Dangerous to simplify the complex matter of climate
The UN Climate Change Conference this week in Madrid provides an important opportunity to reflect on the state of the public debate surrounding climate change.
Most of the world’s governments are prioritising energy security, affordability and industrial competitiveness over commitments made for the Paris climate agreement. Even if these countries were on track to meet their commitments, most of the national pledges would be insufficient to meet the Paris targets. At the same time, we are hearing increasingly shrill rhetoric from Extinction Rebellion and other activists about the “existential threat” of the “climate crisis”, “runaway climate chaos” and so on.
There is a growing realisation that the Paris climate agreement is inadequate for making a meaningful dent in slowing down the anticipated warming.
And the real societal consequences of climate change and extreme weather events remain largely unaddressed.
How have we arrived at this point? For the past three decades, the climate policy cart has been way out in front of the scientific horse. The 1992 climate change treaty was signed by 190 countries before the balance of scientific evidence suggested even a discernible observed human influence on global climate. The 1997 Kyoto Protocol was implemented before we had any confidence that most of the recent warming was caused by humans. There has been tremendous political pressure on the scientists to present findings that would support these treaties, which has resulted in a drive to manufacture a scientific consensus on the dangers of man-made climate change.
Fossil-fuel emissions as the climate “control knob” is a simple and seductive idea. However, this is a misleading oversimplification since climate can shift naturally in unexpected ways.
There is still great uncertainty about the sensitivity of the Earth’s temperature to increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We have no idea how natural climate variability (solar, volcanoes, ocean circulations) will play out in the 21st century, and whether natural variability will dominate over man-made warming.
We still don’t have a realistic assessment of how a warmer climate will affect us and whether it is dangerous. We don’t have a good understanding of how warming will influence extreme weather events. Land use and exploitation by humans is a far bigger issue than climate change for species extinction and ecosystem health. Local sea level rise has many causes and is dominated by sinking from land use in many of the most vulnerable locations.
We have been told that the science of climate change is settled. However, in climate science there has been a tension between the drive towards a scientific consensus to support policymaking, versus exploratory research that pushes forward the knowledge frontier. Climate science is characterised by a rapidly evolving knowledge base and disagreement among experts. Predictions of 21st-century climate change are characterised by deep uncertainty.
Nevertheless, activist scientists and the media seize on each extreme weather event as having the fingerprints of man-made climate change — ignoring the analyses of more sober scientists showing periods of even more extreme weather in the first half of the 20th century, when fossil fuel emissions were much smaller.
Alarming press releases are issued about each new climate model prediction of future catastrophes from famine, mass migrations and catastrophic fires, yet these press releases don’t mention that these predicted catastrophes are associated with highly implausible assumptions about how much we might emit in the 21st century. Issues such as famine, mass migrations and wildfires are caused primarily by government policies and ineptitude, lack of wealth and land-use policies. Climate change matters, but it’s outweighed by other factors in terms of influencing human wellbeing.
We have been told that climate change is an existential crisis. However, based on our current assessment of the science, the climate threat is not an existential one, even in its most alarming hypothetical incarnations.
However, the perception of man-made climate change as a near-term apocalypse has narrowed the policy options that we’re willing to consider.
We have not only oversimplified the problem of climate change but we have also oversimplified its solution. Even if you accept the climate model projections and that warming is dangerous, there is disagreement among experts regarding whether a rapid acceleration away from fossil fuels is the appropriate policy response.
In any event, rapidly reducing emissions from fossil fuels and ameliorating the adverse effects of extreme weather events in the near term increasingly looks like magical thinking.
Climate change — man-made and natural — is a chronic problem that will require centuries of management.
The extreme rhetoric of Extinction Rebellion and other activists is making political agreement on climate change policies more difficult. Exaggerating the dangers beyond credibility makes it difficult to take climate change seriously. The monomaniacal focus on elimination of fossil-fuel emissions distracts our attention from the primary causes of many of our problems and effective solutions.
Commonsense strategies to reduce vulnerability to extreme weather events, improve environmental quality, develop better energy technologies, improve agricultural and land-use practices, and better manage water resources can pave the way for a more prosperous and secure future. Each of these solutions is “no regrets” — supporting climate change mitigation while improving human wellbeing. These strategies avoid the political gridlock surrounding the current policies and avoid costly policies that will have minimal near-term impacts on the climate. And these strategies don’t require agreement about the risks of uncontrolled greenhouse gas emissions.
We don’t know how the climate of the 21st century will evolve, and we will undoubtedly be surprised. Given this uncertainty, precise emissions targets and deadlines are scientifically meaningless. We can avoid much of the political gridlock by implementing commonsense, no-regrets strategies that improve energy technologies, lift people out of poverty and make them more resilient to extreme weather events.
Judith Curry is president of the Climate Forecast Applications Network and professor emeritus at Georgia Institute of Technology.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/dangerous-to-simplify-the-complex-matter-of-climate/news-story/b736d9f4c79b435baa5e3b46b8fc14ba
