A Bit of Science and a Bit of Honesty
MERLIN BETTS discusses climate change in response to Jonathan Andrews’ article (HIP 234)
Whether facts are convenient or not, they’re supposed to be…factual. Some people think ‘true’ is a step too far here. Fine. But fact should at least bear some relevance to the truth. Here are some facts.
The Greenhouse Effect and us
Carbon dioxide (CO₂ ) is a greenhouse gas. It heats the place up. This is good. If we didn’t have enough greenhouse gas, Earth would be too cold to sustain our kind of life. But if the atmosphere has too much greenhouse gas, the planet keeps warming, which can have unexpected effects on your bit of it. Melting ice caps, dying sea life, burning forests, desertified agricultural land, tsunamis and hurricanes, droughts and vicious storms.
There are two other big greenhouse gases: methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N20). Nitrous oxide, apart from being car-make-go-fast and a cheap home entertainment, destroys the ozone layer like the various CFCs we banned years ago and heats the planet 300 times faster than CO2 . Methane does this only 80 times faster, but there’s much more of it than N20.
A long time ago…
Andrews doesn’t mention N2O or CH4. But he does mention that about 500 million years ago “when the ancestors of the plants on which humans rely first evolved” there was a lot of CO₂ about. He doesn’t say 500 million, but the RA Berner study he cites does put it in that era. And yes, there was a lot of CO₂ about.
However, the first organisms to use oxygenic photosynthesis (i.e. “the ancestors of the plants on which [we] rely”) existed at least 2,000 million years ago. What we care about here is that they used up CO₂ and made oxygen.
Over 2,000 million years or so, photosynthesis brought us here. It indirectly built an ozone layer, sped up various evolutionary processes, got us on land, got us aerobic animals and killed off most anaerobic life. It also set the temperature on the global thermostat to “allows human life” by, amongst other things, pulling CO₂ out of the atmosphere.
Nowadays, plants still consume CO₂ and produce oxygen. Animals, meanwhile, consume oxygen and produce CO₂ (so we don’t run out of CO₂ and go cold). We have a nice thing going. It works for everyone. It’s balanced. Well, it was until we killed off most of the plant life on the planet, and started pumping excess CO₂ , methane, nitrous oxide and other dangerous waste into the atmosphere.
The World Reply to Jonathan Andrews
Andrews cites the World Climate Declaration (WCD) in his article. This is not a World-sponsored document. It’s the product of Clintel, a lobbying group that openly states: “There is no climate emergency.” Clintel was founded by the author of the World Climate Declaration, Augustinus Johannes ‘Guus’ Berkhout, a professor who’s worked for Shell and founded the Delphi Consortium, which does seismic research for oil and gas companies.
NASA claimed that 97% of “actively publishing climate scientists” agree that humans are causing global warming and climate change. Not just any old surgeon or astrophysicist. Climate scientists with relevant expertise, who are still actively working.
Meanwhile Clintel’s WCD has been signed by 1,700 people, who are a random selection of scientists – many retired – economists, engineers, computer pros and “other experts,” including a commercial fisherman and an air conditioning engineer. Research group Desmog have extensively exposed Clintel’s structure and its links to fossil fuel lobbies at desmog.com/climate-intelligence-foundation-clintel/.
NASA shoots rockets into space using huge amounts of fossil fuels. It says humans are causing climate change. Clintel’s immersed in oil and gas. It says there is no meaningful climate change. Who do you believe?
Statistical Manipulation Party
Statistics don’t really tell you anything unless they’re specific, carefully gathered, and used alongside other relevant statistics to narrow down a more-or-less truthful area of information. Politicians and marketing pros rely on statistics that look simple (but are actually very complicated) to manipulate audiences like us into believing what they want.
Inconvenient Facts (HIP 234), quoted NASA as saying that 97% of scientists agree that humans are causing climate change. What NASA actually said was “the vast majority of actively publishing climate scientists – 97 percent – agree that humans are causing global warming and climate change.” Actively publishing climate scientists. It cited nine sources.
Andrews addresses only one of those sources, a study by J. Cook et al from 2013. It says that about 66% of the climate literature analysed took no position on whether humans cause global warming. 33% said humans are actively causing global warming. 0.7% rejected the idea that we’re causing it. 0.3% were uncertain about the cause of global warming.
One way of reading this is that 97% of the literature about the human impact on global warming says we are indeed increasing it, and around 2% rejects that idea, 1% is uncertain. This seems to be the NASA perspective.
Andrews also quotes David Legates’ stat suggesting 0.3% agreement on human global warming. The reasoning for this comes from a work on “agnotology,” which is less of a quantitative survey and more of a discussion of language concepts. The abstract of the work says that he’s using the stats from Cook and simply trying to redefine “consensus” from “human activity is very likely causing most of the current global warming” to “most warming since 1950 is anthropogenic.”
In this sense, even he seems to agree with the conclusion that the majority of actively publishing climate scientists think humans are causing most of the current global warming. He just doesn’t want this to be seen as a consensus.
A Polar Bear’s Chance in the Sea
David Legates was employed by the Trump White House for about five months before being thrown out for printing his personal views on Executive Office of the President notepaper, pretending to be copyrighted White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. His views did not represent the White House and were not approved by Office head Kelvin Droegemeier. He was also one time State Climatologist of Delaware, where his boss, Governor Ruth Minner, told him to stop erroneously feeding his personal views into state policy.
In 2007, Legates co-authored a paper that questioned previous findings about the impact of climate change on the habitat of polar bears. According to InsideClimate News, that research was partially funded by grants from Koch Industries, the American Petroleum Institute lobbying group and ExxonMobil.
Andrews wrote something nice about polar bears at the end of his piece, didn’t he? Well, according to the World Wildlife Federation, “because of ongoing and potential loss of their sea ice habitat resulting from climate change… polar bears were listed as a threatened species in the US under the Endangered Species Act in May 2008.” The US government clearly wasn’t swayed by Legates’ report.
The WWF continues, “As their sea ice habitat recedes earlier in the spring and forms later in the fall, polar bears are increasingly spending longer periods on land, where they are often attracted to areas where humans live.” And then it’s less a matter of hunting and more the shady area of personal and property defence.
While polar bears might be able to survive increasingly smaller areas of ice field, or swim in freezing waters from ice chunk to ice chunk desperately searching for a decent meal, they can’t survive the destruction of any life that lives outside of the sea. And nor can we. We’re here to steward this planet, not because anyone told us to, but because we’re utterly dependent on it for our continued existence. Don’t let some strange capitalists ruin it for almost every living thing here.
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“Whether facts are convenient or not, they’re supposed to be… factual” Great article Merlin, absolutely nails it.