The Climate Fade
This story in yesterday’s NYT, titled “What happened to global warming?” has stirred some discussion over why a sizable bloc of Americans aren’t taking climate change seriously. Brad Plumer in the Washington Post says it’s a “great piece,” while Joe Romm grits his teeth at what he considers a big omission.
I offer my take on the premise of the NYT story at the Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media.
“Is climate fatigue setting in?” I ask. Let me know over there what you think.
The article does a decent job describing how denialism is mostly a US phenomenon. Not that there aren’t such people elsewhere, but nowhere except here has that effort had such political success. Seems to be fairly good evidence that it isn’t all the fault of the IPCC or some arrogant scientists. Our two party system encourages extreme partisanship in ways that no others do, and I would guess that there are some American cultural attitude that also encourage it.
Keith,
The movement you chose to belong to is making a familiar arc: Exciting ‘discovery’, early adopters and trend setters making it cool, World changing import, ‘progressive’ entrancement, big predictions, and then the skeptics show up and ask tough questions, and the opinion leaders ridicule, because they actually have no substance. Skeptics ask more questions, even as profiteers move in and exploit your faith and sincerity. Confusion and anger hit your movement, as the “plain truth” is somehow resisted by those wicked skeptics and doubters. Huge myth making about conspiracies to hold back the salvation of your enlightened discovery. Constant drumbeat from ever more partisan and authoritarian opinion leaders. Yet the bulk of the people, especially those who only gave lip service, move on. The only hope you guys have of winning is to corrupt the political process completely and take over power and impose your policies. I doubt if you can do it.
Your climate hype, after > 35 years if you are honest and include the ice age scare, has worn people out. You can talk radiative physics all you want. People smell bs, no matter their technical education. And your group has utterly failed to make itself serious by dealing with the bs of your opinion leaders and profiteers.
Even this “old news” angle is er, old news.
The only thing that could warm it up again is some kind of real climate problem.
Richard Black of the BBC: “We need a medium-size disaster to wake up the public”.
This is sick. It’s also circular – like wanting a big dramatic plane crash to remind people that planes can crash.
Perhaps a bloc of Americans have realized that
a) climate change is not such a big threat to the US in the next 20-30 years and
b) that the cost/benefit ratio of cutting emissions is heavily against them.
c) whatever emission cuts the US made would be dwarfed by the growth of emissions in the developing world
d) so what’s the point? The planet will warm up anyway.
The idea that emission cuts are the responsibility of developed countries until 2030 or some later date (the basic idea of the Kyoto Protocol) is a dead duck. China’s emissions growth alone is over 5 times larger than the emission cuts by Kyoto participants.
http://www.thedailygreen.com/environmental-news/latest/china-co2-47031109
China will soon pass Europe in per capita emissions (with emissions growing 10 % annually) and India is following at a slower pace. Unilateral emission cuts by Europe or the US will not change that fact.
@Jack Hughes
I think Black needs to be read along the lines “it will take a medium-size disaster to wake up the public”; not a wish but an observation on human nature.
@Jarmo
Let’s assume you are correct. Why then does that bloc not argue along the lines “it’s too expensive” but “it’s not happening”?
bluegrue,
The skeptics say it is not happening because it is not happening as predicted by the AGW promoters. From the stage managed hearing of of 1988 to Kyoto to the melting glaciers of Himalaya to the 2005 “new normal” storm season, it is not happening. Every time some AGW believer claims that this or that weather event is ‘proof’ of AGW, and it turns out the event was historically typical, people pay attention. And every weather event turns out to be historically typical, and the farther back it turns out to have happened, undermines the AGW claim further.
@hunter
one thing at a time. Jarmo’s reasons that the bloc he describes accepts AGW, but think it won’t affect them / CO2 reduction is too costly. I’d like to know from him why that hypothetical bloc argues AGW is not happening.
#5 bluegrue,
#7 bluegrue
Something messed up my previous attempt…let’s try again.
So, first of all, I am not saying that these people deny AGW is real. Read my text again. I think you could describe them as lukewarmers.
They have just looked at world realpolitik, the most realistic predictions about climate and energy, done some math and come to the conclusion that unilateral climate change mitigation action will harm them more than the actual climate change will and will not stop climate change
Beautifully illustrated here:
http://e360.yale.edu/content/images/1010-climate-change-index-maplecroft.html
#8,
+1
Jarmo,
First, CO2 mitigation does not exist in the real world.
Even if we chose to pursue mitigation today, nothing exists that will accomplish mitigation.
The only technology close to mitigation, nuclear fission power, is not acceptable to most inthe AGW community.
And don’t talk about windmills or solar. Their carbon footprints are understated by their supporters, and they are not close, even if their actual power output increased by 1000%, to replacing a meaningful amount of coal plants.
Next, the skeptics notice that not only are the predictions of doom by the AGW community overstated, the policies demanded by the AGW community do not work.
The arguments about how skeptics are too selfish to think of their grandchildren is so fact-free and insultingly ignorant that I hope you will not raise it here.
So what I see is that we have a social movement taht has obssessed over CO2 to the point of extremism, pushing policies that relieve their obsession but foes nothign to either deal with weather events, help people or improve the environment.
The last I checked in the US we have nuclear power plants, windmills, solar panels, solar thermal plants, high efficiency gas plants and various energy storage demonstration projects all under construction and some being deployed at a substantial scale and our CAFE standards for vehicles are rising substantially.
Germany may be beating us in Solar Panel deployment but our coal consumption is decreasing and theirs is going up.
harrywr2,
Germany beating us in deplying solar panels is a meaningless stat.
Germany, with long drak winters and many cloudy days is wasting its national resources pursuing the sun.
Their walk away from nuclear- the one thing that actually works well- and back to coal is simply a great tell about how unserious AGW policy actually is in the real world.
#13
Agree about German solar. The capacity installed by 2011 will require 120 billion euros as feed-in tariffs in 20 years – and produces less than 4 % of German electricity.
But to return to the costs of global warming:
http://khanna.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/05/08/who_will_win_from_climate_change
Jarmo,
As a big fan of science fiction, I appreciate it when academics write it.
I usually prefer when they label their fiction as fiction.
Since there is no credible demonstrated predictive ability regarding climate in 50 years, I think this book is better labled palinly as fiction, however serious.
‘hunter’ proffers nothing but tropes all so boringly familiar and wrong:
— he cites the ‘new ice age’ predictions as if they were consensus science in the 70s : a favorite canard of dishonest/misinformed ‘skeptics’.
— he cites the Himalayan glacier retreat mistake, which is ultimately traceable to a *typo*, as if it were a major, globally discrediting finding of the last IPCC report: this and the *handful* of other errors are favorites of the dishonest/misinformed skeptics who simply ignore the sheer size of the IPCC document, the number of cites therein, the sourcing differences between the different sections and summaries.
— he makes the extraordinary (and false) claim the climate science has demonstrated no predictive ability in the last 50 years.http://www.skepticalscience.com/comparing-global-temperature-predictions.html
Steve,
You keep on telling yourself all those little rosaries against thinking. The yare obviously helping you achieve your goal. The IPCC used crap literature from an NGO to come up with that Himalaya- it was not a typo. That you are credulous enough to buy that speaks volume of your faith. As to the error and corruption of the IPCC, there is a well documented book on it, I am certain you won’t read. According to Pielke,Sr, and others the GCM’s have no regional predictive power. We have floods in Australia and droughts in E Africa causing more damage thanks to planners who failed to understand that.
As to the 1970’s, and the great ice age, I was there, and I know what was written. You can use your memory hole all you want, but it won’t work.
What I do like bestest is how so many of you believers cannot simply have someone be wrong, but as I pointed out elsewhere, the person you disagree with must be dishonest. But thanks for not living down to the typical stereotype of using ‘denier’, when you run out of things to say.
by the way, using SkS for really anything except a cautionary tale is an automatic fail.
#9, Jarmo
please look at the Pew poll numbers, the study cited by the NYT.
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1780/poll-global-warming-scientists-energy-policies-offshore-drilling-tea-party
You will see that it’s not that people argue about cost/benefit. It has become a partisan divide. 53% of the Republicans have convinced themselves, that warming is not happening. Not that it’s not manmade, no, they are convinced, that AGW is not happening. At all. Of those accepting that it is warming, another 18% claim natural causes. So only 16% of the Republicans accept that it is warming and that humanity is the main cause. As 14% of all Repulicans see global warming as a very serious problem, I expect a large overlap of these 14% with the 16% accepting AGW. So where does this leave your hypothetical block of Americans who think cost/benefit is not worth CO2 reductions? Where is your bloc supposed to come from? About 2% of the Republicans? The Democrats, where 50% consider global warming to be a serious problem and 68% think that it requires immediate government action?
Hunter @2,
You are displaying ignorance of the subject in your comment, as usual, focusing on the noise made by climate skeptics and deniers.
The real narrative of the GHG theory of global warming is here:
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/summary.htm
The GHG theory of global warming originated with Tyndall in 1859. In 1896, Arrhenius did the first estimate of the effect of CO2 doubling and pointed out that fossil fuel burning would warm the planet. Over time more accurate spectroscopy, atmospheric measurements and the development of digital computers allowed accurate 1 dimensional computation of the effect of CO2 in radiative transfer to outer space in the late 50’s by Plass. Subsequently in the 70’s 3 d modelling became possible and has been steadily improving. In addition ground and satellite measurements have increased our detailed knowledge of the energy balance and climate. Throughout all of this , the estimates of the effects of CO2 doubling on global average temperature remain centered at around 3C. There is no doubt about the existence of a global warming trend and all of the real evidence points to GHG emissions and other human activities as a primary cause.
Hunter @ 17,
You are fooling yourself. You look at Climate Science as a house of cards, where a few errors are enough in your mind to make the whole thing collapse. Your arguments are totally riddled with errors in every post. Using the house of cards picture, every post should collapse.
In your claim about the ice age being predicted in the ’70’s, in which you were present, it is clear that you were reading the popular press, not the peer reviewed scientific literature, which told a totally different story and weren’t predicting an ice age in the near future.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/01/the-global-cooling-myth/
In this case of the ’70’s the majority of climate papers were predicting that CO2 emission which cause warming would predominate, although some papers focused on cooling due to sulfate aerosals as the biggest problem.
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/2008BAMS2370.1
“The survey identified only 7 articles indicating
cooling compared to 44 indicating warming. Those
seven cooling articles garnered just 12% of the
citations.”
This basic error proves that you don’t know what you are talking about and shouldn’t be listened to by anyone. Your house of cards has just collapsed.
Hunter,
You say,
“by the way, using SkS for really anything except a cautionary tale is an automatic fail.”
The only failure here is your failure to understand climate science, and your lack of knowledge. Deniers like you may not like the Skeptical Science website because it is effective in debunking the nonsense that you spout.
It just so happens Skeptical Science is a winner of a Eureka prize, given by the Australian Museum.
http://eureka.australianmuseum.net.au/index.cfm?objectid=987D1F90-1F70-11E0-85AB005056B06558
2011 Advancement of Climate Change Knowledge
SCIENCE COMMUNICATION & JOURNALISM
Winner
Mr John Cook
Skeptical Science
#18 bluegrue
You should read the study you quote more carefully. In addition to Democrats and Republicans, they list independents. Their share is around 30% of the electorate, right?
But my real point is that the required “immediate government action”, whatever that may be, is not likely to include any drastic measures to cut emissions. If it comes down to jobs and CO2 cuts, jobs win.
The policies the Pew study you quoted mentioned include tax incentives to people who buy hybrid or electric cars, more money for alternative energy and better fuel economy for cars. On the last two, the majorities of all political denominations agree.
If the push comes to shove, what do you think will happen? Will Americans make drastic emission cuts? With zero economic growth while China continues to grow at 10% annually, GNP and emissionwise?
#20: Like Hunter I was there inthe 1970s and the ice age scare was real. It is quite Orwellian the way green party activists like Connolley try to rewrite history.
It’s an easy exercise (5 minutes with Google scholar) to find more papers that Peterson and Connolley missed in their ‘literature review’. (for example Twomey 1974 “Pollution and the planetary albedo” talks about how a slight change could cause an irreversible flip to a state where the earth would be in the grip of another ice age)
By the way, one way to tell the difference between people who know what they are talking about and were really there, like hunter, and the activist history-rewriters, is in the terminology used. At the time the concern was that we might be on the brink of the next ice age. The term ‘global cooling’ was hardly used.
This is one of the reaons for the ‘climate fade’, but there are many others – the increasing hysterical rants of the doommongers (thanks Joe), the lack of warming over the last decade, climategate etc.
One thing the NYT article gets wrong is the idea that the ‘climate fade’ is a US effect and Europe is still ‘on message’. In fact belief in AGW is falling in Europe and there is increasing opposition to wind turbines.
It’s an easy exercise to check Peterson and Connolley’s paper and see that Charles is wrong. P&C cite Twomey 1977 as a cooling paper. Twomey 1977 cites Twomey 1974, so it’s clear that P&C were aware of it. Twomey 1974 wasn’t listed as a cooling paper because he did not estimate the magnitude of the albedo effect, so could not be taken as predicting cooling or warming. It was Twomey’s 1977 which did that. And hence Twomey 1977 was properly listed as a cooling paper.
Sigh. Always with the communications angle. People are just fatigued, or don’t want to think about “reality”. If only a way could be found to enliven the rotting corpse.
I offer the null hypothesis that people have rumbled what’s actually been going on and how suspect CAGW is.
Eric,
My only failure is to not agree with you, and I will remain a failure in that regard. I recognize extremists and true believers and, you are one. You have no idea of the science, the history or the truth. All you have is your faith and your deep need to cling to that faith no matter what.
Hunter @26,
It is clear that you have no answer to any substantive points I have made about your mistakes, and you are making unsupported accusations, using epithets, to cover up for your inability.
1) You claimed that scientists in the ’70’s were predicting a new “ice age”, while the peer reviewed literature predominately was about global warming. This was true despite the cooling period that was experienced during those years as a result of sulfate aerosals.
2) You called referral to “Skeptical Science” and automatic fail, despite the fact that John Cook won the Australian Eureka prize from the Australian Museum of Science for excellence in climate journalism. The web site makes the results of peer reviewed climate science articles understandable to the average person.
3) In your post @6 you claim that extreme weather events are pointed to as “proof” of AGW, and that these events always turn out to be typical.
First of all, extreme weather events are not used by scientists as “proof” of AGW. There is no such thing as proof of a scientitic theory. Data is examined for consistency or inconsistency. Data cannot conclusively prove a theory, and no scientist will argue that it can.
What is cited by scientists as consistent with GHG induced global warming is the increasing predominance of high temperature records over low temperature records at locations around the globe, especially night time highs. This is only one of many signs that are consistent with warming due to GHG’s, and not consistent with other possible causes of warming.
In addition, some of the recent extreme events in the news are indeed out of the ordinary and represent record rainfall events or drought events. The drought in Texas is an example, and the rainfall which devastated Southern Vermont are two current examples which come to mind.
http://blog.chron.com/climateabyss/2011/08/texas-drought-spot-the-outlier/
http://capitalclimate.blogspot.com/2011/08/irene-sets-25-all-time-rainfall-records.html
“Is climate fatigue setting in?” Keith asks.
“You ain’t seen nothin’ yet,” I answer. “You’re gonna be a lot more tired of this story in the future. A whole lot.”
Eric,
It is clear that your opinion of your points and my opinion of your points is very different.
We will certainly grow tired of the constant recasting and recycling of tired memes. Even when old vinegar is poured into new gourds it doesn’t pass for Beaujolais.
Rosenthal’s article is very amateurish and certainly doesn’t reflect the real world. I suggest someone buy here a copy of Roger Pielke Jr’s The Climate Fix.
India’s carbon tax is about $1 per tonne and on electricity generation only. Sure, Australia has a carbon tax of $23 going through Parliament but it will be another year before it is in operation and that is unlikely as the Opposition leading 57% to 43% in the polls is pledged to remove the tax. Europe is virtually certain, given the financial mess it is in, to back away from/dilute its renewable energy targets.
The article is simply not credible, more wishful thinking.
#22, Jarmo
>You should read the study you quote more carefully. In addition to Democrats and Republicans, they list independents. Their share is around 30% of the electorate, right?
So the 30% indepents are your block? Let’s have a look at the numbers. 32% of these are convinced that we have AGW and 30% think it’s a very serious problem. Funny how you have this almost exact 1:1 correspondence between the fraction of a political leaning that is convinced of AGW and the fraction of that political leaning that sees Global warming as a very serious problem.
Jarmo, for your claim in #4 to be true, a seizable fraction of those convinced that AGW is happening should see AGW not as a very serious problem by your point a). However, the numbers contradict that. So yet again, where do you see your postulated block from #4 represented in the survey? Sorry if I don’t follow your further arguments right now, but you’ve made a huge – and IMHO false – claim in #4 and have neither convincingly defended it nor stepped back from it.
Hunter @29
Obviously our opinions differ. There is another big difference. I support my opinion with facts and logic. You decline to do so.
“What happened to global warming?”
It shifted to global cooling, just like it always does. It happened at the maximum “CO2 forcing”, just like it always does.
“We’ve learned from experience that the truth will come out. Other experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were wrong or right. Nature’s phenomena will agree or they’ll disagree with your theory. And, although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven’t tried to be very careful in this kind of work. And it’s this type of integrity, this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much of the research in Cargo Cult Science.”
Eric,
I don’t think many disagree that it is warming, hence more high temp records than low. The data suggests that wrming incrases precipitation; most, I think, would agree with that.
But I’m unaware of any data showing that drought increases with temperature. In fact, it is my understadning that the data does not support that claim. Would you be kind enough to point me to the data showing that droughts increase with temperature?
kdk33
Funny how it’s always someone else that has to do the work.
An often-cited study is Burke et al. (2006). Abstract here:
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JHM544.1
Future projections of drought in the twenty-first century made using the Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES) A2 emission scenario show regions of strong wetting and drying with a net overall global drying trend. For example, the proportion of the land surface in extreme drought is predicted to increase from 1% for the present day to 30% by the end of the twenty-first century.
There’s plenty more. Try looking for it.
#35, kdk33
> I don’t think many disagree that it is warming
For some definition of “many”. In the US, just 53% of the Republicans, 31% of the Independents and 14% of the Democrats.
KDK33 @35,
In areas that are drought prone, rainfall decreases with increasing temperature. Here is the example of Texas:
http://blog.chron.com/climateabyss/2011/08/texas-drought-spot-the-outlier/
Eric
Have you also read that there is a large landless tongue west of Europe?
That’s a candidate for best predictive text ever.
Eric,
Texas is infamous for bad droughts.
The last one of this magnitude lasted five years and was about 60 years ago, from 1951-1956. We do not need some re-constructionist bs posing as science telling us that we have droughts.
BBD,
Thank you for the reply. To my knowledge I have been exquisitely polite when interacting with you. Are you grown enough to return the favor?
Unfortunately, I am looking for data, not “future projections”. There is a data base of global PDSI at Ucar.edu. The text version isn’t, and I would rather not spend time figuring out the other formats if I can help it. I, myself have plotted the US (a place with perhaps the best data) PDSI index versus temperature for the last 100 years and there is no statistically significant trend. Tangentially, NOAA generates a climate extreme index (CEI) and it similarly has no trend with temperature. For “enhanced” PDSI globally, Briffa draws the same conclusion globally (see:http://drought.wcrp-climate.org/workshop/Talks/Shrier.pdf)
If you know the location of a text version of this data, I would be interested in getting the data.
————————————
bluegrue: I don’t know where you get those numbers; I assume a poll of some kind. I don’t believe them to be true. I’ll simply point out that even Rick Perry doesn’t dispute there has been warming.
————————————-
Eric,
Data in the US shows that precipitation increases with warming and this is consistent with the theory as I understand it. The claim that extra rain will only fall on places already too wet, and places that are driy will only get drier is a dubious one, and not supported by the data. There have always been droughts in Texas; there always will be.
If you know where I can find actuall drought data I would like to have a look.
KDK33, @42
I actually gave you data on Texas that shows that in that state, rainfall decreases with increasing temperature. Texas is basically a dry state.
http://blog.chron.com/climateabyss/2011/08/texas-drought-spot-the-outlier/
Hunter @ 41,
The graph shows that Texas is dry in the summer, and that the higher the temperature, the lower the rainfall. That was my point.
In addition projections for the impact on rainfall in the dry southwestern US are for less rainfall as a result of global warming.
http://downloads.globalchange.gov/usimpacts/pdfs/southwest.pdf
42, kdk33
The numbers are from the Pew poll linked in #18 and used in the NYT article that prompted Keith’s post here. The numbers reflect the reply to the question:
> From what you’ve read and heard, is there solid evidence that the average temperature on earth has been getting warmer over the past few decades, or not?
It’s up to you to assume that professional polsters don’t know how to do their job.
Eric @43,
Indeed you did. My apologies.
The plot is Texas rainfall (not US or global drought) versus Texas temperature (which isn’t the same thing as the global mean temperature).
I suspect the results is in part tautology (daily highs are hotter when it doens’t rain).
Nevertheless, it gives me something to think about…
Do you know where I can get the data in text form?
Eric,
Yes, it is very much as I thought…
I have plotted FNEP precipitation data as a function of GISS L-S global temperature anamoly for all 10 Texas climate divisions. The slope for every division is positive, so I did not test for statistical significance. According to the data, as the global temperature increases precipitation in every Texas climate division increases. The opposite, of course, of dry getting drier.
The data is here: http://atmo.tamu.edu/osc/
An interesting trend map here: http://blog.chron.com/climateabyss/2011/05/our-new-analysis-of-united-states-precipitation-trends/
In Texas, the daily temperatures are strongly influenced by whether there was, or was not, rain. Plotting local precipitation against local temperature is, in effect, plotting precipitation against itself. It is tautology.
Though you couldn’t provide the actual data, I’ve very much enjoyed exploring this issue, so I appreciate your bringing the grapyh to my attention.
Thank You.
KDK33;
The data you cite is the increase in precipitation over a century. This is not really relevant to a discussion of drought which is an extreme event.
The models say that higher global average temperatures will result in more intense drought events, and more intense rainfall events. These will vary with the development of weather systems. So looking at overall average precipitation is not the right way to analyze the data for model validity.
If you look at the environment 360 forum on this topic, most of the participants in the forum cite more extreme events of drought and floods as an expected development.
http://e360.yale.edu/feature/forum_is_extreme_weather_linked_to_global_warming/2411/
The IPCC 2007 report also noted that extreme rainfall events since 1950 have increased as well a extreme drought in drought prone areas.
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/faq-3-3.html
Eric,
I’ve heard completely different claims regarding models. Just a week or so ago, MT explained the models were mute on the subject of extreme weather events. Either way, if models are claiming something not supported by the data, I’ll go with the data.
Please see my reply to BBD at 42. I have looked at actual data for weather extremes in the US and drought is not increasing with temperature. I posted the results here about 2 weeks ago, as you may recall.
KDKD33 @48,
Looking at the presentation you referenced in 42. I am not sure what data you looked at for your statement about US and drought. One of the conclusions the authors come to as a result of the data analysis was:
“area percentage with extremely dry conditions
may have increased due to climate change”
This is a presentation consisting of bullet points and graphs, given to specialists and assumes the audience has specific background information that I lack. I am not sure what this is all about and can’t draw any conclusions from this. I doubt that you are any better off than I am.