 by John Hartz
Story of the Week
Imagining a World Without Fossil Fuels
Mark Stoll’s new book “Profit” describes how capitalism and its spawn, consumerism, fuel climate change and environmental degradation. “The environment,” he writes, “can no longer bear the cost.”
The commercial, from 2021, starts with a typical prelude to a 21st-century first date. There’s a young woman, with pink-streaked hair and a teal smartphone, swiping on dating profiles as upbeat music plays in the background. She fixes her hair, puts contacts in her eyes and applies lipstick in the backseat of a car on her way to the restaurant to meet her date. The date, a guy in glasses, appears in front of his bathroom mirror, smearing gel in his hair. The camera zooms in on his white sneakers as he approaches the girl, and they stop on the sidewalk, staring at each other and smiling.
“That connection was brought to you by petroleum products,” the commercial’s narrator informs us. “But what if we lived in a world without oil and natural gas?” The video rewinds, reversing to the first scene of the girl in her apartment. Her phone distingrates in her outstretched hand, melting away into nothing. “Life would be very different, because oil and gas are part of just about everything you touch,” the narrator says.
The guy’s hair gel vanishes. So do her contacts and his clean white sneakers. When the car’s tires disappear, she smudges her lipstick across her face as the backseat lurches suddenly to the ground. They sit down at the restaurant and her hair dye and make-up evaporate, along with his glasses, a beer glass, the TV on the wall and a football jersey.
“Our world would be unrecognizable if the products we rely on just disappeared,” the narrator concludes, snapping his fingers. “Better luck next time,” he says to the guy, who looks unhappy. In this petrochemical-free universe, the date doesn’t work out. The screen fills with the blue logo of Energy Transfer, a Texas-based company that builds natural gas and propane pipelines.
I thought about this commercial—which I’ve seen multiple times on TV in the last few weeks—as I read Mark Stoll’s new book about the environmental history of capitalism, “Profit.” Stoll’s book offers the opportunity to better understand how the world depicted in the commercial came to be.
Click here to access the entire article as originally posted on the Inside Climate News website.
Imagining a World Without Fossil Fuels by Kiley Bense, Warming Trends, Inside Climate News, Feb 11, 2023
Skeptical Science New Research for Week #6 2023
Posted on 9 February 2023 by Doug Bostrom, Marc Kodack
Open access notables
In this week's government/NGO section, a bit of a smack in the face. Hamburg Climate Futures Outlook 2023 comes via the CLICC center at Universität Hamburg, authored by a powerhouse team. With a comprehensive look at our state of natural and human affairs, the report's main payload is quick to read:
Reaching worldwide deep decarbonization by 2050 is currently not plausible, given the observable trajectories of social drivers. The select physical processes of public interest only moderately, if at all, inhibit the plausibility of attaining the Paris Agreement temperature goals, although they can substantially modify the physical boundary conditions for society. Meeting the 1.5°C Paris Agreement temperature goal is not plausible, but limiting the global temperature rise to well below 2°C can become plausible if ambition, implementation, and knowledge gaps are closed.
Do however note a glimmer of hope: "given the observable trajectories of social drivers." We have control over the throttle and steering to create our trajectory, levers we're not fully effectively employing. This report's conclusion implies we should grip and use our levers of control harder, waste no capacity. The main methods and locations of our control options are conveniently provided in the report's circumspect, meticulous body. It's our challenge to provide means of falsfication of the authors' projections— here in our world.
Jeremy Moulton reviews a new book built on a premise that is both provocative and unsurprising: The performative state: public scrutiny and environmental governance in China by Iza Ding. As summarized by Moulton: "The Performative State hinges on a simple and effective argument: when there is a high level of public scrutiny and demand for action, but state capacity is simultaneously weak, the state will proceed to act performatively to appear to be meeting public demands." This is not indicative of a lack of sincerity; it's more complicated than "just lying" and is perhaps even arguably reflective of trying too hard with too little.
Towards more impactful energy research: The salient role of social sciences and humanities makes the case for us not fighting with no legs and only one arm. Eventually it'll sink into our heads: with our success at confronting and solving our climate problem being mostly governed by human nature, ignoring human nature in our effort to do this is remarkably dense. Gracia Brückmann et al. remind us of this in a more productive and thorough fashion, because the lesson still hasn't been absorbed. The authors are very kind, given obtusely slow uptake on the part of us pupils.
Climate change vs energy security? The conditional support for energy sources among Western Europeans: Chistoph Arndt does a really nice job of testing three hypotheses, with the third essentially an extension of the first two: "Higher worries about climate change increase the support for renewable energies and decrease the support for fossil forms of energy," and "Higher worries about energy security decrease the support for renewable energies and increase the support for fossil forms of energy." We may not find the formally derived answers so surprising, but oddly enough these questions have never before been properly tested for predictable conclusions. Not least, this paper features a positive torrent of interesting citations setting up "the state of the art" leading to this new investigation, especially as it includes an explicit literature review in its introductory section.
Bromley, Khan & Kenyon have instantly elicited some remarkably hysterical reactions with their paper Dust as a solar shield. These astrophysics researchers are conducting what for practical purposes is only a thought experiment given the effectively impossibly insurmountable mountain of deployment challenges entailed in their model. Meanwhile, assuming enough people were so genuinely naive as to imagine there's a plausible chance of living a happy future behind a lunar dust cloud, how are we doing with actual moral hazards down on the ground, in reality? Is it truly the case that we'll form a connection and excuse between this impracticable scheme and our frequently compromised decisions, such as to jaunt to Ibiza, Spain for a weekend via jet? How do we explain our behavior before such putative temptations emerged? Is geoengineering research such dangerous thought crime? Research listed here only a short while ago calls abstract worry over moral hazards posed by work into question.
113 articles in 52 journals by 715 contributing authors
Physical science of climate change, effects
Climate responses under an extreme quiet sun scenario
Liu et al., Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, 10.1029/2022jd037626
Controls on Surface Warming by Winter Arctic Moist Intrusions in Idealized Large-Eddy Simulations
Dimitrelos et al., Journal of Climate, Open Access 10.1175/jcli-d-22-0174.1
Effects of Surface Heating on Coastal Upwelling Intensity
Jung & Cho, Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans, 10.1029/2022jc018795
Myths about fossil fuels and renewable energy are circulating again. Don’t buy them.
Posted on 8 February 2023 by Guest Author
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Karin Kirk
Alarge and growing fraction of U.S. residents understands that human-caused climate change is a significant problem in need of urgent solutions. But as public alarm increases, misinformation about fossil fuels and renewable energy has also seen an uptick.
For example, some politicians and petroleum producers have said that the Biden administration is addressing climate change by slowing down domestic energy production, characterizing the president’s policies as an attack on American energy.
But the data doesn’t bear that out.
Reality: U.S. gas production is booming
Below is a graph of energy production in the United States since 1997. It includes every major type of energy produced in this country. The data is from the Energy Information Administration, a U.S. agency responsible for gathering and analyzing energy data and sharing it with the public.
Oil and gas extraction has been on the rise since the COVID-induced slowdowns of late 2020 and early 2021. Since then, gas production has set multiple all-time records, and the Energy Information Administration anticipates new oil production records will be set in 2023. The data behind those assessments stands in stark contrast to accusations that the Biden administration is curtailing domestic oil and gas extraction.
That’s just one of myths that can be easily knocked down by looking at energy data. Read on to explore the state of American energy —and to inoculate yourself against some common myths about American energy independence and the contributions of renewable energy.
The graph is interactive. Click on a line to highlight it, and hover over a particular point to bring up a text box with the specifics.
A few highlights:
- This graph plots all major forms of energy extraction in the same units on a single axis, enabling an easy comparison of the scale of each source of energy. Did you know that fossil gas, commonly called natural gas, is the nation’s largest source of energy production?
- The major uptick in oil and gas production over the last 10 years is the “shale boom,” driven by advances in drilling and extraction technology that allowed oil and gas to be produced from areas that were previously unprofitable.
- The sharp dip in oil, gas, and coal in late 2020 was driven by the COVID pandemic, which slowed demand and field production.
- COVID uncertainties and supply chain challenges kept oil, gas, and coal production slow through most of 2020. By the end of 2021, fossil gas production had surpassed pre-COVID levels, setting new all-time high records in 2021 and 2022.
- The overall trend in coal production is sharply down, but coal has rebounded slightly as rising fossil gas prices make coal more economically competitive. Coal is expected to decline again in 2023, according to the Energy Information Administration.
Reality: The U.S. is the strongest energy exporter it has ever been
Climate change is increasing the risk of a California megaflood
Posted on 7 February 2023 by Guest Author
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Jeff Masters
Asequence of nine atmospheric rivers hammered California during a three-week period in January 2023, bringing over 700 landslides, power outages affecting more than 500,000 people, and heavy rains that triggered flooding and levee breaches. On a statewide basis, about 11 inches of rain fell; 20 deaths were blamed on the weather, with damages estimated at over $1 billion.
But the storm damages were a pale shadow of the havoc a true California megaflood would wreak.
The Golden State has a long history of cataclysmic floods, which have occurred about every 200 to 400 years — most recently in the Great Flood of 1861-62. And a future warmer climate will likely significantly increase the risk of even more extreme floods. In particular, a 2022 study found that, relative to a century ago, climate change has already doubled the risk of a present-day megastorm, and more than tripled the risk of a trillion-dollar megaflood of the type that could swamp the Central Valley.
Given the increased risk, it is more likely than not that many of you reading this will see a California megaflood costing tens of billions in your lifetime.
This is the third part of a three-part series on California’s vulnerability to a megaflood. Part One examined the results of a 2011 study introducing the potential impacts of a scenario, known as “ARkStorm,” which would be a repeat of California’s Great Flood of 1861-62 — though the study did not take climate change into account. Part Two looked at how California is preparing its dams for future great floods. Here, in Part Three, we’ll look at the increasing future threat of a California megaflood in a warming climate.
Clean energy permitting reform needed to boost economy, protect climate and burn less coal
Posted on 6 February 2023 by dana1981
Originally published by The Hill
After decades of failure to pass major federal climate legislation, Congress finally broke through last year with the Inflation Reduction Act and its close to $400 billion in clean energy investments. Energy modeling experts estimated that these provisions would help the U.S. cut its carbon pollution about 40 percent below 2005 levels by 2030, bringing the Biden administration’s Paris commitment of 50 percent cuts within reach. But there’s a catch — the new law could cause the U.S. to actually burn more coal, if it’s not coupled with clean energy permitting reform.
That’s because the energy modeling groups assumed nothing would limit the rate at which clean energy projects like big wind and solar farms would be deployed. A subsequent Princeton analysis found that the slow rate at which the U.S. is building its electric transmission infrastructure would act as a crucial bottleneck slowing that clean energy deployment.
In recent years, the nation has only expanded its electricity transmission capabilities at a rate of just 1 percent annually, only about half as fast as in prior decades. Over the past decade, the U.S. has built more than 10,000 miles of new natural gas pipelines per year, compared to an average of just 1,800 new miles of electric transmission lines. Building a single new transmission line takes over a decade on average. Meanwhile, 2030 is now a scant seven years away.
The optimistic projections of the potential carbon pollution cuts from the Inflation Reduction Act mostly stem from an expected explosion in solar panel and wind turbine installations, thanks to clean energy tax credits. Energy modelers expect a tripling in American wind and solar generation capacity over just the next seven years. But most of those wind and solar farms would be built in rural areas and in the windy middle of the country. The clean electricity those projects generate would need to be transported to households and businesses in big population centers, mainly in cities and along the coasts.
That will require a lot of new electric transmission lines. The Princeton modeling team estimated that if the U.S. continues its slow 1 percent rate of annual transmission infrastructure expansion, that will only suffice to allow about 20 percent of the potential emissions cuts to be realized. And if those new solar panels and wind turbines are unable to connect to the grid, the increased electricity demand from the other Inflation Reduction Act provisions — which incentivize people to transition to electric cars, heat pumps and induction stoves — would instead be met by burning more coal and gas.
