The (possibly alternative) Facts

So now I come to the 'nay sayers' book, to see what they themselves have to say, and whether it's at all convincing. It turns out that some of it is ridiculous ("the developing world are the biggest emitters"), some of it is technically true but irrelevant (CO₂ is necessary for life), some of it is passingly thought provoking (some good things might happen).  And some of it just comes down to disagreeing about basic facts.

The book is a series of essays, each author with a different take on the problems with the climate change question. The result is a book which isn't a package deal, like the 'ay sayers' book, but rather a collection of arguments that sometimes contradict each other ("the climate isn't warming" vs. "the climate is warming, but not because of CO₂").  This is actually probably good, as it means that some of the patently ridiculous things said can be ignored without affecting some of the things that bear thinking about.

The book was published in 2015, and presumably some of the material was written prior to that. Being a few years old, it's actually a little out of date; so for example claims that temperatures are no longer rising now fall firmly in the "ignorable" basket, as the last three years have each been the hottest on record.

Given the variety of authors and arguments, probably the best way to summarise is by author:

Ian Plimer

Unfortunately, the very first chapter is full of ridiculousness and irrelevances. Luckily that doesn't necessarily set the tone for the rest of the book.  Here goes:

• Science is about observed data, not generated data, so climate models prove nothing. [Actually, building models that behave like observations, and then investigating how they behave under various other conditions is pretty standard science.]
• Consensus is not science. [It's true that an individual scientist shouldn't necessarily assume that the consensus view is the truth, and should trust data over opinion. But data often conflicts, and believing the majority of the data while remaining curious about the data that doesn't fit, is pretty much what science is like. And rational non-scientists trying to figure out what science is saying have little choice but to go by what most scientists say. Ignoring 29 experts and believing the 1 expert that disagrees doesn't seem very wise.]
• CO₂ is indeed rising, but "as all farmers know", CO₂ is plant food and thus good for life. "...the carbon gas emitted from industry is CO₂ - a colourless, odourless, non-toxic gas" ['...what you do not smell is iocane powder...'].
• CO₂ is a greenhouse gas, but increases above 400ppm will warm the earth an insignificant amount.
• Global temperature has not increased in the last 17 years [after this was written, though, 2014, 2015, and 2016 were record-breaking years].
• Ice cores show that temperature rises before CO₂ rises [so CO₂ can't be the cause of the higher temperatures].
• CO₂ levels have been higher than this before, and life thrived.
• Historically, humans thrive in warm temperatures, and die in colder temperatures.
• In these previous periods, there were no 'tipping points'.
• Sea levels rise and sink throughout the ages, and land levels rise and sink too; ice covering the land has "pushed the land down", and when the ice melts "there is a rebound". [Is this even true? Is he confusing plate tectonics with climate change?] "Land level rises and falls are far more profound tha[n] long-term sea-level rises and falls".
• Temperature and sea levels have changed for natural reasons before, so it "seems illogical" that the current sea level right is due to human activities".
• Coral reefs rise and fall with sea-level, and they love warm temperatures and high levels of CO₂ [but since then the Great Barrier Reef has had large-scale bleaching two years in a row, which we've never seen happen before].  
• Extinction is normal. [Unfortunately, this is both true-but-irrelevant and precisely-the-problem; the true-but-irrelevant part is that extinction is normal, but the current rate of extinction is extremely high, high enough to call it a mass-extinction, of which there have been several in the history of the earth, and all of them totally changed the face of the earth.  Which brings me to this being precisely-the-problem: mass extinctions are extremely bad news for the species at the time (except maybe cockroaches), and we are a species during this mass extinction - in fact we are Plimer's example of a short-lived species: "Highly adapted terrestrial species (such as humans) have a short life"] [Seperately, he seems to misunderstand how extinction relates to the food chain - dominant species kill others for food, and that's normal. Except that killing them is different from killing them off; death of some individuals is not the same as death of all individuals]
• "Vacated ecologies are quickly filled and life goes on".
  [This relates to a misunderstanding that I think the language environmentalists use generates: they talk about "saving the planet", as if emitting lots of CO₂ will cause the Earth as a whole to disappear.  Of course they don't mean that, but the answer to this hyperbole is that they're exaggerating, which they are. Of course 'the planet' will be fine, it will continue turning and orbiting the sun, it will still be made up of lots of iron with a bunch of water sloshing around the outside and a bunch of nitrogen blanketing it from the void of space. And no doubt life in general will go on even if most species die out, it will just be different life.  This is true but irrelevant; the primary point is that some of the life that dies out could be us.  And a secondary point (pretty closely related to the first, actually), is that a bunch of species that would have happily continued on will, instead, die out; this seems like shame if you're have even a slight conservationist bent, but also they might be species we depend on, like fish.  And there might be (in fact almost definitely are) dependencies that we don't know about yet.]
• And anyway, most species can just move to their ideal climate, if it changes where there currently are.
• Oceans are alkaline, so anybody who talks about 'acidification' "demonstrates a lack of knowledge". [Whatever]
• "There is no such thing as carbon pollution and the carbon gas emitted from industry is CO₂". [He can't mean that CO₂ doesn't contain carbon, so I guess he's taking issue with people calling it 'carbon pollution' instead of 'carbon dioxide pollution'. Whatever.]
• Decreasing alkalinity of the ocean even slightly would involve "monstrous volumes of acid". [or huge amounts of chemicals like CO₂ being emitted into the atmosphere and from there absorbed into the ocean]
• Only research that supports the ideology of global warming receives funding.
• Even if Australia reached its 2020 target of reduced emissions, temperatures would be only 0.0007°C-0.00007°C cooler than if not. [So if Australia was the only country who did something in 5 years, the effect would be small? Yeah, that's why everyone has to do something, not just Australia.]
• The developing world is increasing emissions. [But even so, emit, and have emitted, far less than the developed world - so again, true but irrelevant]
• Taxing the polluter will push the "economically vulnerable" into "fuel poverty", so children and the elderly will die, particularly in the "Third World" [Maybe "fuel poverty" means that we're somehow not allowing poor people to use oil?  I'm not sure anyone is proposing that, but anyway, that's what the big push for renewables is for, so everyone has the energy they need without emitting CO₂].
• Renewables cause loss of ecosystems and destruction of wildlife, and "sterilisation of land" [I'm not sure about the sterilisation thing, but it's true that whatever energy solutions we employ, be they wind or solar farms, or gas rigs and pipelines, they should minimise ecological damage.]
• Renewables can't provide constant energy supply, because the wind dies down and night falls. [This is true, and is an active research area.  But it's not like there are no existing solutions - from keeping a few gas plants around for topping up supply at peak times, to storing energy in chemical batteries, as heat, or by pumping water up hill to later let it run down through a hydro-electric generator.]
• Renewables don't decrease CO₂ emissions. [...erm.  If you use them to replace emitting energy sources, how can they not decreas CO₂ emissions? Or perhaps he means this...] "No CO₂ emitting ... power station has been replaced by a wind farm" [...except that last month, admittedly two years after this book was published, Great Britain had a full day of coal-free power generation for the first time - this isn't technically 'replacing the power plant', because the plants no doubt still exist, but the point is they aren't burning coal]
• Lots of pejorative language like "religious narcissism", "money laundering", "vapid, alarmist", "fraud", and exaggerations like "Wind just doesn't blow. People die." Whatever.

Patrick J. Michaels

This chapter is more sciency, and tries to present an argument that climate-change-avoiding policies, fuelled by hysteria, are no longer justified by the climate science (if they ever were), by showing that more recent climate models project a much lower impact of CO₂ emissions on temperature.

The main points are:

• The 108 climate change models quoted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) average a temperature rise of 2.6C per century, but the observed warming was in fact 1.7C per century, a lot less.
• The author compares the range of results from the 108 models, over longer and longer periods running each model, compares them to each other by graphing the average prediction but also the lower and upper ranges of the predictions, and also comparing to the actual measured temperature trends for the last 60 years (well, until 2013).
• The graph shows that the actual temperature trends always fall below the average modelled trend, for all the time periods used.  It creeps pretty much along the bottom of the range of the models, and dips into the range of the bottom 2.5% of the models for the most recent periods.
• This failure of the models to predict what actually happened should lead to the models being disregarded when making policy
• But "tier 1" scientific publications are reluctant to publish these results, which means they languish in obscurity.
• This is because the profession of science resists novel results, preferring to keep the current way of thinking, even though the evidence doesn't support it.
• And funding is only available for research in the mainstream.

On my first reading of this, looking at the graph of temperature trends, my impression (which I think was the intended impression) was that it said the models were goodish at modelling temperature change 60 years ago, but they got progressively worse, and now only the lowest-change models are actually modelling reality.  I thought his claim that this should "spell the end of any onerous climate policy" was a slight stretch; what I saw in the graph was that observed temperature change falls within the range of predicted values, but near the bottom of the range.  To me, that mean that the models more or less working (which is good news) but that reality had so far erred on the low side of what was possible (which is pretty good news too).

However, looking at the graph and the description of it again, I think it actually shows something else.  Michaels says that "calculated the model trends for periods beginning at ten years (i.e. 2004-2013), eleven years (2003-2013), etc. all the way back to 1951-2013 (my emphasis).  So although the graph looks like the passage of time (low, accurate values in the 1950s on the left but high, inaccurate values in the 2000s on the right, it's actually amounts of data fed into the model, with higher amounts on the left and lower amounts on the right.  The x axis of the graph is clearly labelled "Trend length", and the numbers clearly (but unusually) go from high on the left to low on the right.

So if I'm understanding this correctly, it's really saying that if you give the models more data (say 60 years' worth) they do a better job then if you give them less data (say 10 years' worth). In which case, so much the better for the models, and the conclusions drawn from this comparison are unjustified; no wonder nobody will publish them.  Frankly, it sounds like sour grapes from an academic who couldn't get published.

Anyway, pressing on... where were we?  Something about science being unwilling to change its paradigm...

• There is a new paradigm of modelling emerging that shows that the climate's "sensitivity" to CO₂ lower than thought.
• "Sensitivity" is the amount of surface warming that occurs if the amount of CO₂ is doubled from it's 'pre-industrial' level - before the Industrial Revolution there was 300 parts-per-million of CO₂ in the atmosphere, so double that would be 600 parts-per-million - climate "sensitivity" is how many degrees temperature would rise if we got to that level.
• The IPCC says that sensitivity is 3.2C, but other models say it's 2.3C, or 2.2C, or 1.9C, or 1.5C, or 1.3C, or as low as 1C

Overall, the purported result is that the IPCC's models have failed, and that climate policies should be rolled back.  However, looking at the details, I'm inclined to conclude that a) "failure" isn't an accurate way to describe what's going on, b) the more data the models have, the better they work, and c) there's no question that CO₂ makes the temperature go up, but the question is 'by how much', and science is doing its job: trying to get a good prediction, by building models that mostly work for real data, and then seeing where they head.

Richard S. Lindzen

This section is more talk about whether the models are any good.

• The models say that catastrophe is possible - but this is almost impossible to disprove - the real question is how likely?
• It's possible to admit that climate changes, CO₂ is a greenhouse gas, greenhouse gasses cause warming, and man's activities increase greenhouse gasses - to admit all of these things but for there to be still no problem; the question is how much?
• The answers to these questions, so far, come only from computer models, and those models build in feedback effects that are "highly uncertain".
• Is the climate highly sensitive to CO₂ levels? The models the IPCC use (General Circulation Models or GCMs) compute sensitivity themselves, but there are other models Energy Balance Models, with which you can try out a given value for sensitivity, and compare it to what actually happened since the Industrial Revolution.  If you do that, a sensitivity of  about 1C is what reflects reality.
• If you add the effect of major volcanoes into these models, then again, 1C or below looks to be the sensitivity.
• There are also other influences which are hard to model - aerosols, El Niño, solar variation, etc.  
• High sensitivity is associated with slow response time - i.e. when a change in CO₂ (or something else) occurs, the temperature changes slowly rather than quickly.  But volcanic-eruption-related cooling is fast, which indicates low sensitivity.
• It actually looks like sensitivity is small.
• Mild warming is likely to be a good thing anyway
• Current models include the effects of feedbacks, but it's not known that the feedbacks really exist, and some studies indicate that they don't, or even that there is negative feedback
• Extreme weather events have been attributed to global warming, but even the IPCC admits that such connections between weather and climate can't be made
• And actually, extreme weather events are generated by temperature difference between the equator and the poles. In a warmed world, the difference would be lower, so extreme weather would be less likely
• There's no empirical evidence that more evaporation means more extreme weather
• And anyway, there might not be more evaporation, because humidity over the ocean might be higher, preventing evaporation [erm... isn't humidity caused be evaporation? Does that mean the point is that, after more water has evaporated, increasing the humidity, water will stop evaporating? Hmm]

William Soon

• Consensus is one of the founding principles of the IPCC, but consensus is anti-scientific.
• The sun's time in temperature variation is incorrectly minimised by the IPCC.
• They incorrectly assume an eleven year cycle of insolation, but there's no evidence the cycle exists.
• They don't cite or use some data sets and literature that they should, breccias using them would weaken the claim that CO₂ is the main driver of warming.
• In particular they don't cite Soon's own paper reporting that temperature change since 1850 can be largely explained with reference to the sun.
• The IPCC depends on promoting the existence of man made climate change for its existence.

Robert M Carter

• The source of temperature date data for the 20 the century is the HadCRUT data set, which had a lot of possible errors in individual measurements - between 1 and 5 degrees, much higher that the purported average rise of 0.7C [this shows a misunderstanding about how averages work; with a large enough set of data, high errors in a small number of days points will make no important difference]
• Ice core evidence shows that temperatures have been much hotter before, and also much cooler despite rising CO₂ [but the rise he mentions is a mere 20ppm)
• Also, CO₂ levels have been much higher in the past, so representing current levels as unusually high is misleading [I don't think scientists are alarmed about the CO₂ level as such, but rather the rate at which it's rising, which is unprecedented, and leashes little time for species to evolve to cope with the change in environment]
• Burning coal is just returning CO₂ to the atmosphere, from whence it came, "yielding the twin benefits of generation of cheap electricity and the greening of the planet" [similar to Plimer's "colourless, odourless gas" stance above]
• Plants, particularly cereals, need CO₂, and the earth is currently in a CO₂ starved state [I suppose the mention of cereals is meant to imply that more CO₂ means more food crops. The ay sayer's response would presumably be to point out that sea level rise means less arable land, due to coastal population displacement]
• The more CO₂ in the atmosphere, the less effect the extra CO₂ has on temperature, because the relationship between CO₂ and temperature is logarithmic. Everyone agrees that doubling to 560ppm will cause a 1ºC rise. The IPCC claim that feedbacks will amplify that, but that hasn't been proven.
• Language like "radical environmentalists" "global warming bandwagon" "propaganda" "ceaselessly alarmist" "scientific malfeasance" "corruption" "indoctrination of school children", "risible" etc.
• The IPCC is a political, not a scientific, organisation
• The NIPCC on the other hand is non-governmental, and this independent of political bias, and it's conclusions after reviewing climate literature are the opposite of the IPCC
• Many scientists agree than global cooling, sure to sun cycles, is in fact the most likely thing to happen in the coming decades
• Rather than address the purported causes of warming, we should concentrate on mitigating the effects of climate change, be it warming is cooling [i.e. symptomatic relief is better than cure]

John Abbot and Jennifer Marohasy

• GCM based rainfall forecasts aren't accurate
• Old fashioned statistical methods were perfectly good
• Astronomy based forecasts like those of Ken Ring might be more accurate accurate, if only somebody would fund a study to compare them
• Statistical neural network AI methods might be more accurate too, if only there were funding to find out
• Science should be funded by private, apolitical foundations rather than government, who require researchers to sell their research as the solution to a problem
• Anyway, predicting weather is more useful than predicting climate

Nigel Lawson

He starts complaining about how mean people are to him about climate change dissent.

Then poses four questions

1. All things being equal, how much will increased CO₂ increase temperature?
2. Are all things equal?
3. Would warming be bad?
4. If there's a problem, what should be done?

His answer to 1 is that it's not really known yet. But the 'hiatus' may indicate that the effect isn't all that big, and that natural variation is more important (i.e. the answer to 2 is no). His claim is that the answer to 3 is no too, as cold causes more health problems and deaths than warmth does, and people generally choose to move to warmer rather than colder places. Also, the biggest health threat today is poverty. Fossil fuels are the cheapest and most efficient mechanism for providing energy on a large scale, and thus lifting the developing world out of poverty. [That might be an argument for allowing the developing world to continue using fossil fuels, but doesn't let the developed world of the hook.]

Supposedly warming will have a detrimental effect on crops, but actually more CO₂ means healthier crops due to the 'fertilization effect'.

The IPCC itself admits that there has so far been no increase in frequency or severity of extreme weather events. The general impression is that there's more extreme weather, but that's partly because global communications means that people are generally more aware of events in far away places, and there are simply more people now, so more people are affected.

The latest IPCC report admits that moderate warming may be economically beneficial, but what the report doesn't do is study the economic effects of the decarbonising policies they recommend.

The answer to 4 is the same as it ever was for humanity: adapt; take advantage of the good effects, and mitigate the bad ones. Guarding against disease, famine, flood, and fight are things we should be doing anyway.

Decarbonising only makes sense of everyone does it, and a global agreement in Paris in 2015 is very unlikely [of course it's now old news that the Paris agreement was in fact achieved, with only 2 nations refusing to sign, and one of them was because it wasn't strict enough on developed nations. Also, of course, it's new news that Trump's US has just pulled out of it, although many individual states seem Ken today day in it without federal support]

Decarbonisation policies will also does the development of developing nations, which is immoral as it means that many of their inhabitants will remain in poverty.

Alan Moran

This section basically claims that the IPCC's estimations of the cost of global warming are exaggerated, and that the estimated costs of mitigating are way lower than they really are. In particular, the real costs of business as usual are much lower than the real costs of mitigating climate change [which might be true, and would be fine if money was the only important thing]

The IPCC's mitigation costs include assumptions about "mythical technology" that doesn't exist yet, and "horrendously expensive renewables" [except that the cost of solar, at least, has nosedived of late. Maybe that happened after this was written?]. And anyway, who knows what might happen in the future [so best not to try to plan for it, or something].

...


To be honest, this is as far as I could get in the book without actually throwing it out the window. I was hoping this would, at least, be a "I read it so you don't have to" type post (and at a stretch, something that maybe cast a positive light on climate change or the prospects of it not being a calamity for humanity).  All I really found was sour grapes, irrelevancies, and a ridiculously blinkered outlook.  There were more authors that I didn't get to, but I think I've seen enough.

Obviously this is just my opinion, having read much (but not all) of the 'other side' of the argument. But frankly, it just doesn't hold water.  We're in serious trouble, and now is not the time to bicker and nit-pick.

Decay and Renewal

Four months ago, with some trepidation, we started composting on the roof of our apartment. The internet recommends things we can't do, like burying it in the ground, having a large, aerated wooden box, tolerating rats and other vermin, etc. Rather, we're following the "just do it and see what happens" approach, which is actually working ok; we've ended up with 5 paint buckets with no holes, to keep smells in, but left open daily, and stirred up weekly, to keep the putrefaction "aerobic". Food scraps go in the first bucket.  When it gets full, it becomes the second bucket, replaced by an empty one, and so on.

Chain of putrefaction

The main idea is to avoid sending all those organics to landfill. So one of our rubbish outputs has become the compost-bucket-chain input. Yay!

Except that after five buckets' worth, we've got another output.  Compost, which is good. But no garden to put it in...

So my considerate wife, ever attentive to my complaining about the poor supply of limes in Buenos Aires when lemon-lime-and-bitters season rolls around, procured a lime tree and a large wooden crate to plant it in. With the addition of some dirt and two buckets of compost, Lima María arrived:

Lima María, here pictured with her new flatmates, Basil, Rosemary, and Unidentified But Enthusiastic Yuyo

Habemus "garden"!

The months passed, and the buckets filled, and we decided that maybe we could try planting some veggies; if we got to the point of eating them, it would be zero-food-mile produce.  Yes, I know that every household with a veggie garden has been doing this for centuries. But for me personally, this would be an Unprecedented Leap Forward, one which people who know me well may struggle to actually believe.

So my resourceful wife managed more container-procuring, we bought some spinach seeds, and dutifully sowed one neat row with some more dirt and putrefied bucket loads.

Sowing

It was just a matter of time, we thought. So we waited patiently...

...and then waited less patiently...

And just as we we debating what went wrong (old seeds? wrong season? incompetent sowing?) this happened:

Sprouting

I tried to keep my cool, but there was a disproportionate level of elation felt.

Which turned out to be proportionate to the amount of crest that fell the following day, when I found this:

It's a jungle out there

Not visible in this photo is a very small stalk, neatly snipped off where the leaves would have been, presumably by the adept mandible of some industrious ant.  The outdoor ants of Buenos Aires are frighteningly large compared to New Zealand ants, but are generally too busy to be aggressive, never venture indoors, and until this moment I had admired their tireless industriousness.

But now I was starting to share my mother-in-law's indignant disdain for them. Alas!

A few days layer, a few more spinach fronds ventured forth, so I've done my nurturing best to give them a fighting chance in this brutish world:

Greenhouse apartments

(...so I can later eat them myself...)

Meanwhile, a friend suggested maybe starting seedlings off inside, before transferring them to the rooftop planter.  So these started appearing in various locations in our apartment:

...which a couple of weeks later, are looking like this:

More disproportionate elation is swelling inside my urban soul.

Where will it all end?

Winter Sun

One of the things that's become clear from looking into running our house off solar panels is that the most difficult time of year will be winter, when the sun is lower in the sky. Our place is in the midst of much taller buildings, which are going to block out even more of the sun.  Basically, if I can design a system that will get us enough energy in winter, it'll work for all all year round.

So how much sun is blocked out in winter?  Well, my handy app drew this diagram:

...which was not overly encouraging, as the "Winter Soltice" line in blue is rather interrupted by grey building shadows. Even worse, I had a strong suspicion that my prime spot for some panels would be totally overshadowed by our water tank in winter (the water tank is too near to appear in the diagram).

So the only thing to do was to wait until the depths of winter and check out the shadow situation. This is a photo taken every half an hour or so, on 19 June (3 days before the soltice):

My supposedly sweet spot for panels is the area on the bottom right. And sure enough, from about 1:30pm onward, it's completely in the shadow of the water tank - i.e. it only gets morning sun, and even then, until about 10am, it's streaked with shadows of chimneys and antennas - shadows like that reduce the amount of energy generated by panels, because the cells in shadow drag down to performance of sun-bathed cells in the same circuit.

An alternative spot I'd thought about for panels is the wall that can be seen in the background - the top-right of the photos.  This gets quite a lot of sun, but also lots of pointy-thing shadows.

The other thing that's clear is that, from 3:15pm, all of our roof is in shadow.

So this is probably bad news for a regular photovoltaic system with lots of panels in the same circuit.  The only way I can see to get this to work would be to get creative, and have panels on different circuits, optimised for different positions at different times of day.

Tricky...