The New York Times, the high church of political correctness, has conceded the waning appeal of one of its cardinal doctrines: the imminent risk of climate disaster.
Hallelujah! As a climate scientist, I have always been skeptical of the alarmist views (and have gotten into trouble because of that). If the NYT is now backing down, maybe the drivers of this nonsense are finally listening to the louder (than mine) voices of reason. And I was struck by a comment early in the essay. So many responses to luxury beliefs (of which climate alarmism was one) do end up hurting the very people they purport to help.
I am someone who has spent years studying anthropogenically-induced climate change. The evidence so far is nonexistent, or at least, undetectable. Our current tools just cannot extract this information since they are so primitive and limited. That is why I am devoting a lot of time to creating better tools. We have to treat this as a serious science, not just some scam for extracting cash from the public.
I am very skeptical of large scale geo-engineering projects or terra-forming projects, since we know so little about these systems. As a friend of mine quipped, "Geo-engineering is a bad idea whose time has come."
I also have as a goal the divorce of climate science funding from these hysterical morons who do not know much if anything . We need stable serious long term funding of these fascinating problems if we are to climb up the Kardashev Scale a bit, as a species.
I read that the total mass of concrete now exceeds the mass of all living things on Earth. Do you think that it has an impact on climate apart from the energy used and CO2 released in producing it, eg thru albedo? I have no idea, just curious.
I wonder about the same thing. It does seem like a reasonable question to ask, for sure.
Amazingly, this stuff does not show up in the data. So we need better data, longer term data, and better data analysis tools. And this is at a minimum.
I am also in touch with people improving our numerical models of various kinds. We do not cover yourselves in glory when solving numerical PDEs.
People currently take tools that were obsolete decades or even centuries ago, and throw them at the problem. And we make horrendous approximations all over the place as well.
I think that is not good enough. We should do better. We can do better.
Catastrophism does not help. We have to treat this area as serious science. Running around like chickens whose heads have been cut off does not really help the situation, particularly.
Yeah, we are not doing that well with our science, to be honest.
This has been sort of a slap-dash mess. We can do better. I am sure of it.
But, we have to treat it seriously, not as some crazy frantic response to some hysterical alarmists. We have to take a step back, take a few breaths, and treat this set of problems with some seriousness. Sure, this approach might be slow and tedious, but rushing has not really done much but burn through a phenomenal amount of cash with very little to show for it, frankly.
Your essay would be stronger if you didn't cite large language models, even if you relied upon them for initial research. Even if the presented info is true here and you took the time to verify it, the audience has no idea what prompts you used, your historical interaction with the bot, how to recreate your chart, or if the information presented is from an actual source, or a representation of what something might look like if the data were real. The reader is left assigning whatever you're talking about with low confidence
Anyone who has low confidence in whatever I'm talking about will doubtless have low confidence in my self-defense. I welcome readers to check out all hyperlinks in my essay, query LLMs with prompts of their choosing, and write a reasoned rebuttal that HxSTEM will gladly post.
LLMs are not reliable. Certainly not for science. LLMs regurgitate whatever is the most reinforced (i.e. common for it to run across). LLMs are just superannuated search engines.
I would characterize this article as an example of AI Slop. It appears to be work that says things, but it fails in multiple ways. Do you know what happens when AI outputs are fed back to it? It melts down. That is what is happening in our Western society today. The more people use AI to write articles, the more AI Slop gets fed back into the LLMs. This is not a good thing.
Rebuttal is not the correct term for what I wrote. You can see it below. The fundamental agreement is that degrowth is garbage, and founded in nonsensical economics disjoint from reality. Discussed below.
Great summary! I have fellow geoscientists who use terms like “combatting climate change” knowing full well the lessons from geologic past. The argument for “unprecedented” rates of change only work if one knows the past rates (limited by the resolution of dating methods). Any forcing on climate or sea level that cannot be affected by a policy (solar activity, cloud cover, global underwater volcanism) are of no interest to the activists. How about remaining a prosperous nation so we can deal with specific events, such as storms and droughts.
The alarmist narrative certainly impacted public trust. I, knowing nothing about the science behind all the moving parts that impact our Earth, have zero confidence in in anything reported. I cannot trust the models, the graphs, the experts, the scientists, the studies, etc. Where is there objective information? It cannot be found because there is manipulation at many places for many reasons. For example someone laser focused on anthropogenic warming takes no notice of or will not report on cycles of the Earth, the impact of the sun, etc. Or someone laser focused on extreme weather events will hype the story then it's revealed there is no real trend, it has happened before, or the trigger is movement of the Earth's crust, etc. How can I conclude anything but a charade?
Lomborg has been wrong too many times to count and Shellenberger is a classic grifter. (His Substack is an embarrassment.)
Climate activists are irrelevant -- CO2 and global temps continue to rise and are potentially even accelerating.
The denialists and FUD purveyors like the author have been successful in delaying action on climate for 40+ years, so they are their fossil fuel benefactors should be pleased at a job well done. The rest of us, not so much.
Denialism /delay is so tired and cliched at this point -- the fact that Heterodox STEM is still pushing it is disappointing. Unsubscribed.
Your "rest of us" served to accelerate CO2/warming even faster by greenlighting manufacturing shifts to coal-intensive, scrubber-light China. What feasible proposal do you offer to halt the rise, at whose developmental cost?
So, if all that manufacturing had been done in the USA, it would have produced almost double the CO2. Yes? Come on. You have outsourced your mind to an LLM.
Those particulates from China's coal plants helped reflect energy back into space. Geo-solar engineering. Come on, think these things through. Go to original sources. Don't believe an LLM "thinks" or can do any thinking for you. It's just a super-search engine. No cognition there. Sam Altman lies. It's his fiduciary duty to hype his firm.
China has been building nuclear power at a good pace. And China has managed to create a nation for its citizens with infrastructure that puts the USA to shame---near Jetson's future while our nation rots --- on a fraction of the CO2 per capita we use.
The way through is nuclear power, built on a wartime schedule. Convert 95% in 10 years. Build out double the electrical power we use today as nuclear.
Accusing me of outsourcing my mind based on an irrelevant comparison I did not make seems overheated. Fyi, I trust LLMs to summarize consensus views of other groups (in this case, climate activists) better than I can, and to graph data supplied. All facts I independently verified. My reference to manufacturing shifts concerned Kyoto-inspired transfers from Europe in the 2000s, when China was highly coal-intensive. Much of the rest of what you say I agree with.
Yay! My fan. What I was getting at is mostly not thinking through the relative tradeoff, as if (outside of France) the EU had a terribly different carbon energy mix, and that unscrubbed coal emissions act much like high sulfur oil emissions to reflect energy.
Germany, Italy, etcetera had energy mixes then that were not much different. You did, implicitly, make the comparison when you said that greenlighting manufacturing to China served to "accelerate CO2/warming". Now, one could say that the manufacturing outsourced might be equal to or higher CO2, but I don't see evidence for that, so did acceleration happen?
The China-outsource sector I know of that I think did accelerate warming is Chinese solar panels, because the lower cost panels led to expanded manufacturing and deployment. That deployment supported a PR campaign that enabled shutdown of nuclear plants (killing fossil fuel interests competition), and nonsensical summertime claims of over 100% solar energy generation---as if that meant anything over the course of a German year.
China still is coal intensive. But unlike EU, (particularly Germany) China hasn't killed nuclear power and gotten worse.
The degrowth economists are a menace, because as Kent said, energy is GDP. What this means is that politicians cannot and will not degrowth for very long for the most part because it means mass poverty. The nations that do not degrowth will dominate the future, it's as simple as that. If the West does not take its head out of its virtue signaling behind, the contest will be over, and the new hegemon will take charge. This means the right move now is a wartime level project to convert to nuclear power now. Forget solar and wind, those are parasitic and essentially worthless. Now, when carbon energy is still relatively cheap is the time to build the nuclear capacity to get off most carbon fuel. There are massive perverse incentives in the West for fossil fuel interests to profiteer off the runup in fuel prices. That course that we are on to please the fossil fuel interests will cause destabilization of nations and war. All that solar and wind nonsense that can't support a modern economy because it's EROEI is far too low? That's part of what fossil fuel interests are pushing---because they know it cannot work.
I guess that I am not terribly surprised that Kent did not report on the world experiment with sulfate solar engineering. Economists don't follow climate science literature, they follow each other and poli-sci bloggers like Lomborg---at least in the West. This has been true since Nordhaus created his "Climate Economics" field that was defined to be utterly disconnected from climate science from the inception. Utterly disconnected from any physics [1]. That is an atrocity, and Nordhaus' "Nobel" will go down in history with Lysenko, but it's our reality.
The switch to low sulfur fuel oil is massive solar engineering [2, 3, 4, 5]. There is a lot of agreement on the effects of that. Further, if you read those papers you find out that the shipping lane emissions did a better job (because it's over oceanic clear skies) than any land-based emissions could.
Sea ice? Citing Gore's exaggeration has nothing to do with science, or the inexorable progression of ice melt. It's a straw man. In Geological terms, what is shown in this time lapse video (all ice fluctuation, then median ice extent) is lightning fast.
Climate is still an emergency, but Kent is correct that overstatements (Gore, others) and Potemkin agreements (Kyoto, Paris) have done terrible damage to public trust. This has created a kind of straw man festival in which, as Kent did here, various parties point to non-scientists and say, "That didn't happen." Those agreements, if fully implemented, would have done nothing significant. This is a slow-moving thing, but don't think it's not as real as a tank division. There will be crises coming. We saw a taste of that in 2021 in North America. 121 F in Canada, and Washington state's wheat and other crops baked in the fields is not normal. Beware the outlier damages years. Just like there are 10 year, 100 year, and 1000 year storms, there are damages years in the same vein that are not necessarily tied to storms, but to heat, and multiple factors coming together.
The physics are inexorable, driven by civilization---so we have to change course. Nuclear is the way through.
1. Keen S, Lenton TM, Garrett TJ, Rae JWB, Hanley BP, Grasselli M. 2022 Estimates of economic and environmental damages from tipping points cannot be reconciled with the scientific literature. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 119, e2117308119. http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2117308119
2. Manshausen P, Watson-Parris D, Christensen MW, Jalkanen JP, Stier P. 2022 Invisible ship tracks show large cloud sensitivity to aerosol. Nature 610, 101–106. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-05122-0
3. Diamond MS. 2023 Detection of large-scale cloud microphysical changes within a major shipping corridor after implementation of the International Maritime Organization 2020 fuel sulfur regulations. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics 23, 8259–8269. http://dx.doi.org/10.5194/acp-23-8259-2023
4. Gettelman A, Christensen MW, Diamond MS, Gryspeerdt E, Manshausen P, Stier P, Watson-Parris D, Yang M, Yoshioka M, Yuan T. 2024 Has Reducing Ship Emissions Brought Forward Global Warming?. Geophysical Research Letters 51, e2024GL109077. e2024GL109077 2024GL109077 http://dx.doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1029/2024GL109077
5. Hansen JE, Sato M, Simons L, Nazarenko LS, Sangha I, Kharecha P, Zachos JC, von Schuckmann K, Loeb NG, Osman MB, Jin Q, Tselioudis G, Jeong E, Lacis A, Ruedy R, Russell G, Cao J, Li J. 2023 Global warming in the pipeline. Oxford Open Climate Change 3, kgad008. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfclm/kgad008
Hallelujah! As a climate scientist, I have always been skeptical of the alarmist views (and have gotten into trouble because of that). If the NYT is now backing down, maybe the drivers of this nonsense are finally listening to the louder (than mine) voices of reason. And I was struck by a comment early in the essay. So many responses to luxury beliefs (of which climate alarmism was one) do end up hurting the very people they purport to help.
AGW was always pseudoscience. Global dimming is also nonsense.
Man adapts. Long term nuclear is the answer, but there’s no rush.
I am someone who has spent years studying anthropogenically-induced climate change. The evidence so far is nonexistent, or at least, undetectable. Our current tools just cannot extract this information since they are so primitive and limited. That is why I am devoting a lot of time to creating better tools. We have to treat this as a serious science, not just some scam for extracting cash from the public.
I am very skeptical of large scale geo-engineering projects or terra-forming projects, since we know so little about these systems. As a friend of mine quipped, "Geo-engineering is a bad idea whose time has come."
I also have as a goal the divorce of climate science funding from these hysterical morons who do not know much if anything . We need stable serious long term funding of these fascinating problems if we are to climb up the Kardashev Scale a bit, as a species.
I read that the total mass of concrete now exceeds the mass of all living things on Earth. Do you think that it has an impact on climate apart from the energy used and CO2 released in producing it, eg thru albedo? I have no idea, just curious.
I wonder about the same thing. It does seem like a reasonable question to ask, for sure.
Amazingly, this stuff does not show up in the data. So we need better data, longer term data, and better data analysis tools. And this is at a minimum.
I am also in touch with people improving our numerical models of various kinds. We do not cover yourselves in glory when solving numerical PDEs.
People currently take tools that were obsolete decades or even centuries ago, and throw them at the problem. And we make horrendous approximations all over the place as well.
I think that is not good enough. We should do better. We can do better.
Catastrophism does not help. We have to treat this area as serious science. Running around like chickens whose heads have been cut off does not really help the situation, particularly.
Here's an interesting compendium of failed predictions https://wattsupwiththat.com/failed-prediction-timeline/
Yeah, we are not doing that well with our science, to be honest.
This has been sort of a slap-dash mess. We can do better. I am sure of it.
But, we have to treat it seriously, not as some crazy frantic response to some hysterical alarmists. We have to take a step back, take a few breaths, and treat this set of problems with some seriousness. Sure, this approach might be slow and tedious, but rushing has not really done much but burn through a phenomenal amount of cash with very little to show for it, frankly.
Your essay would be stronger if you didn't cite large language models, even if you relied upon them for initial research. Even if the presented info is true here and you took the time to verify it, the audience has no idea what prompts you used, your historical interaction with the bot, how to recreate your chart, or if the information presented is from an actual source, or a representation of what something might look like if the data were real. The reader is left assigning whatever you're talking about with low confidence
Anyone who has low confidence in whatever I'm talking about will doubtless have low confidence in my self-defense. I welcome readers to check out all hyperlinks in my essay, query LLMs with prompts of their choosing, and write a reasoned rebuttal that HxSTEM will gladly post.
LLMs are not reliable. Certainly not for science. LLMs regurgitate whatever is the most reinforced (i.e. common for it to run across). LLMs are just superannuated search engines.
I would characterize this article as an example of AI Slop. It appears to be work that says things, but it fails in multiple ways. Do you know what happens when AI outputs are fed back to it? It melts down. That is what is happening in our Western society today. The more people use AI to write articles, the more AI Slop gets fed back into the LLMs. This is not a good thing.
Rebuttal is not the correct term for what I wrote. You can see it below. The fundamental agreement is that degrowth is garbage, and founded in nonsensical economics disjoint from reality. Discussed below.
Great summary! I have fellow geoscientists who use terms like “combatting climate change” knowing full well the lessons from geologic past. The argument for “unprecedented” rates of change only work if one knows the past rates (limited by the resolution of dating methods). Any forcing on climate or sea level that cannot be affected by a policy (solar activity, cloud cover, global underwater volcanism) are of no interest to the activists. How about remaining a prosperous nation so we can deal with specific events, such as storms and droughts.
The alarmist narrative certainly impacted public trust. I, knowing nothing about the science behind all the moving parts that impact our Earth, have zero confidence in in anything reported. I cannot trust the models, the graphs, the experts, the scientists, the studies, etc. Where is there objective information? It cannot be found because there is manipulation at many places for many reasons. For example someone laser focused on anthropogenic warming takes no notice of or will not report on cycles of the Earth, the impact of the sun, etc. Or someone laser focused on extreme weather events will hype the story then it's revealed there is no real trend, it has happened before, or the trigger is movement of the Earth's crust, etc. How can I conclude anything but a charade?
Lomborg has been wrong too many times to count and Shellenberger is a classic grifter. (His Substack is an embarrassment.)
Climate activists are irrelevant -- CO2 and global temps continue to rise and are potentially even accelerating.
The denialists and FUD purveyors like the author have been successful in delaying action on climate for 40+ years, so they are their fossil fuel benefactors should be pleased at a job well done. The rest of us, not so much.
Denialism /delay is so tired and cliched at this point -- the fact that Heterodox STEM is still pushing it is disappointing. Unsubscribed.
Your "rest of us" served to accelerate CO2/warming even faster by greenlighting manufacturing shifts to coal-intensive, scrubber-light China. What feasible proposal do you offer to halt the rise, at whose developmental cost?
In the spirit of your article, Kent, China's (8.37 mT) CO2 per capita is 58% of the USA's (14.3 mT) CO2 per capita. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita
So, if all that manufacturing had been done in the USA, it would have produced almost double the CO2. Yes? Come on. You have outsourced your mind to an LLM.
Those particulates from China's coal plants helped reflect energy back into space. Geo-solar engineering. Come on, think these things through. Go to original sources. Don't believe an LLM "thinks" or can do any thinking for you. It's just a super-search engine. No cognition there. Sam Altman lies. It's his fiduciary duty to hype his firm.
China has been building nuclear power at a good pace. And China has managed to create a nation for its citizens with infrastructure that puts the USA to shame---near Jetson's future while our nation rots --- on a fraction of the CO2 per capita we use.
The way through is nuclear power, built on a wartime schedule. Convert 95% in 10 years. Build out double the electrical power we use today as nuclear.
Accusing me of outsourcing my mind based on an irrelevant comparison I did not make seems overheated. Fyi, I trust LLMs to summarize consensus views of other groups (in this case, climate activists) better than I can, and to graph data supplied. All facts I independently verified. My reference to manufacturing shifts concerned Kyoto-inspired transfers from Europe in the 2000s, when China was highly coal-intensive. Much of the rest of what you say I agree with.
Yay! My fan. What I was getting at is mostly not thinking through the relative tradeoff, as if (outside of France) the EU had a terribly different carbon energy mix, and that unscrubbed coal emissions act much like high sulfur oil emissions to reflect energy.
Germany, Italy, etcetera had energy mixes then that were not much different. You did, implicitly, make the comparison when you said that greenlighting manufacturing to China served to "accelerate CO2/warming". Now, one could say that the manufacturing outsourced might be equal to or higher CO2, but I don't see evidence for that, so did acceleration happen?
The China-outsource sector I know of that I think did accelerate warming is Chinese solar panels, because the lower cost panels led to expanded manufacturing and deployment. That deployment supported a PR campaign that enabled shutdown of nuclear plants (killing fossil fuel interests competition), and nonsensical summertime claims of over 100% solar energy generation---as if that meant anything over the course of a German year.
China still is coal intensive. But unlike EU, (particularly Germany) China hasn't killed nuclear power and gotten worse.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-source-and-country?stackMode=absolute&country=~CHN
Germany is less coal than China, but still high in fossil fuel fraction.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-source-and-country?stackMode=absolute&country=~DEU
And if the BENEFITS of climate change outweigh the HARMS ...
.
It's comical, when you examine the benefits vs. harms.
Thank you for this rare good news. Any reduction in crazy is appreciated.
The degrowth economists are a menace, because as Kent said, energy is GDP. What this means is that politicians cannot and will not degrowth for very long for the most part because it means mass poverty. The nations that do not degrowth will dominate the future, it's as simple as that. If the West does not take its head out of its virtue signaling behind, the contest will be over, and the new hegemon will take charge. This means the right move now is a wartime level project to convert to nuclear power now. Forget solar and wind, those are parasitic and essentially worthless. Now, when carbon energy is still relatively cheap is the time to build the nuclear capacity to get off most carbon fuel. There are massive perverse incentives in the West for fossil fuel interests to profiteer off the runup in fuel prices. That course that we are on to please the fossil fuel interests will cause destabilization of nations and war. All that solar and wind nonsense that can't support a modern economy because it's EROEI is far too low? That's part of what fossil fuel interests are pushing---because they know it cannot work.
I guess that I am not terribly surprised that Kent did not report on the world experiment with sulfate solar engineering. Economists don't follow climate science literature, they follow each other and poli-sci bloggers like Lomborg---at least in the West. This has been true since Nordhaus created his "Climate Economics" field that was defined to be utterly disconnected from climate science from the inception. Utterly disconnected from any physics [1]. That is an atrocity, and Nordhaus' "Nobel" will go down in history with Lysenko, but it's our reality.
The switch to low sulfur fuel oil is massive solar engineering [2, 3, 4, 5]. There is a lot of agreement on the effects of that. Further, if you read those papers you find out that the shipping lane emissions did a better job (because it's over oceanic clear skies) than any land-based emissions could.
Sea ice? Citing Gore's exaggeration has nothing to do with science, or the inexorable progression of ice melt. It's a straw man. In Geological terms, what is shown in this time lapse video (all ice fluctuation, then median ice extent) is lightning fast.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=634hhKkYbu4
Climate is still an emergency, but Kent is correct that overstatements (Gore, others) and Potemkin agreements (Kyoto, Paris) have done terrible damage to public trust. This has created a kind of straw man festival in which, as Kent did here, various parties point to non-scientists and say, "That didn't happen." Those agreements, if fully implemented, would have done nothing significant. This is a slow-moving thing, but don't think it's not as real as a tank division. There will be crises coming. We saw a taste of that in 2021 in North America. 121 F in Canada, and Washington state's wheat and other crops baked in the fields is not normal. Beware the outlier damages years. Just like there are 10 year, 100 year, and 1000 year storms, there are damages years in the same vein that are not necessarily tied to storms, but to heat, and multiple factors coming together.
The physics are inexorable, driven by civilization---so we have to change course. Nuclear is the way through.
1. Keen S, Lenton TM, Garrett TJ, Rae JWB, Hanley BP, Grasselli M. 2022 Estimates of economic and environmental damages from tipping points cannot be reconciled with the scientific literature. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 119, e2117308119. http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2117308119
2. Manshausen P, Watson-Parris D, Christensen MW, Jalkanen JP, Stier P. 2022 Invisible ship tracks show large cloud sensitivity to aerosol. Nature 610, 101–106. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-05122-0
3. Diamond MS. 2023 Detection of large-scale cloud microphysical changes within a major shipping corridor after implementation of the International Maritime Organization 2020 fuel sulfur regulations. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics 23, 8259–8269. http://dx.doi.org/10.5194/acp-23-8259-2023
4. Gettelman A, Christensen MW, Diamond MS, Gryspeerdt E, Manshausen P, Stier P, Watson-Parris D, Yang M, Yoshioka M, Yuan T. 2024 Has Reducing Ship Emissions Brought Forward Global Warming?. Geophysical Research Letters 51, e2024GL109077. e2024GL109077 2024GL109077 http://dx.doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1029/2024GL109077
5. Hansen JE, Sato M, Simons L, Nazarenko LS, Sangha I, Kharecha P, Zachos JC, von Schuckmann K, Loeb NG, Osman MB, Jin Q, Tselioudis G, Jeong E, Lacis A, Ruedy R, Russell G, Cao J, Li J. 2023 Global warming in the pipeline. Oxford Open Climate Change 3, kgad008. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfclm/kgad008