Ignoring the Climate

So far, I’ve looked at three approaches used by climate denialists:  to blankly deny that anything is happening to the climate, to distract from the topic and to minimise the effects and/or evidence.  The fourth that I have identified is to ignore, to ignore the whole topic (which is more of a denier tactic than a denialist one) or to ignore selectively (in other words to cherry-pick).

Ignorance is a key element of the other three approaches, but I think it’s worth bringing it out as a separate approach in itself – because cherry-picking is such an important part of the denialist effort.  (I did mention cherry-picking in On Climate Denialism - Deny Deny Deny! and Misdirection and Misinterpreting the Climate and Climate Emergency? What Climate Emergency? and, well, quite a few earlier articles on climate change).

First, consider the denier.  Note that a denier is not a denialist – where I have defined a denialist as “someone who has taken the time to review at least some of the available climate change data and, for whatever reason, rejects enough of it reach a position that climate change is not real, or is not anthropogenic, or is not as serious as it’s being made out to be” and a denier is “an ignorant person who just denies the existence of climate change (to some extent) based on information taken on face value that was originally sourced from a climate denialist”.

There’s a certain amount of synergy among denialists, they take information from each other so they could be called deniers to the extent that they don’t check each other’s work.

I would go so far as to say that all deniers ignore the majority of the information out there on climate change.  They don’t go to the reports that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), they don’t go to NASA, or NOAA, or any local body responsible for monitoring the climate (Australia, United Kingdom, Sweden, Germany, France, South Africa).  They might, however, watch some local equivalent of Fox News or read some local version of the Murdoch press (News Corp) and shape their opinions based on the advice of people who are possibly less ignorant, but who have been particularly selective in what information they have taken on board.

Denialists don’t have the luxury of passively ignoring all the information available to them, instead they need to have an idea of what is out there so that they can actively ignore that which is inconvenient and carefully carve out factoids that support their case.

An example of this relates to the Federation Drought, which was actually a number of droughts that ran into each over around the year 1900, when Australia was in the process of federating into one country rather than remaining as a few colonies of the United Kingdom.

A family member sent me a post to what looks very much like an astroturf group, Farming in Australia for real farmers and supporters. (noting that the full stop is part of the name of the group).  This Facebook group was set up by a(n unsuccessful) right-wing politician who stood for the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party.

Now there are two ways to approach something like this.  The first is to track down the origins of the post, which was presented to me like this:

History is a useful unless it's ignored or even overlooked 

‎Bernie Jackson‎ to Farming in Australia for real farmers and supporters.

October 27, 2019

" CLIMATE CHANGE"
During the 7 year period from 1896 to 1903, before the vast land clearing, Industrial Revolution, before the first world war, and the second world war, before the millions of cars were on the road and the vast amount of coal mining to date, and the Green Party, I was looking at this period and here are some of the facts from the period.
. Rainfall for this period was 46% below the previous wet period
.Federation Drought, Heatwaves, Bush Fires and Dust storms, associated with 40% livestock losses in Queensland.
.Livestock numbers in Queensland reduced from 6.5 million to 2.5.million (cattle), and from 19 million to 7 million ( sheep).
.Western New South Wales, impacted by soil erosion, and woody weed infestation (1898-1899).
.Properties in the Western New South Wales were abandoned with collapse in carrying capacity, resulting in the Royal Commission investigating financial stress in the Western Division.
.Sir Sydney Kidman acquired properties, and nearly lost all by 1901, due to severity and wide spread nature of this drought.
.Tropical Cyclone Mahina struck Bathurst Bay ( Cape York) on the 4th March 1899, the surrounding region suffered a massive storm surge from the category 5 system, killing over 400 people - the largest death toll of any national disaster in Australian History.
Reports recorded that grass was ripped from the ground on the islands offshore and that fish and dolphins were left in trees,15 metres above sea level
This all happened before the new catch cry of "GLOBAL WARMING", and "CATASTROPHIC".
The words they use now to frighten the public.
Puppet Palaszczuk should look back at previous records to see what has happened in years gone by, and order an enquiry into the recent fires in National Parks, she would then find it is the incompetence of National Parks management. Instead of making wild statements, GLOBAL WARMING.!
Reference- QUEENSLAND GOVERNMENT
ECOSCIENCES PRECINCT
Web: www.longpaddock.qld.gov.au
I sympathise with the devastation that farmers and public have endured over the past few years. Is this a matter of history repeating it's self.

There is enough idiosyncratic wording and punctuation in the text that it’s not going to be too hard to see where it really came from.  Perhaps it really was written by a Queensland farmer called Bernie Jackson (albeit on 26 October rather than 27 October 2019), but no.  I found that it was written by Rex Berry (according to Colin Boyce on 1 March 2019), by Angelina Nic (on 28 October 2019), by NighthawkNZ (on 27 October 2019), by Stand Up For Australia-Melbourne (on 1 March 2019), by Bernie Delany (on 12 November 2019), by Claude Bedrossian (on 11 November 2019), by Climate Truth (on 21 October 2019), by Cronin Ken (on 18 January 2020).  A snippet of it also appears to have been written by Chet McAteer (on 9 January 2020).  This is the sort of thing that you see when someone has a barrow to push.

I had to dig deep to find that, apparently, Rex Berry was the original source, but it’s been spread wide and thin ever since – with that post being shared more than 19,000 times.  Most of his other posts get one or two shares although another one, about the climate and bushfires did get twenty-six.  It’s not hard to comprehend why some people are tempted to post inflammatory stuff about climate change.

Another approach, the one I actually took with my relative, is to address the content of such a post.  It’s worth a reminder that I am talking about how selectively ignoring facts and evidence is a key element to being a denialist.  Much of what Rex wrote is true enough. 

The Federation Drought did happen.  Having followed a particularly wet spell, that drought was perfect for contributing to bushfires (a lot of growth followed by an extended drying out period, leaving plenty of readily ignitable fuel) – and there were some major bushfires in 1896 and 1898 which denialists are keen to point out, while skilfully ignoring that in 2019 (but not in in the 1890s) we had aerial support, modern firefighting ground vehicles, radio communications and a regime of fuel reduction.

There was a Category 5 cyclone in 1899, Mahina, although dolphins 15m up in trees appears to be a bit of an exaggeration (or misremembering of dolphins being found on 15m cliffs).

Rex argument pivots on the reader being ignorant with respect to a number of key facts: no-one is denying that Australia has experienced droughts regularly in the past, Mahina was a one in two to three hundred year storm (more on Mahina in a moment), climate scientists have not categorically stated that there is a direct link between climate change and drought frequency and severity in Australia and climate scientists have instead indicated that storms may in fact decrease in number, although they are expected to increase in intensity.

As I responded to the person who sent me Rex Berry’s work:

No-one is suggesting that intense storms haven’t happened in the past.  The fact that there was one in 1899 is immaterial.  The question is more about what is happening in general with storms over the past 100 years or so.  I have, coincidentally, been researching storms and the following is salient:

if we look at Cat 4 hurricanes (in the Atlantic), we see:

Which does seem to have a distinct trend to it.  If we did something similar with Cat 5s, it would look like this:

Which again appears to have something like a trend to it.

and:

In IPCC report AR5 Part A, there is reference to Severe Storms:

Severe storms such as tropical and extratropical cyclones (ETCs) can generate storm surges over coastal seas. The severity of these depends on the storm track, regional bathymetry, nearshore hydrodynamics, and the contribution from waves. Globally there is low confidence regarding changes in tropical cyclone activity over the 20th century owing to changes in observational capabilities, although it is virtually certain that there has been an increase in the frequency and intensity of the strongest tropical cyclones in the North Atlantic since the 1970s (WGI AR5 Section 2.6). In the future, it is likely that the frequency of tropical cyclones globally will either decrease or remain unchanged, but there will be a likely increase in global mean tropical cyclone precipitation rates and maximum wind speed (WGI AR5 Section 14.6).

Note that there was a prediction that the number of storms will (likely) decrease.  What we see, however, is the number of storms remaining about the same, but the strength of them increasing on average, leading to a greater number of higher rated storms.  The Atlantic has a higher concentration of storms than other basins (this might be why Magellan gave the Pacific its name, ie the [relatively] calm ocean) and there are twice as many cyclones/hurricanes in the Northern hemisphere than the south (probably due to the Northern being the warmer hemisphere). 

Additionally, the Atlantic is much smaller than the Pacific, which means that storms that are generated there are more likely to make landfall at full strength and that is a key also to the newsworthiness of Mahina.  Mahina made landfall at Cape York while at Cat-5 level (note that of Pacific storms, which are by definition North Pacific Storms, only 18 have reached Cat-5 since 1959 and none of them made landfall – no-one cares too much about a super storm that only happens at sea [well, seafarers and fishermen, perhaps].  It’s entirely possible that no-one would remember today Mahina if it got to Cat-5 out in the middle of the Coral Sea and made a less intense landfall). 

There’s another question though, why was that cyclone particularly bad?

It was because two factors combined to make it so:

It wasn’t just one storm, it was two.  Therefore, it was a bit of an outlier (a 1:200 to 1:300 year event) and should not be taken as indicative.  If we start seeing storms like this every second year, then we ought to start worrying.

Picky I know, but the industrial revolution is more commonly said to have started in 1760 (at least the First Industrial Revolution), with coal production rising significantly in the 1790s (to feed steam engines).  I think the author may be referring to the second industrial revolution, also known as the Technological Revolution which was, in part, dependent on the introduction of fossil fuels on a major scale, with petroleum taking off in the 1850s.  I know Australia tends to be behind on some things, Queensland doubly so (with waking up to the climate change related issues being one of those things), but I don’t know how this guy can think that 1903 was before the industrial revolution.  The first railway in Queensland opened in 1865 and the steam train was a product of the industrial revolution.  They didn’t use donkeys to pull the trains:

That is definitely a steam locomotive, although initially wood or coke was the fuel.  The locomotives began being converted for coal burning after an edict by the Commissioner for Queensland Railways in December 1870.

Other than that, the author appears to have dug up the Federation Drought, which we already know about, and tried to present it as something new.  We have droughts in Australia.  Note that the link between climate change and drought is nuanced.  Warmer air holds more water, which could mean that some areas which are currently particularly drought prone will become wetter (more tropical), while other areas, further south and nearer the coasts, will become drier and more prone to drought.  The AR5 findings were:

·       Low confidence in an observed global-scale trend in drought or dryness (lack of rainfall) since the 1950s, due to lack of direct observations, methodological uncertainties and choice and geographical inconsistencies in the trends;

·       High confidence that the frequency and intensity of drought since 1950 have likely increased in the Mediterranean and West Africa (although 1970s Sahel drought dominates the trend) and likely decreased in central North America and northwest Australia;

·       Low confidence in attributing changes in drought over global land areas since the mid20th century to human influence owing to observational uncertainties and difficulties in distinguishing decadal-scale variability in drought from long-term trends;

·       High confidence for droughts during the last millennium of greater magnitude and longer duration than those observed since the beginning of the 20th century in many regions.

In other words, increased drought in Australia is not a climate change prediction.  So, the fact that we had a long drought a hundred and twenty years ago, give or take, is immaterial.  (Note: the possibility of human drivers on drought is raised as an emerging area of research – it’s not a claim that humans caused the droughts now or in the past.)

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I have great confidence that Rex Barry was entirely ignorant of most of that and that it was that ignorance that enabled him to put together a post that gave him his fifteen minutes in the spotlight.

More well-established denialists, such as Tony Heller, Joanne Nova and Anthony Watts (basically anything where he writes about “the pause”), are unlikely to be so comprehensively ignorant and instead they aggressively cherry pick, even the more scientifically inclined collaborators have been shown to cherry pick.  Note that the fact that these people are masters of cherry picking does not stop them from accusing others of cherry picking, in fact it’s one of their favourite accusations.