Climate Emergency? What Climate Emergency?

Climate Emergency?  What Climate Emergency? (Defining our terms)

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There’s been a little bit of back and forth on the Climate Emergency that I’ve noticed lately.  The first that came to my attention was the warning of a climate emergency put out the Alliance of World Scientists, a large proportion of whom appear to be biologists.  More recently I noticed something by a Netherlands based group called CLINTEL, who put out something from another perspective, saying that there is no climate emergency.  In neither case was the term “climate emergency” made perfectly clear.

There’s another Australia-centric organisation that tracks those who have declared a climate emergency, noting as of 18 December 2019 that 1261 jurisdictions in 25 countries have done so, and has links to the Climate Emergency Summit planned for mid-February 2020.  They get close to defining the term, albeit via comments of various people such as “We are in a kind of climate emergency now… It is becoming more and more urgent. Time has almost run out to get emissions down. That’s the real emergency” and an emphasis that we are (nearly) out of time.

The Oxford Dictionary made the term their word of the year for 2019 (cheating a bit since it’s two words), so we do have some sort of formal definition: “a situation in which urgent action is required to reduce or halt climate change and avoid potentially irreversible environmental damage resulting from it”.

Therefore, we have a basis on which to compare the claims of the two organisations that seem to have started it all, the Alliance of World Scientists and CLINTEL.

These two organisations take quite different approaches.  The AWS provide evidence, summarised as below:

To go with this is a supplemental file that provides the sources and additional detail for each variable.  There is no mention of models per se although there is reference to IPCC 2018 which, inter alia, does report on the results of various models.  Note however that the AWS consider that our observations outstrip the predictions of the IPCC, predictions based on the model outputs.

CLINTEL, on the other hand, in their letter to the UN Secretary-General and Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, provide no evidence whatsoever.  They merely claim that the models are inadequate.  There are a few truisms presented as arguments for example: there are non-anthropogenic factors affecting climate, and CO2 is used by plants for photosynthesis.

Basically, it seems as though the AWS are relying on evidence to support their case while CLINTEL is relying on little more than authority of being a “global network of more than 500 knowledgeable and experienced scientists and professionals”.  Every “ambassador” as listed has a history of climate denial and/or links to the fossil fuel industry.

• Guus Berkhout – (the founder) – engineer who worked for Shell before focussing on seismic research for oil and gas companies
• Richard Lindzen – atmospheric physicist – urged the Bush Administration to not ratify the Kyoto Protocol which was effective as of February 2005
• Reynald Du Berger – geological engineer focussed on seismology – petitioned against the Kyoto Protocol
• Ingemar Nordin – philosopher (of science and technology as well as politics) – was writing at The Climate Scam blog in 2010
• Terry Dunleavy – journalist (with no discernible expertise in the area) – set up a climate denialism organisation in New Zealand in 2006
• Jim O’Brien – electrical engineer, energy consultant and lobbyist (there’s a guy with the same name who is far more qualified which was a bit confusing) – has been blogging climate denialism since 2007
• Viv Forbes – geologist with a background in coal mining
• Alberto Prestininzi – geologist – was a signatory to a letter defending fossil fuels earlier in 2019, otherwise there’s not much historically on this guy
• Jeffrey Foss – philosopher of science – was attending climate denialism symposia in 2012
• Benoît Rittaud – mathematician – wrote The Climate Myth in 2010 (the translation in the article for <<Le mythe climatique>> is incorrect)
• Morten Jødal – biologist – was apparently writing to newspapers about the climate debate going off the rails in 2008
• Fritz Vahrenholt – chemist who was on the board of directors for Deutsche Shell
• Rob Lemeire – “energy specialist” and publicist (according to CLINTEL) – has been involved with a  denialist site since 2016
• Christopher Monckton – hereditary peer, journalist – has been a climate denialist since at least 2006

If this is the authority that you are relying on, there are problems.  There’s only one person who has relevant qualifications, Richard Lindzen, and they don’t have a completely monolithic view of what is going on.

• Guus Berkhout – as the founder of CLINTEL, we can probably take the CLINTEL letter to the UN as indicative of his position: climate change scientists exaggerate their findings, there’s more the climate change than CO2 (almost certainly true), the world is warming more slowly than originally predicted (maybe), the models are inadequate (not true from my own investigations), CO2 is “plant food” (yes, sort of, but no-one was suggesting that we take it all away), global warming has not contributed to natural disasters (questionable) and climate policy must respect scientific and economic realities (scientific yes, (politico-)economic realities perhaps)
• Richard Lindzen – has criticised the IPCC since 2001 (after contributing to an IPCC report), he has a pet theory (iris hypothesis) which would have the planet effectively counteracting the effect of CO2 via a reduction in cirrus clouds in the tropics allowing more heat to escape.  Testing of the hypothesis found either no evidence in support of the hypothesis or evidence of an effect, but in the opposite direction (increased warming).  I haven’t seen any explanation by Lindzen as to why there is nevertheless observed global warming
• Reynald Du Berger – no clear statement or summary of position, but appears to be a general denier of fact (ie temperature has not risen in the past 20 years, the sea levels aren’t rising, etc)
• Ingemar Nordin – believes that climate research is a corruption of science
• Terry Dunleavy – founded a group that believes that claims of anthropogenic global warming are unfounded, “(t)he climate is always changing and the nation (New Zealand) may well benefit from moderate global warming” and “that New Zealand has not warmed significantly in the last fifty years” (apparently it’s risen about 0.75C using a 5-year running average, that’s a bit less than the global which is somewhere between 0.8 and 0.9C, and “significantly” was not defined)
• Jim O’Brien – founded a group that believes “that observed climate variability is caused by some combination of low-sensitivity GHG and solar/natural influences, where the relative contributions of these are still open to ongoing observation and research”
• Viv Forbes – believes (or believed) that over 1901 to 2000, the average surface temperature rose only 0.6C (which is true) and that, as of 2007, “there has been NO increase in temperature since 1998” (which is not precisely true, between 1998 and 2007, there was a 0.2C increase – however, if you look only at 1997 (which was abnormally warm) and 2008 (which was a bit cooler than the years around it), you can say that the temperature had cooled.  Since then though the temperature has risen 0.3 to 0.5C (depending on the year that you cherry-pick as your starting point).  He does not believe that high levels of carbon in the atmosphere are a problem
• Alberto Prestininzi – no clear statement or summary of position
• Jeffrey Foss – no clear statement or summary of position, but appears to be saying that the sun rules the climate and we are going into a cooling phase, and in any case the cost of mitigating global warming would be catastrophic
• Benoît Rittaud – believes that the climate has always changed and that models are inadequate
• Morten Jødal – belongs to a group that believes that “climate is dominated by natural variations”, particularly the sun, and that “CO₂ is … a harmless and vital gas that is essential for all life on Earth”
• Fritz Vahrenholt – believes (or believed) that climate change is due to variations in solar activity, and is about to cool, but in 2012 suggested there would be a cooling of 0.2 to 0.3C by 2035, which would require a cooling from today of 0.5 to 0.6C since there was a 0.3C rise between 2012 and 2019
• Rob Lemeire – no clear statement or summary of position, but appears to be saying that mitigating climate change is too expensive (at least not without including a nuclear power option)
• Christopher Monckton – believes that there’s no causative link between CO2 levels and global temperatures, but accepts the greenhouse effect exists and CO2 contributes to it

The thing with the denialist umbrella is that it covers a range of people from those who deny that there’s any significant warming at all (Terry Dunleavy), those who think there is some warming but it’s all natural, those who think that we are not warming at all but are in fact going into a cooling phase, those who don’t deny warming but think that doing anything about it is too expensive, those who just think that the risks associated with warming are overblown and we should just chill, those who think that global warming is a positive thing (hello Tropical Canada, with all its beaches!), those who think that there’s a conspiracy (for monetary gain, or due to ineptitude and or ideological corruption on the part of the IPCC), those who think that the authorities are meddling with the data to make it fit the predictions, those who have alternate theories (like the iris hypothesis), those who are denying climate change out of vested interest or political allegiance or a hatred of greenies and so on.

On the other side, you have a preponderance of evidence of that there is warming in line with the increasing concentration of atmosphere CO2 (and methane).  One single message.  It’s getting warmer, generally in line with the models and the consequences are unlikely to be good.  Sufficiently bad, in fact, to be considered by some to be an emergency.