In 1986, I was a grad student at Princeton, working in the atomic physics lab of Will Happer. It was at a department colloquium that I first heard a science talk that raised serious concerns about our use of fossil fuels potentially impacting the climate. This was not received well.
People asked all sorts of questions, with much of the discussion revolving around feedback effects. Perhaps warmer weather from CO2 will result in higher humidity, making more clouds*, and reflecting more sunlight into space. It does not. What about ice cover? This is actually a positive feedback – as the globe warms, ice coverage is replaced by darker surfaces, leading to more absorption of the incident solar radiation. And so on.
I thought the speaker did a creditable job of answering the concerns raised, repeatedly making the point that most feedback effects would make things worse, not better. It was entirely new to me at the time; I didn’t have any context to judge the relative merits of the discussion. Prof. Happer is one of those remarkable people who seems to know a lot about everything. So, as I related before, I asked him. His immediate and harsh retort was
“We can’t turn off the wheels of industry, and go back to living like cavemen.”
I relate this story again because the same language comes up today in a story I saw in the Guardian:
The president of Cop28, Sultan Al Jaber, has claimed there is “no science” indicating that a phase-out of fossil fuels is needed** to restrict global heating to 1.5C, the Guardian and the Centre for Climate Reporting can reveal.
Al Jaber also said a phase-out of fossil fuels would not allow sustainable development “unless you want to take the world back into caves”.
COP23 article, 3 December 2023
This is exactly the same solution aversion that Happer displayed, using exactly the same language. It doesn’t address the actual question. It leaps ahead to the worst conceivable consequence, doesn’t like it, and so reverts to reality denial: We don’t want that to happen, so the evidence must be wrong!
We humans excel at reality-denial. It is not helpful. Rather than starting to deal with the problem of climate change thirty years ago – the science was already crystal clear by then – we’ve dug ourselves a much deeper hole. That’s not to say we should abandon all hope and revert to living in caves, but we do need to take serious and rapid steps to reform the ways in which we generate power. It is doing more of the same that risks sending us back into caves.
The quoted reaction to this assertion in the story is predictably tepid. The quote in the Guardian is “The comments were `incredibly concerning’ and `verging on climate denial’, scientists said.” As a scientist who is not directly involved with dealing with these people, let me be more blunt:
ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?
Al Jaber’s attitude isn’t verging on climate denial, it is the archetype of climate denial. Literally the same thing that climate deniers said in the 1980s. It expresses an attitude that was clearly wrong and dangerously backwards by the early 1990s. And this guy is the president of COP28? I say again
ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?
And who is this guy? The Guardian reports “Al Jaber is also the chief executive of the United Arab Emirates’ state oil company, Adnoc, which many observers see as a serious conflict of interest.” A conflict of interest? Really? Do you think? Again I say
ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?
This is obviously a conflict of interest, of the worst sort. His personal wealth, and the sovereign wealth of his nation, is entirely based on the production and sale of fossil fuels. Mitigating climate change means reducing our consumption of fossil fuels, which is a direct threat to the economic interests he represents. Talk about putting the fox in charge of the hen house.
I am impressed by how the moneyed interests have managed to slither their way into positions of consequence on discussions in which they have an obvious conflict. I guess money always finds a way in. But can we please stop being so polite that we fail to call out obvious bullshit wherever it crops up? It seems to be spreading at the rate of made-up conspiracy nonsense on that site formerly known as Twitter. We should stop putting up with it already.
*Ironically, SO2 pollution from ocean-going vessels does have this effect, and as these emissions have been cleaned up, we can see the effect in global temperatures. This is not to advocate for SO2 pollution! though injecting aerosols like SO2 into the stratosphere is one of geoengineering approaches that gets discussed. Before going down that path, the obvious first step is to stop pouring petrol on the fire by continuing to add CO2 to the atmosphere.
**We’re already committed to 1.5C. I see no conceivable way that we can curb emissions fast enough to avoid that. So I guess this statement is true, from a certain point of view – that of a liar. A less misleading statement would be that a phase-out of fossil fuels is necessary to prevent things from getting much worse than forecast for the 1.5C threshold.
His concept is for fossil fuel industries to become net-zero via carbon capture and storage, e.g.
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20231129-uae-to-pump-co2-into-rock-as-carbon-capture-debate-rages
Currently (2022), 94 million barrels of oil are produced daily. That is 15 million cubic meters per day. This produces 40 million tons of CO2 per day.
The plant described in the article has a near-term target of processing 1 ton of CO2 daily.
To achieve climate neutrality, an increase by a factor of 40 million is therefore required. Nice toy.
The plant described in the article has a near-term target
i thought of the azolla fern
Carbon capture is a thing to try, but it is not, by itself, a serious solution. In this case, I don’t think it is even intended seriously. It is just another example of the kind of distraction and misdirection that the oil industry has engaged in all along (e.g., the greening earth society).
I wouldn’t hold your breath waiting for a top-down solution. Power at the top is not going to cut off their own legs. Grass-roots movement is something people can be in more control of – how do you spend your money? Who do you work for? Who do you invest in? You have to be the change.
They’re also “dark matter deniers”:
https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/dark-matter-deniers
Objectivity and politicization are seldom in the same room for long.
In this political environment “consensus” is obtained by censoring dissenting voices, denying funding, etc. Not by chance groupthink is the norm not the exception in academia.
Lack of political diversity in academia/universities is slowing down scientific progress as universities are not hiring, or firing dissenting voices. Typical of totalitarian societies.
Political diversity is not only a needed condition for democracy but also for a healthy academia, lack of political diversity always leads to political corruption and the suppression of ideas associated with the “other side”.
Well said, jeremyjr01.
The article will pull a few to the MOND site
Yes, and it is even worst than you suspect. I’ve never asked a student to work on MOND out of concern for their career. I’ve seen people’s jobs threatened for writing papers on the subject. I myself have been accused of being a “dark matter denier” in a pejorative, straw man sense that intentionally conflates my legitimate concern for the interpretation of data with an unreasonable denial of what data show.
It sometimes feels like we’re in a reverse scientific revolution that will usher in an age of dark epicycles.
Briefly on COP and all the mofos that flew there, some in luxury jets, as it’s frankly a waste of time; we’ve spent roughly 10,000 years digging ourselves in this hole. Hoping we’ll get out in a generation or two is a delusion. Best we can hope is not to end up with Venus 2. Besides, it’s Kobayashi-Maru. Look up the amount of energy all the ICE vehicles consume and then convert that to number of new (nuclear), wind and solar power plants. And that’s just a portion of transportation part of energy consumption.
As for the universe; you will not solve your problem until you stop thinking in terms of objects in space and start thinking about it as a fluid. Just because to us a parsec is an enormous distance it doesn’t mean it actually is.
I guess it’s a matter of time-scale.
In the long run, life itself is a “Kobayashi Maru” – no matter what, everybody dies.
Similar with atmospheric CO2.
For the next generations it will be hard, but in a few hundred million years things will become “normal” again.
And perhaps new more advance species will be around, using the extra CO2 we produced (e.g. intelligent photosynthetic animals).
See what happened to the stromatolites, they polluted the atmosphere with O2 and… here we are.
Interesting.
For me, the “Kobayashi Maru” test is the epitome of a hopeless situation, a no-win situation.
Then it’s time to change the rules, just like JTK did.
In physics:
We live on math that was invented for point-like objects (differential calculus). Planets are points, compared to the size of the solar system. Electrons are not. The physicists of this world have known this for 100 years. But they are too lazy or too scared to come up with something new…
@Dimitri
OK, I suppose one could argue that at the end of the universe life can not exist thus everybody truly has died. Speculative, both ‘the end of the universe’ and ‘nothing can be alive then’ but I’ll grant you that. However, before that, from life’s point of view, its constituents don’t matter. Life survives despite them dying. It’s just an adaptation to environment forbidding one, eternal organism, which is energetically far more efficient. Reproduction is costly.
@stefanfreundt1964
1) Exactly. Except alternate ruleset where problem is solvable goes against life’s basic instruction. Which I suspect is Fermi paradox’s primary great filter. Before technological cheats everybody’s desire for unrestricted expansion is self-limiting.
Let’s be incredibly optimistic and imagine we reduce energy consumption by 90% as well as equal it out. What will prevent us to simply grow to 80 billion and face the same problem again? Birth rate in developed world is on decline. Do you think that’s due to its inhabitants raising moral values; people thinking “Well shit, there’s obviously too many of us around already, I really shouldn’t participate in making more.”?
Given time I guess enough would adopt that stance. I very much doubt we do have that much time.
There is a solution. Replacement. With something that has that primary function commented out. You recon we’ll make our AIs that way?
2) Oh really? Where does Earth end? Let’s for the sake of argument concede matter is made up of elementary particles. Very anthropocentric view but still. Now, electrons, as you point out, have no edge. Nor do protons and neutrons although that doesn’t really matter. Now, what we perceive as surface is just cloud of electrons, correct? So if electrons don’t have an edge how can anything made out of them have one? And if rocks and stuff that make Earth surface is made of edgeless things, how can the planet itself has an edge?
Planet on a scale of solar system is *not* a point. It’s not a point on a scale of entire universe even if you assume the latter to be infinite. Point is well defined abstract concept. It doesn’t exist outside geometry. Sure, depending on the resolution of your solution you can approximate some thing to a point. But you immediately introduce an error. Do few billions of errors in an average galaxy cancel themselves out?
@Stefan:
I don’t see physics as a K-M no-win situation, but I agree with you about changing the rules.
And this is exactly what Milgrom did – he changed Newton’s 2nd law!
And this is how Sultan Al Jaber came to be president of COP28:
https://climate-reporting.org/al-jaber-cop28-uae-oil/
I can’t say I’m shocked, or even much surprised. Realpolitik is a filthy business.
It never ceases to amaze me how often people make the dichotomy of 1) continue burning fossil fuels as we do now versus 2) regress to pre-agrarian life. Because there always has been and always will be a third option: replace fossil fuels with good old fashioned nuclear power. It’s statistically safer than everything else, the waste issue is an overblown fabrication, and it will last for one approximate unit of forever.
Nuclear power provides the only solution that can save the planet and also maintain the standard of living we currently enjoy. There’s truly nothing else to be said on the matter, that’s all we have. Everything else is a non-solution.
Nuclear has some upside, but needs a marketing overhaul. It does seem odd to me that an apparent majority of people would choose to mandate a switch to wind and solar at the start of a climate crisis. If you can’t count on climate stability, then maybe wind and solar is not such a good idea, as their economics is climate dependent.
I have been following this great blog for years and want to give a huge thanks for your work Stacy.
But your stance on the climate issue seems off for a non conventional thinker. The climate models are a mess, the data that has some huge uncertainties and there are unknown factors. I am quite certain that we don’t know where temperatures are heading. The situation in a lot of scientific areas are quite similar to physics and the MOND vs LDBM conflict. And people just ignore the evidence against their dug in position. It can cerainly be hard to figure out which way to go when there is polarisation on the issue. I think a suggestive thing in your post regarding your own degree of a closed science I settled mindset comes from the hyperbole “are you f-ing kidding me”.
We know since
We know since at least 30 years where temperatures are heading, if we continue to pollute the atmosphere with increasing levels of CO2 – not exactly of course, mostly because this depends on what we are doing or refrain from doing. The models are good enough for tat and coincide with what we observe – as far as that applies. The problem is that many like you simply don’t like the results and prefer to follow the desinfomation of the profiteers of ruining our atmosphere and climate.
As I was saying… how come I am an egocentric puppet and you are not?
My thinking is don’t hurt todays people for uncertain benefits to the future. I live in Sweden where we did like Germany and closed nuclear for wind. We had a great energy system, stable and no co2. and now it’s worse and more expensive. Hallmarks of ideological solutions.
And certainly the dark matter models are good enough to prove that dark matter is the answer, We just dont know the precise solution.
This is in the realm of solutions – i.e, how we react to the problem as opposed to whether or not there is a problem. Replacing CO2 intensive energy generation with nuclear seems like a sensible approach, as it will be difficult to replace all energy generation with renewables-only, especially in the near term. The examples of Sweden and Germany would seem to confirm that suspicion.
It is interesting to me that the people who want to go towards renewables are also often against nuclear power generation. That is not a logical position. It seems to be born of an irrational fear of nuclear (which has caused far less harm than carbon industries) combined with basic innumeracy: they have no understanding of the amount of energy they utilize, much less where it comes from. Anecdotally, I’ve had some ask me why they can’t just strap a solar panel to the roof of their SUV and drive forever.
10,000-16,000 years ago, the mean sea level was 125 m below the current value–and we had 1-2 miles of ice over Boston. All that because of normal climate variability. I would much prefer palms on Nantucket than glaciers–wouldn’t you?
I’m disappointed in the settled-science position taken here by Stacy.
Having once accepted the mainstream narrative at face value, I have become much less certain and therefore would agree. Anyone who has observed the unquestioning belief in dark matter in the astro community (not to mention other questionable pillars of current cosmology) should be alive to the dangers of relying on consensus. That the climate has warmed over the last century and that pCO2 continues to rise is indubitable. That it is all down to us is not (https://climatechangedispatch.com/new-study-natural-co2-emissions-nearly-six-times-higher-than-man-made-sources/), and even if it were, it has been argued that doubling the current concentrations of CO₂, N₂O or CH₄ would increases the forcings by only a few per cent (https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/03/07/infrared-forcing-by-greenhouse-gases/).
An impressively sober assessment that I would recommend is Judith Curry’s here: https://judithcurry.com/2023/08/14/state-of-the-climate-summer-2023/
She says the exceptionally warm global temperature in 2023 is part of a warming trend since 2015 that is associated primarily with greater absorption of solar radiation in the earth-atmosphere system. This increase in absorbed radiation is driven partly by a slow decline in springtime snow extent, but primarily by a reduction in reflection from the atmosphere driven by reduced cloudiness and to a lesser extent a reduction in atmospheric aerosol, i.e. shipping sulphate emissions. Any increase in the greenhouse effect from increasing CO₂ (which impacts the longwave radiation budget) is lost in the noise.
Yes, indeed, cleaning up shipping sulfate pollution (as I mentioned) has reduced the planet’s albedo and led to additional warming. I.e., human-induced pollution was partially compensating for human-induced heating. Fixing one problem reveals that the other was even worse than the temperature record shows, not better.
It is also true that there can be natural sources of greenhouse gases that do not balance into equilibrium on the short term. Volcanoes are an important source that can cut either way, depending on the event – the northern hemisphere summer of 1992 was chilled by high altitude aerosols emitted by Mt. Pinatubo. However, these DO NOT outweigh human emissions: the sum of CO2 in the air is roughly equal to but a little bit less than the pre-industrial level plus industrial emissions – the rest has been absorbed by the ocean, acidifying it. So we can do the check-sum, and before we recognized ocean acidification, the question was why things weren’t already worse. Now that we’ve figured that out, the check-sum very nearly balances: there is extra CO2 in the air, and we put it there.
As for forcings, the question isn’t how large they are, it is the impact they have. There are many systems in which a few percent suffice to tip the balance. Saying it is only a few percent is a classic way to make it sound like a problem isn’t a big problem when it is indeed a problem.
Never mind the models. The data show that we have changed the atmosphere by adding greenhouse gases. The data also show that we can affect the climate by regulating shipping pollution. That’s a much smaller twiddle than CO2. So: there is no question that the industrial activity we humans engage in has a global impact on the climate. From that perspective, does it seem wise to continue our uncontrolled experiment on the climate?
That would make a heck of an NSF proposal. Give me trillions of dollars per year to dig up carbon and see what happens when we inject it into the atmosphere. Will report back about the global impact in a century or two.
I am a scientist, not a knee-jerk contrarian. I understand the science myself; I am not relying on consensus. As you note, I have a good track record of not doing that.
There is nothing serious left to debate about climate change: it is real, and we are driving it by adding CO2 (and methane) to the atmosphere. What we do about it is a separate issue. To have a sensible discussion about that we have to start with the recognition that it is real.
For over 40 years since Exxon started suppressing its own internal research and saying the opposite of what it showed in public, people with a clear economic incentive to deny reality have played this propagandist’s game of pretending like there is some uncertainty in the science. There is not.
True indeed!
Still I’m also a fan of nuclear power like Peter S.
This discussion reminded me of an article I read in Scientific American in 2018.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-overcome-antiscientific-thinking/
The Coles Notes
(warning: as I understand and interpret it, but you can read the article yourself).
There are basically three areas to combat.
1. Shortcuts / TMI. There just is not enough time to digest the information we’re presented (a fire hose of data), so we rely upon heuristics or experts to come to a conclusion. If you are a fan of Ethan Siegel, then you rely on him to tell you what to think (sorry / not sorry for the DM dig).
2. Confirmation Bias. This is pretty well known, but it floored me that two groups of people presented an unbiased presentation on capital punishment ended up further in their respective camps afterwards.
3. Tribal / Group Dynamics. I was surprised at expulsion from a group could be analogous to physical pain, hence the Scarlett Letter, etc. We are a social species.
There were no definitive solutions identified in the article, but it did outline some possible strategies.
1. Titrate information and give people time to digest. Many will say it is too late and we are already out of time, but we can only shout at the wall for so long before trying something else.
2. Try to get people to argue the other side (devil’s advocate). I admit this was the weakest strategy. We are likely Bayesian engines after all.
3. The group is not quite as cohesive as you / they think. Sometimes just debunking the “so called” authorities is enough (hopefully not ad hominem).
I guess in the end, I’d like people to think like scientists (channeling Carl Sagan). I’m guilty of all of the above at one time or another, and what fascinates me most about DM / MOND “debate” is the epiphany that “scientist are people too” and people first. Humility, curiosity, and wonder appear to be in short supply.
I’m all for doing something, but I believe it should also be approached scientifically and holistically, not just a piece at a time. From what I’ve seen, most positive “action” is pretend. It seems better to look like you are doing something than actually doing it, at least politically. We also need to call out BS and bad actors right away, as I believe Stacy was trying to do in his post. Probably misquoting Terry Pratchett (paraphrasing Jonathan Swift), “a lie can make it around the world before the truth has its boots on.”
The same strategies would likely work as well for either climate or gravity (or any other difficult human problem).
I may pick up David Merrits book for light reading over the holidays.
Stepping down from the soapbox … (where’d I leave my mic? 🙂
Interesting article. Includes the quote
“ostracism activates the brain’s dorsal anterior cingulate cortex—the same region recruited when we experience physical pain. In a 2005 study, a team of researchers led by Gregory Berns, a neuroeconomics professor at Emory University, and his colleagues found that disagreeing with a group to which you belong is associated with increased activity in the amygdala, an area that turns on in response to different types of stress. Holding an opinion different from other group members, even a correct one, hurts emotionally.”
Can confirm.
If controlled hot fusion ever became a reality that would solve our energy needs into perpetuity. One fly in the ointment is how to get that energy to replace hydrocarbon fueled engines for cars and trucks. Since it’s probably unlikely that fusion reactors will become small enough to put under the hood of an automobile, like in a favorite movie trilogy – Back to the Future – another strategy would be needed. One possibility would be to use the (hopefully) limitless energy of fusion reactors to synthesize hydrocarbon fuels from water and atmospheric CO2, so that there would be no net carbon emissions.
Some people here might find this interesting:
https://nca2023.globalchange.gov/
This paper gives me hope that regardless the rhetoric presented by vested interests, plans are being made that incorporate climate change. As for assigning blame to natural phenomena or human lifestyles? Who cares? We know what greenhouse gases do. We know we’re contributing to the increase. Why not at least try to mitigate the human effects?
How many people know that the central states aquifer that extends from Canada to Texas is now 100 feet lower than it was in the 1880’s when is was first being tapped for agriculture. We’re using water faster than it can be replenished by rainfall.
And it if hadn’t been for the discovery of an industrial process for making nitrogen for fertlilizer we’d have reached a food crisis 100 years ago. That discovery opened up whole new areas of poor land for agriculture, population increase, more energy needs, and a corresponding demand in these areas for more water. Which can’t be replaced if the climate continues its current trend. Ironically, California is one of the largest producers of bottled water, which it exports all over the country. Let that sink in.
Meanwhile, we tie our hands by limiting our nuclear power capabilities When what we need is more non-fossil power generation while we transition away from greenhouse gas production.