Climate scientists then and now

It’s been interesting the last few months on TSW seeing up close how climate change deniers operate.  To me any way, but maybe not to everyone reading TSW for insights about public land management.  I don’t think this is the place to debate the scientific nuances of global warming, point by point (nor is it the place to be debating Hillary or Hunter).  At the risk of feeding the trolls one more time, I’ll say one more thing about what I think about the broader climate issue, and then try hard to disengage.

This article (partially excerpted here) is actually about the role of scientists (one of Sharon’s favorite topics), and its actual title is

Why many scientists are now saying climate change is an all-out ‘emergency’

After a few years of record-breaking temperatures and extreme weather events, Ripple’s experience is a sign of how climate scientists — who once refrained from entering the public fray — are now using strident language to describe the warming planet. References to “climate emergency” and “climate crisis,” once used primarily by activist groups like the British-based Extinction Rebellion or the U.S.-based Sunrise Movement, are spiking in the academic literature. Meanwhile, scientists’ communication to the media and the public has gotten more exasperated — and more desperate.

On Monday, scientists released a paper showing that the world’s “carbon budget” — the amount of greenhouse gas emissions the world can still emit without boosting global temperatures more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) — has shrunk by a third. The world has only six years left at current emissions levels before racing past that temperature limit.

“There are no technical scenarios globally available in the scientific literature that would support that that is actually possible, or can even describe how that would be possible,” Joeri Rogelj, a climate scientist at Imperial College London, told reporters in a call.

Tim Lenton, one of the co-authors on Ripple’s most recent paper and a professor of earth system science at the University of Exeter, said that 2023 has been filled with temperatures so far beyond the norm that “they’re very hard to rationalize.”

It wasn’t always this way.

In the 2000s and even early 2010s, most scientists shied away making any statements that could be seen as “political.” Jacquelyn Gill, a professor of climate science and paleoecology at the University of Maine, said that when she was doing her PhD in those years, senior academics warned her against deviating at all from the science when interacting with the media or the public.

Hassol said that the shift is simple. In the 2000s, she said, climate change wasn’t yet at the level of an emergency. She recalls a 2009 report called “The Copenhagen Diagnosis,” which analyzed climate science to date and made suggestions for how to reach net-zero carbon emissions. If world governments had acted swiftly, the world would have had to cut emissions only by a bit over 3 percent per year. “We called that the bunny slope,” Hassol recalled.

If, on the other hand, governments waited until 2020 to start the transition, cuts would have to be much steeper — up to 9 percent per year. “We called that the double-black diamond,” she said. Despite the brief respite in CO2 emissions during the pandemic, humanity’s trajectory has veered closer to the double-black diamond.

If my communication has gotten “more exasperated – and more desperate,” maybe this is why.

The degree to which forest fires are caused by fossil fuel-driven climate change

I happened to run across something that contradicts Bob Zybach’s repeated assertions that, “these fires have been clearly predicted by me and others because of USFS management policies and Wilderness designations and have zero to do with warming climate or drier fuels.”  The Union of Concerned Scientists calculated the effect of warming climate and drier fuels on burned area, and the result from their peer-reviewed analysis is not “zero.”

Climate change is causing hotter, drier conditions that are also fueling these increasingly large and severe wildfires. In particular, vapor pressure deficit (VPD), a measure of atmospheric “thirst,” has emerged as a key way of tracking how climate change is amplifying wildfires because of its role in regulating water dynamics in ecosystems and, together with rising temperatures, contributing to increasing dryness (Box 1).

UCS used a combination of data and modeling to determine how much the carbon emissions associated with 88 major carbon producers (hereafter, the “big 88”) have historically contributed to increases in VPD and burned forest area across the western United States and southwestern Canada (see Methodology).

Across western North America, the area burned by forest fires increases exponentially as VPD increases, which means that relatively small changes in VPD result in large changes in burned forest area. The observed rise in VPD has enabled a steep increase in the forest area that has burned across the region since the mid-1980s. Since 1986,1 a cumulative 53.0 million acres of forest area has burned across western North America as VPD has risen. Without emissions tied to the big 88, the rise in VPD would have been much smaller, and 33.3 million acres (IQR 27.7 million–38.5 million) would have burned (Figure 4). That means that 37 percent (IQR 26–47 percent) of the cumulative burned forest area from 1986 to 2021 is attributable to emissions from the big 88. This represents nearly 19.8 million acres of burned forest area, or an area roughly the size of Maine.

You can criticize UCS for being agenda-driven (and we’ve talked about the limitations of “burned area” as a metric), but I’d challenge Bob or others to provide a similarly peer-reviewed research paper that attributes fire effects to his chosen causes.

 

Undermining science to undermine renewable energy

 

We’ve talked a little about energy transmission, especially in conjunction with renewable energy production, and the need to improve the electrical grid.  One thought seems to be that conservation interests are a barrier to that.  It turns out that the coal industry may be an even bigger barrier.  At least, here’s an example from the Trump Administration.

The Seams study demonstrated that stronger connections between the U.S. power system’s massive eastern and western power grids would accelerate the growth of wind and solar energy—hugely reducing American reliance on coal, the fuel contributing the most to climate change, and saving consumers billions.

But a study like Seams was politically dangerous territory for a federally funded lab while coal-industry advocates—and climate-change deniers—reign in the White House.

According to interviews with five current and former DOE and NREL sources, supported by more than 900 pages of documents and emails obtained by InvestigateWest through Freedom of Information Act requests and by additional documentation from industry sources, Trump officials would ultimately block Seams from seeing the light of day. And in doing so, they would set back America’s efforts to slow climate change.

The fallout was swift: The lab grounded Bloom and Novacheck (the lead researchers), prohibiting them from presenting the Seams results or even discussing the study outside NREL.  And the $1.6 million study itself disappeared. NREL yanked the completed findings from its website and deleted power-flow visualizations from its YouTube channel.

If NREL researchers are able to work unencumbered by political concerns and release Seams in its entirety, it could help point the U.S. toward a greener future, in which a robust economy runs on renewable energy. But for now, Seams is demonstrating an unintended finding—that when administrations stick their hands into scientific research, politically inconvenient truths are in peril.

The author indicated later that Congress had demanded that the study be released (and here it is).

This story is another example of political interference in science production and distribution.  I remain a strong skeptic that the pro-environment side can match this kind of interference by the coal lobby and “climate-change deniers” (as some have suggested here, including self-proclaimed climate-change “skeptics”).  It also seems obvious that this direct intervention is a lot more influential than any bias that exists in research funding.

Deeper Climate Change Discussions IV. Apocalypses and Trade-Offs

Thanks to everyone participating in our discussion on climate!.

Let me restate: we are leaving the “let’s not worry about it” folks by the side of the road for our discussion right now.  We heard you. We are not convinced and are unlikely to be. Speaking for myself, I don’t know for sure. But I also know that you don’t know for sure either. We can still act without knowing for sure.  Like wildfire mitigation efforts, we do them without knowing for sure a wildfire will hit our house while we live there. As Mike says, it’s about risks -and includes uncertainties and values.

Anyway, the last topic was exploring the differences between 4’s and 5’s in my original typology.. the difference was between “we need to focus on reducing GHGs” and “if we don’t stop fossil fuels apocalyptic things will happen.”

As it turns out, that was an oversimplification.  There are at least three different areas to explore 1) what needs to be done, 2) how quickly and 3) how apocalyptic future consequences might be.  Clearly all of these are related. If it was easy to fix, then decarbonization could happen rapidly and perhaps there would be no apocalyptic consequences.

One thing you may have noticed as you read the comments on the last piece is how few relate to atmospheric climate models, or physical science at all.

In fact, the discussion reminded me of the famous Thomas Sowell quote:

“Politics allows people to vote for the impossible, which may be one reason why politicians are often more popular than economists, who keep reminding people that there is no free lunch and that there are no ‘solutions’ but only trade-offs.”

If there are trade-offs, then indeed no particular discipline or expert, or even way of thinking, can claim to know the right answer.  Because someone calls themself a “climate expert” does not mean that they know any more about these trade-offs than anyone else.

First, about apocalypticism,

That was fairly vague, I grant you. Carl suggested:

a) “involving or causing sudden great damage or suffering” or more narrowly b) “involving a sudden and large-scale alteration in state.”

But if you believe that climate has been involved in wildfires, then a) has already happened.  We won’t know about b, probably until it’s too late.  So maybe that’s not a good word to use at all.

The next comment was he ever-helpful Anonymous leaving a link to a paper written by a philosophy professor and fortunately leaving a summary:

“All real-life decisions have the decision-maker face some kind of knowledge gap. Therefore, an idea of precautionary decision-making needs to be able to guide decision-makers with regard to:(1) if the knowledge gap faced is to be tolerated, and a decision made in spite of it, or(2) if the decision should be delayed while attempting to close or narrow the gap,(3) and, if so, how much time, effort and resources should be spent on that endeavor.”

Many of us may remember that there is in fact a social science field called “decision sciences” that has explored these kinds of questions in great depth (Al Lundgren cited an economics paper from 1921) .  In fact, my first memories of discussions of uncertainty  were Lundgren’s forest economics papers in the 1970’s- even one I recall on uncertainty in planning, though I can’t find it right now.

Jon then mentioned trade-offs as well:

 Where action is needed to mitigate climate change, it puts a premium on the tradeoff analysis, including on alternative locations that trade off some energy efficiency/cost for species protection.

And yet, trade-off analysis a project at a time doesn’t really work, so we’d need wider scale planning. Vladimir suggested that we need a plan, something like the Public Lands Commission in the 60’s. It’s conceivable that different alternatives could be looked at at either the national or state level and people familiar with the physical reality of building or changing, and the economic realities of who will pay and who will benefit, plus the availability of labor, capital and mineral and other resources.

Then there are values that haven’t yet been discussed in public fora… like how self-sufficient do we want to be as a country? Do we want to protect any domestic supply chains/jobs?

And Mike looked at it through the risk assessment lens..

Lastly, I try look at ACC through a risk analysis lens. What’s the worst that can happen if we continue down our current path of adding CO2 and other “greenhouse” gases (it’s not just about CO2) to the atmosphere vs what is the worst that can happen if we reduce those outputs and prepare for a warmer and, in some areas, drier future.

Who wins and who loses from any policy is ultimately in the realm of politics.  We folks who have spent time nestled in the depths of NEPA documents know that the best we can do is fairly describe the pros and cons and uncertainties insofar as they are known.  And present them to the public for feedback and additional info. I can see why maybe we don’t need to do that for national security policy, but decarbonization could be an opportunity to be as rational as we can be.. involving all the research disciplines, and people working on the ground.  No one discipline has the key to trade-offs, clearly if you are really an expert in industrial solar cells, then you aren’t an expert in hydro storage, electric cars, or carbon capture technologies. And to circle back, economists also have an important role to play in evaluating trade-offs.

Thanks again to everyone contributing to the discussion, and new people feel free to step in!

Foot on the Gas. Log on the Brake and.. Arbitration?

A theme I’ve been thinking about..is in terms of infrastructure build-out our country has one foot (and lots of federal tax $) on the gas, and a log (and lots of federal tax $) on the brake. I’ve been working on comments to the proposed NEPA regs, and listening to speakers on their webinars. It’s kind of funny how agency NEPA people are responsible both for not using plain language, and not including enough detailed scientific perspectives- which might be hard to do at the same time. We can discuss the proposed reg here at TSW, if anyone wants. The Admin claims that it is streamlining while adding more analysis and legally disputable changes. Anyway, I’d appreciate draft copies of comments if you would like to share.

From last week, here are some foot and log stories..

From the LA Times:

Note what Dave Jones, director of UC Berkeley’s Climate Risk Initiative and the state’s former insurance commissioner says needs to be done to avoid an “uninsurable future” in California?

“I’m not suggesting that we’re there yet,” he noted, “but it definitely bears paying attention to, because that’s a potential path of transmission of this risk in ways that could have negative consequences for our financial system.”

So what else should the state and federal government be doing to avoid the “uninsurable future” Jones warns about? He shared a few ideas:

  • The Federal Reserve and other federal financial regulators need to get serious about assessing the risks climate change poses to the financial system. That’s something the Fed just recently started to do, though critics say their efforts are weak and well behind other countries’ efforts.

  • State and federal leaders should invest more in forest management, especially prescribed burns. Jones said officials finally recognized that “a century and a half of fire suppression has resulted in forests choked with fuel.” Prescribed burns are key to reducing the risks of fires growing to out-of-control infernos, and Jones would like to see insurers factor such risk reduction into their assessments.

  • Most significant, Jones said, is the need to dramatically and quickly cut the human-made emissions that affect our environment.

I’m kind of dubious when financial regulators, who seem to have challenges with regulating things currently and most notably in 2008 , may take their eye off the ball to worry about the climate future.  But then perhaps that’s a feature for them, not a bug.  I wonder what regulatory work they are now not doing and whom that not-regulating might benefit?  And could there be reasons for insurance companies to err on the side of overestimating future risk?

So we need to invest more in forest management?

And to the brake..

From the Flathead Beacon (op-ed by Jim Peterson):

How else to explain the Court’s rejection of two forest restoration projects on the Kootenai National Forest in only 41 days. Judge Donald Malloy shut down the Black Ram Project on August 17 and Judge Dana Christensen’s July 7 ruling upended the Ripley Project.

Lincoln County and the State of Montana have an agreement with the U.S Forest Service to restore – via thinning and prescribed burning – up to 10,000 acres of designated Wildland Urban Interface per year to protect homes and forests from catastrophic wildfire.

Again, like last week’s post, somehow I don’t think it’s true that if NEPA practitioners cleaned up their act, then these projects would move through smoothly.  The other interesting thing is that the Kootenai Tribe supports the project:

“The Tribe supports the Black Ram project, because it protects our Ktunaxa resources, furthers restoration of Ktunaxa Territory forests and was developed through our government-to-government relationship with the United States Forest Service,” said Gary Aitken, Jr., Vice-Chairman, Kootenai Tribe of Idaho.

So even their feet on the gas doesn’t seem to matter because at the end of the day a federal judge will decide.  I hope that any settlements will involve the Tribe.

Anyway, back to the op-ed – Jim suggests arbitration instead.. it’s been around awhile as an idea.. I think it might have been in some proposed legislation..at least as a pilot.  Does anyone remember what bill that was? He suggests:

Let’s nix litigation in favor of baseball-style arbitration. You bring your best ideas for protecting forests and we’ll bring ours and three qualified arbitration judges will decide which ideas best meet the goals and objectives of the Forest Service’s decadal forest planning documents. No more bad juju.

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Which reminds me that I ran across this idea also from Wildlife for the 21st Century by the American Wildlife Conservation Partners.

Increase Collaboration, Reduce Litigation
* Authorize collaboration in federal land decisions and protect collaboratively based decisions from litigation. Congress;Agriculture/FS; Interior/F WS, BLM; Defense/COE
* Authorize alternative remedies to litigation, including arbitration, and limit fee reimbursement to cases of direct and personal interest as defined in the Equal Access to Justice Act. Congress; Agriculture/FWS, BLM; Defense/COE; DOJ Collaboration is the voluntary work of citizens with each other and federal agencies to develop plans and projects.
These locally driven solutions achieve buy-in from diverse stakeholders. New policy must place collaborative agreements on par with lawsuits in determining the direction of federal land conservation. Arbitration between litigants and collaborative groups can avoid costly and disruptive litigation on projects where stakeholders have already agreed upon the best approach.

Of course, the forest kinds of collaborative efforts might work for forest resilience projects, probably not so much for transmission lines, solar and wind installations, carbon capture, mines and other kinds of facilities. Still, it may be worth it for vegetation projects.

Deeper Climate Change Discussions III. Does Apocalypticism Affect Our Path Forward and If So, How?

So let’s go back to our discussion. Again, the point is not to change minds but to understand each other better. It turns out that many of us are in camps 4 and 5.

4. Humans are influencing the climate and we need to focus on reducing greenhouse gases, notably carbon and methane.
5. Humans are influencing the climate and if we don’t stop fossil fuels apocalyptic things will happen.

It is true that some folks here are not in 4 and 5. For the time, though, let’s leave that discussion. We don’t need to convince them, nor they us. As the English cleric and writer Charles Caleb Colton wrote: “The greatest friend of truth is Time, her greatest enemy is Prejudice, and her constant companion is Humility.” So we can leave them to their beliefs.. they may be correct but time will tell. It’s also possible that the way we propose to deal with decarbonization will have other advantages such that those folks may ultimately agree. For example, the way the authors of he 2009 Hartwell Paper framed the issue:

Therefore, in our view, the organising principle of our effort should be the raising up of human dignity and in that pursuit, our re-framed primary goals should be three:
1) to ensure that the basic needs, especially the energy demands, of the world’s growing population are adequately met. ‘Adequacy’ means energy that is simultaneously accessible, secure and low-cost.
2) to ensure that we develop in a manner that does not undermine the essential functioning of the Earth system, in recent years most commonly reflected in concerns about accumulating carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere, but certainly not limited to that factor alone;
3) to ensure that our societies are adequately equipped to withstand the risks and dangers that come from all the vagaries of climate, whatever may be their cause.

So stand by, 1s,2s, and 3s, we may pick you back up somewhere along the way.

For now, I’d like to go back to 4s and 5s and look more deeply into where our different views could lead us in terms of efforts to decarbonize.

If I think about the differences between 4’s and 5’s, we all agree that decarbonizing is something that needs to be addressed. What we differ on (perhaps?) is urgency, what environmental, social justice, economic, national security trade-offs should be made, and what will work in physical reality. Then there’s scale, country or international. Should the US export more LNG to help other countries burn less coal? Should we tell Africa not to develop its resources? And there are so many values and scientific disciplines and practitioners involved in all the possibilities and trade-offs. This is a tough problem, because right now our world runs on fossil fuels- electricity, transport, chemicals and so on. We also know it’s difficult because states like California, and countries like Germany, have tried a bunch of things- some have worked better than others- and we have watched them struggle. If you follow Sammy Roth at the LA Times you can follow some of California’s twists and turns.

At the same time that states and countries are making efforts to decarbonize, the natural world (e.g., many aspects of wildfires); the human world (e.g., the War in the Ukraine); and interactions of both (e.g., the Covid pandemic) can change expectations and possibilities of any steps forward at any time. As does technological innovation for both mitigation (carbon capture, geothermal, small modular reactors, and so on) and for adaptation (wildfire suppression technology, CRISPR for plant breeding and so on).

So decarbonizing will be difficult in terms of new energy sources and building and buying new energy sources and physical infrastructure, it can’t physically happen as quickly as some might want, and care will have to be taken such that the transition doesn’t impose undue burdens on the non-wealthy/environmental justice/marginalized communities; AND we will have to be flexible as new information and natural, human and the interactions of those change through time. It seems like we should ask everyone to help row the boat. and we need to build a coalition that can maintain itself and be flexible through time and all kinds of internal and external trials. Including groups that want to hijack the issue to their own known or unknown ends. So what is the path to that coalition.. via old-fangled traits such as honesty, transparency, intentionally developing trust, and perhaps a healthy dose of humility?

So my question to 4s and 5s, do you see the situation the same way? If not, why not? And specifically for 5’s, do you think your view on the possibly apocalyptic nature of climate change affects your views on the above?

Thanks to all for your continued participation in this discussion.

A Look Behind the Scenes in Climate Science Publishing: Patrick Brown Explains Why Our Wildfire-Related Sciences Are Left Out

Patrick Brown of The Breakthrough Institute posted this today at The Free Press.  It’s about wildfires and climate, and also IMHO does a great job of explaining the climate science system and what gets published. Warning: this is an extraordinarily long post because I believe it’s paywalled. So

This may be surprising to some of you, but to others.. not so much. Here are some excerpts.. I bolded sentences that deal with the theme of “why are the usual sciences that deal with, say, forests or wildfire, often overlooked in climate papers (as is adaptation)?”

I am a climate scientist. And while climate change is an important factor affecting wildfires over many parts of the world, it isn’t close to the only factor that deserves our sole focus.

So why does the press focus so intently on climate change as the root cause? Perhaps for the same reasons I just did in an academic paper about wildfires in Nature, one of the world’s most prestigious journals: it fits a simple storyline that rewards the person telling it.

The paper I just published—“Climate warming increases extreme daily wildfire growth risk in California”—focuses exclusively on how climate change has affected extreme wildfire behavior. I knew not to try to quantify key aspects other than climate change in my research because it would dilute the story that prestigious journals like Nature and its rival, Science, want to tell.

This matters because it is critically important for scientists to be published in high-profile journals; in many ways, they are the gatekeepers for career success in academia. And the editors of these journals have made it abundantly clear, both by what they publish and what they reject, that they want climate papers that support certain preapproved narratives—even when those narratives come at the expense of broader knowledge for society.

To put it bluntly, climate science has become less about understanding the complexities of the world and more about serving as a kind of Cassandra, urgently warning the public about the dangers of climate change. However understandable this instinct may be, it distorts a great deal of climate science research, misinforms the public, and most importantly, makes practical solutions more difficult to achieve.

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Here’s how it works.

The first thing the astute climate researcher knows is that his or her work should support the mainstream narrative—namely, that the effects of climate change are both pervasive and catastrophic and that the primary way to deal with them is not by employing practical adaptation measures like stronger, more resilient infrastructure, better zoning and building codes, more air conditioning—or in the case of wildfires, better forest management or undergrounding power lines—but through policies like the Inflation Reduction Act, aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. 

So in my recent Nature paper, which I authored with seven others, I focused narrowly on the influence of climate change on extreme wildfire behavior. Make no mistake: that influence is very real. But there are also other factors that can be just as or more important, such as poor forest management and the increasing number of people who start wildfires either accidentally or purposely. (A startling fact: over 80 percent of wildfires in the US are ignited by humans.)

In my paper, we didn’t bother to study the influence of these other obviously relevant factors. Did I know that including them would make for a more realistic and useful analysis? I did. But I also knew that it would detract from the clean narrative centered on the negative impact of climate change and thus decrease the odds that the paper would pass muster with Nature’s editors and reviewers.

This type of framing, with the influence of climate change unrealistically considered in isolation, is the norm for high-profile research papers. For example, in another recent influential Nature paper, scientists calculated that the two largest climate change impacts on society are deaths related to extreme heat and damage to agriculture. However, the authors never mention that climate change is not the dominant driver for either one of these impacts: heat-related deaths have been declining, and crop yields have been increasing for decades despite climate change. To acknowledge this would imply that the world has succeeded in some areas despite climate change—which, the thinking goes, would undermine the motivation for emissions reductions.

This leads to a second unspoken rule in writing a successful climate paper. The authors should ignore—or at least downplay—practical actions that can counter the impact of climate change. If deaths due to extreme heat are decreasing and crop yields are increasing, then it stands to reason that we can overcome some major negative effects of climate change. Shouldn’t we then study how we have been able to achieve success so that we can facilitate more of it? Of course we should. But studying solutions rather than focusing on problems is simply not going to rouse the public—or the press. Besides, many mainstream climate scientists tend to view the whole prospect of, say, using technology to adapt to climate change as wrongheaded; addressing emissions is the right approach. So the savvy researcher knows to stay away from practical solutions.

Here’s a third trick: be sure to focus on metrics that will generate the most eye-popping numbers. Our paper, for instance, could have focused on a simple, intuitive metric like the number of additional acres that burned or the increase in intensity of wildfires because of climate change. Instead, we followed the common practice of looking at the change in risk of an extreme event—in our case, the increased risk of wildfires burning more than 10,000 acres in a single day.

This is a far less intuitive metric that is more difficult to translate into actionable information. So why is this more complicated and less useful kind of metric so common? Because it generally produces larger factors of increase than other calculations. To wit: you get bigger numbers that justify the importance of your work, its rightful place in Nature or Science, and widespread media coverage. *

Another way to get the kind of big numbers that will justify the importance of your research—and impress editors, reviewers, and the media—is to always assess the magnitude of climate change over centuries, even if that timescale is irrelevant to the impact you are studying.

For example, it is standard practice to assess impacts on society using the amount of climate change since the industrial revolution, but to ignore technological and societal changes over that time. This makes little sense from a practical standpoint since societal changes in population distribution, infrastructure, behavior, disaster preparedness, etc., have had far more influence on our sensitivity to weather extremes than climate change has since the 1800s. This can be seen, for example, in the precipitous decline in deaths from weather and climate disasters over the last century. Similarly, it is standard practice to calculate impacts for scary hypothetical future warming scenarios that strain credibility while ignoring potential changes in technology and resilience that would lessen the impact. Those scenarios always make for good headlines.

A much more useful analysis would focus on changes in climate from the recent past that living people have actually experienced and then forecasting the foreseeable future—the next several decades—while accounting for changes in technology and resilience. 

In the case of my recent Nature paper, this would mean considering the impact of climate change in conjunction with anticipated reforms to forest management practices over the next several decades. In fact, our current research indicates that these changes in forest management practices could completely negate the detrimental impacts of climate change on wildfires. 

Another way to get the kind of big numbers that will justify the importance of your research—and impress editors, reviewers, and the media—is to always assess the magnitude of climate change over centuries, even if that timescale is irrelevant to the impact you are studying.

* When I first saw Patrick’s paper on TwitX, I thought “why on earth did they pick that bizarre variable when we know total acres haven’t gone up?  I even wondered, skeptic that I am, if they had looked at a lot of other variables that didn’t work out for the Preferred Narrative.

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I think the article might be paywalled. So here’s more.  I think I’ve tried to say this in the past but much less articulately..

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For example, it is standard practice to assess impacts on society using the amount of climate change since the industrial revolution, but to ignore technological and societal changes over that time. This makes little sense from a practical standpoint since societal changes in population distribution, infrastructure, behavior, disaster preparedness, etc., have had far more influence on our sensitivity to weather extremes than climate change has since the 1800s. This can be seen, for example, in the precipitous decline in deaths from weather and climate disasters over the last century. Similarly, it is standard practice to calculate impacts for scary hypothetical future warming scenarios that strain credibility while ignoring potential changes in technology and resilience that would lessen the impact. Those scenarios always make for good headlines.

A much more useful analysis would focus on changes in climate from the recent past that living people have actually experienced and then forecasting the foreseeable future—the next several decades—while accounting for changes in technology and resilience.

In the case of my recent Nature paper, this would mean considering the impact of climate change in conjunction with anticipated reforms to forest management practices over the next several decades. In fact, our current research indicates that these changes in forest management practices could completely negate the detrimental impacts of climate change on wildfires.

This more practical kind of analysis is discouraged, however, because looking at changes in impacts over shorter time periods and including other relevant factors reduces the calculated magnitude of the impact of climate change, and thus it weakens the case for greenhouse gas emissions reductions.

You might be wondering at this point if I’m disowning my own paper. I’m not. On the contrary, I think it advances our understanding of climate change’s role in day-to-day wildfire behavior. It’s just that the process of customizing the research for an eminent journal caused it to be less useful than it could have been.

This means conducting the version of the research on wildfires that I believe adds much more practical value for real-world decisions: studying the impacts of climate change over relevant time frames and in the context of other important changes, like the number of fires started by people and the effects of forest management. The research may not generate the same clean story and desired headlines, but it will be more useful in devising climate change strategies.

But climate scientists shouldn’t have to exile themselves from academia to publish the most useful versions of their research. We need a culture change across academia and elite media that allows for a much broader conversation on societal resilience to climate.

The media, for instance, should stop accepting these papers at face value and do some digging on what’s been left out. The editors of the prominent journals need to expand beyond a narrow focus that pushes the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. And the researchers themselves need to start standing up to editors, or find other places to publish.

What really should matter isn’t citations for the journals, clicks for the media, or career status for the academics—but research that actually helps society.

Why would we do that? (Just joking, I am a proud graduate of land-grant institutions with that explicit mission).

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Here’s the beginning of the piece:

If you’ve been reading any news about wildfires this summer—from Canada to Europe to Maui—you will surely get the impression that they are mostly the result of climate change.

Here’s the APClimate change keeps making wildfires and smoke worse. Scientists call it the “new abnormal.

And PBS NewsHour: Wildfires driven by climate change are on the rise—Spain must do more to prepare, experts say.

And The New York TimesHow Climate Change Turned Lush Hawaii Into a Tinderbox.

And BloombergMaui Fires Show Climate Change’s Ugly Reach.

I am a climate scientist. And while climate change is an important factor affecting wildfires over many parts of the world, it isn’t close to the only factor that deserves our sole focus.

So why does the press focus so intently on climate change as the root cause? Perhaps for the same reasons I just did in an academic paper about wildfires in Nature, one of the world’s most prestigious journals: it fits a simple storyline that rewards the person telling it.

The paper I just published—“Climate warming increases extreme daily wildfire growth risk in California”—focuses exclusively on how climate change has affected extreme wildfire behavior. I knew not to try to quantify key aspects other than climate change in my research because it would dilute the story that prestigious journals like Nature and its rival, Science, want to tell.

This matters because it is critically important for scientists to be published in high-profile journals; in many ways, they are the gatekeepers for career success in academia. And the editors of these journals have made it abundantly clear, both by what they publish and what they reject, that they want climate papers that support certain preapproved narratives—even when those narratives come at the expense of broader knowledge for society.

To put it bluntly, climate science has become less about understanding the complexities of the world and more about serving as a kind of Cassandra, urgently warning the public about the dangers of climate change. However understandable this instinct may be, it distorts a great deal of climate science research, misinforms the public, and most importantly, makes practical solutions more difficult to achieve.

Why is this happening?

It starts with the fact that a researcher’s career depends on his or her work being cited widely and perceived as important. This triggers the self-reinforcing feedback loops of name recognition, funding, quality applications from aspiring PhD students and postdocs, and of course, accolades.

But as the number of researchers has skyrocketed in recent years—there are close to six times more PhDs earned in the U.S. each year than there were in the early 1960s—it has become more difficult than ever to stand out from the crowd. So while there has always been a tremendous premium placed on publishing in journals like Nature and Science, it’s also become extraordinarily more competitive.

In theory, scientific research should prize curiosity, dispassionate objectivity, and a commitment to uncovering the truth. Surely those are the qualities that editors of scientific journals should value.

In reality, though, the biases of the editors (and the reviewers they call upon to evaluate submissions) exert a major influence on the collective output of entire fields. They select what gets published from a large pool of entries, and in doing so, they also shape how research is conducted more broadly. Savvy researchers tailor their studies to maximize the likelihood that their work is accepted. I know this because I am one of them.

Disclaimer: I’ve had convos with various folks at The Breakthrough Institute and will be moderating a panel at an upcoming conference of theirs, but have never spoken to Patrick.

Deeper Climate Change Discussions II. Who’s a Skeptic of What Exactly?

Thanks to everyone who has participated in our first Deeper Climate discussion! It’s not too late.. if you want to weigh in with your own views on the Five Claims or the Ship or Flotilla of Climate, please do so.

It turns out that many of us here at TSW agree that greenhouse gases have something to do with climate change. And as Jon said, maybe what we disagree about is “what should we do about it, and how quickly?”.

At the same time, some of us are skeptical of the various burs that have attached themselves to the climate change socks (I really need a better analogy, suggestions?), and of the certainty that some people claim with regards to climate model outputs. So would someone skeptical of any of these be considered a “climate skeptic”? Do we even have a mutually agreed upon definition?

Here’s one study that tries to address that question specifically, from Britain in 2014 by Capstick and Pidgeon. It’s open-source.

This lack of clarity about what climate change scepticism actually is has important implications. This is not least because the concept is often used synonymously (and pejoratively) with ideas such as contrarianism and denial, as where Nerlich (2010, p. 419) refers to climate scepticism “in the sense of climate denialism or contrarianism”. With particular reference to Anderegg et al.’s (2010) study of expert credibility in climate science in which these labels are also used interchangeably, O’Neill and Boykoff (2010, p. E151) caution against the imprecise use of such terminology, arguing that:

Blanket labeling of heterogeneous views under… these headings has been shown to do little to further considerations of climate science and policy… Continued indiscriminate use of the terms will further polarize views on climate change, reduce media coverage to tit-for-tat finger-pointing, and do little to advance the unsteady relationship among climate science, society, and policy.

.

That letter in PNAS O’Neill and Max Boykoff is also open source.

I agree that unclear language of a pejorative nature is probably not helpful to productive discourse. But I thought we already knew that? So if we follow that logic, people who use those terms might not really be interested in understanding others’ points of view, or maybe they don’t know about this not-helpfulness or have forgotten. We’ll have to ask next time we see this.

Anyway, Capstick and Pidgeon go on to say..

We contend that, to date, applications of the notion of scepticism have been inconsistent and have often mixed disparate types of perceptions – but that nevertheless their usage has corresponded thematically to two broad treatments. The first of these concerns perceptions about scientific and physical matters, such as regarding scientific consensus and an anthropogenic component to climate change. The second concerns perceptions about social and behavioural matters, including doubts about responding to climate change at the individual and collective scales, and concerning the communication and portrayal of climate change.

The authors suggest at the end in their “implications for public engagement with climate change” that:

To date, the majority of work focussing on communicating climate change has tended to be concerned with aspects of climate science. We suggest, however, that additional efforts are required to identify and engage with the doubts held by people concerning the relevance and effectiveness of measures taken to address climate change. Whilst a substantial literature has now developed around strategies for promoting behavioural responses to climate change (e.g. Swim et al., 2010, Whitmarsh et al., 2011) nevertheless this has tended not to directly address people’s fundamental misgivings about the value of such responses in themselves. To do so is complicated by the fact that a person cannot be said to be ‘wrong’ should they be sceptical in this way. Perhaps then, the most appropriate strategy may be to acknowledge the validity of such doubts, but in such a way that nevertheless permits the value of personal and societal action on climate change to be emphasised. This may be most likely to work where individual action is contextualised to common efforts (notwithstanding that this may be particularly challenging for those of an individualistic disposition). Connections made with the effectiveness of collective action (Koletsou and Mancy, 2012), including promotion of environmental citizenship (Wolf, 2011), participatory democracy (van den Hove, 2000) and decision-making at local scales (Rayner, 2010) may be some ways in which this could be achieved. Likewise, Van Zomeren et al. (2010) have shown that communicating strong group efficacy beliefs (conveying the message that people are able to collectively address climate change) can increase individuals’ pro-environmental behaviour intentions.
(my bold)

Who would have placed “wrong” and “skeptical” in the same group in the first place? As if one group has perfect knowledge. But science is messy, conditional and contested, let alone policy.

As for me, I would want to go deeper into what responses people are skeptical about and why. Let’s take an example. We had “bike to work” day at the Forest Service which was supposed to be good for climate (of course it was a bit of a show, and at our RO not particularly safe, involving inhaling car and truck fumes, bouncing over badly maintained roads, and insensitive drivers). It seemed performative rather than helpful. I suggested instead we start a calculus tutoring program for some of the poorer schools in our area to encourage more students to go into engineering- which will probably be the actual solution to decarbonization, in my view. So we have different views of the best way forward (and at the mega scale, nuclear, carbon capture, geothermal and so on). Who determines what gains the “climate skeptic” label from all these choices? Or are they doubts around responding at all- that nothing will work? If I think something will work and they don’t – do they not know about all the technologies? Do they have a negative view of human nature or politics?

It seems like we all may simply disagree about the best paths forward, as with any other policy question. And that’s OK because if believe in diversity, then the best ideas will come forward through discussion and challenge. Not fuzz and name-calling. But how relevant is the “best path forward” question to the “is this specific wildfire/wildfires in Canada/wildfires around the world made worse by climate change?”.

Understanding Folks’ Views on a Changing Climate and Designing a Framework for More Productive Discussions

Various folks on TSW have been having a discussion on their climate views, including what constitutes “denial.”  I’m not sure that the folks who write about climate (or AGW anthropogenic global warming or whatever) have parsed out all the complexities of different views that human beings have, and try to understand why we disagree.  Instead, some of our academics are more inclined to study how to convince us to think differently, as if it were simple to figure out what is the correct way to think on such an incredibly complex matter.

There is an extremely diverse range of views about different aspects of climate change and, for some reason, it seems like the Powers That Be that shape our discourse haven’t given us the words to discuss it.  Rather, it seems they prefer to lump us into large groups “warmists” “deniers” and so on.  So let’s work the other way, and assume we’re doing a survey of different knowledge claims around climate change.  We can jointly develop a landscape of views, and after we have done that, we can discuss our own experiences with the climate and climate science literature and use those stories to help understand each other.  Because it could be argued that raising the level of hype and calling each other names has not been effective in moving climate policy forward.

I’ve been following climate science and politics for around thirty years in various venues, so I think I can safely say that if we want to talk to each other across our disagreements, we need to do something differently.  To my mind that starts with developing our own terminology.. designed to clarify, not to disrespect, nor even dissuade.  Personally, I’m not trying to convert anyone to my point of view but I’d like to understand others’.  And we don’t have to argue evidence right now either (or ever, it seems like that ends up being a rabbit hole), we can just see where everyone is.

I’d like to start with our own abbreviation for this topic. How about CC for talking about “the issue around different concepts about the sources, intensity and impacts of human-caused changes to the climate and what are the best strategies, time-frames, adaptation and energy technologies to deal with those changes.”

So I’ll start with two approaches and then move on to some others.

The Five Claims: Where Do You Stand?

1. The climate is changing. (1)Strongly Agree, (2)Agree, (3)Neutral, (4)Disagree, (5)Strongly Disagree

2. Humans have never influenced the climate and aren’t influencing it now.  Strongly Agree, Agree, Neutral, Disagree, Strongly Disagree

3. Humans have influenced the climate in the past and are doing it today in many ways including greenhouse gases, land use, irrigation, wildfire suppression or not, smoke of various kinds. Strongly Agree, Agree, Neutral, Disagree, Strongly Disagree

4. Humans are influencing the climate and we need to focus on reducing greenhouse gases, notably carbon and methane. Strongly Agree, Agree, Neutral, Disagree, Strongly Disagree

5. Humans  are influencing the climate and if we don’t stop fossil fuels apocalyptic things will happen. This view is held by Antonia Guterres, the current Secretary-General of the United Nations and was stated in July of this year.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Thursday that it is not too late to “stop the worst” of the climate crisis, but only with “dramatic, immediate” action. “The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived,

On the five claims, I’m a 1(1),2(5),3(1),4 (1.5),5 (5).  What are you?

To my mind, a climate change denier is a 1 4 or 5- that would be the plain English read.  But I (and others)  have been called deniers because we agree all the way up to 5.  In fact, some people have been called climate deniers for being anything other than a 5(1).  So the term “climate denier” has basically lost all meaning in my opinion.

The CC Ship Analogy

I haven’t decided yet whether this analogy works, so let me know what you think, or if you can think of another.

It seems like people on the CC Ship spend a fair amount of time determining who belongs on it.  If you spend time on Climate Twit-X, as I do, you’ll notice there are many discussions around Groups That Don’t Belong There.  One week everyone’s ganging up on nuclear, the next week carbon capture.  I imagine them trying to throw them overboard.  Ironically, the Ship itself is powered by diesel (because there are no alternatives), but the oil and gas people were thrown off a long time ago. Since funding, honors, professional standing, and an unruffleable sense of rectitude are the joys of being on the ship, most people who work for a living don’t want to be tossed off.

This leaves a bunch of us watching the Ship cruise along, watching people, ideas and groups that seem reasonable get thrown overboard.  In patterns that can be baffling. I have two problems with the Ship. The solutions to CC don’t seem rational and coherent or based on any kind of physical or engineering reality.

Some areas of science have more representation on the Ship than others, which don’t have to be tossed off the Ship because they are mostly ignored  as long as they give lip service to the dominance of the prevailing sciences. That’s where our traditional forest sciences are.

Is anyone steering this thing?  We don’t know.  And if there is, and one watches carefully the dynamics of who is on and who is off, many get the feeling that the Ship is not really about decarbonization at all.  As soon as the Ship gets closer to what we thought was the target (decarbonization) it seems to change direction. Or perhaps it originally was about decarbonization, but is now about prolonging the time the Ship continues to sail, rewarding the same folks and with the same folks in charge.

So I am both agnostic (I don’t know) and skeptical (dubious) about the nature of the Ship, its passengers, and the less-than-transparent decisions being made on the bridge. My skepticism is based on their behavior over the last 30 years that I’ve been watching.  Does that make me a “climate” skeptic, or a “Ship” skeptic?  But I’m generally skeptical, as a scientist was trained to be back in the day.  I’m pretty much skeptical of any claims that seem based on authority, be it religion or science, if those claims don’t agree with other information I have, including personal experience.

Doomberg on Substack had an interesting observation on language last week..maybe Doomie is oversensitive, but at least they are observing the ship.  Many of us are only aware of its vague outlines.

For decades, we were told that carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels were dooming the planet and that we needed to slow and then eventually eliminate the amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere. Now, with industry on the cusp of validating carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technologies at commercial scale—an advance that would theoretically allow humanity to benefit from the life-nourishing energy fossil fuels provide while minimizing global emissions of CO2—environmentalists are throwing everything they have at stopping such developments in their tracks. As part of this coordinated effort, the word “emissions” is being purposely de-emphasized in Newspeak, replaced instead with “burning.” Read how YouTube currently contextualizes all videos on its platform that mention climate:

Funny, we thought emissions were the problem | YouTube

To discover that emissions emanating from the burning of fossil fuels is the real issue to be dealt with, one has to click through to “learn more,” something we presume precious few people do.

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Here’s an illustration of the “we know best so we can change the language”. The problem with this is that many of are sensitive to changes in language and manipulation thereby.  Not a way to build trust.

From  this piece on  Ideastream Public Media:

Changing climate language

The words we use to talk about climate change and its effects are essential to make sure we’re communicating the right message, Hassol said. But this also means we should choose our words carefully.

When discussing climate change, Hassol recommends referring to it as human-caused climate change to specify that the effects we’re seeing today are not natural, and instead brought on by human action.

“Some people hear climate change and they think, ‘oh, well then, the change we’re seeing now could be natural,’” she said. “But the science is very clear that this current warming is not natural.”

There are also a few phrases she’d recommend over global warming, which can be confusing and inaccurate when used in conversation.

“[The] problem with global warming is that it sounds nice to some people, right? Warmth is generally a positive thing.,” Hassol said. “Another problem is that it speaks mainly to rising temperatures, and it doesn’t invoke all the other things that come along with the rising temperatures: heavy rainfall that causes flooding, stronger, more destructive hurricanes [and] larger, more intense wildfires.”

Instead, Hassol recommends phrases like climate disruption, global heating and global weirding to cover all the bases of climate change and its effects.

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So what do you think? Where do you stand on the Five Claims? Do you think the claims should be expanded to different views on what to do about climate change? Does the Ship of Climate make sense to you?  I’m going to moderate this a little more intensively than usual as I think I know the common discussion rabbit holes after much time on Climate Twit-X.

Climate change in the courts – a win for Montana youth plaintiffs

I mentioned this Montana lawsuit in an earlier litigation update since it was going to be the first case going to trial nationally involving youth plaintiffs demanding action on climate change in a state court.  Since then, we’ve been debating climate science a little here, so here’s an update.  The trial happened and the court ruled in favor of Plaintiffs on one claim (2023.08.14-Held-v.-Montana-victory-order):  a recent change in Montana’s environmental policy act (MEPA), which prohibited consideration of impacts on climate for proposed projects, “violates Plaintiffs’ right to a clean and healthful environment and is facially unconstitutional.”  The state also failed to show that “the MEPA limitation serves a compelling government interest.”

The Montana state constitution includes this specific right, so the applicability of this outcome elsewhere is uncertain, but Plaintiffs’ attorneys (who are representing youth plaintiffs in other climate cases) are optimistic that it may provide some momentum.

The Washington Post had an interesting take on factual questions related to climate change:

In a pivot from its expected defense disputing the climate science behind the plaintiffs’ case, the state focused instead on arguing that the legislature should weigh in on the contested law, not the judiciary.

Michael Gerrard, the founder of Columbia’s Sabin Center, said the change in strategy came as a surprise: “Everyone expected them to put on a more vigorous defense,” he said. “And they may have concluded that the underlying science of climate change was so strong that they didn’t want to contest it.”

The state’s defense was unsuccessful. Judge Kathy Seeley determined that the state’s emissions could be fairly traced to the legal provision blocking Montana from reviewing the climate impacts of energy projects. She further wrote that the state’s emissions and climate change have caused harm to the environment and the youth plaintiffs.

If the WaPo article isn’t viewable, here’s another with more background on the case.

(It was interesting when I looked for a meme to include with this post – they seem to be dominated by not-very-clever climate change denialism.)