The Patrick T Brown Debacle - An Own Goal or Something More Sinister

 On 5 September 2023, the climate scientist Patrick T Brown published an article at “The Free Press” which implied that he had perpetrated a Sokal style hoax on the journal Nature.  His explicit claim was that an “unspoken rule in writing a successful climate paper (is that the) authors should ignore—or at least downplay—practical actions that can counter the impact of climate change.”

 

Note the title of the article, “I Left Out the Full Truth to Get My Climate Change Paper Published” and the by-line “I just got published in Nature because I stuck to a narrative I knew the editors would like. That’s not the way science should work.”  Note also that the link includes the word “overhype”, indicating that the editor had a different title in mind.  This is another claim in itself, although it doesn’t really appear in the text.

 

The paper he co-authored was Climate warming increases extreme daily wildfire growth risk in California.

 

This all raises some key questions.  Who is Patrick T Brown?  Where does he hail from?  And are his claims reasonable?

 

Patrick T Brown is, among other things, a co-director of the Climate and Energy Group at the Breakthrough Institute.  This institute, established by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, is focused on “ecomodernism” which tends to be in favour of using technology to solve problems – replacing fossil fuels with nuclear energy (not entirely bad), but resisting anything approaching efforts to minimise current reliance on fossil fuels.  To be cynical, they appear to be in the “we don’t need to worry about climate change because we can fix it with out technology” camp of climate deniers.

 

If it were true that there was a real effort by academia to squash efforts to address climate change, this would indeed be a problem.  We should do all the research, research into the impact of human activities on the climate (which we can more easily moderate), the effects of climate change and ways of mitigating the effects of climate change.  However, there are journals which address different aspects of science.

 

What does Nature publish?  According to their website:

 

The criteria for publication of scientific papers (Articles) in Nature are that they:

• report original scientific research (the main results and conclusions must not have been published or submitted elsewhere)
• are of outstanding scientific importance
• reach a conclusion of interest to an interdisciplinary readership.

 

Note that they don’t indicate that they publish articles on technological developments (which is where much of the detail on efforts to mitigate climate change would be expected to appear).  However, there is a journal in the Nature stable precisely for that, the open access journal npj Climate Action.  So, the question is, did Patrick T Brown do any original scientific research into other contributions to climate change?  He doesn’t say so we don’t know.

 

Does Nature refuse to publish papers on natural contributions to climate change?  No.  Contribution of natural decadal variability to global warming acceleration and hiatus. Indirect radiative forcing of climate change through ozone effects on the land-carbon sink.  Admittedly this is old (about a decade), but there’s no indication that there is new original research into other factors that has been rejected.  There are newer papers on the effect of the release of methane due to melting permafrost, such as this one from 2017: Limited contribution of permafrost carbon to methane release from thawing peatlands.

 

Did Nature give any indication that they didn’t want publish a paper that talked about other drivers of climate change?  No, the opposite in fact.  Hi co-author, Steven J Davis (reported at phys.org), said “we don't know whether a different paper would have been rejected.  … Keeping the focus narrow is often important to making a project or scientific analysis tractable, which is what I thought we did. I wouldn't call that 'leaving out truth' unless it was intended to mislead—certainly not my goal.”

 

Nature provides visibility of the peer review comments, available here, and in those comments, there are references to other factors “that play a confounding role in wildfire growth” and the fact that “(t)he climate change scenario only includes temperature as input for the modified climate.”  Two of the reviewers rejected the paper, but neither of them did so on the basis that it mentioned other factors than anthropogenic climate change.

 

In the rebuttal to the reviewer comments, the authors wrote:

 

We agree that climatic variables other than temperature are important for projecting changes in wildfire risk. In addition to absolute atmospheric humidity, other important variables include changes in precipitation, wind patterns, vegetation, snowpack, ignitions, antecedent fire activity, etc. Not to mention factors like changes in human population distribution, fuel breaks, land use, ignition patterns, firefighting tactics, forest management strategies, and long-term buildup of fuels.

Accounting for changes in all of these variables and their potential interactions simultaneously is very difficult. This is precisely why we chose to use a methodology that addresses the much cleaner but more narrow question of what the influence of warming alone is on the risk of extreme daily wildfire growth.

 

We believe that studying the influence of warming in isolation is valuable because temperature is the variable in the wildfire behavior triangle (Fig 1A) that is by far the most directly related to increasing greenhouse gas concentrations and, thus, the most well-constrained in future projections. There is no consensus on even the expected direction of the change of many of the other relevant variables.

 

So the decision to make the study very narrow, in their (or his) own words, was made on the basis of ease and clarity, not to overcome publishing bias.  Perhaps Patrick T Brown was lying.  But there would be little point, since the paper’s authors write:

 

Our findings, however, must be interpreted narrowly as idealized calculations because temperature is only one of the dozens of important variables that influences wildfire behaviour.

 

So, that’s true.  Like much of science, it’s all about trying to eliminate confounding factors and working out what the effect of one factor is (or a limited number of factors).  In this case, the authors have (with assistance of machine learning) come to the staggering conclusion that if forests are warmer and drier, they burn more.  The main criticism that could be made is that Nature published a paper with such a mundane result.  However, the mechanism, using machine learning, is potentially interesting.  It could easily contribute to modelling – both in predicting the outcomes of various existing models and potentially by being redeployed to improve existing models (or create new and better models).

 

It’s a bizarre situation.  Why did Patrick T Brown, as a climate scientist, do this?  Maybe he has been prevented from publishing something in the past.  Perhaps his new institute (or group) has been prevented from publishing something.  That would be interesting to know.

 

Or is it something else?

 

Well, if you search hard enough, you can find that Patrick T Brown has posted at Judith Curry’s blog back when he was a PhD student.  And if you look at Judith Curry, you will find that she is what Michael Mann labelled a delayer – “delayers claim to accept the science, but downplay the seriousness of the threat or the need to act”.

 

Is it merely coincidence that the Breakthrough Institute for whom Patrick T Brown works, and his fellow ecomodernists, are also the types who appear to accept the science, but downplay the seriousness of the threat of climate change and the need to act, or at least criticise all current efforts to act?

 

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My own little theory is that Patrick T Brown was not so much involved in scoring an own goal in the climate science field, but that he was attempting deliberate sabotage.

How to break OpenAI's chatbot

Just a question on how climate change predictions are wrong (testing to see what the bot would do):

Now do it in the style of Noel Coward:

Mind. Blown.

Note: Noel Coward is wrong.  And dead.

It's Hot Up Here, Eh?

Just in case you haven’t noticed, it’s been a bit hot in Canada.  Also in north western USA.

Apparently it’s all due to a “heat dome” and these are not new (for example the link there explaining what one is is from 2020).  Fundamentally it’s just a high pressure system that doesn’t move away, getting trapped in place by other weather systems around and heats up a location with no relief from a following cold front (that inevitably always comes).  High pressure systems do two things that increase the temperature in an affected area:

·  they take air from higher altitudes (which is initially at a lower pressure) and compresses it, which warms it up – you might notice that when you release a gas from compression it gets cold, which is how your air-conditioner and fridge work, and

·  they dampen wind that could otherwise bring in cooler air from other areas.

This is what North America looked like at 2200 UTC on 29 June of this year (with my addition of high and low pressure system markers and an x to indicate where Lytton is):

The white streaks indicate wind (and its direction by increasing width of the line).  There was basically no movement of air along the west coast and inland which meant that the air that was there was just baking in the clear, cloudless skies (which is another feature of the high pressure system).

Could this situation have occurred without climate change?  Maybe.  Could it have got quite so hot?  It’s unclear.  It’s basically impossible to say that any single event is a consequence of climate change, all we can do is look at the trends.  The question we need to ask is whether these heat domes are moving northwards, as a trend.  Unfortunately, that is hard to tell too, since the term only entered into public consciousness in 2011, as far as I can tell.  At that time, the heat down was a lot further south, but the sample isn’t large enough to tell.

All I can suggest is that, if you are interested in what is going on, and why, it’s probably better to visit a site that is interested in weather and climatology rather than one that is interested in denying climate change.  Even if the events in Canada can’t be definitively pinned on climate change.

Atomic Tea

There is at least one complaint made by my climate denialism curious friend, JP, that is valid.  Some elements of the media are guilty of catastrophising.

 

I can understand why they do it, to a certain extent – they are selling papers, or magazines, or advertising airtime, or clicks, or eyeballs, or bums on seats etc etc.  The complete and accurate truth is, in at least one sense, not primary.  If the complete and accurate truth got them the outcome there are after, then they would be all for it, but still only as a means to an end, not as the end itself.  Even non-commercial media has to report viewer numbers, or levels of engagement, making them more and more like the commercial outlets with their click-baity headlines and sensational content.

 

The most recent example that I have read, at time of writing, is a piece by the Australian ABC, talking about how bad 2020 was.  I think we call all agree that 2020 was pretty bad but this article was focussed on something that has not been foremost in our concerns for a while – the climate.  The climate is still there, even if it’s largely outside and many of us have been locked inside more than usual.  And it’s still on a bit of a slide.

 

The article in question did highlight something of considerable concern, namely that the “world's oceans absorbed 20 sextillion joules of heat due to climate change in 2020 and warmed to record levels” (referencing a paper that has “temperature” in the title, but not so much in the text).  For context, it’s worth considering what NOAA have to report.  They talk about this in terms of a “heat content anomaly” measured against the average for the period 1955-2006 in the top 700m of (ocean) water:

Note that a sextillion (or zetta) is 10²¹, so don’t let the fact that this is sitting just under 20x10²² confuse you.  Things are a little more clear in another chart (lower on the same page).

It does seem like 20 zettajoules in a year is a bit of a spike, but there are ups and downs, so we really should be thinking about the trend, which is a bit over 160/27 = ~6 zettajoules per year.  Still not great.

 

The most egregious statement, in my view, is that 20 zettajoules is equivalent to the release of 10 Hiroshima grade atomic bombs each second.  That’s more than 300 million bombs, or slightly over two bombs for every square kilometre of land surface on the planet which, even if it happened only once in a year, would be enough to make that a worse year than 2020.

 

(For those keeping score, the Hiroshima bomb, “Little Boy”, is calculated to have released between 50 and 75 terajoules.  If we say it was 63 terajoules [15 kilotons], then you would indeed need very close to 10 bombs per second for a year to reach 20 zettajoules.)

 

It’s very scary to think of so many atomic bombs going off and one could well imagine that this was intention of the writer.  It’s also probably pretty scary to imagine that amount of energy being added to the oceans, since it’s the heat in oceans that cause the sort of storms that can do so much damage to coastal regions and it’s simple to imagine that more energy equals either more storms or stronger storms (or perhaps both).  Whether there is such a simple link? … perhaps, perhaps not.  Oil extraction companies have upgraded their drilling platforms, so perhaps they think there might be.

 

I wondered, however, how much energy we expend each year on hot drinks?  To make it easier, I am going to limit it to tea and assume that for tea, one boils fresh water from room temperature (293K) to boiling (373K) without markedly affecting the density of said water.  I am also going to assume one drinks from a standard cup at 0.24 litres.  So, a litre of fresh water weighs one kilogram and the heat capacity of water is 4.2kJ per kg per K.  Conveniently, this is very close to 1kJ per cup of water per K and since the temperature difference is 80K, we expend 80kJ on boiling water for each cup of tea (assuming no wastage).

 

The question then is how many cups of tea do we, as humans, drink?  World Tea News (yes, there is such a thing) has the answer, conveniently in terms of cups per second – 25,000 cups.  That means that we expend about 2 million kilojoules per second on tea.  This is somewhat short of a sextillion, but we are thinking in terms of Hiroshima grade atomic bombs, each at 63 terajoules.   A terajoule is 10¹² joules, so one bomb is equivalent to 31437 seconds of tea preparation, which is one bomb every 8.7 hours, or very close to 1,000 bombs a year.

 

I am reasonably certain that the average English person would be willing to accept 1,000 bombs a year in order to have a good cup of tea.  What, on the other hand, would be patently ridiculous is to express the energy used to prepare tea in terms of atomic bombs.  I have a nagging feeling that the same applies to the amount of energy absorbed by the oceans.

 

Perhaps the author of the article (and the original paper) could have assisted by expressing the temperature change that would be caused by the 20 zettajoules being absorbed by the oceans.  If we make some assumptions, we can get a rough idea.  The ocean surface is about 360 million square kilometres.  The paper was referring to a depth of water of 2,000 metres, but not all the ocean is that deep, and beyond a certain depth (the epipelagic zone) there really isn’t much variation in the temperature, so we could make a rough calculation using an average of 600 metres depth, which is in the middle of the mesopelagic zone, so we have an ocean volume of 2.17x10¹⁷ m³ and given that there are 1000 litres in a cubic metre and it takes 3850J to raise a litre of seawater by 1K, that’s about 0.024K a year or 0.24 degrees per decade.  Note that this is very rough calculation, but it’s in the same order as what NOAA are reporting (at climate.gov) where they say that temperatures have been rising at 0.18 degrees per decade since 1981.  If we use 800m, which is towards the bottom of the mesopelagic zone, the result is very close to 0.18K per decade.  I doubt that that figure is right though, since that’s the average since 1981, and today’s figure is likely to be higher (although maybe not as much as a full third higher).

 

If anyone knows what the actual average temperature increase of the ocean was, please let me know.  Looking at the heat content chart (1955 through to 2020) overlaid on the temperature chart (1880 through to 2016), it looks like it’s probably gone up:

The Very Model of Climate Change Concern

A friend of mine, JP, started all of this when writing:

If you were to ask me 2 years ago what my key understandings were about climate change, I would have said the following:

Sea ice is rapidly shrinking (summer arctic sea ice to be gone by 2015)

Sea levels are rising and accelerating

Polar bear populations are under stress (have increased in the last 20 years)

The levels of glacial retreat around the world are unprecedented (similar retreats have been seen in the last century)

97% of scientists agree that global warming is real and an urgent problem

Any scientist who is skeptical about the claims made about climate change is a "denier" and is funded by oil/resource companies

We are seeing an increase in extreme weather events (they are actually getting less common)

Climate models are accurate in their predictions 

Every one of those things is either totally false, or a largely exaggerated claim.

This is the eighth in a series based on my response, which itself was split over a few emails.  The first was Ice Extent Challenge (in which I provided a little more context about JP) and was followed by Sea Levels Rising, Polar Bears and Climate Change, Glacial Retreat, A Worry of Climate Change Scientists, Denying Denialism and Weathering a Storm of Climate Denial.  Some of the issues may also be touched on in a series of articles on the nature of climate denialism.  Please also note the caveat.

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JP’s Claim: The statement “Climate models are accurate in their predictions” is either totally false or largely exaggerated

Note that JP is most familiar with statistical modelling.  JP has modelled demand on a supply chain and it’s amazingly accurate.  Based on statistical data from previous years, and possibly a whole suite of data that I am not aware of, JP can get very close to current demand.  It’s brilliant stuff.  However, it should also be noted that climate models are not, repeat NOT, and – just to make this perfectly clear – climate models are NOT statistical models.  They are models of physical processes.

I’ve long been of the opinion that models are never entirely accurate, no matter what sort of model they are, and that the only completely accurate model of the universe is … the universe.  This applies also to systems that are smaller than the universe, even though processing power necessary to do the modelling decreases significantly as you approach more human-sized scales.

You don’t need to take my word for it, you can just consider the three body problem.  Start with two bodies in otherwise empty space that are acting on each other gravitationally, say a star and a planet.  They will orbit the centre of their combined mass with a speed and separation that is inversely proportional to their relative mass (the heavier body will have a smaller separation from the centre of the combined mass than the lighter one, they will share the orbital period and thus the lighter one will have a higher speed having a greater distance to cover – with something as massive as a star compared to a planet, ).

Then consider three bodies, specifically two stars and a planet – like Tatooine:

Note that the planet orbits the pair of stars, since it’s the light one of the three-some.  This is not solvable analytically, it can only be solved numerically, meaning that you have to plug the figures in an run the problem (like at the link).  Now in the second program window, if you fiddle with the code to make one of the stars more than twice as heavy as the other, something strange happens (at a factor of 2.2):

At higher values, the binary stars lose the planet entirely (pretty much immediately at a factor of 3).

Now imagine trying to predict where the planet in the image above will be after 50 years.  It’s easy enough to run the simple program and find out, but you have some issues that are going to affect your results.  How accurate is your value of G?  How accurate are your masses?  How accurate were your initial conditions (speed and direction)?

Your inaccuracy in any of these figures are going to affect your results and that’s when you are assuming a spherical cow.  The bodies in question are not perfect point masses, they are two balls of gas and … a planet, which might be a third, smaller ball of gas or a conglomeration of rocks – and we are assuming only one single rock in the system.

The upshot of this is that we can predict with great accuracy where the planets in our solar system will be in the short term, but have no idea where they will be in 100 million years – and it’s not that we just haven’t worked it out yet but rather that, at that longer scale, the solar system is chaotic.

Now consider a model involving 10⁴⁴ gas molecules (the atmosphere), interacting with 10 million cubic kilometres of water (admittedly only the top layer of it, so more than 350 million square kilometres times the average significant depth, whatever that is) and just under 150 million square kilometres of land surface which is covered variously by deserts, forests, ice, mountains, lakes, grasslands and, relatively recently, cities and towns.  Then factor in the vagaries of the sun, which has its own cycles which do affect us (for example with solar minima, grand or otherwise) and all the different products that end up in the atmosphere (CO2, methane, aerosols, water, etc).

Climate models don’t even bother trying to be accurate.  Instead, they do what is call parametrisation, breaking the planet up into gridboxes – the size of which vary depending on the precise application (and the computing power available).  The smallest gridboxes are usually in the range of about 5km, with clouds sometimes being modelled at 1km – and this is way too coarse for most clouds.

Even at the finest parametrisation used today, there will still be inaccuracies inherent in the model.  These are expected and discussed with an eye to minimising them (see “Are Climate Change models getting better?” which starts on page 824 at the linked document).  In part because the models are never perfect, the IPCC and climate scientists in general talk about trends and projections rather than predictions.  The trend observable in all the models across the standard scenarios (RCPs 2.6, 4.5, 6.0 and 8.5) is that the more you increase the amount of CO2 in the system, the more the temperature rises.

Again, you don’t need to take my word for this.  The outputs of the models are freely available (admittedly they take some time to figure out).

I compared the results against the temperature measurements available from NASA and NOAA which, without a model overlay, looks something like this:

Once I converted to absolute (rather than anomaly) values and corrected for an oddity in starting temperatures, the HADGEM2-ES model results look like this:

Be very careful about just accepting this though.  I don’t understand the starting temperature oddity, but basically not all models had the same temperatures at the beginning of the run, or the same date for the beginning of the run.  I fixed for that and used this model as an example because, without that correction, the results were offset by about 0.2 degree (noting that I used an RCP8.5 run).  The corrections I made did not change the trend, they just shifted the entire yellow line up a bit.  Additionally, I don’t know precisely what was fed into the model.  They seem to have included some volcanoes (which pump aerosols into the atmosphere and push down the temperature for a short period) and anthropogenic aerosol production seems to be accounted for, but this is just guesswork on my part.

With those caveats in mind, this is what the results look like from a raft of models (note that HADGEM is not in this one, so the yellow line represents output from a different model):

There’s a range of about a degree between the models, and about four of them are consistently higher than the measurement (although, prior to my adjustment, they were all below so perhaps I’ve messed it up somehow – and that messing up could be contributing to the spread as well) … but note that the overall trend is precisely the same.  Over the period 1880-2020, there is a rise in temperature of about a degree – which is consistent with the measurements.

Therefore, noting that the models are not expected to be wholly accurate, indicating temperature rise in pretty much precisely what we have experienced, and that they provide projections rather than predictions, JP is simply wrong when claiming the climate change models predictions projections are inaccurate.  They are a lot more accurate than one might have predicted.

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.