THIS POST IS A CRITICAL EVALUATION OF THE ASSOCIATED PRESS REPORT THAT “Global Warming Already Baked In Will Blow Past Climate Goals, a New Study Says”.

THIS ASSESSSMENT BY THE ASSOCIATED PRESS DERIVES FROM A RESEARCH PAPER BY DESSLER ETAL

PART-1: WHAT THE AP ARTICLE SAYS

The amount of baked-in global warming, from carbon pollution already in the air, is enough to blow past international agreed upon goals to limit climate change, a new study finds. But it’s not game over because, while that amount of warming may be inevitable, it can be delayed for centuries if the world quickly stops emitting extra greenhouse gases from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas, the study’s authors say. For decades, scientists have talked about so-called “committed warming” or the increase in future temperature based on past carbon dioxide emissions that stay in the atmosphere for well over a century. It’s like the distance a speeding car travels after the brakes are applied. But Monday’s study in the journal Nature Climate Change calculates that a bit differently and now figures the carbon pollution already put in the air will push global temperatures to about 2.3C. International climate agreements set goals of limiting warming to 2C since pre-industrial (SPI), with the more ambitious goal of limiting it to 1.5C SPI added in Paris in 2015. The world has already warmed about 1.1C SPI.

Climate scientist Andrew Dessler explains the baked in theory: “You’ve got some global warming inertia that’s going to cause the climate system to keep warming. Think about the climate system like the Titanic. It’s hard to turn the ship when you see the icebergs. (a reference to inertia). Dessler etal calculated committed warming based on the assessment that the world has warmed at different rates in different places and that places that haven’t warmed as fast will catch up. Places such as the Southern Ocean, surrounding Antarctica are a bit cooler, and that difference creates low-lying clouds that reflect more sun away from earth, keeping these places cooler. But this situation can’t keep going indefinitely because physics dictates that cooler locations will warm up more and when they do, the clouds will dwindle and more heating will occur.

Outside experts said the work is based on compelling reasoning, but want more research to show that it’s true. Breakthrough Institute climate scientist Zeke Hausfather said the new work fits better with climate models than observational data. Just because the world is bound to get more warming than international goals, that doesn’t mean all is lost in the fight against global warming, said Dessler. {translation: we still need climate action} If the world gets to net zero carbon emissions soon, 2 degrees of global warming could be delayed enough so that it won’t happen for centuries, giving society time to adapt or even come up with technological fixes, he said.If we don’t, we’re going to blow through (climate goals) in a few decades, Dessler said. “It’s really the rate of warming that makes climate change so terrible. If we got a few degrees over 100,000 years, that would not be that big a deal. We can deal with that. But a few degrees over 100 years is really bad.”

In one of his many research papers on climate change Dr. Dessler writes: I estimated the magnitude of the cloud feedback in response to short-term climate variations by analyzing the top-of-atmosphere radiation budget from March 2000 to February 2010. Over this period, the short-term cloud feedback had a magnitude of “0.54 ± 0.74 (2σ) watts per square meter per kelvin, meaning that it is likely positive” {Dessler, Andrew E. “A determination of the cloud feedback from climate variations over the past decade.” Science 330.6010 (2010): 1523-1527}. Yet, a finding that the mean is 0.54 and the standard deviation is 0.37 does not imply that we know this phenomenon well enough to make forecasts. Standard deviation is a measure of ignorance and not a measure of “look how high it could be”. This issue is discussed in some detail in a related post: LINK: https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/04/22/climate-science-uncertainty/ where we explore the statistical impossibility of the usual climate science position that the less they know the scarier it gets to show that a large uncertainty does not mean “oh look how high it could be”. It means that we don’t really know. The less we now the higher it COULD be and in perfect ignorance it COULD be as high as infinity because the answer is not constrained by information. Ignorance is not information. Therefore the finding that the cloud feedback effect on warming is 0.54 plus or minus 0.74 does not mean oh look it could be as high as 1.28. It means that we don’t know.

This kind of bias in climate science is well established and supported by the argument that the assumed danger of climate change makes it impossible for climate science to carry out objective and unbiased scientific inquiry. Climate scientist James Hansen explains this principle in climate science as follows: Scientific reticence hinders communication with the public about the dangers of global warming. It is important that policy-makers recognize the potential influence of this phenomenon. Scientific reticence may be a consequence of the scientific method. Success in science depends on objective skepticism. Scientific reticence has its merits. However, in a case such as ice sheet instability and sea level rise, there is a danger of excessive reticence“. TRANSLATION: ADHEFRENCE TO UNBIASED OBJECTIVE SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY INTERFERES WITH CLIMATE ACTIVISM.

Fear based activism by climate scientists for climate action is deeply interwoven into their science so much so that a pattern has emerged where the fear is extended to the point where climate action is no longer an option as in the so called tipping point where climate change becomes self driven and out of control. That implies of course that climate action is no longer an option. At this point climate science, having realized what they have done, quickly back peddles saying that “there is still time” if we act quickly to cut emissions. Many of these tipping points have come and gone in this comical cycle. If there is still time it wasn’t a tipping point.

Some examples are listed below. More can be found in a related post on this topic: LINK: https://tambonthongchai.com/2019/02/22/old-climate-fears-revisited/

1. 2004 GLOBAL WARMING WILL LEAVE ARCTIC ICE FREE The Arctic ice cap is shrinking at an unprecedented rate and will be gone by 2070. It has shrunk by 15%to 20% in the last 30 years. This process will accelerate with the Arctic warming twice as fast as the rest of the world due to a buildup of heat trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The findings support the broad scientific consensus that global warming is caused mainly by rising atmospheric greenhouse gases as a result of emissions from cars, factories and power plants.
2. 2005: HURRICANE KATRINA WAS CAUSED BY OUR USE OF FOSSIL FUELS A high level of interest in tropical cyclones derives from an unusually active hurricane season in 2004 when more than 14 tropical cyclones formed in the North Atlantic basin. Four of these storms intensified to Category 4 or greater and made landfall in the USA causing considerable damage. The even more dramatic 2005 season followed in its heels with more than thirty depressions. Four of them intensified to Category 5 and three made landfall. The most intense was Hurricane Wilma but the most spectacular was Hurricane Katrina which made landfall in Florida and again in Louisiana. Its devastation was facilitated by a breach in a levee system that was unrelated to AGW but its dramatic consequences made it an icon of the possible extreme weather impacts of fossil fuel caused global warming. Climate scientists stepped up quickly and said that Katrina was confirmed as a climate change even by climate models. More info: [LINK]
3. 2005: METHANE BOMB IN THE PEAT BOGS OF SIBERIA Man-made global warming is melting the vast peat bogs of Siberia. The melt will release enough methane and carbon dioxide to bring about climate change Armageddon by virtue of a positive feedback and its non-linear process gone berserk. This scare is repeated in 2007 saying that global warming is causing the Alaska coast to melt. More info: [LINK]
4. 2006: CORAL DOOMED TO EXTINCTION BY GLOBAL WARMING Climate scientists see all coral bleaching as anomalous and unnatural and therefore symptoms of human caused global warming, as if they had never seen coral bleaching before. In 2006, they issued an alarm that “it was already too late for the coral” because we have put too much CO2 into the atmosphere and the warming and acidification of the oceans thus caused will kill off all the world’s coral. More info: [LINK]
5. 2007: WE PASSED THE CLIMATE CHANGE TIPPING POINT AND ARE DOOMED. Ahead of the Bali meeting in 2007, climate scientists flooded the media with press releases that were increasingly alarmist in their pitch to save the planet from fossil fuels, so much so that they got carried away and announced that it was too late to save the planet for we had passed the tipping point. The damage done by the carbon dioxide already in the air had put into motion irreversible non-linear changes that would lead us to climate doom whether or not we cut emissions. Soon thereafter, having realized their folly, they quickly reversed themselves just in time for Bali by saying that there was still time to save the planet if we act quickly and decisively.
6. 2009: WE ARE APPROACHING THE ABYSS OF CLIMATE CHANGEBetween 2005 and 2007 the UN repeatedly declares that we have passed the tipping point and that it is “already too late to late. The planet is doomed. But in 2009, Ban Ki Moon contradicts his staff and describes the effect of carbon dioxide emissions on climate as “our foot is stuck on the accelerator and we are heading towards an abyss”. That we are not at the abyss yet and there is till time to act. More info: [LINK]

HUMAN CAUSE: THE REAL ISSUE HERE IS HUMAN CAUSE BECAUSE WITHOUT EVIDENCE OF HUMAN CAUSE OF THE WARMING TREND, WHATEVER IMPACTS THE WARMING MAY HAVE ARE ALL NATURAL.

LINK: https://tambonthongchai.com/2021/11/09/the-issue-is-human-cause/

THE CLIMATE SCIENCE OF FOSSIL FUELED GLOBAL WARMING:

The essence of the climate science of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) and the implied climate action needed is that since the industrial revolution, humans have been burning fossil fuels. The carbon in fossil fuels is millions of years old and therefore not part of the current account of the carbon cycle but something external to it that therefore causes the atmospheric CO2 concentration to rise. The greenhouse effect of atmospheric CO2 implies that at any given concentration, the mean global surface temperature will be proportional to the logarithm of atmospheric CO2 concentration. Therefore, as humans burn fossil fuels and increase atmospheric CO2 the temperature rises. This sequence of higher and higher global mean surface temperature due higher and higher atmospheric CO2 levels caused by continued human fossil fuel emissions is understood as global warming and because it is caused by the fossil fuel emissions of humans, the warming is also understood as anthropogenic global warming or AGW.

The theory also holds that rising global mean surface temperature (GMST) creates the possibility that the temperature will reach a point where it is warm enough to initiate natural positive feedback warming that feeds on itself by way of mechanisms such as melting ice and the release of methane from methane hydrates. The GMST at which this natural feedback mechanism will be initiated was thought to be 5C of warming since pre-industrial but over the years, climate science has gradually lowered this critical value of GMST to 4C then to 3C and to 2C and finally in 2018 an IPCC special report lowered this dangerous level of GMST that must not be breached to 1.5C. We are told that currently we have warmed 1C since pre-industrial (or perhaps it is as high as 1.1C claimed in the source document being reviewed here. In any case, the GMST is still below the critical value of 1.5C.

The reference article proposes a wholesale overhaul of climate science where the critical value of GMST at which feedbacks will take over as an unstoppable warming mechanism is further lowered from 1.5C to 1.1C. A new feedback mechanism is proposed as low cloud feedback as a feedback that will cause regional differences in global temperatures to vanish leaving the world with a uniform GMST that will be higher and higher until it takes us to the critical GMST of 1.5C and its planet destroying feedback warming beyond our ability to mediate. A new tipping point that will take us to the old tipping point. In other words what we have here is more tipping point weirdness. It implies that we no longer have a rational motivation for climate action. As in the other tipping points cited in the list above, the declaration of the tipping point is quickly followed with the “but there is still time” clause that a rapid shutdown of fossil fuel emissions can avoid this apocalyptic scenario.

THE CREDIBILITY OF THESE CLAIMS IS GREATLY DIMINIHSED BY THESE INCONSISTENCIES WITH THE FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTS IN MAINSTREAM CLIMATE SCIENCE AND ALSO BY THE EXTREME UNCERTAINTY IN THE CLOUD FEEDBACK MECHANISM BEING PROPOSED. AS IN THE COMICAL LIST OF PRIOR TIPPING POINTS WHERE “THERE IS STILL TIME IF WE ACT QUICKLY” THIS NEW THEORY THAT IS INCONSISTENT WITH CLIMATE CHANGE THEORY IS BEST UNDERSTOOD AS DESPERATION CLIMATE ACTVISM. SUCH EXTREME MEASURES IN CLIMATE SCIENCE IMPLY ONLY THAT THEIR ACTIVISM AGAINST FOSSIL FUELS IS NOT GOING WELL AND THAT IT NEEDS THESE EXTREME AND UNSUPPORTED ARGUMENTS IN A FEAR BASED ACTIVISM AGAINST FOSSIL FUELS.