Using The Big Freeze To Deny Climate Change... Stupidity Or Cynicism?

The Guardian - Michael M Mann

The reaction to the polar vortex reminds us it is important to have a citizenry who can distinguish between scientific fact and fiction

Sunrise in Chicago, Illinois, as temperatures plunged to Arctic levels on 31 January. Photograph: Scott Olson/Getty Images

Michael E Mann Michael E Mann is distinguished professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University. He is the co-author of The Madhouse Effect

The winters of the early 1970s were very cold and snowy in the northeastern United States where I grew up – as elsewhere around the US and Europe. I remember snowfalls that came up to my chin (though, of course, I was only a few feet tall back then). We now call those “old-fashioned winters”, precisely because they have grown so rare as a consequence of – yes – global warming.
If you’re younger than I am (I became a demi-centenarian three years ago), those winters are likely to be outside the range of your experience. And so it may seem plausible to you that cold snaps, that in reality simply reflect the sort of weather that was commonplace just decades ago, might constitute “record” or “unprecedented” cold.
Such a myopic view of weather extremes can be exploited by those who look to cast doubt on the overwhelming scientific consensus behind human-caused climate change. Very much in that vein, Donald Trump recently asserted in a tweet about the cold spell in the midwest that “windchill temperatures are reaching minus 60 degrees, the coldest ever recorded”. He added: “What the hell is going on with Global Waming [sic]? Please come back fast, we need you!”

The Grand Haven Pier in St Joseph, Michigan, was covered by amazing formations of giant icicles Photograph: Mike Kline / Barcroft Media

Neglect, for the moment, that “global waming” isn’t a thing and that, as we have come to expect, almost none of the claims in Trump’s tweet are true – the coldest wind-chill temperatures recorded for the midwest are close to minus 70F (minus 57C), and for the US overall below minus 100F (minus 73C). Might he have a point?
For example, if we were seeing more frequent cold extremes, would this contradict the theory of human-caused global warming? No. Scientists increasingly think that climate change may cause a more frequent breakdown of the “polar vortex” of the northern hemisphere (the tight band of winds in the upper atmosphere that, typically, confine the cold North Pole air masses to the Arctic, loosely associated with the jet stream). The amplified warming of the Arctic caused by the melting of sea ice reduces the temperature contrast between the equator and pole. It is that contrast that maintains the polar vortex and jet stream. As the vortex breaks down, the jet stream slows and exhibits broader north-south wiggles, just as a river crossing almost level territory exhibits broad meanders as it snakes its way to the coastline.

That makes it easier for pieces of the cold Arctic air masses to break off and wobble down into middle-latitude continental regions such as North America and Europe, precisely what happened with the recent cold air outbreak in the US. But let’s return to the other first question: are we seeing an increase in record cold? So far, in the first month of 2019, two all-time cold records were set – in towns in Illinois. Meanwhile, there have been 35 all-time records for heat (many of them set in the extreme summer heatwave that is baking Australia and scorching cities such as Adelaide). That’s a ratio of 18 hot records to each cold record.

Michael Mann says climate deniers have ‘weaponised ignorance’ Photograph: Supplied

In the absence of planetary warming, that ratio should be one to one. Maybe, you say, it’s a fluke. After all, it’s only one month of data. But the ratio of warm to cold records is roughly two to one for the past decade.
We can now go a step further, “attributing” record warm spells to global warming by employing climate models to quantify the incidence of extreme events, both with and without the effect of human-caused greenhouse warming. The extreme European heatwave last summer was, according to one such estimate, made twice as likely by human-caused climate change. (In reality, this is probably an underestimate because the models do not capture some of the effects of a slowing jet stream analysed in some of my own recent research). So we’re seeing a trend toward more record heat, not record cold. And, even if we were seeing an increase in cold winter outbreaks in certain parts of the US and Europe, it wouldn’t necessarily contradict the case for climate change – it might even be symptomatic of it, associated with the breakdown in the polar vortex.
Let us return to Trump’s tweet, for it does not stand in isolation. It is part of a several-years-old pattern of denying the basic scientific evidence for human-caused climate change. Trump is plainly not the “genius” he has claimed to be, but he knows that climate change is real. We know this because he cited it as a reason to be granted a special dispensation to build a wall – a wall to protect his golf course in Ireland from the damaging effects of a rise in sea level.

 A New Yorker waits to cross a street during heavy snow fall in downtown Manhattan Photograph: Johannes Eisele/AFP/Getty Images 

So, if it’s not due to ignorance, what is responsible for Trump’s continued climate-change denial? Could it be the same thing responsible for him outsourcing his energy and environmental policy to fossil fuel interests? Could it have something to do with Russian influence that some have suggested helped get him elected?
We may have some answers to these questions when special counsel Robert Mueller completes his investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 US presidential election.
In any case, Trump’s repeated dismissive comments about human-caused climate change are an example of what I have referred to as “the weaponisation of ignorance”. The ignorance in this case isn’t Trump’s. He appears to know better. It’s the electorate’s.
Only with an ill-informed citizenry could you plausibly dismiss the consensus of the world’s scientists based upon a single cold spell. Trump and, more to the point, the fossil fuel interests whose bidding he is doing have weaponised the public’s poor understanding of science.
The great Carl Sagan presaged this very scenario in his classic work The Demon-Haunted World. Sagan feared a descent into ignorance and expressed his apprehension of a future in which “no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues”.
He worried about the emergence of a citizenry that is unable to differentiate between “what feels good and what’s true” and is therefore vulnerable to pseudo science and anti-science.
With the election of Donald Trump, have we finally arrived in the future that Sagan so feared? And if so, is there any escape from it? That remains to be seen.

Links

• 22 National Science Academies Urge Government Action on Climate Change
• Q&A: How is Arctic warming linked to the ‘polar vortex’ and other extreme weather?
• So far 2019 has set 35 records for heat and 2 for cold
• Australia is sweltering through record-breaking heat. And the worst is yet to come
• Record High Temps vs. Record Low Temps
• Heatwave made more than twice as likely by climate change, scientists find
• Look at This Embarrassing F*cking Moron
• Yes — Donald Trump IS A Threat To The Planet
• Australia's extreme heat is sign of things to come, scientists warn
• 'Our house is on fire': Greta Thunberg, 16, urges leaders to act on climate
• Teenage activist takes School Strikes 4 Climate Action to Davos
• Analysis warns of lack of progress on 2020 global emissions target
• David Attenborough tells Davos: ‘The Garden of Eden is no more’ 
• Antarctic expedition sets out to map Larsen C ice shelf 
• EU coal subsidy phase-out 'completely inconsistent with Paris deal'

Are We Living Through Climate Change’s Worst-Case Scenario?

The Atlantic - Robinson Meyer

“We’re a lot closer than we should be,” one Stanford scientist warned.

Smoke and steam billow from Belchatow Power Station in Poland, the site of the UN's 2018 climate conference. Kacper Pempel / Reuters

The year 2018 was not an easy one for planet Earth.
Sure, wind and solar energy kept getting cheaper, and an electric car became America’s best-selling luxury vehicle. But the most important metric of climatic health—the amount of heat-trapping gas entering the atmosphere—got suddenly and shockingly worse.
In the United States, carbon emissions leapt back up, making their largest year-over-year increase since the end of the Great Recession. This matched the trend across the globe. According to two major studies, greenhouse-gas emissions worldwide shot up in 2018—accelerating like a “speeding freight train,” as one scientist put it.
U.S. emissions do remain 11 percent below their 2007 peak, but that is one of the few bright spots in the data. Global emissions are now higher than ever. And the 2018 statistics are all the more dismal because greenhouse-gas emissions had previously seemed to be slowing or even declining, both in the United States and around the world.
Many economists expect carbon emissions to drop somewhat throughout the next few decades. But maybe they won’t. If 2018 is any indication, meekly positive energy trends will not handily reduce emissions, even in developed economies like the United States. It raises a bleak question: Are we currently on the worst-case scenario for climate change?
“We’re actually a lot closer than we should be; I can say that with confidence,” says Rob Jackson, an Earth scientist at Stanford and the chair of the Global Carbon Project, which leads the research tracking worldwide emissions levels.
When climate scientists want to tell a story about the future of the planet, they use a set of four standard scenarios called “representative concentration pathways,” or RCPs. RCPs are ubiquitous in climate science, appearing in virtually any study that uses climate models to investigate the 21st century. They’ve popped up in research about subjects as disparate as southwestern mega-droughts, future immigration flows to Europe, and poor nighttime sleep quality.Each RCP is assigned a number that describes how the climate will fare in the year 2100.
Generally, a higher RCP number describes a scarier fate: It means that humanity emitted more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere during the 21st century, further warming the planet and acidifying the ocean. The best-case scenario is called RCP 2.6. The worst case is RCP 8.5.“God help us if 8.5 turns out to be the right scenario,” Jackson told me. Under RCP 8.5, the world’s average temperature would rise by 4.9 degrees Celsius, or nearly 9 degrees Fahrenheit.
“That’s an inconceivable increase for global temperatures—especially when we think about them being global average temperatures,” he said. “Temperatures will be even higher in the northern latitudes, and higher over land than over the ocean.”
This scenario could still be in the planet’s future, according to Zeke Hausfather, an analyst and climate scientist at Berkeley Earth. Since 2005, total global greenhouse-gas emissions have most closely tracked the RCP 8.5 scenario, he says. “There may be good reasons to be skeptical of RCP 8.5’s late-century values, but observations to-date don’t really give us grounds to exclude it,” he recently wrote.
Even if we avoid RCP 8.5, the less dramatic possibilities still could lead to catastrophic warming. Jackson, the Stanford professor, warned that every emissions scenario that meets the Paris Agreement’s 2-degree Celsius “goal” assumes that humanity will soon develop technology to remove carbon directly from the atmosphere. Such technology has never existed at industrial scales.
“Even some [of the scenarios] for 3 degrees Celsius assume that at some point in the next 50 years, we will have large-scale industrial activities to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere,” he said. “It’s a very dangerous game, I think. We’re assuming that this thing we can’t do today will somehow be possible and cheaper in the future. I believe in tech, but I don’t believe in magic.”
Yet not all data suggest that we’re doomed to RCP 8.5 or equivalent amounts of warming, Hausfather cautions. If you look only at pollution from fossil-fuel burning—and not from land-use events like deforestation—then humanity’s recent record trends closer to RCP 4.5.
That’s good news, but only by comparison: RCP 4.5 still forecasts that global temperatures will rise by 2.4 degrees Celsius, enough to kill off nearly every coral reef and soar past the 2-degree target set out in the Paris Agreement on climate change.There are a few reasons it’s hard to say which RCP comes closest to our reality.
First, most of the RCPs tell roughly the same story about global emissions until about 2025 or 2030. Second, the RCPs describe emissions across the entire sweep of the 21st century—and the century mostly hasn’t happened yet. Trying to pick the most likely RCP in 2018 is a bit like trying to predict the precise depth of late-night snowfall at 4:32 a.m.
The RCP 8.5 scenario may also become less likely in years to come, even if major polluters like the United States, China, and India never pass muscular climate policy. RCP 8.5 says that the global coal industry will eventually become seven times bigger than it is today.
“It’s tough to claim that … that is a business-as-usual world,” Hausfather says. “It’s certainly a possible world, but we also live in a world today where solar is increasingly cheaper than coal.”That’s part of the reason the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will soon expand its list of standard scenarios. Its next major synthesis report, due to be published in 2021, will replace RCPs with five “socioeconomic pathways” that allow for a broader range of futures.
Jackson urged caution. “We don’t know yet what scenario we’re on,” he said. “I think most climate scientists will tell you that we’re below the 8.5 scenario. But every year that emissions increase like they have this year, it makes the 8.5 scenario more plausible.”
Jackson published his first academic paper in 1989, just a year after the NASA scientist James Hansen first warned Congress that global warming had begun in earnest. I asked whether he thought actual emissions would ever come close to RCP 8.5.
“It’s nuts,” he said. “But I used to think a lot of things were nuts that turned out not to be nuts.”

Links

• How to understand the UN’s dire new climate report
• No ecosystem on Earth is safe from climate change
• A Grave Climate Warning, Buried on Black Friday
• U.S. Carbon Pollution Surged in 2018, After Years of Stasis
• Young Workers Want Their Job to be More Than a Paycheck
• It's Not Just America: Climate Policies Are Stumbling Worldwide
• The Global Rightward Shift on Climate Change