Author: rp

We don’t have the money, workforce or materials to achieve net zero

This is an interview with Michael Kelly, professor emeritus of technology at the University of Cambridge. He was a government scientist when the Climate Change Act was launched in 2008 in the UK, and has been researching the reduction of carbon in Britain since then. This is incredibly practical.

Notes…

This podcast is an interview of Judith Curry, covering her whole life and experience and a very rich summary of much of the history of climate science. Judith has always tried to foster consensus and discussion. She is also good at talking about uncertainty and risk.

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLz0O1tH0Uc&t=31s

1972 – President Nixon – cooling is due soon. Consensus view of major media outlets. 1978 New York Times said no end in sight to the cooling of last 30 years. Certainty instead of humility…

Alot we didn’t know then. And not know now.

Early 1990s Judith worked on the World Climate Research Programme. Consensus then was that the IPCC was a political exercise that had escaped the bounds of scientific knowledge and uncertainty.

1997 Judith worked on SHeBA (Surface Heat Budget of the Arctic ocean) which aimed to document feedback among the atmosphere, sea ice, and the ocean. Navy funding had dried up after end of cold war. Scientists added climate action to get it funded. The expedition sought to address discrepancies between observations and climate models.

2004 Hurricane season. 14 named storms in the North Atlantic. If there was a signal from global warming you’d see it in the global hurricane, not just north Atlantic. All available data. Global number not changed since 1970. But % of catagory 4 and 5 hurricanes doubled since 1970. Right after New Orleans and Katrina. Attracted scathing attracts from critics. With respect to the data it relied on.

Article – 2006 “Mixing politics and science in testing the hypothesis that global warming is causing an increase in hurricane intensity“. And got into better forecasting of hurricanes. Policy makers need to rebuild New Orleans for a cat 4 or 5 hurricane, not just cat 3. Hurricanes/global warming became focussing event. Asking us about global warming. Not entirely comfortable talking about it . But from 2005-2008 it felt responsible to support IPCC building of consensus in order to get focussed on the right response to hurricane Katrina. It is not easy to untangle any global warming effect from background natural variability in hurricanes. Uncertain.

[00:18:37] Ken asks Judy about the November 2009 unauthorized release of emails from the Climactic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, otherwise known as “climategate”. The emails showed that some researchers were manipulating data to make it seem that the earth was heating up dangerously. IPCC had evaded FOI requests, cherry-picked data, manipulated peer review process, downplayed uncertainty, tried to discredit sceptics. Judith wrote an essay on ClimateAudit blog: “On the credibility of climate research”. Make data public, transparent about methods, honest about uncertainty, more respectful of scientists who were critical of their research. I had been duped into substituted judgements of IPCC for my own in public statements on climate change.

[00:20:45] Morley asks Judy to give a primer on climate modeling and how complex it is.

Global models = course-grained simulation of earth’s climate system using computers. Simulate the atmosphere, ocean, land surface, sea ice, glaciers. Complex mathematical equations that can only be solved on computers. Some equations based on laws of physics. However, a lot of key processes are approximated and not based on physical laws. Hence there are a number of tuneable parameters, including clouds. Models are exceedingly complex. Tools for trying to understand how global climate system works, but not fit for making future predictions of the future, simulating regional climates or extreme weather and climate events.

[00:22:09] Morley mentions that in her book, “Climate Uncertainty and Risk: Rethinking Our Response,” Judy discusses several incontrovertible facts about global warming. Morley asks Judy to list them for the listeners.

• average global surface temp has overall increased since about 1860
• CO2 has infrared emission spectra thus acts to warm the planet
• Humans have been adding CO2 to atmosphere by burning fossil fuels.

These facts about climate change do not tell us much about the most consequential issues associated with climate change. Judy’s book highlights four key arguments in regards to global warming:

• we do not definitively know to what extent CO2 and other human-caused emissions have dominated natural climate variability as the cause of recent warming.
  • factor 3 uncertainty in the sensitivity of climate to rising CO2 (true value of the sensitivity likely to be between 0.3x estimate and 3x estimate).
  • disagreement on how much the sun has warmed the climate in second half of 20th century when there was a grand solar maximum.
  • IPCC not adequately accounted for multi-decadal temperature variability associated with large scale ocean circulations.
• we don’t have a good handle on how much the climate can be expected to change over the course of the 21^st Century.
  • models are tied to scenarios of how much CO2 we emit. We now understand these have been too extreme and unrealistic. IPCC is backing off such extreme scenarios.
  • unable to predict solar variations, volcanic eruptions, multi-decadal ocean oscillations
  • this amounts to a great deal of uncertainty as to how the 21st century will play out (which is generally acknowledged by climate scientists, despite what we read in the media).
• there is not agreement on whether warming is actually dangerous, and that the notion of danger is based on societal values on which science has little to nothing to say.
  • no truly objective way to measure if warming is dangerous or to define a threshold for danger (how much is too much?)
  • how to compare risks of warming with other risks?
  • the 1.5C threshold comes from politics, not from science
  • risks are convoluted with natural weather patterns – hurricanes and floods have little if anything to do with global warming.
  • climate activists characterise risks as intolerable, but there is is widespread disagreement about this.
• there is widespread disagreement about whether radically reducing emissions will improve human wellbeing in the 21^st Century.
  • to make any sense of this policy, climate sensitivity to CO2 must be considered very significant and natural variability must be discounted.
  • if climate sensitivity to CO2 is actually on the low end and natural variability is dominant, then reducing CO2 will have little effect.
  • worst possible scenario – we will be left to face extreme weather conditions with a crippled energy system (drastically reduces our resilience to extreme weather events).
  • opportunity cost – if we focus solely on climate change, we end up ignoring broader ecological problems like pollution, over-fishing…

Judy pointed out many of these issues in 2013 during testimony she gave to a house committee after President Obama’s United Nations climate pledge. Judy argued at the time that the climate community had been working on building a scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change for 20 years, and that she believed this consensus building process perhaps had the unintended consequence of oversimplifying the climate change problem and its solution.

[00:31:51] Morley explains that Judy once said in an interview that even if we achieved net zero with our carbon footprint, we would barely notice. Morley goes on to say that people hold up the pre-industrial era as a “golden age” for the climate, and asks Judy what her thoughts are on this.

[00:32:50] Ken asks Judy to elaborate on her stance that there is no climate change emergency. Ken mentions that Judy’s stance has led to her being labeled a contrarian and dissident climatologist.

[00:34:21] Ken explains that Judy resigned from her tenured position in 2017 due to a variety of factors, including not knowing how to advise students and postdocs on how to navigate the “craziness of the field of climate science.” Ken asks if this was a difficult decision for Judy.

[00:35:44] Morley explains that in a post about her resignation, Judy wrote: “Once you detach from the academic mindset, publishing on the internet makes much more sense, and the peer review you can get on a technical blog is much more extensive. But peer review is not really the point; provoking people to think in new ways about something is really the point. In other words, science is a process, rather than a collection of decreed ‘truths.’” Morley asks Judy to expand on this perspective.

[00:37:31] Morley explains that there has been a lot of publicity regarding the recent extreme weather events over the past few years, with some climatologists arguing that these events are evidence that we are in the midst of an emergency. He asks Judy for her take.

[00:39:04] Morley mentions that Judy frequently argues that policy makers haven’t thought through climate change. While climate change is real, and has negative impacts, Judy argues that common portrayals of a crisis are unfounded. Morley goes on to mention a 2020 paper by Bjorn Lomborg in which he points out that under scenarios set out under the IPPCC, human welfare is likely to increase by 450 percent by the end of the 21st Century. Lomborg estimates climate damages will modestly reduce this welfare increase to 434 percent. Morley explains that Judy’s argument is that policymakers could screw up this upward trajectory in welfare if they destroy our current energy infrastructure. He asks Judy to expand on this.

[00:41:37] Ken asks Judy to talk about how transitioning to all wind and solar power would require a large expenditure of fossil fuel.

[00:44:13] Morley asks if it is true that Judy believes that instead of trying to reach zero carbon emissions by 2025, or some other date, that we should invest in increasing our resilience to extreme weather events.

[00:45:05] Morley pivots to talk about Judy’s book, “Climate Uncertainty and Risk” which Judy began writing in 2020.

[00:45:58] Morley asks Judy when and why she started her blog “Climate Etc.,” and how it helped her in preparation for her book.

[00:46:31] Ken explains that Judy’s book is very ambitious and sets out to show how the narrow and politicized framing of the climate debate has resulted in an oversimplification of both the scientific problem and its solutions. Ken asks if it is true that the book is not just about the climate debate but also, in more broad terms, about uncertainty and risk.

[00:48:00] Morley asks Judy about the second part of her book, specifically the chapter titled “The Climate Change Uncertainty Monster,” which highlights the problems we face in terms of climate change.

[00:49:03] Morley mentions that there is a section in Judy’s book titled “Emissions and Temperature Targets.” She begins the chapter with a quote from environmental scientist John Foley: “The first rule of climate chess is this: The board is bigger than we think, and includes more than fossil fuels.” Morley asks Judy what else the board includes.

[00:49:41] Morley asks about a paper that Judy referenced towards the end of her book in laying out scenarios for a way forward with climate change, “Usable Climate Science Is Adaption Science,” in which Adam Sobel of Columbia University writes that in the present historical moment, the only climate science that is truly usable is that which is oriented toward adaptation. He argues that current policies and politics are so far removed from what we need to do to avert dangerous climate change that scientific uncertainty is not a limiting factor on mitigation.

[00:51:32] Morley asks about another paper that Judy references in her book titled “Small Is Beautiful: Climate-Change Science as if People Mattered.” Written by Regina Rodrigues of Brazil’s Department of Meteorology and Theodore Shepherd of the University of Reading in the UK, it describes how there is a widely accepted gap between the production and use of climate information. The authors call for a break with traditional climate research and methodology, which at the moment seems to be very top-down driven. Morley asks Judy to talk about the proposal for a more bottom-up approach.

[00:52:26] Ken pivots to ask Judy about the term “wicked science,” which she refers to in the last chapter of her book. The chapter is titled “Wicked Science for Wicked Times.”

[00:53:58] Morley asks Judy how she spends her time now that she has resigned from Georgia Tech and academic life.