Global lukewarming need not be catastrophic

My luke-warming column in the Times on 28th September 2013, pleaded in vain for a moderate middle approach to climate change, and drew a parallel with the nature-nurture debate. Here's what I wrote:

In the climate debate, which side are you on? Do you think climate change is the most urgent crisis facing mankind requiring almost unlimited spending? Or that it’s all a hoax, dreamt up to justify socialism, and nothing is happening anyway?

Because those are the only two options, apparently. I know this from bitter experience. Every time I argue for a lukewarm “third way” — that climate change is real but slow, partly man-made but also susceptible to natural factors, and might be dangerous but more likely will not be — I am attacked from both sides. I get e-mails saying the greenhouse theory is bunk and an ice age is on the way; and others from guardians of the flame calling me a “denier”.

Yet read between the lines of yesterday’s report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and you see that even its authors are tiptoeing towards the moderate middle. They now admit there has been at least a 15-year standstill in temperatures, which they did not predict and cannot explain, something sceptics were denounced for claiming only two years ago. They concede, through gritted teeth, that over three decades, warming has been much slower than predicted. They have lowered their estimate of “transient” climate sensitivity, which tells you roughly how much the temperature will rise towards the end of this century, to 1-2.5C, up to a half of which has already happened.

They concede that sea level is rising at about one foot a century and showing no sign of acceleration. They admit there has been no measurable change in the frequency or severity of droughts, floods and storms. They are no longer predicting millions of climate refugees in the near future. They have had to give up on malaria getting worse, Antarctic ice caps collapsing, or a big methane burp from the Arctic (Lord Stern, who still talks about refugees, methane and ice caps, has obviously not got the memo). Talk of tipping points is gone.

They have come to some of this rather late in the day. Had they been prepared to listen to lukewarmers and sceptics such as Steve McIntyre, Ross McKitrick, Pat Michaels, Judith Curry and others, then they would not have had to scramble around at the last minute for ad-hoc explanations. These issues have been discussed ad nauseam by lukewarmers.

The climate war has been polarised in the same way that the nature-nurture debate was in the 1970s. Back then, if you argued that genes affected behaviour even a bit, you were pigeon-holed as a heartless fatalist with possible tendencies to Nazism. I barely exaggerate at all. Today, if you express a hint of doubt about the possibility of catastrophic warming, you are a heartless fool with possible tendencies to Holocaust denial. Sceptics are “truly evil people”, the former US Senator Tim Wirth said this week.

In the nature-nurture war, polarisation was maintained by the fact that people only read their own side’s accounts of their opponents’ arguments. So they spent their time attacking absurd straw men. Likewise in the climate debate. The most popular sceptical blogs — such as Wattsupwiththat in America, Bishop Hill in Britain, JoNova in Australia and Climate Audit in Canada — provide sometimes brilliant analysis and occasional mad mistakes: scientific conversation as it should be.

[Update: sure enough Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit found a huge problem in the IPCC report on day 1: the graphs appear to have been changed since the previous draft, without referring back to reviewers, in such a way as to reduce the apparent failure of the models to match reality. Watch this space. See "The IPCC disappears the discrepancy".]

But most “proper” climate scientists won’t go near them, so misunderstand what the sceptics are talking about. They keep saying they don’t “believe” in climate change. Nothing could be farther from the truth: most think man-made climate change is real, just not very frightening. So the IPCC saying yesterday that it is 95 per cent certain that more than half of the warming since 1950 is man-made is truly a damp squib: well, duh.

We’ve warmed the world and will probably warm it some more. Carbon dioxide alone can’t cause catastrophe. For that you need threefold amplification by extra water vapour — which is not happening. So maybe it’s not a big enough problem to justify ruining landscapes with wind turbines, cutting rain forest to grow biofuels and denying World Bank loans to Africans for life-saving coal-fired electricity. (I declare a commercial interest in coal and wind, although I give the latter money away as an essay prize: won this week by Michael Ware’s brilliant demolition in The Spectator of the electric car madness.)

Of course, the IPCC’s conversion to lukewarming is not the way it will be spun, lest it derail the gravy train that keeps so many activists in well-paid jobs, scientists in amply funded labs and renewable investors in subsidised profits. After all, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, confidently asserted in 2009 that “when the IPCC’s fifth assessment comes out in 2013 or 2014, there will be a major revival of interest in action that has to be taken.” He said this before the people who would write the report had been selected, before any meetings had happened and before the research on which it was based had even been published.

Nature-nurture eventually grew reasonable: most people now agree it’s a bit of both. In the end, the same moderation will happen with climate, but by then fortunes of your money may have been spent on technologies that do more harm than good.

We need a grown-up conversation without name-calling about the possibility that, if the climate resumes warming at the rate the IPCC expects, it may do more good than harm for at least 70 years: longer growing seasons, fewer droughts, fewer excess winter deaths (which greatly exceed summer deaths even in warm countries) and a general greening of the planet. See here and here.  Satellites show that in the period 1982-2011, 31 per cent of Earth’s vegetated area became more green, 3 per cent more brown. The main reason: carbon dioxide.

Leave the last word to Professor Judith Curry, of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, who used to be alarmed and no longer is. Her message to the IPCC this week was: “Once you sort out the uncertainty in climate sensitivity estimates and fix your climate models, let us know .. .. . And let us know if you come up with any solutions to this ‘problem’ that aren’t worse than the potential problem itself.”

Post-script:

In response to a comment by Tom Whipple, challenging my "gravy train" remark, I wrote the following:

I'm surprised by your naivety here. Go and look up the total grants to climate scientists for their research. it's a very large number,has grown hugely over the last 3 decades, is almost entirely unavailable to sceptics and would vanish like snow in summer if the scientists were more honest about lukewarming. No, they don't get rich but they get very large flows of funds from taxpayers, which sceptics don't.

As for the idea that straying from the consensus is lucrative, the reverse is the truth. Sceptic scientists have in some cases been driven from their posts and the sceptics I know struggle to make ends meet by doing other jobs.

As Jo Nova, one of those who lives on a shoestring, pointed out after doing research on the sums concerned:

"As Climate Money pointed out: all Greenpeace could find from Exxon was a mere $23 million for skeptics over a decade, while the cash cow that is catastrophic climate change roped in $2,000 million a year every year during the same period for the scientists who called other scientists “deniers”."

see http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/originals/climate_money.html

which finds that the US government alone has spent "$79 billion since 1989 on policies related to climate change, including science and technology research, administration, education campaigns, foreign aid, and tax breaks." Tom, it would be great to get the numbers for the UK -- why not do that?

And as others have pointed out, McIntyre, McKitrick, Michaels, Curry and others do publish in the journals. But the gate-keeping by alarmists exposed by the climate gate scandal continues so it's far harder to get sceptic papers published. Oh, and remember 30% of the last IPCC report's sources were non-peer-reviewed.

If you don't believe me, Tom, why not look into it? Go and do a feature on some of these sceptic blogs. They have HUGE traffic compared with the ones that promote alarm. At the very least they are an interesting social phenomenon.

Or you could remain content in the echo chamber of of only reading your friends' accounts of your enemies' arguments as I describe above.

2nd postscript:

In response to a message from Hugo Rifkind, I wrote the following:

The 3.2mm per year since 1993 is a steady rise. You can find the graph on the web, (e.g. here:http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/clip_image0044.jpg) and there's no acceleration within that 18 year period, which is what I was referring to. It's showing no sign of acceleration in the last two decades, in others words. That's the total satellite era as far as sea level is concerned. Before that, the data is much less good. They are saying, based on buoys corrected for changing land levels (which complicate the picture e.g. As Scotland continues to rise because of the ice sheet having been lifted off it), that the rate of increase was lower before 1993. Well, yes, we would expect that because there was slight cooling during the periods 1890-1910 and 1940-1980, so sea level rise was likely to have been slower. So yes it probably did accelerate around 1990, but no it is not accelerating now.  I stand by the statement. They did forecast an acceleration in each of their previous four reports and it has so far failed to show up.

This is what they said in 2007: “Global average sea level rose at an average rate of 1.8 mm per year over 1961 to 2003. The rate was faster over 1993 to 2003: about 3.1 mm per year.”. So they claimed the acceleration had then happened. There has been no acceleration since then. That's news.

As for their prediction of an acceleration in the future, yes, but their previous predictions of acceleration were wrong. Remember, I was not arguing that there will be no further sea level rise and no further acceleration, just that reality continues to be less alarming than predicted. It really is peculiar how journalists are not prepared to ask tough questions about failed predictions, but instead jump on those who do.

On the general doomsday stuff, the IPCC may not have yet pronounced on it, but the scientists who contribute to it have conceded these points in recent publications.

On malaria: Gething et al have said as follows and all the people I talk to say this will now be the orthodox view in the IPCC report: "First, widespread claims that rising mean temperatures have already led to increases in worldwide malaria morbidity and mortality are largely at odds with observed decreasing global trends in both its endemicity and geographic extent. Second, the proposed future effects of rising temperatures on endemicity are at least one order of magnitude smaller than changes observed since about 1900 and up to two orders of magnitude smaller than those that can be achieved by the effective scale-up of key control measures. Predictions of an intensification of malaria in a warmer world, based on extrapolated empirical relationships or biological mechanisms, must be set against a context of a century of warming that has seen marked global declines in the disease and a substantial weakening of the global correlation between malaria endemicity and climate."

On refugees, the claim was made by UNEP that there would be 50m climate refugees by 2010. See here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/04/15/the-un-disappears-50-million-climate-refugees-then-botches-the-disappearing-attempt/

You say "And the frequency of droughts, floods and storms obviously wouldn't be affected yet, because the temperature hasn't changed, yet." which I find puzzling for two reasons.

1. The temperature has changed! The IPCC says it has, so do I. Just not in the last 15 years. But the change before that led to no change in extreme weather.

2. There are very frequent claims made, even in the pages of the Times, that the frequency of these things has changed! Lord Hunt in a Times column in April said: "Extreme weather has become more frequent across the world." and proceeded to give examples ranging from unseasonable cold in Britain to floods, droughts and storms elsewhere. I was astonished at the time that a former chairman of the Met Office should tell such an untruth and get away with it. Al Gore and many others frequently claim that climate change caused Sandy and frequently claim that extreme weather has increased. It would be bizarre if you were to deny that this claim of an increase in extreme weather has not been very frequently made by both scientists and politicians as well as journalists. Yet the IPCC itself produced a report in 2011 that explicitly denied it, which is what I was referring to. So I stand by that.

This is what Roger Pielke Jr said in recent testimony to Congress:

"• It is misleading, and just plain incorrect, to claim that disasters associated with hurricanes, tornadoes, floods or droughts have increased on climate timescales either in the United States or globally. It is further incorrect to associate the increasing costs of disasters with the emission of greenhouse gases.