The politics of climate alarmism

The story behind the “climate crisis”

Do you remember the story of the emperor’s new clothes? The emperor was persuaded by a tailor that he could make him a grand set of clothes which could only be seen by the really intelligent. When this invisible set of (non-existent) clothes were put on, everyone wanted to appear intelligent and so they commented about how grand and beautiful they were. Until one small boy shouted out in the crowd “the emperor is naked. He has no clothes”! And then the truth became obvious to everyone. The climate emergency is like the emperor’s clothes. It doesn’t exist. There is no climate emergency.

This post comes from interviews with Dr Judith Curry (Appendix) over the past year. It addresses claims that there is a climate emergency or climate crisis because of dangerous climate change caused by increased emissions of greenhouse gases from the use of fossil fuels.

THE ULIMATE GOAL

People or the environment?

There are two fundamentally different outlooks (views) on the relationship between humans and the environment.
Environment first approach. Aim for “environment flourishing and thriving”. We rely on the environment for our sustenance, and we have to take care of our environment. For example, the UN doesn’t put humans first – they are putting reducing carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions first.
People first approach. Aim for “Human flourishing and thriving”. We can engineer our environment to make it work for us. Work out how we can best use the earth’s resources for human thriving.

Dr Curry follows a people first approach, whereas climate activists follow an environmental first approach.

PART A SCIENCE

What do the scientists agree about?

They agree that the climate has been warming for over 100 years. And that we’re adding CO₂ into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels and other activities. Also, CO₂ strongly absorbs infrared radiation in a wide range of the spectrum which acts to warm the planet. Beyond that there is not much agreement, particularly about the most consequential issues. For example, how much of the recent warming is natural variability and how much is human caused? How much warming can we expect in the 21^st century? Is warming dangerous? Will humans overall be better off if we stop using fossil fuels? There is a lot of disagreement about the answers to these questions.

Many scientists agree with the climate narrative, and many don’t. Most climate scientists work in very narrow areas – like the microphysics of clouds or the geochemistry of the ocean. They don’t really know the big picture. They listen to what people say. They see that it is beneficial for their career to go along with this rather than to disagree with it. There are a large population of scientists who do not support what is going on with the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). There is a lot of disagreement and there are a lot of things that we don’t know. And trying to manufacture that into some sort of consensus has been very bad for the scientific process and also for the policy process. Overconfidence is a bad thing for policy deliberations if you turn out to be wrong! We should tell them what we know, what we don’t know and what we can’t know. And that hasn’t been done. It’s just one big overconfident consensus that they get presented with.

The scientists still cherrypick in the IPCC reports – “since 1970, we have seen …”. And you are left to infer that it must be caused by fossil fuel emissions. Climate models don’t predict these extreme events. They don’t resolve them. So all the projections about them getting worse are based on toy models and other kinds of inferences. It’s very flimsy. All of this is weakly justified.

The IPCC technical reports are not too alarmist. But in the Summary for Policy Makers, that is where they cherrypick it and only talk about since 1970 or something like that. But if you look at the main IPCC reports for Working Group 1, there is a lot of good information there. It’s not complete and I don’t agree with all of their conclusions. And there are certain things that they choose to ignore. But overall, the Sixth Assessment report is pretty good. But quoting the IPCC is now something that is done by the so-called skeptics. The alarmists find the IPCC too tame – so they say things that are very weakly supported. But the Working Groups 2 and 3 reports were not good this time. There is no basis for alarm. You can extrapolate and worry about worse case scenarios, and you have to consider how well justified these are. It’s pretty speculative. You could say, shouldn’t we try to be safe rather than sorry (like in the precautionary principle)? Well, if you are trying to decide to cross a street and a car is coming or not it doesn’t cost you anything to wait an extra 15 seconds until the car passes by. But in this case, we have to tear down our entire energy and transport infrastructure and screw up our agricultural production in a misguided attempt to eliminate CO₂ emissions that we think that are going to control the climate. We can’t control the climate like we couldn’t control the COVID-19 epidemic. If we think we can control these extremely complex situations, we are fooling ourselves in a very dangerous way.

CO₂ is not the most important determinate of climate. If all other things are equal, if you increase CO₂ you will warm the planet. By how much we don’t know as there is a lot of disagreement. But there are a lot of other variables that can counteract that warming. It could be solar variations – by the way, the sun is the dominant cause of warming. Or large-scale ocean circulations. Or geological processes including volcanoes. So, there are a lot of other things that happen in the climate system. And the big issue is to what extent is the warming due to CO₂ dominating natural variability. That is an unanswered question.

The IPCC does periodic assessments of the observations and they coordinate some specific climate modelling experiments using scenarios specified by the IPCC. But the climate models are not fit for purpose. There’re great tools for scientific research. But they are not useful as prediction machines. They can’t clarify regional climate variability because they don’t get the large-scale ocean circulations correct. They can’t predict volcanic eruptions. They can’t predict solar variability. There are many deficiencies and many uncertainties. There is uncertainty with regard to climate sensitivity (the response to a doubling of the concentration of CO₂). And estimates vary by a factor of three. That’s a 300% uncertainty in how fast the climate responds to an increase in CO₂! So, there is a huge amount of uncertainty in these climate models. They have been way oversold. And even climate scientists are backing off the climate models. In the 6^th assessment report, they downgraded the use of climate models noting that some of them are running way too hot. They are not fit for most of the purposes they are used for.

The “scientific consensus” on climate change

Let’s look at the sociology of why certain people have been separated out as heretics or even called deniers. There are some very legitimate disagreements about this topic but it’s not about the basics. What I object to is the idea of a manufactured consensus for political purposes. This is not a natural scientific consensus that has emerged over a long time. It’s a manufactured consensus of scientists at the request of policy makers, which has been too narrowly framed. There’s too much politics in it. And that’s what I object to and there’s a number of other scientists that object to this as well. And we’ve also been critical of the behavior of some of the more politically active scientists who are exaggerating the truth in the interests of a good story or political objectives. That’s why the alarmists often refer to Curry as a climate denier or a climate skeptic.

Changing the terminology

Climate alarmists are trying to get people’s attention. Now it’s called global heating because heating sounds more dangerous than warming – warming sounds rather nice! So, it has changed from global warming to climate change and now to climate emergency or climate crisis.

And the attention has shifted to extreme weather events (hurricanes, floods, and heatwaves), but the impact of global warming can’t be determined for these weather events because it would be miniscule. It’s very difficult to tease out because of the natural weather variability. These events would have happened anyway, with possible some minor change associated with the warming. But you can’t determine that in an objective way. But people are trying. There are a bunch of complicated motives here. People’s worldview, their politics, career investments, a certain narrative, wanting to play various political games. If you are an academic scientist working in the climate area you want to advance and get grant money and professional recognition, you would be well served to adhere to the alarmist narrative. The people who are getting professional recognition and being put in charge of big institutes are all alarmists who speak about doom and gloom and exaggerate.

Is there gloom and doom?

It’s very far from gloom and doom. Governments and oil companies are being sued left and right over bad weather because they’re not doing enough. By people who think that they can control the climate… It’s just a pipe dream. Even if we went to net zero anthropogenic CO₂ emissions, we would barely notice. It would be hard to detect any change in the climate. The climate is going to do what the climate’s going to do. And there’s a lot of inertia in the system. If the carbon dioxide that we’ve put in is as important, as bad as some people seem to think, those effects are going to be with us for a very, very long time. And stopping now isn’t going to change that trajectory very much. So, we just need to look forward and try to understand what’s happened. But thinking that we’re going to control the climate by going to net zero very quickly is not good.

If somehow we were successful in eliminating CO₂ emissions by 2050 (say), what would happen to the climate? Well, not much. We probably wouldn’t notice anything until the 22nd century. Natural weather and climate variability is very strong. The oceans and ice sheets have long memory – they would continue responding for a long time. And even if you believed the climate models you might slow down the warming by a few tenths of a degree C by the end of the 21st century.

The pre-industrial era is held up as some sort of golden age that we’re supposed to go back to. Well in pre-industrial times the weather was horrible. This was at the end of the little ice age. It was the coldest period of the millennium. There were horrible famines, extreme weather and extremely, terribly cold winters and springs and things like that. That was not good weather. The weather now is much better. Even when you look more recently, at least in the US, where I’ve looked most carefully, the weather was much worse in the 1930s by any measure. Forest fires, droughts, heatwaves, hurricanes, everything that you can imagine in the US was much worse in the 1930s. Does anybody remember that? Well, no. Most of those people are no longer living.

But if you look at the data there, it says so. Most people just look at the data from 1950 or 1970. The 1970s and 1980s was a relatively benign period of weather. And so, if you just do the trend since 1970, “Oh, the weather is worse now”. Well, yes, but it’s not worse than the 1930s or 40s or even the 50s. And people are much more prosperous. Globally, poverty is way down. Life expectancy is up. We’re doing very well as we reduce poverty and human development advances. A lot of that has been fueled by petroleum and coal.

The weakest part of the alarmist argument is “is more CO₂ in the atmosphere dangerous”? They haven’t made that case very well. They tie it to extreme weather events which have always happened and will always continue to happen. It’s very difficult to disentangle the role of natural weather and climate variability, land-use, and the slow creep of global warming to try to attribute any of the problems that we are having to increased CO₂ in the atmosphere. Global warming does produce a slow creep of sea-level rise – it’s been rising slowly since the mid-nineteenth century. Certain people predict that this could rapidly accelerate, but this hasn’t been happening. Anything catastrophic with sea level rise, such as the collapse of the west Antarctic ice sheet is more likely to be associated with under ice volcanoes than it is to CO₂ in the atmosphere.

So this whole issue of danger is the weakest part of the argument. And they try to get around that by blaming everything, like floods and hurricanes on climate change. Well, these severe weather events would have happened independent of climate change. And if you look back to the early part of the 20^th century you will always find more extreme events than what we have seen in the last ten years. And if you go back even further using paleo-climate records you see some really awful extreme events. The worst weather in the USA (heatwaves, fires, floods, hurricanes) occurred in the 1930s. Nothing comparable to this has occurred in the 21st century. Did the US weather in the 1930s relate to fossil fuel emissions? No! So, there is a very weak argument to present all this as dangerous.

We have oversimplified the climate problem. And we have oversimplified the solution. There is a lot of inertia in the climate. Even if we removed CO₂ emissions, it would be 50 years before we saw any change in the weather. Sea levels would continue to rise. Ice sheets would be doing what they are doing. It involves very long time scales. This urgency to cut emissions isn’t really going to help the weather at all.

Are the big ice sheets melting?

The Greenland icesheet has been melting since about 1993. The melting peaked about 2010-2012 and it slowed down. There is evidence that this is dominated by the Atlantic multidecadal oscillation (we’ve been in a warm period since 1995). It’s hard to know whether global warming is causing much melting. Also, the Greenland melting responds quite a bit as to whether there is clouds in the summer time or not. And that has to do more with weather patterns.

The main Antarctic sheet is not changing. The west Antarctic ice sheet is the one of concern. This is a marine ice sheet. If you were to take away the ice sheet, the ground would be well below sea level. It’s unstable because it’s a marine ice sheet. So it moves. You can also melt it from below if the sea level rises. If the west Antarctic ice sheet were to collapse, global warming is unlikely to be the cause. It would be due to internal ice dynamics, geothermal heat flow from below, or some changes in ocean circulation. If it partially collapsed, it could increase sea levels substantially but it would happen over several centuries. It is just as likely to happen from geological processes as it is from global warming. But it’s unlikely to have much impact during the 21^st century.

Is the sea level rising?

If there is a risk of higher sea levels, why are many rich people buying houses near the beach and banks are giving loans to buy properties near the sea? The little ice age ended in the mid-1800s. And since then, sea level has been rising. Over the last 100 years it has increased by about 20 cm (8“). In recent decades sea level has been rising about 3mm/year.

Jakarta in Indonesia is sinking like crazy (at about 30 times the rate of sea level rise) because they have withdrawn a lot of groundwater, which compacts the soil. So, they have moved the capital of Indonesia inland. So, there are some places that are sinking fast. The Dutch have been dealing with sea level rise for centuries and there are parts of the Netherlands that are as much as 2.1 m (7’) below sea level. So, it can be managed. The places that are most vulnerable to sea level rise are because they are sinking.

Extreme weather

South Asia floods frequently during the monsoon season, especially during La Nina years. This is nothing exceptional. We now have more global communication and the internet so the hyping of every natural disaster and tying it to climate change gives all this higher visibility. But there is nothing exceptional about what has been going on. The natural ocean oscillation, which determines the seasonal weather has been in a bad spell since about 2017. Once this shifts things will calm down for a while. Bad weather happens in cycles. There is a lot of natural weather and climate variability and trying to tie each event to the slow creep of global warming is wrong scientifically and its counterproductive in dealing with this topic.

Even if we go to net zero by 2050 we will still have floods and hurricanes. So, we should be spending more time and money trying to figure out how to increase the resilience, especially in developing countries, to bad hurricanes. The biggest tragedy is that a lot of the development funds from the World Bank have been refocused on wind and solar rather than on development and adaptation and reducing vulnerability. So, these countries are worse off than if the climate change narrative hadn’t been around! It’s interfering in development. Countries like the USA can bounce right back after natural disasters, but in underdeveloped countries it is relentlessly impoverishing. They don’t have the resilience to cope. They go further into debt. Better weather forecasting and climate forecasting. Better operational procedures would help. Also, better infrastructure, including energy. Once you have an energy infrastructure you can develop. Bangladesh is a good example – they developed their natural gas and fossil fuel resources. Their life expectancy has increased, and their birthrate has decreased to a saner level. They have a real economy. And they ignored a lot of advice from places like the World Bank. And they are doing well.

Weather disasters wipe underdeveloped countries out. It’s best to assist in the development and adaptation of these countries. Allow Africa to develop its own fossil fuel resources so they can develop. Give them some help with this. Instead, their resources are being exploited and sent to Europe rather than being used in their countries because they don’t have the power plants. It doesn’t take that much to give them some power plants and help them develop an infrastructure and then Africa could take off.  But because of global warming, the powers that be aren’t lending or giving Africa the resources that they need to develop these resources. That is the biggest crime on the planet right now. Not allowing Africa to develop its fossil fuel resources is not ethical or just. It’s a very different crime to what the global warming activists think about. But this could help a huge fraction of the world to develop and then become more environmentally conscious and eventually they will transition to cleaner energy. But anybody who thinks that burning dung in a cooking stove is clean energy, then they need to think again. It is shortening their life spans because of the terrible air quality. Burning dung and wood is terrible for their health and for the climate. But it’s renewable! The developed world’s insistence on limiting carbon output in developing countries while maintaining their own luxury and security is hypocritical and oppressive.

Is the incidence of extreme weather events increasing as we are being shown? Does that just depend on the time scale that you look at? Even if you go back to 1980 most of them show no increase. The hurricanes show no increase. Floods show no increase. Heatwaves show a small increase, and cold events show a decrease. But the worst heatwaves were in the 1930s, not in the 21^st century. Even if you go back to 1900 it’s very hard to find widespread trends over large regions in any kind of weather event where they would be seen to be worse. Much multi-decadal natural variability in extreme weather events is caused by changes in large scale ocean regimes. Now the 1970s and the 1980s were relatively quiet. So, if this is your reference point, then things will look worse – it does look like a trend. But if you go back to the 1950s and the 1930s, a lot of weather events were worse in those periods.

Is global warming necessarily a bad thing?

No, it’s not. This whole issue of “dangerous” is the weakest part of the whole argument. What is dangerous? It’s a whole Goldilocks, I don’t know if you’re familiar with Goldilocks and the Three Bears, the fairy tale about “too hot, too warm, just right”. Everybody has a different idea of what’s good. In the US, people are migrating south to places like Florida, Texas and California. These are southern states. This is where people are migrating to in the US. They’re going south, not north. They don’t like cold winters. And that’s the biggest, dominant thing. So, nobody is moving north. People are still living on the coastline. Ex-president Obama has just bought a big estate on coastal Massachusetts. Right on the coast. This is what’s regarded as desirable.

The only harm from warming is sea level rise. And that’s a slow creep, unless something catastrophic happens, say, to the West Antarctic ice sheet. And if something catastrophic happens there, that’s as likely to be associated with under ice volcanoes as it is to be with global warming. So, the only real danger is sea level rise. And people can manage sea level rise and move inland.

There is more water in a warmer climate. South Asia is water starved overall because the population is so high, and for agriculture – they are draining down their groundwater. Half of the world’s population is living in that region. Alarmists rely on extreme weather events for the idea that global warming is bad. If you go back 100-200 years, you can always find something that was as bad or worse!

Is an increase of 3 degrees C in the next 50 years dangerous?

That’s the weakest part of the whole argument, it’s not dangerous. In the US people are leaving the northern states and moving to southern states, like Florida, Texas and Arizona. They don’t like cold winters. The climate has always changed and always will change. It’s changing relatively slowly and well within the envelope of natural climate variability. There’s so much year-to-year variation with El Nino and La Nina years that the slow creep of climate change mostly happens un-noticed. It can easily be normalized in terms of how we adapt. So, it’s just not dangerous. The only way you can make this dangerous is if you attribute every extreme weather event to fossil fuel emissions. So, every time you have a hurricane or a flood or a heatwave, they blame it on global warming. Well, it is conceivable for some of these events warming might make it incrementally worse, but against the backdrop of natural weather and climate variability you can’t even really separate out the signal. There is just no basis for blaming extreme weather on fossil fuels. In fact, at least in the US the weather was much much worse in the 1930s and the 1950s than it has been in the 21^st century. So, there is a lot of regional natural weather and climate variability. You can’t blame this on fossil fuel emissions. Theoretically for some event types you may get a small signal, but you can’t discern it from the observations because there is too much natural variability.

Climategate

The Climategate scandal (unauthorized release of emails in 2009 from the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, which revealed that some researchers were manipulating climate data to make it appear as though earth was heating up dangerously) taught Curry that other climate researchers weren’t open-minded. Alarmist scientists’ aggressive attempts to hide data suggesting climate change is not a crisis were revealed in leaked emails. They avoided Freedom of Information Act requests for data, had cherrypicked data, manipulated the peer review process, downplayed uncertainty, attempted to squash and discredit the skeptics, and tried to get journal editors fired. It made her realize that there is a “climate change industry” set up to reward alarmism.

The hockey-stick temperature graph which was used to support climate alarmism included both paleoclimate data (from an analysis of tree rings) and observational data. These were two completely two different data sets and this fact was not made evident in the graph. This deception was an example of image fraud. The upwards curve in temperatures was not evident in the tree-ring data at all. It was caused by adding the recent temperature record.

Energy

Once you take the urgency out of the equation for reducing emissions of CO₂, then you are in a very different place in thinking about policy. I am a strong proponent of a new vision for 21^st century energy infrastructure – cleaner, cheaper, and more reliable. There are many reasons for not continuing relying on fossil fuels. By the end of the 21^st century it will be very expensive to extract anyway. But there is no way on earth that wind and solar is the answer. These are very low power density. They require a lot of land for the power plants themselves and the transmission lines. They are very materials intensive – an enormous amount of copper, cement etc. Renewable energy is very vulnerable to the vagrancies of weather and climate variability. If we are worried about the CO₂ impacts on the weather, why would we pick an energy system that is exceptionally vulnerable to weather variability? Wind droughts, floods, hail, lightning etc. Why would we subject our energy supply system to that?

Wouldn’t you like to see an improved energy infrastructure with abundant inexpensive clean electricity and transportation fuels? Everyone would want that, and we need that for the 21^st century. Fossil fuels are not going to last forever. We need to figure out better solutions. But the urgency is misguided. And wind and solar are not those solutions.

Are there better fuels out there? Well, hopefully in the future there will be advanced nuclear and advanced geothermal. But right now, this minute, having our entire energy infrastructure relying on wind turbines and solar energy is going to cause a lot of harm to a lot of people, not just to the overall economy. You can’t run an industrial economy on wind and solar, at least not in the way it’s currently envisioned. It requires a huge land footprint. No one wants a landscape covered in wind turbines and transmission lines.

People haven’t thought this out and there’s no emergency. Economically, we’re all expected to be four times better off worldwide by the end of the 21st century. And a little bit of that might be shaved off because of damages from global warming. But we’re all going to be better off moving forward through the 21st century unless we do really stupid stuff like destroy our energy infrastructure before we have something better to replace it with. That’s the biggest danger. The biggest climate risk right now is a so-called “transition risk”; the risk of rapidly getting rid of fossil fuels. I’m no fan of pollution and crazy price spikes and whatever. I’d love to see inexpensive, cleaner, reliable, secure energy, better than what we have now. But going to 100% renewables is not a better solution. All the electricity storage options are decades away. The time between now and 2050 needs to be a period of technological development and experimentation – with different countries and different states trying different things to see what works and from there some good solutions will emerge. But trying to mandate that everybody goes to wind and solar is going to be an unmitigated disaster. The supply chain for all this doesn’t exist right now. It’s very material intensive. We have established pipelines for fuel, coal and gas and oil. But we don’t have supply chains for wind, solar and batteries. People have plans, but they can’t get the materials! We need to accept that we have decades to figure this out. By the end of the 21^st century we could have a really good energy infrastructure in place with abundant clean inexpensive power. But not if we fritter away all our efforts right now on wind and solar that’s going to damage our economies, so we are going to be less likely to be able to make the transition in the way that we need to. That will really support more people and the need for more electricity. Thinking that we are going to need less energy in the future is a pipe-dream – we are moving towards electrical vehicles and heat pumps, artificial intelligence, machine learning and robotics, which all need electricity. So, we are going to need more electricity, not less. And wind and solar is not a long-term global solution.

Fossil fuels

Even if we’re going to transition to all wind and solar, we’re going to need a lot of fossil fuels to accomplish that, to do all the mining and establish the supply chains and all the transport and everything else. So, in the near term, even if the plan is to go to all renewable wind and solar, then we’re going to need a lot of fossil fuels to get us there. People just repeat these mantras without any thought. It’s not a good place. 

But the thing about the energy transition is that we need to understand that we are going to need a lot more energy in the 21^st century. Not just to bring underdeveloped countries up to the level of grid electricity, but we are trying to electrify everything, with heat pumps and electrical vehicles and all this kind of thing. But more fundamentally, electricity is the resource behind all our societal innovation through robotics, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, new materials etc. So, we are going to need a lot more electricity. And there is no way, even if you could work out the relevant technologies for wind and solar to keep it reliable, there is no way we have the land-use that would support an awful lot of wind and solar power plants. So much of this is driven by the desire for a particular political solution. Kill the fossil fuel companies is top priority. And then bring in wind and solar. But that’s not going to help anybody! It’s going to give us less reliable electricity, which is going to reduce our economic development, which means we have less money to protect ourselves from extreme weather events!

If we have a lot of electricity we can run desalination plants, run indoor vertical agriculture, and build infrastructure to protect our cities. We can manage flood plains. Smart grids can increase the reliability of electricity. Electricity is so central, and we are destroying the infrastructure that has built the prosperity of the 20^th century and the first two decades of the 21^st century. And we are destroying it without having a viable replacement! It makes absolutely no sense. This is not the way to support human thriving and flourishing.

What are the problems with wind and solar energy?

The biggest problem is land-use. If we were to replace all our current energy with wind and solar, we’d use a huge amount of land. However, we’re going to need orders of magnitude more energy because we are electrifying everything – like home heating and transportation. Also, we need more electricity just for our human advancement – computerize this and robotic that. Quantum block chain. Everything! We need more and more electricity. And there is no way that the land we can devote to wind and solar farms can produce that amount of electricity. There is not enough land available!

There are three other serious issues. First, wind and solar is not dispatchable – you can’t call it up on demand. You get it when the wind is blowing, and the sun is shining. You don’t get any energy when the wind isn’t blowing, and the sun isn’t shining. So, it’s intermittent. So wind and solar not only raise energy costs, they also reduce energy reliability.

Second, you have to keep a parallel fossil fuel system as a backup when the wind is not blowing and the sun isn’t shining.

Third, it’s asynchronous, which puts a lot of stress on the transmission grid. And it makes it much harder to keep the grid stable. So, you get blackouts and power outages. It’s increasing the instability of the grid. Even if you have a huge amount of wind and solar, your grid transmission is going to be unstable. And batteries don’t help because they are asynchronous as well. Hydo-power, geothermal, fossil fuels and nuclear are all synchronous – they can keep a grid stable. But wind and solar can’t. We’re just fooling ourselves to think we can have 100% wind and solar renewable energy systems. It’s just not going to work.

And huge amounts of materials are required for wind turbines. There is debate about offshore wind turbines as to whether all energy that goes into building them will be recovered over the lifecycle of such a wind turbine. There are a lot of estimates that say no. We could be putting ourselves into energy debt by building offshore wind turbines. The construction of those is extremely complex and the lifetime of the turbine is much shorter than one over land.

Pursuing wind and solar energy is like putting a tourniquet around our neck as we seek to supply more electricity in the 21^st century. Wind and solar is a niche solution for some locations, but it’s not the answer. It’s dodgy to go above 50% with wind and solar, unless you have good pumped hydro storage. And there are not many locations where you can do that effectively.

Nuclear power

What is the concern about nuclear power? Is it the waste? No, that’s not a problem anymore. It’s never really been a problem. There are ways of dealing with it – for example, it’s been contained in concrete. Finland has some very interesting and sophisticated ways of dealing with the waste. Nuclear is far away the safest power source.

I don’t know why nuclear has gotten such a bad rap. Even with the incidents at Fukushima (2011) and Three Mile Island (1979) and Chernobyl (1986) and all these kind of things, people didn’t really die from this and the land around it has recovered. All of that was really bad engineering of those power plants. Nothing like what would be today. The number of people who have died installing wind farms is much much larger than people who have died in any way associated with nuclear power. It’s a very misplaced risk perception. People are starting to come around to nuclear. Hopefully that will accelerate.

They’ve been shutting down nuclear plants although energy is what we need. So, we should certainly keep using existing nuclear power plants. Germany is now up to 44% renewable. But all these gains in CO₂ emissions have been cancelled out because they got rid of their nuclear power plants and replaced them with coal burning plants. Germany has lost all its savings in CO₂ emissions from wind and solar. It makes no sense!

But the policy makers and the politicians can’t be that stupid, can they? Is it ignorance or something else? They have been sold a bill of goods. The experts who understand energy production and transmission have been ignored in all this. They have become marginalized. It’s political. In the state of New York, the politicians have passed incredible stringent timetables for going to complete wind and solar. The engineers are starting to realize that we can’t do this without a lot of backup from either natural gas or nuclear power. But wind and solar are useful at the 20-30% level.

Climate activists say, if we don’t act and what we are saying is correct it would be a huge disaster. It would be catastrophic for the planet.

Here’s what the biggest disaster would be. Let’s say the alarmists are right about how much warming we can expect. The worst position we could be in is to have our electricity supply driven by wind and solar, which is inadequate for protecting us and to have our energy supply dependent on the weather itself. It makes no sense. In hydro power you have droughts. Extreme weather events can hamper wind and solar. You can have long multi-week wind droughts when the wind doesn’t blow at all. To me this is the worst-case scenario – to be stuck with a completely inadequate electric power system. Because if we have electricity we can protect ourselves – we have air conditioning and desalination plants. And also, if we have abundant cheap electricity we will have more wealth which also provides resources for protecting us from whatever the climate might hold, be it natural or human caused. Meanwhile we are rushing into destroying our energy infrastructure and replacing it with wind and solar, which are totally inadequate for the electric power system, but also have very adverse environmental impacts including the massive land-use required. To me this is not a recipe for any kind of protection. If you want to get rid of fossil fuels that’s one thing – but come up with a good solution. The next generation nuclear power plants and advanced geothermal look quite good. There are other potential solutions out there. Wind and industrial scale solar plants are not the solutions.

Energy mix

The best energy option for the future is nuclear power. I don’t know if it can happen in the US because of all the regulatory roadblocks that make no sense. Elsewhere, a new nuclear power plant can be built in eight years. Looking out to the end of the 21^st century, I see mainly nuclear. Some geothermal. Some rooftop solar. I think coal will be gone by 2050 or 2060. I think we may still need oil and natural gas for energy and transportation for decades to come. But in terms of electricity, I think nuclear with geothermal with some supplemental rooftop solar and maybe wind in certain locations where land-use isn’t an issue. I think that as a power mix that makes a lot of sense.

PART B POLITICS

If climate change propaganda is not based on sound scientific fact, why is it being promoted so seriously by governments around the world. What’s behind it?

It’s part of a political agenda. You have to go back to the 1980s to understand where this comes from. The UN Environmental program wanted world government. They didn’t like capitalism. They want power for themselves. It’s a power issue and they latched onto global warming as the issue that could help it achieve its goals. It developed a lot of momentum in the late 1980s and the 1990s before there was even any signal of warming. We had been cooling since the 1940s! There was no warming. But they had a climate change treaty in place in 1992 before there was any sign of warming – the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change! This was before the temperature even started warming in a significant way! The political and policy cart was way out in front of the scientific horse. Right at the beginning. And then the IPCC was instructed to frame the problem to look at dangerous human-caused [anthropogenic] climate change. Don’t tell us about natural climate variability. Don’t tell us about whether warming is good. We just want to hear about dangerous human-caused climate change. And this is an UN agenda. It’s anti-growth and anti-capitalism and anti-democratic. They can’t trust the people or the countries to make the right decisions so there needs to be more coercion from the top down at the international level from the UN. In order to enforce this, they amp up the alarm. The worst rhetoric (apart from Extinction Rebellion) comes from UN officials – “Global boiling”; “Code red”. All this kind of stuff over a slow creep of warming. And the agenda is to kill off the fossil fuel industry. They don’t like that. And they don’t like nuclear power either. It’s a clash of values. These people want power and control. If you can scare people, you can control them. This is part of what is going on. There’s a worldview and an ideology behind all this that is driving the alarmism.

There is a lack of debate on climate change because everyone has to agree to the oversimplified analysis that our policy makers have made for global collective action on this problem. This rejects anyone who disagrees. They will not tolerate dissent.

President Biden was talking about declaring a climate emergency, which would be a long-term emergency. Emergencies usually go on for 2 weeks or a month or a year, but not for decades. That would force people to do this and not to do that and take away a lot of freedom (remember the COVID-19 restrictions) if he declares a climate emergency. And it says that a lot of power grabbing is going on in the name of this issue.

The UN climate stuff is at odds with its own sustainability goals. 17 global sustainability goals were agreed in 2015. These included eliminating global poverty (No. 1), eliminating global hunger (No 2), affordable and clean energy for all (No 7), and climate action (No 13). Somehow climate action has been elevated as the most important thing in the world. Forget eliminating poverty. Forget food security. The most important thing is climate action. Now farmers can’t get enough fertilizer to grow their crops because it produces CO₂ emissions. This doesn’t make sense! So, there is a lot of stuff going on in the name of sustainability and climate change policy that has nothing to do with sustainability, or human well-being or economic development. It’s acting counter to the reduction of poverty and to food security.

It’s just politics right from the start. And it has developed a lot of momentum. And if it chimes in with certain people’s politics or environmental worldview. And then you have Greta Thunberg having an enormous influence on children with books. Now children are being raised on this. All this alarmism has become a huge psychological problem for children. They are suicidal. They don’t see that they have a life. Why should I bother to study when the world is going to end in 12 years? And all sorts of nonsense that they are fed. And they don’t know how to filter it. And the adults in their life are feeding it to some extent. And it’s becoming a big cult. And common sense has left the room. With the kids it’s really bad. And it’s very hard to counter. It’s a global problem – kids being depressed and thinking they don’t have a future. Whereas the next generation need to be educated to be the future engineers etc. All for a political agenda to get rid of fossil fuels. It just makes no sense. Children are victims of the climate urgency.

The policy makers wanted a simple cause and effect and a simple fix. But the weather and climate doesn’t work that way. It’s extremely complicated. And there was also the hubris that they could control the climate by eliminating fossil fuels. They are seeking a simple solution and have a total lack of humility in thinking that we can actually control this. It’s humans failing. That’s why we have scientists to sort all this out. But when the scientists become political activists and become active in trying to cancel anyone who disagrees with them, then the whole thing falls apart and we end up with nonsense like we are currently facing.

What are our silliest policy responses? The rapid rush to wind and solar. It makes sense to look forward into the 21^st century and figure out how we can improve our energy infrastructure so that we have more abundant cheaper cleaner energy and let’s look forward and try to get there. That will help support our progress in the 21st century. That will require research and development and a learning curve. Different localities and countries experimenting and by the end of the 21^st century if the market was left to take care of all this we would probably have a much better, clearer energy infrastructure. But now that we are tearing what we have down and replacing it with wind and solar, which is totally inadequate, we’re setting ourselves up to make ourselves more vulnerable to whatever weather or climate extremes that nature might throw at us. Electricity helps keep us safe with desalination plants, air conditioning etc. And electricity is the source of our innovations across everything. What we are doing is extremely stupid. We’ve got politicians in charge of all this wind and solar stuff and no one is talking to the engineers. People who design transmission lines and grid operators are all tearing their hair out over all this wind and solar. So what we are doing is just plain stupid and if we continue on this path we’re going to end up in a worse place at the end of the 21^st century than if we had just left market forces and our desire for innovation to take charge and move forward. It’s a very bad place to be.

The first IPCC assessment said we don’t see anything beyond natural climate variability. The UN framework convention didn’t like that, and the existence of the IPCC was threatened. If the IPCC wanted to stay in business, they needed to find dangerous human-caused climate change. The second assessment report looked just like the first one. They were not really seeing anything yet. And tremendous pressure was put on the scientists in the summary for policy makers meeting where the scientists meet with the policy makers. And that was when the scientists came up with “we have seen a discernible impact of emissions on warming of the climate”. This was after the report had all been written! And then they went back and changed the report to be consistent with this. And this was an enormous scandal in scientific circles. But politically it served a purpose. And the IPCC was able to retain its relevance and viability. So in these very early days you can see how politics influenced science. The whole scientific problem was framed very narrowly – let’s look only at CO₂ emissions and other greenhouse gases. Forget natural climate variability and only focus on what might be dangerous. We don’t need to concern ourselves with any benefits of a warmer climate. So, all of climate science began to be framed in this very narrow way. That’s where the funding was for research from national governments to support the efforts of the IPCC. And the IPCC third and fourth assessments were the worst – it was sheer political advocacy. Then after that Climate-gate struck and the IPCC was put under a lot of scrutiny. They cleaned up their act to some extent in the 5^th and 6^th assessment reports. In the 5^th assessment report, Working Group 2 on impacts and Working Group 3 on mitigation were relatively good. In the 6^th assessment report, Working Group 1 on the science and the physical basis was good, while Working Group 2 and Working Group 3 were not good. It’s a very mixed bag – it depends on who gets selected to be authors and lead authors – and these authors are selected with a political agenda in mind. I was a minor contributor and reviewer for the 3^rd assessment report, but when I read the report I was disgusted. So, from then I had no more to do with the IPCC. The whole thing is very politicized. But the IPCC reports are more reasonable than what the activists are saying – things like “extinction”, “code red”, and all kinds of emergencies. That’s irresponsible.

The climate crisis isn’t what it used to be, even two years ago. The large emissions scenario (RCP8.5) is now off the table. The Conference of the Parties 26 and 27 are no longer considering this extreme emissions scenario. Two or three years ago warming of 3-4 degrees C since the preindustrial period would have been regarded as policy success because everyone was worried about this really extreme emission scenario and all the extreme weather that might be associated with it. Now everyone has backed down to the reference (RCP4.5), which is a much more modest increase and has much more modest impacts. We’re in reach of 2 degrees C – I don’t think we will have a problem staying within 2 degrees C by the end of the 21^st century. We’ve already warmed by 1.1 degrees C. Now that it is in sight, they have moved the goal posts down to 1.5 degrees C to amp up the urgency to do this and do that! So, these targets have nothing to do with science – they involve politics and efforts to achieve the maximum action to get rid of fossil fuels. And it’s all about renewable energy – they don’t want nuclear energy either. So, it’s a very specific worldview that is being out forward here that has very little basis in science and sensible energy policy.

Climate change industry

The IPCC’s mandate is to look for dangerous human-caused climate change. Because of this, the national funding agencies directed all the funding assuming there are dangerous impacts. The researchers quickly figured out that the way to get funded was to make alarmist claims about man-made climate change. This is how manufactured consensus happens. Even if a skeptic did get funding, it’s harder to publish because journal editors are alarmists. They promote the alarming papers and don’t even send the other ones out for review. If you wanted to advance in your career, there was clearly one path to go. That’s what we’ve got now: a massive government-funded climate alarmism complex.

Have you noticed any parallels between the official COVID-19 narrative and the climate change narrative?

Yes, that’s a big part of my book (see below). There are a lot of parallels. To me one of the big lessons of COVID is that that we can’t control really large and difficult problems by science and policy. And the interesting thing about COVID was the politicalization and consensus building – as soon as COVID came out there was this consensus about what we needed to do. That it wasn’t transmitted through the air, but through touch and masks weren’t going to work. Many of these things turned out to be wrong. But there was a consensus. There was also a very early consensus that COVID-19 was natural and could not have been caused by the laboratory in Wuhan. An absolute consensus developed very early in 2020. But this has all blown up since then. We’ve seen a lot of the same dynamics play out in 2-3 years for COVID-19, whereas the climate issue is playing out over decades. It’s the same things in play – people having an agenda, people wanting to protect their professional advancement, politics, the desire to control people – a lot of the lockdowns went beyond what was needed.

How can we resolve the differences of scientific outlooks and interpretation? Science is almost irrelevant at this point. It’s more about the decisions we need to make. You search for no-regrets solutions. You do lots of experimenting. You bring in a lot of stakeholders and decision makers and try to come to some sort of agreement. It’s a difficult problem. There are better ways to approach this than the top-down UN mandated solution. There are better ways to find solutions to this problem.

CONCLUSION

When we see the political aspect of climate alarmism, it is obvious that there is no climate emergency or climate crisis at the present time. The current climate charge targets have no scientific basis. Climatic change is an incredibly complex phenomenon that is outside human control and that is dominated by natural variability. Humans can’t control the climate. Atmospheric climate is characterized by significant uncertainty and complexity. We can’t even define the dimensions of the problem (if there is one), let alone the solution (if we need one). They have oversimplified both the problem and the solution. Consequently, their diagnosis and their solution are unreliable.

Many are deceived by the UN’s climate change narrative. This includes clever billionaires like Elon Musk and Richard Branson.

In her book, Curry concluded: “We need to open up space for dissent, disagreement, and discussion about scientific and policy options so that multiple perspectives can be considered, and broader support can be built for a range of policy options. … scientists (who investigate complex problems) are willing to become embroiled in political debates and social problems. To be effective we need to break the hegemony [dominance] of disciplinary researchers, particularly for those who are strident political activists as being regarded as experts for solutions to the complex problem of climate change.” We need more robust debate about the best path forward.

Appendix: Dr Judith Curry

The atmospheric scientist Judith Curry is a Professor Emeritus and former Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She retired in 2017 from her tenured position as a professor at age 63, because of what she called “the poisonous nature of the scientific discussion around human-caused global warming”. After leaving academia, Curry shifted to running the Climate Forecast Applications Network, a climate-risk consulting company whose clients include federal agencies, insurance companies, and energy companies.

In June 2023 her academic book, “Climate uncertainty and risk”, was published by Anthem Press, This is a holistic look at the whole problem, including how this has become politicized, and the philosophy of science. What could happen in the 21^st century and what we don’t know. Risk science and decision making under deep uncertainty. Adaptation. And a vision for the 21^st century energy system.

References: Recent interviews with Dr Judith Curry

This post comes from the following interviews.

“Relax, there is no climate emergency”, The European Institute of Science in Management (EISM), 29 Nov. 2022.
“There’s no emergency” – the ‘manufactured scientific consensus’ on climate change, BizNews, 5th October 2022.
How climate “science” got hijacked by alarmists, Reason Roundup, 8 September 2023.
Climate Change: Separating Facts from Fiction, EP 329, Interviewed by Jordan B Peterson.
The climate “emergency” is not an emergency, Paint my mind podcast, 7 June 2023.
“Climate science and policy response” The Power Hungry Podcast, September 2023.
The Heartland Institute: “Climate goals versus human wellbeing”, January 2023
Judith Curry on “wicked science” and the uncertainties of climate change, STEM-Talk E158, October 2023.

Judith Curry’s Blog: Climate etc

Posted, October 2023

Also see: Testing climate science