Category: Climate Change

“Powerless in the storm” Climate Industry Misdirection

A version of this post appeared at Watts Up With That

I came across a paper that concludes “The US power grid is proven to be highly reliable in general; however, the resilient and reliable grid operation is increasingly challenged by severe weather events–events that are increasing in frequency and magnitude due to climate change.”  I have many issues with this paper, but I am only going to discuss one.  Apparently peer reviewed papers today require marginal support for claiming increasing severity because everyone knows that climate change affects the frequency and magnitude of severe weather events

This analysis is typical of the reports used to justify the Climate Leadership & Community Protection Act (Climate Act).  I have followed the Climate Act since it was first proposed, submitted comments on the Climate Act implementation plan, and have written over 400 articles about New York’s net-zero transition. This post explains why the connection between this work and climate change is tenuous.  The opinions expressed in this post do not reflect the position of any of my previous employers or any other organization I have been associated with, these comments are mine alone.

Powerless in the Storm

The paper in question is  “Powerless in the storm: Severe weather driven power outages in New York State, 2017–2020” (Flores NM, Northrop AJ, Do V, Gordon M, Jiang Y, Rudolph KE, et al. (2024) Powerless in the storm: Severe weather-driven power outages in New York State, 2017–2020. PLOS Clim 3(5): e0000364. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0000364)

The only proof cited to “support climate change is increasing weather variability” is the reference to this sentence: “The power grid’s vulnerability to severe weather events becomes even more critical in the context of climate change, which is expected to increase weather variability and prevalence of extreme events (e.g., storms, wildfires, heatwaves, floods)”.  The reference included cites the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report: IPCC, 2022: Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Portner H.-O., Roberts D.C., Tignor M., Poloczanska E.S., Mintenbeck K., Alegrı´a A., Craig M., Langsdorf S., Lo¨schke S., Mo¨ ller V., Okem A., Rama B. (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK and New York, NY, USA, 3056 pp., https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009325844

The Other Side of the Story

However, if the authors were to look at the actual IPCC report rather than what they assumed it would say about the example weather events (storms, wildfires, heatwaves, floods) the narrative falls apart.

The CO2 Coalition published a paper prepared by Richard Lindzen, William Happer, Steven Koonin on April 16, 2024 titled Fossil Fuels and Greenhouse Gases Climate Science.  Richard Lindzen, Professor of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, Emeritus  Massachusetts Institute of Technology; William Happer Professor of Physics, Emeritus Princeton University; and Steven Koonin  University Professor, New York University, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution reviewed what the IPCC documents actually said about these extreme weather events.  The paper explains:

Hurricanes. A deep analysis of the facts reveals that “the data and research literature are starkly at odds with this message” — “hurricanes and tornadoes show no changes attributable to human influences.” Id. pp. 111-12. Further, “There has been no significant trend in the global number of tropical cyclones nor has any trend been identified in the number of U.S. land-falling hurricanes.” U.S. Global Climate Research Program, 3rd National Climate Assessment, Appendix 3, p. 769 (footnotes omitted).

Wildfires. There is a powerful new source of data on wildfires, “Sophisticated satellite sensors first began monitoring wildfires globally in 1993.” Id. p. 142.

The result of this new source of data is totally contrary to what is in the news. Unsettled cites NASA data and others that show the global area burned by fires declined each year from 1998 to 2015:

“Unexpectedly, this analysis of the images shows that the area burned annually declined by about 25% from 1998 to 2015.” Further, “Despite the very destructive wildfires in 2020, that year was among the least active globally since 2003.” Id. p. 142.

Heat Waves. On extreme temperatures in the U.S., we all agree: “The annual number of high temperature records set shows no significant trend over the past century, nor over the past 40 years.” Koonin, supra, p. 110.

Flooding: US data shows “modest changes in US rainfall during the past century haven’t changed the average incidence of floods.” Globally, data from the IPCC shows that there is “low confidence regarding the sign of trend in the magnitude and/or frequency of floods on a global scale.”  We all agree with the summary in Unsettled: “we don’t know whether floods globally are increasing, decreasing, or doing nothing at all.” Id. p. 137.

Discussion

I have nothing to add to the main point that the authors of this paper just assumed that the IPCC found that extreme weather events were increasing despite evidence in the latest report to the contrary.  The peer review process did not call them out on this. 

For the record the authors, their roles and affiliations follow:

Nina M. Flores

ROLES Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

AFFILIATION Department of Environmental Health Sciences, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, New York, New York, United States of America

Alexander J. Northrop

ROLES Conceptualization, Data curation, Writing – review & editing

AFFILIATIONS Department of Environmental Health Sciences, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, New York, New York, United States of America, Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University, New York, New York, United States of America

Vivian Do

ROLES Conceptualization, Writing – review & editing

AFFILIATION Department of Environmental Health Sciences, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, New York, New York, United States of America

Milo Gordon

ROLES Conceptualization, Writing – review & editing

AFFILIATION Department of Environmental Health Sciences, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, New York, New York, United States of America

Yazhou Jiang

ROLES Conceptualization, Writing – review & editing

AFFILIATION Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Clarkson University, Potsdam, New York, United States of America

Kara E. Rudolph

ROLES Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing – review & editing

AFFILIATION Department of Epidemiology, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, New York, New York, United States of America

Diana Hernández

ROLES Conceptualization, Writing – review & editing

AFFILIATION Department of Sociomedical Sciences, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, New York, New York, United States of America

Joan A. Casey

ROLES Conceptualization, Funding acquisition, Methodology, Writing – review & editing

AFFILIATIONS Department of Environmental Health Sciences, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, New York, New York, United States of America, Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, United States of America

One final point is that my impression of the analysis is that the authors had pre-conceived conclusions in mind and tortured the data to get the results desired.

Conclusion

I have to assume that this is an example of the Climate Industry’ Misdirection Campaign described recently by Kip Hansen.  All of the authors are associated in some way with public health departments at universities.  I doubt that any of them has any background in climatology or meteorology beyond a possibly a class or two in introduction to Climate Change – The Existential Threat.  Today it is sufficient to just note that extreme weather is getting worse due to climate change to hype the results claimed because the peer reviewers know that is “true”.

Natural Climate Variability

A recent Associated Press story noted that “For the 10th consecutive month, Earth in March set a new monthly record for global heat — with both air temperatures and the world’s oceans hitting an all-time high for the month, the European Union climate agency Copernicus said.”  It went on to state that “Climate scientists attribute most of the record heat to human-caused climate change from carbon dioxide and methane emissions produced by the burning of coal, oil and natural gas.”  This post provides evidence that human-caused climate change was not the primary cause for the records.

The rationale used for New York’s Climate Leadership & Community Protection Act (Climate Act) that reducing GHG emissions will affect climate is of special interest to me.  However, I question whether we know enough about natural climate variability to legitimately make that claim.  I have followed the Climate Act since it was first proposed, submitted comments on the Climate Act implementation plan, and have written over 400 articles about New York’s net-zero transition. The opinions expressed in this post do not reflect the position of any of my previous employers or any other organization I have been associated with, these comments are mine alone.

Observed Climate Variability

The video Climate the Movie: The Cold Truth includes a very good description of historical temperatures and CO2 trends.  It provides examples why claims that today’s observations indicate unprecedented heat in earth’s history are wrong.  In geologic time scales temperatures today are not at all unusual and because we are in an ice age all previous non-ice age geologic epochs were warmer.  Over the last 2,000 years there also have been periods of warmer temperatures.  The video goes on to compare CO2 trends over those periods to show that there is no link. 

In a recent post I addressed the basic tenet of anthropogenic global warming catastrophists, like the authors of the Climate Act, that the correlation between CO2 and global warming evident since 1976 proves that CO2 is the control knob for climate.   Andy May prepared an Annotated Bibliography for Climate the Movie that includes a section titled “From 1945 to 1976 the world cooled”.  It includes the following plot of global temperatures and carbon dioxide.  Climate Act proponents believe that increasing temperatures since the end of the Little Ice Age are caused by increases in CO2.  This graph does not support that claim.  From 1850 to 1910 temperatures trend slightly down and CO2 trends slightly up.  From 1910 to 1944 there is little change in the CO2 trend but the temperature trends up markedly.  CO2 emissions don’t start to rise significantly until the end of World War II in 1945 but from 1944 to 1976 the global temperature trends down.  For the remaining two periods shown in the graph temperature and CO2 correlate well.

The caption highlights the key point.  There is good correlation between CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere after 1980 but the correlation is poor before that.  I believe this shows that natural climate variation caused the 1910 to 1944 warming.  I do not believe that anyone has proven that the same natural climate drivers are not affecting the recent warming. 

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) recently posted a comment that contradicts the existential threat narrative and supports those who argue natural climate variability is the main driver of climate change.  It states that “The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere today is comparable to around 4.3 million years ago, when sea level was about 75 ft higher than today, the average temp was 7 degrees F higher than in pre-industrial times, & large forests occupied areas of the Arctic that are now tundra.”  Climate the Movie shows that going back further in time that CO2 levels were much higher than today. It is not clear to me why there is supposed to be an existential threat to society when temperature and CO2 concentrations were higher in the past and the ecosystems survived.

Recent Warming

The claims for recent global temperature records reference NASA satellite data.  This data set only goes back to 1979 but it provides the greatest representative coverage of the globe because it does not depend on randomly spaced surface measuring stations.  In the following graph note the large spike in recent months.

Note that the spikiness in these measurements is not reflected in the atmospheric concentrations of CO2 measurements.  According to NOAA’s CO2 measurements:

The global surface concentration of CO2, averaged across all 12 months of 2023, was 419.3 parts per million (ppm), an increase of 2.8 ppm during the year. This was the 12th consecutive year CO2 increased by more than 2 ppm, extending the highest sustained rate of CO2 increases during the 65-year monitoring record. Three consecutive years of CO2  growth of 2 ppm or more had not been seen in NOAA’s monitoring records prior to 2014. Atmospheric CO2 is now more than 50% higher than pre-industrial levels.

If CO2 really is the control knob, then why is there so much inter-annual variation in temperature at the same time there is so little variation in the CO2 trend?  The only possible explanation activists have is that there are some natural variation processes.  Picking and choosing CO2 as the cause of the increasing trend while simultaneously acknowledging that there also are natural processes affecting the observed temperatures does not seem to be a particularly strong position to me.

Most Recent Warming

The Associated Press article claimed that “Climate scientists attribute most of the record heat to human-caused climate change from carbon dioxide and methane emissions produced by the burning of coal, oil and natural gas.”  The reality is that not all climate scientists support the claim that most of the record-breaking heat was caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gases.    

Javier Vinós described the recent warming explaining that this spike in temperatures marked the warmest period recorded by instruments and that the recent change was exceptional.  He found that “the temperature increase from the previous record was the largest in 153 years, at +0.17°C. This level of increase from previous records is remarkable, even for a year that has been recorded as the warmest on record.”  If there had been a spike in GHG emissions that preceded this warming spike, then I would be more supportive of the CO2 is the control knob theory.  It turns out that there was no spike in human emissions but there was a natural spike.  The Tonga-Hunga underwater volcanic eruption blasted unprecedented amounts of water vapor into high levels of the atmosphere.  Water vapor is more effective than CO2 as a greenhouse gas so this could be part of the reason for the recent warming spike.

There is another natural phenomenon likely responsible for some of the warming.  Surface water temperatures in the Pacific Ocean oscillate between warm (El Niño) and cold phases (La Niña ) of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation or “ENSO”.  The winter of 2023 occurred during an El Niño when the ocean releases heat into the atmosphere and has been associated with marked increases in global temperatures.  However, the 2023 El Niño was a weak year so its contribution to the observed warming was minimal.

In an article entitled “State of the climate – summer 2023“, Judith Curry examined the top of the atmosphere radiation balance.  As of June 2023, her analysis suggests that the water vapor increase in long-wave radiation warming from the Tonga-Hunga underwater volcanic eruption was offset by the short-wave aerosol particle cooling.  She gave other reasons for the observed warming records:

The exceptionally warm global temperature in 2023 is part of a trend of warming since 2015 that is associated primarily with greater absorption of solar radiation in the earth-atmosphere system.  This increase in absorbed solar radiation is driven by a slow decline in springtime snow extent, but primary by a reduction in reflection from the atmosphere driven by reduced cloudiness and to a lesser extent a reduction in atmospheric aerosol.  Any increase in the greenhouse effect from increasing CO2 (which impacts the longwave radiation budget) is lost in the noise.

She lists three reasons for the warming.  The slow decline in springtime snow extent has been linked to the warming trend as we come out of the Little Ice Age.  Clouds affect global temperatures.  Within the atmosphere more low clouds reduce temperatures by reflecting more sunlight but increased high clouds increase temperatures.  Particles or aerosols also scatter light and can affect temperatures by blocking sunlight.  She attributes the observed warming to the reduction in reflection from the atmosphere driven by reduced low-level cloudiness and to a lesser extent a reduction in atmospheric aerosol particles.  Low-level cloudiness trends are not well understood and are not included in climate models.  The aerosol changes are attributed to changes in the sulfur content of ship fuel. Most importantly, she points out that increasing CO2 effects are “lost in the noise” which directly contradicts the Associated Press article.

Conclusion

The rationale for the multi-billion Climate Act net-zero transition is the alleged link between climate change and greenhouse gas emissions.  Undoubtedly the emissions increases have some greenhouse effect on global temperatures, but the effects of natural climate variability not only must have been responsible for all of the historical variations in global temperatures but also appear to be the primary driver even during the most recent period when carbon dioxide emissions and global temperatures are well-correlated. The rationale for the Climate Act transition is weak at best.

 Burn, Hollywood, burn

This article was originally published at Watts Up With That.

Irina Slav on energy Substack is described as “All things energy. Challenging the dominant narrative because facts matter”.   Her latest article “Burn, Hollywood, burn” calls out the blatant indoctrination and propaganda associated with Hollywood today.  As always when you dig deeper it is all about money for the shills.

I have followed issues related to climate change and the net-zero energy transition for many years. The opinions expressed in this post do not reflect the position of any of my previous employers or any other organization I have been associated with, these comments are mine alone.

In her introduction, Slav expressed a concern that is common to many readers of Watts Up With That:

A couple of days ago, in a conversation with David Blackmon on X, I unthinkingly commented that we’ve reached peak idiocy in the transition narrative. David wisely reminded me that we keep getting proven wrong in this by the narrative constantly discovering new peaks to strive for and conquer. Alas, I couldn’t disagree.

In my work here I’ve mostly focused on calling out the climate indoctrinators in the media, in politics, and, occasionally, in schools. But there is an indoctrination channel I have so far steered clear of, for reasons of mental self-preservation. I get angry about things, you see, and I don’t really like being angry. When I saw this article on Rolling Stone a while ago, however, I got too angry to bother about disliking being angry.

The article is a symphony of climate propaganda done absolutely openly and eagerly, with an unshakeable conviction that amplifying climate catastrophism is the right thing to do. Through all means necessary.

She explains how this article is evidence of the incessant indoctrination of the masses regarding climate change.  Earlier the emphasis was on social justice but now there is a shift:

That was the social justice stage of the indoctrination drive. Now, we seem to have reached the next stage, which is all about climate change, a distillate of social justice issues, if you will, since every single problem we have today can be traced back to climate change by the eager narrative pushers. Why so eager, you might ask? Well, because there’s money and fame in it.               

The most revealing part of her article for me was her description of the organization called Good Energy.  She describes it thusly:

Said organisation exists with the sole purpose of making climate change a central topic in movies and TV shows. Because it’s important, of course. The most important topic ever. And these gracious people are there to guide film folk on the journey to internalising this so they can make more climate change-centric movies and TV shows.

Here’s an excerpt: “We aim to make it as easy as possible to weave climate into any aspect of a story. Applying the Climate Lens™ to your narrative can reveal complexities in character and setting, add conflict, and unlock touching, funny, and surprising storylines — all of them backed by climate science, psychology, and lived experiences.”

Incidentally, while helping writers, directors and producers “weave climate into any aspect of a story” and why not every single aspect of a story, they’d make some money from this because these consulting services are not free. Indoctrination is a mission but that doesn’t mean it can’t be a business at the same time, and how cool is that!

The Good Energy “Library of Experts” is interesting for a couple of reasons: the wide range of expertise disciplines that claim a link to their work and climate change and the number of individuals who loyal readers here might recognize like Dr. Peter Kalmus.  Slav goes on to expose a potential driver for their concern about climate change:

Speaking of money, the Daily Sceptic has done a great job in exposing the financial backing of Good Energy and similar organisations or shall I say formations because it certainly sounds more appropriate. You won’t be surprised to learn that this backing comes from climate obsessed billionaires. Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Sierra Club pop out among the list of backers, along with the Walton Family Foundation and One Earth.

She takes an optimistic view of this:

Sad as all this may be there is a silver lining and that silver lining lies in the fact that propaganda has never, ever produced quality art of any form or quality entertainment. Good art and good entertainment tell stories, invoke various emotions, and, if done really well, result in some form of catharsis.

Climate propaganda does not tell stories. It only aims to invoke one emotion and that’s fear. It hammers in a message disguised as a story that is so solid and unwieldy it defies interpretation. You can only swallow it whole. Or ridicule it, of course, because it is ridiculous.

Since climate propaganda in film – and in literature, too – is so rigid, it’s doomed to failure, just like the identity politics trend in literature. The reason for this is that while there may be many people with a mental age of four when it comes to discriminating between art and propaganda, there are many more who instinctively sense the difference and sooner or later shun the latter.

I hope she is correct.  I tend to be a bit more pessimistic because I think that the inevitable reality slap of the insane transition policies may occur after irreparable harm.  I encourage you to read all of her article and consider subscribing to her Substack.

Articles of Note October 15 2023

Sometimes I just don’t have time to put together an article about specific posts about the net-zero transition and climate change that I have read that I think are relevant.  This is a summary of posts that I think would be of interest to my readers.

I have been following the Climate Leadership & Community Protection Act (Climate Act)

Climate Act since it was first proposed and most of the articles described are related to it. I have devoted a lot of time to the Climate Act because I believe the ambitions for a zero-emissions economy embodied in the Climate Act outstrip available renewable technology such that the net-zero transition will do more harm than good.  .  The opinions expressed in this article do not reflect the position of any of my previous employers or any other company I have been associated with, these comments are mine alone.

lawsuit is filed in New York.

Climate Act Background

The Climate Act established a New York “Net Zero” target (85% reduction and 15% offset of emissions) by 2050.  It includes an interim 2030 reduction target of a 40% reduction by 2030 and a requirement that all electricity generated be “zero-emissions” by 2040. The Climate Action Council is responsible for preparing the Scoping Plan that outlines how to “achieve the State’s bold clean energy and climate agenda.”  In brief, that plan is to electrify everything possible and power the electric grid with zero-emissions generating resources.  The Integration Analysis prepared by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) and its consultants quantifies the impact of the electrification strategies.  That material was used to write a Draft Scoping Plan.  After a year-long review the Scoping Plan recommendations were finalized at the end of 2022.  In 2023 the Scoping Plan recommendations are supposed to be implemented through regulation and legislation. 

Videos of Note

For those of you who would rather watch a video than read about a topic I list a few interesting videos.  This video describes historic global temperatures and how ancient temperatures are estimated.  I think it does a good job describing a complicated subject.

This interview of Judith Curry by John Stossel is a good overview of the climate science hype.

Offshore Wind Costs

Renewable developments are struggling due to soaring interest rates and rising equipment and labor costs.  Reuters describes two “procured” projects that have been cancelled:

On Monday, Avangrid (AGR.N), a U.S. subsidiary of Spanish energy firm Iberdrola (IBE.MC), said it filed agreements with power companies in Connecticut to cancel power purchase agreements for Avangrid’s proposed Park City offshore wind project.

“One year ago, Avangrid was the first offshore wind developer in the United States to make public the unprecedented economic headwinds facing the industry,” Avangrid said in a release.

Those headwinds include “record inflation, supply chain disruptions, and sharp interest rate hikes, the aggregate impact of which rendered the Park City Wind project unfinanceable under its existing contracts,” Avangrid said.

Avangrid has said it planned to rebid the Park City project in future offshore wind solicitations.

Also over the past week, utility regulators in Massachusetts approved a proposal by SouthCoast Wind, another offshore wind developer, to pay local power companies a total of around $60 million to terminate contracts to provide about 1,200 MW of power.

Rich Ellenbogen described how the Offshore Wind Market is broken all over the world in an email.  First he mentioned this Avangrid project buyout of their contractual obligations.  He also pointed out that at a recent  UK wind auction, there were no bidders because the maximum selling price for the electricity was not high enough to justify the investment.  Their installation costs have risen by about 40% and the UK government did not factor that in to the allowable costs. He explains:

The article states that the wholesale price of electricity in the UK is £80 /Megawatt hour (MWh).  With an exchange rate of $1.23 per pound-sterling, that equates to  $98.40 per MWh.  The article also states that they would need £60  per MWh to make the wind farms profitable, or $73.80 per MWh.   However, according to this link, “the wholesale price for electricity in NY State in calendar year 2023 has increased from $24.57/MWh to $42.97/MWh over the last year.”, 47% lower than the wholesale cost in the UK  and 72% lower than what the wind installers say that they need to be profitable.

If the Wind installers can get $73.80/MWh installing wind farms in the UK but they can only get $42.97/MWh installing Wind farms here, 42% less,  while also having no ships to do the installation because of the Jones Act, where do you think that they will install the wind farms?  This is a global market.

The other way to look at this is that the energy from Offshore Wind will cost 72% more than what the ratepayers of NY State are currently paying. This is not a good economic model for the NY State rate payers.  72% increases are well outside of what surveys have said the public will tolerate.  Coupled with 15% increase in delivery costs from the utilities, the number of ratepayers, currently  1.2 million ratepayers that are $1.8 billion in arrears, will greatly increase making NY State even less affordable than it already is.

In New York, on October 12, 2023 the Public Service Commission turned down a request to address the same cost issues.  Times Union writer Rick Karlin summarizes:

At issue was a request in June by ACE NY, as well as Empire Offshore Wind LLC, Beacon Wind LLC, and Sunrise Wind LLC, which are putting up the offshore wind tower farms.

All told, the request, which was in the form of a filing before the PSC, represented four offshore wind projects totaling 4.2 gigawatts of power, five land-based wind farms worth 7.5 gigawatts and 81 large solar arrays.

All of these projects are underway but not completed. They have already been selected and are under contract with the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, or NYSERDA, to help New York transition to a clean power grid, as called for in the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, approved by the state Legislature and signed into law in 2019.

Developer response suggests that “a number of planned projects will now be canceled, and their developers will try to rebid for a higher price at a later date — which will lead to delays in ushering in an era of green energy in New York”. Karlin also quotes Fred Zalcman, director of the New York Offshore Wind Alliance: “Today’s PSC decision denying relief to the portfolio of contracted offshore wind projects puts these projects in serious jeopardy,”

Francis Menton did an overview of the status of offshore wind projects that summarizes all the issues confronting offshore wind development.

Renewable Costs

Francis Menton also did an overview of renewable costs.

Another article in the Telegraph also addresses green energy costs.

Weather and Climate

The September edition of Climate Fact Check debunks ten bogus climate claims from last month.  There is a description of the analysis here. 

Electric Vehicles

Electric van maker on verge of bankruptcy

EV owners facing soaring insurance costs

How to Publish a High-Profile Climate Change Research Paper

Regular readers of this blog have noticed that there aren’t many articles in high-profile journals that suggest there are any issues with the narrative that climate change impacts are pervasive and catastrophic. Patrick T. Brown explains that “There is a formula for publishing climate change impacts research in the most prestigious and widely-read scientific journals. Following it brings professional success, but it comes at a cost to society.”  His formula explains part of the reason we see so little skeptical research in those journals.

The biggest topic on this blog is climate change and the proposed greenhouse gas emission reduction solutions.  From what I have seen the pressure to conform to the narrative described here is immense and it should be kept in mind by my readers.  The opinions expressed in this post do not reflect the position of any of my previous employers or any other company I have been associated with, these comments are mine alone.

Background

Patrick T. Brown is a Ph.D. climate scientist. He is a Co-Director of the Climate and Energy Team at The Breakthrough Institute and is an adjunct faculty member (lecturer) in the Energy Policy and Climate Program at Johns Hopkins University. 

This month, he published a lead-author research paper in Nature on changes in extreme wildfire behavior under climate change. This is his third publication in Nature to go along with another in Nature’s climate-focused journal Nature Climate Change. He notes that “because Nature is one of the world’s most prestigious and visible scientific journals, getting published there is highly competitive, and it can significantly advance a researcher’s career.” 

His article is based on this publication experience, as well as through various failures to get research published in these journals.  He explains:

I have learned that there is a formula for success which I enumerate below in a four-item checklist. Unfortunately, the formula is more about shaping your research in specific ways to support pre-approved narratives than it is about generating useful knowledge for society.

Formula for Publishing Climate Changes Impact Research

Before describing his approach to get research published, he describes what is needed for useful scientific research.  He says:

It should prize curiosity, dispassionate objectivity, commitment to uncovering the truth, and practicality. However, scientific research is carried out by people, and people tend to subconsciously prioritize more immediate personal goals tied to meaning, status, and professional advancement. Aligning the personal incentives that researchers face with the production of the most valuable information for society is critical for the public to get what it deserves from the research that they largely fund, but the current reality falls far short of this ideal.

Brown explains that the “publish or perish” mentality in academic research is necessary.  In addition, it also matters “which journals you publish in”.  It turns out a “researcher’s career depends on their work being widely known and perceived as important.”  Because there is so much competition now it has become more important to publish in the highly regarded journals”  “while there has always been a tremendous premium placed on publishing in the most high-profile scientific journals – namely Nature and its rival Science – this has never been more true.”  As a result, “savvy researchers will tailor their studies to maximize their likelihood of being accepted.”  In his article he explains just how he did it.

First, he offers general advice:

My overarching advice for getting climate change impacts research published in a high-profile journal is to make sure that it supports the mainstream narrative that climate change impacts are pervasive and catastrophic, and the primary way to deal with them is not through practical adaptation measures but through policies that reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Specifically, the paper should try to check at least four boxes.

The first box to hit is that it is that “climate change impacts something of value is usually sufficient, and it is not typically necessary to show that the impact is large compared to other relevant influences.”  In order to do this there are tradeoffs:

In my recent Nature paper, we focused on the influence of climate change on extreme wildfire behavior but did not bother to quantify the influence of other obviously relevant factors like changes in human ignitions or the effect of poor forest management. I knew that considering these factors would make for a more realistic and useful analysis, but I also knew that it would muddy the waters and thus make the research more difficult to publish.

This type of framing, where the influence of climate change is unrealistically considered in isolation, is the norm for high-profile research papers. For example, in another recent influential Nature paper, they calculated that the two largest climate change impacts on society are deaths related to extreme heat and damage to agriculture. However, that paper does not mention that climate change is not the dominant driver for either one of these impacts: temperature-related deaths have been declining, and agricultural yields have been increasing for decades despite climate change.

The second box is to avoid discussion of anything that could reduce the impact of climate change:

This brings me to the second component of the formula, which is to ignore or at least downplay near-term practical actions that can negate the impact of climate change. If deaths related to outdoor temperatures are decreasing and agricultural yields are increasing, then it stands to reason that we can overcome some major negative effects of climate change. It is then valuable to study how we have been able to achieve success so that we can facilitate more of it. However, there is a strong taboo against studying or even mentioning successes since they are thought to undermine the motivation for emissions reductions. Identifying and focusing on problems rather than studying the effectiveness of solutions makes for more compelling abstracts that can be turned into headlines, but it is a major reason why high-profile research is not as useful to society as it could be.

His third component is to focus the presentation on alarm:

A third element of a high-profile climate change research paper is to focus on metrics that are not necessarily the most illuminating or relevant but rather are specifically designed to generate impressive numbers. In the case of our paper, we followed the common convention of focusing on changes in the risk of extreme wildfire events rather than simpler and more intuitive metrics like changes in the amount of acres burned. The sacrifice of clarity for the sake of more impressive numbers was probably necessary for it to get into Nature. 

Another related convention, which we also followed in our paper, is to report results corresponding to time periods that are not necessarily relevant to society but, again, get you the large numbers that justify the importance of your research. For example, it is standard practice to report societal climate change impacts associated with how much warming has occurred since the industrial revolution but to ignore or “hold constant” societal changes over that time. This makes little sense from a practical standpoint since societal changes have been much larger than climate changes since the 1800s. Similarly, it is conventional to report projections associated with distant future warming scenarios now thought to be implausible while ignoring potential changes in technology and resilience.

The good news is that Brown has transitioned out of a tenure-track academic position to one that does not require high-impact publications.  He explains a better approach than what is necessary to publish there:

A much more useful analysis for informing adaptation decisions would focus on changes in climate from the recent past that living people have actually experienced to the foreseeable future – the next several decades – while accounting for changes in technology and resilience. In the case of my recent Nature paper, this would mean considering the impact of climate change in conjunction with proposed reforms to forest management practices over the next several decades (research we are conducting now). This more practical kind of analysis is discouraged, however, because looking at changes in impacts over shorter time periods and in the context of other relevant factors reduces the calculated magnitude of the impact of climate change, and thus it appears to weaken the case for greenhouse gas emissions reductions. 

The final key to publication is presentation:

The final and perhaps most insidious element of producing a high-profile scientific research paper has to do with the clean, concise format of the presentation. These papers are required to be short, with only a few graphics, and thus there is little room for discussion of complicating factors or contradictory evidence. Furthermore, such discussions will weaken the argument that the findings deserve the high-profile venue. This incentivizes researchers to assemble and promote only the strongest evidence in favor of the case they are making. The data may be messy and contradictory, but that messiness has to be downplayed and the data shoehorned into a neat compelling story. This encouragement of confirmation bias is, of course, completely contradictory to the spirit of objective truth-seeking that many imagine animates the scientific enterprise.

Brown explains that despite the allowances he had to make to get it his work published there still is value in it:

All this is not to say that I think my recent Nature paper is useless. On the contrary, I do think it advances our understanding of climate change’s role in day-to-day wildfire behavior. It’s just that the process of customizing the research for a high-profile journal caused it to be less useful than it could have been. I am now conducting the version of this research that I believe adds much more practical value for real-world decisions. This entails using more straightforward metrics over more relevant timeframes to quantify the impact of climate change on wildfire behavior in the context of other important influences like changes in human ignition patterns and changes in forest management practices.

Brown explains his motivations for this post and his new plans:

But why did I follow the formula for producing a high-profile scientific research paper if I don’t believe it creates the most useful knowledge for society? I did it because I began this research as a new assistant professor facing pressure to establish myself in a new field and to maximize my prospects of securing respect from my peers, future funding, tenure, and ultimately a successful career. When I had previously attempted to deviate from the formula I outlined here, my papers were promptly rejected out of hand by the editors of high-profile journals without even going to peer review. Thus, I sacrificed value added for society in order to for the research to be compatible with the preferred narratives of the editors.

I have now transitioned out of a tenure-track academic position, and I feel liberated to direct my research toward questions that I think are more useful for society, even if they won’t make for clean stories that are published in high-profile venues. Stepping outside of the academy also removes the reservations I had to call out the perverse incentives facing scientific researchers because I no longer have to worry about the possibility of burning bridges and ruining my chances of ever publishing in a Nature journal again.

Brown concludes:

So what can shift the research landscape towards a more honest and useful treatment of climate change impacts? A good place to start would be for the editors of high-profile scientific journals to widen the scope of what is eligible for their stamp of approval and embrace their ostensible policies that encourage out-of-the-box thinking that challenges conventional wisdom. If they can open the door to research that places the impacts of climate change in the appropriate context, uses the most relevant metrics, gives serious treatment to societal changes in resilience, and is more honest about contradictory evidence, a wider array of valuable research will be published, and the career goals of researchers will be better aligned with the production of the most useful decision support for society.

My Conclusion

It is no wonder that all we hear from greenhouse gas emission reduction advocates is that climate change is an existential threat because the “science” says so.  Peeking around the curtain shows that the “science” has been perverted to reinforce and maintain this narrative.  I applaud Brown for giving insight into the way this is done.

This sums up a primary motivator for my work on this blog. New York’s planned transition to a net zero economy is a solution to a non-existent problem.  I have shown that New York GHG emissions are less than one half of one percent of global emissions and global emissions have been increasing on average by more than one half of one percent per year since 1990 so even if there was a problem our actions cannot make a difference.  Worse, the so-called solution has enormous reliability risks, eye-watering costs, and under evaluated environmental impacts.  There is no redeeming virtues to New York’s net-zero transition plan.

Articles of Note Relevant to the Climate Act

I have a “to-do” list of posts and analyses that I want to do.  Some items on the list are over a month old.  Rather than adding to the list with articles about specific posts that I have read that I think are relevant, this post describes articles that caught my attention.

I have been following the Climate Leadership & Community Protection Act (Climate Act) since it was first proposed and most of this blog articles are related to it. I have devoted a lot of time to the Climate Act because I believe the ambitions for a zero-emissions economy embodied in the Climate Act outstrip available renewable technology such that the net-zero transition will do more harm than good.  .  The opinions expressed in this article do not reflect the position of any of my previous employers or any other company I have been associated with, these comments are mine alone.

Weather and Climate

It seems that every day there is at least one article that claims that a recent extreme weather event is related to climate change caused by humans.  Roger Pielke, Jr was prompted to write a post after the Lahaina, Maui fire disaster link to climate change.  The post Signal and Noise that addresses this issue and includes the following lessons:

Just because the signal of climate change for particular variables cannot (yet) be detected in the context of historical variability does not mean that climate change is not real or important, and in many, if not most cases, a lack of signal is to be expected.

Natural variability is real and significant. It does not mean that climate change is not real or important, but that detecting signals is often difficult even when climate is changing and there is always a risk of erroneously detecting signals where none is present.

He concludes:

The challenges of detection and attribution should tell us that both adaptation and mitigation policies must be built upon a foundation that involves justifications for action that are much broader than climate change alone.

So far, climate advocates have sought to shape perceptions of science to support a climate-change-is-everything agenda. We will have a lot more success if we instead shape policy to align with what science actually says.

My pragmatic take concerns the tradeoff between the resources devoted to climate change mitigation relative to extreme weather adaptation.  I was involved with emergency planning at a nuclear plant so I have experience with this kind of planning.  From what I have seen the emergency planning for Lahaina relative to an identified wildfire threat was criminally negligent.  Blaming climate change absolves blame for the guilty parties.  Trying to mitigate climate change displaces resources that would be better employed to address existing weather problems. 

I wrote the preceding paragraph before I read that Bjorn Lomborg said that politicians were blaming climate change for disasters like the wildfires on Maui to duck “responsibility” for “failures” in addressing them.  It is reassuring that my thoughts agree with him.

One final note about the Maui fires.  Professor Cliff Mass did an excellent job explaining what really happened: a high amplitude atmospheric wave forced by strong winds interacting with the mountains of northwest Maui.  He explains that:

It did not matter whether the grass or light vegetation were wet or dry the days or weeks before:  this extraordinary atmospheric animal would ensure they were dry enough to burn.   Prior dry conditions during the weeks before were immaterial.

With respect to the current state of the climate, Judith Curry, Jim Johnstone, and Mark Jelinek presented a “deep dive into the causes of the unusual weather/climate during 2023.  People are blaming fossil-fueled warming and El Nino, and now the Hunga-Tonga eruption and the change in ship fuels.  But the real story is more complicated.”  They conclude, among other things:

The exceptionally warm global temperature in 2023 is part of a trend of warming since 2015 that is associated primarily with greater absorption of solar radiation in the earth-atmosphere system.  This increase in absorbed solar radiation is driven by a slow decline in springtime snow extent, but primary by a reduction in reflection from the atmosphere driven by reduced cloudiness and to a lesser extent a reduction in atmospheric aerosol.  Any increase in the greenhouse effect from increasing CO2 (which impacts the longwave radiation budget) is lost in the noise.

Climate Emergency

Alex Epstein writes that it would be inappropriate for the Biden Administraiton to declare a Climate Emergency.  He argues that there is no emergency because rising CO2 levels are:

  1. Not dire: Humans are safer from climate than ever.
  2. Not temporary: They will rise for decades.
  3. Not in our control: We emit 1/7 of CO2—and falling.

He makes the point that a government “emergency” declaration is a temporary increase in power that should only be used if a problem meets three criteria:

  • Dire: Unusually deadly
  • Temporary: Of limited duration
  • In our control: Actually solvable by our government

His conclusion is that none of the conditions necessary to declare a climate emergency have been met and goes on to support his arguments in detail.

Climate Act and Electric Vehicles

The Climate Act is a political animal.  While I focus primarily on the environmental and energy-related issues associated with GHG emission reductions, there is a social justice aka “Green New Deal”  component that is a primary interest of many of the Act’s proponents.  The contradiction between advocating for zero GHG emissions that will markedly increase energy prices and risk electric reliability that will impact those that can least afford to deal with the problems the most while at the same time demanding investments in disadvantaged communities has always seemed incongruous to me.  No where is this tradeoff more stark than in the push for electric vehicles.

The CalMatters post Will California’s push on electric vehicles reduce inequality — or deepen it? touched on the issues that concern me.  The post described a CalMatters panel discussion that addressed the question whether California can make sure the electric vehicle revolution isn’t just for the wealthy few. 

The post noted:

While bringing down the cost of EVs is crucial, so is the availability of chargers. And that is something of a chicken-and-egg proposition.

Some on the panel — moderated by CalMatters’ climate reporter Alejandro Lazo — called for building out the charging infrastructure in disadvantaged communities in advance, especially residential chargers.

  • Steve Douglas, vice president of energy and environment for the Alliance for Automotive Innovation: “You can’t ask low-income residents to spend an hour, three hours, six hours away from their families, every week, just to charge their car, while affluent people pull in, plug in and wake up to a full car.”

But others said without enough EV owners in a neighborhood, it’s a recipe for vandalism and disuse. 

  • Ted Lamm, senior research fellow in the climate program at UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy, & the Environment: “When charging is installed in an area where there is no demand for the vehicles and no local desire to use them, it’s this sort of dead infrastructure. It has no use to the local population and local community, and so it is more likely to be subjected to vandalism, or just disuse and disrepair.”

Montana Court Climate Decision

A group of young people in Montana won a landmark lawsuit on August 14, when a judge ruled as unconstitutional the state’s failure to consider climate change when approving fossil fuel projects. While this has been hailed as a turning point by the usual suspects the reality is different.

David Wojick explained why the court decision was not a big deal.  He writes:

Much ado is being made from the supposed win of a kid’s climate lawsuit in Montana. The alarmists call it a victory, the skeptics a tragedy, but it is neither. What was won is almost funny, while the big ask was in fact denied. The climate kids won a little, but lost a lot.

On the win side the judge merely ruled that the Montana law forbidding consideration of GHG emissions in permitting was unconstitutional. How it is considered is up to the agency or legislature. This need not slow down or stop any project.

The Montana constitution says there is a right to a healthful environment. Alarmism says emissions are harmful which all Courts to date have bought, including this one. So given the possible harm, one cannot simply ignore emissions which the law said to do. Hence the decision to kill the law.

Gregory Wrightstone debunked the claim that Montana is a “major emitter of greenhouse gas emissions in the world” and the state’s emissions “have been proven to be a substantial factor” in affecting the climate.   He explains:

Montana’s CO2 emissions are 0.6% of the total U.S. emissions. If Montana had gone to zero emissions of CO2 in 2010, it would only avert 0.0004 degree Fahrenheit of greenhouse warming by 2050 and 0.001 degree by 2100, according to the MAGICC simulator, a tool created by a consortium of climate research institutes including the National Center for Atmospheric Research. These numbers are far below our ability to even measure and certainly not the “substantial factor” as claimed.

New York’s emissions are a greater proportion of total U.S. emissions but I have found they are not high enough to measure and are also not a “substantial factor”.

The Montana Attorney General’s office considered arguing against the plaintiff’s witnesses about the alleged harms of climate change.  They retained Dr. Judith Curry to prepare evidence but ended up not using it.  She explained the inside story, her written expert report, and why she was not asked to testify at the trial.  I found it fascinating and there is plenty of ammunition included to debunk many of the arguments used by proponents of the net-zero transition.    This will be useful when the inevitable lawsuit is filed in New York.

July Climate Alarmism

It seems that every day we are faced with another claim that we are facing an existential threat from climate change and the proof is right in front of us.  So simple, so obvious and so wrong.  I do not have time to do my own analysis so I am going to use the work of others to rebut the fear mongering stories about these events tied to climate change in July.

July was the Hottest Month Ever

The story that July was the hottest month in 120,000 years is the best example of the media glomming on to a story that does not stand up to scrutiny.  A post at Watts Up With That explains:

From CLIMATE DEPOT

Via The Australian: Cliff Mass, professor of Atmospheric Sciences at University of Washington, said the public was being “misinformed on a massive scale”: “It‘s terrible. I think it’s a disaster. There’s a stunning amount of exaggeration and hype of extreme weather and heatwaves, and it’s very counter-productive,” he told The Australian in an interview. “I’m not a contrarian. I‘m pretty mainstream in a very large [academic] department, and I think most of these claims are unfounded and problematic”. …

Professor Mass said the climate was “radically warmer” around 1000 years ago during what’s known as the Medieval Warm Period, when agriculture thrived in parts of now ice-covered Greenland. “If you really go back far enough there were swamps near the North Pole, and the other thing to keep in mind is that we‘re coming out of a cold period, a Little Ice Age from roughly 1600 to 1850”.

#

John Christy, a professor of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, said heatwaves in the first half of the 20th century were at least as intense as those of more recent decades based on consistent, long-term weather stations going back over a century. “I haven‘t seen anything yet this summer that’s an all-time record for these long-term stations, 1936 still holds by far the record for the most number of stations with the hottest-ever temperatures,” he told The Australian, referring to the year of a great heatwave in North America that killed thousands. 

Professor Christy said an explosion of the number of weather stations in the US and around the world had made historical comparisons difficult because some stations only went back a few years; meanwhile, creeping urbanization had subjected existing weather stations to additional heat. “In Houston, for example, in the centre it is now between 6 and 9 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the surrounding countryside,” he explained in an interview with The Australian.

Professor Christy, conceding a slight warming trend over the last 45 years, said July could be the warmest month on record based on global temperatures measured by satellites – “just edging out 1998” – but such measures only went back to 1979.

Phoenix Heat Wave

Phoenix Arizona had a streak of 31 days when the high temperature was 110 degrees or higher.  The article, “Explaining The Heat Wave: Separating Weather From Climate Change,”  claims that recent warming trends in Phoenix, Arizona are due primarily to increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. However, this is false because data show that the high levels of warming, especially at night and as measured at an airport, are primarily due to urbanization over time, with the modest warming of the past hundred-plus years playing a very small part in comparison.  Another rebuttal notes:

Deadly Summer in the Southwest

Kip Hansen addresses the story:  “A Deadly Summer for Hikers in the Southwest” “At least seven heat-related deaths are suspected in state and national parks during a record-breaking heat wave.” 

He explains:

But, it must be climate change, look how hot it was!”  My dear readers, that’s why they named it Death Valley.    The Monthly Report from the U.S. National Weather Service for the Death Valley station shows that every day during July this year, the average daily temperature (Daily Maximum + Daily Minimum divided by 2) was in excess of 100 °F (37.7 °C).  That’s the average!    The daily highs were above 110 °F (43 °C) every single day, above 120 °F (49 °F) twenty of the days. 

Is this unusual?  Is this “extreme”? No, the U.S. National Park Service reports on the general the Weather in Death Valley:  “Death Valley is famous as the hottest place on earth and driest place in North America. The world record highest air temperature of 134°F (57°C) was recorded at Furnace Creek on July 10, 1913. [ emphasis mine – kh ] Summer temperatures often top 120°F (49°C) in the shade with overnight lows dipping into the 90s°F (mid-30s°C.) Average rainfall is less than 2 inches (5 cm), a fraction of what most deserts receive. Occasional thunderstorms, especially in late summer, can cause flash floods.”  All of those conditions, except the record high temperature of 1913, occurred this summer in Death Valley, just as the National Park Service advised visitors to expect.  There was not any extreme weather, it was usual weather for Death Valley.

Climate Fact Check

If you want short rebuttal summaries to these and other false climate change stories for July check out this fact check report.  It covers the following stories: monthly average temperature is the hottest, the UN proclamation that we are in an era of global boiling, the hottest day in 125,000 years, Atlantic current to collapse by 2025, record for hot days in Phoenix, hottest day in Death Valley, emissions causing hot oceans, hottest seawater ever, and more. 

Heat Health Impacts

The rationale for alarm for the excessive heat stories is the argument that heat results in more deaths than any other weather-related event.  Five years ago I explained why there are analyses that find “most of the temperature-related mortality burden was attributable to the contribution of cold”.  Studies that show that extreme heat results in more deaths than any other weather-related event use a data base that only includes direct deaths.  An epidemiological study that does include indirect deaths concludes most deaths are associated with moderate cold weather.  Roger Pielke Jr. reports how this information can be presented to support the alarmist version:

The Lancet was caught red-handed publishing a figure that, to be as fair as possible, lent itself to misinterpretation (it was first called to my attention by Bjorn Lomborg and is in a paper by Masselot et al. 2023).

Take a look and decide for yourself. Here is the original figure comparing mortality from cold (blue) and heat (orange) in Europe from 2000-2019.

And here is how it looks when the data is graphed using a consistent scale.

Another Examples of Propaganda

We have all seen the graphs that show inexorable global warming.  However this article describes how “alarmist scientists have scared the bejesus out of people by turning a very small temperature change into a monster.”   Jim Steele writes:

Dr. Lindzen graphed the average seasonal anomalies for each weather station in the BEST temperature data base from 1900 to the present. A station’s anomaly is defined as any deviation from its 30-year mean. The results are not very scary. On any given day about half the weather stations experience warm anomalies while half experience cooling anomalies.

Most anomalies cluster between ± 4°C (+/- 7.2°F) causing each data point to merge into the thick black band of the graph. Still, larger anomalies are not uncommon, so the y-axis of the above graph scales between ± 12°C (+/- 21.6°F). The yellow dots represent the average for those anomalies on any given day. We see a small trend that is relatively tiny compared to the variation in actual temperatures. Not very scary either.

So, the showtime graphs isolate the average anomalies from reality, as done in the bottom graph. Now the scale on the y-axis only spans from -0.8°C (-1.4°F) to 1.2°C (2.2°F), turning a small 1°C (1.8°F) rise over 120 years into the illusion of a monster increase. That allows click-bait media, alarmists scientists and politicians to claim that climate change could lead to mass extinctions.

Reporting Issues Influence Results

Roger Pielke Jr. is an expert on the topic of global disaster accounting.  He recently posted an article that makes two relevant points to this post:

Below is the updated time series of global hydrological, climatological and meteorological disasters in the EM-DAT database, along with the linear trend, over the period 2000 to 2022.

You can see that there is no upwards trend. This lack of trend has not been reported by anyone in the legacy media (and I would be happy to be corrected). However, the completely false notion that global weather and climate disasters have increased and will continue to increase is commonly reported in the legacy media, buoyed by the promotion of false information by organizations that include the United Nations. In 2020 the U.N. claimed falsely of a “staggering rise in climate-related disasters over the last twenty years.”

The second point he makes is careful examination of the disaster data clearly shows that “the increase in disasters in its database to 2000 is due to better reporting, and not changes in underlying counts of actual disasters.”  He concludes: “Regardless what happens with trends in disaster counts, it is absolutely essential to remember that if you are looking for a signal of changes in climate — always look directly at weather and climate data, not data on economic or human impacts.”

Conclusion

There is a constant barrage of doom and gloom articles connecting any extreme weather event or disaster to the existential threat of climate change.  In my opinion they all are more propaganda than unbiased reporting.  Every time I have checked a weather event attributed to climate change claim on my own, I have found that the issue is more complex and less threatening than portrayed.  Don’t get scared by these stories!

Recommended Videos

A real short post.  I have been following the Climate Leadership & Community Protection Act (Climate Act) since it was first proposed, submitted comments on the Climate Act implementation plan, and have written over 300 articles about New York’s net-zero transition.  My boilerplate introductory material notes that I have devoted a lot of time to the Climate Act because I believe the ambitions for a zero-emissions economy embodied in the Climate Act outstrip available renewable technology such that the net-zero transition will do more harm than good.  The recommended videos in this post support my position.

The opinions expressed in this post do not reflect the position of any of my previous employers or any other company I have been associated with, these comments are mine alone.

Climate Policies Hurt the Environment

There is very little career upside for anyone in a regulatory agency to speak up about the environmental impacts of wind and solar development.  Consequently, there is not much apparent support for my belief that the Climate Act net-zero transition will do more harm than good.  This post links to a video interview with John Baker, retired Assistant Chief with California Fish and Wildlife Department who describes double standards he experienced while enforcing California’s environmental laws:

“In the name of green energy, we’re sacrificing wildlife species. Because of the power mandates, we’re unable to enforce the take of that. I don’t think they have thought what that cost is to us as Californians and to the environment as a whole.”

Baker describes the pragmatic tradeoffs that have been ignored in the rush for net-zero transition. 

Climate Fearmongering

Paul Homewood introduces a video with Neil Oliver: Weather maps are among the most blatant forms of fearmongering deployed so far.  He notes that British weather maps on TV now use daily temperature maps with frightening colors.  He calls out the fearmongers by describing historical European heat waves and goes on to call attention to the hypocrisy of the loudest voices.  Finally he notes that the 99.7% of scientists meme is a “scam”.

Watts Up With That

You can view this video and more under the topic of Environmentalism on the ClimateTV page

Climate Predictions

Life is a Random Draw website notes that:

As they say in the investment business, past performance is no guarantee of future profits. Just because the climatistas consistently got it woefully wrong  in the past does not mean that this time around they aren’t right. They could be right this time. There may be a wolf for real this time.

But here’s the thing. They got it wrong in the past for a particular set of reasons. Those same reasons continue to apply in the present case too. Therefore, past performance guarantees the present performance to be precisely the same.

Here are climate predictions that turned out wrong.

For fun here is a video of mesocyclones that look like alien spacecraft from the same website.

Syracuse Post-Standard Climate Change Opinions

On July 2, 2023 the Syracuse Post Standard published my letter to the editor Expert’s view of solar energy’s potential in NY is far too sunny that responded to an earlier commentary  Five Reasons New Yorkers Should Embrace a Solar Energy Future by Richard Perez, Ph.D.  I appreciated the fact that they published my rebuttal but I did find it interesting that the following week that there were three guest opinions that also deserve rebuttals.  Given that there are limitations on how often I can get letters published I will have to settle for commentary here.

New York’s response to climate change is the Climate Leadership & Community Protection Act (Climate Act).  I have been following the Climate Act since it was first proposed, submitted comments on the Climate Act implementation plan, and have written over 300 articles about New York’s net-zero transition.  I have devoted a lot of time to the Climate Act because I believe the ambitions for a zero-emissions economy embodied in the Climate Act outstrip available renewable technology such that the net-zero transition will do more harm than good.  The opinions expressed in this post do not reflect the position of any of my previous employers or any other company I have been associated with, these comments are mine alone.

Climate Act Background

The Climate Act established a New York “Net Zero” target (85% reduction and 15% offset of emissions) by 2050 and an interim 2030 target of a 40% reduction by 2030. The Climate Action Council is responsible for preparing the Scoping Plan that outlines how to “achieve the State’s bold clean energy and climate agenda.”  In brief, that plan is to electrify everything possible and power the electric grid with zero-emissions generating resources by 2040.  The Integration Analysis prepared by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) and its consultants quantifies the impact of the electrification strategies.  That material was used to write a Draft Scoping Plan.  After a year-long review the Scoping Plan recommendations were finalized at the end of 2022.  In 2023 the Scoping Plan recommendations are supposed to be implemented through regulation and legislation. 

The three commentaries described here all claim that more action is needed because of the climate crisis.  All three overestimate the impacts and underestimate the challenges.  All three authors have vested interests in their narratives that I believe go beyond environmental concerns.  I describe the commentaries below.

Climate Change is Here

The first page of the editorial section of the Sunday Post-Standard led with a guest opinion, Climate change is here in CNY – We can do something about it.  The author was Katelyn M. Kriesel who is a socially responsible financial advisor, a town councilor for the town of Manlius, chair of Sustainable Manlius, and candidate for Congress.  She opined that the wildfire smoke was an indicator of climate change:

The Canadian wildfires are not normal. More than 11 million acres have burned or are on fire, decimating forests, killing wildlife and threatening homes. This is due to record drought, shifting weather patterns, and a changing climate.

What’s to stop it from happening here? If you think the smoke was bad, wait until we have our own wildfires.

Her arguments that the weather is getting worse around here rely entirely on anecdotal evidence that does not stand up to examination.  For example, she ignores similar poor air quality events from wildfires during the Little Ice Age 200 years ago when she claims that the wildfire smoke is due to a changing climate.

She goes on to provide an oversimplified explanation of the greenhouse effect and claims that ignoring the emissions will lead to catastrophe: “As our planet gets warmer, weather patterns change, causing extreme temperatures, droughts and floods. As this continues, climate change worsens.”  I have no doubt that she believes that “The only solution is to decrease carbon and methane emissions” and that the personal actions she advocates are necessary. 

I also have no doubt that no one could convince her otherwise.  Not even Dr. Bjorn Lomborg who was named one of TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world.  His latest book is entitled “False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet”.  In it he refutes all the points made in this commentary.  I recommended his book three years ago and reiterate that recommendation now.

EV Infrastructure

The other article featured on the front page of the Sunday Post-Standard was titled NY’s economic future requires robust, reliable EV infrastructure.  Mark Lichtenstein described his belief that electric vehicle (EV) infrastructure is necessary: “If we delay, we risk falling short during this critical time to strengthen our economy, attract a talented workforce, improve our environment, and lead New York’s advance into a clean energy future.”  He is executive operating and chief sustainability officer at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, in Syracuse.

He gave EV overview information and argued that recent growth in the EV vehicle registrations portends future success.  Notably lacking is that the numbers he presented lacked context.  For example, “New York is leading the way — as one of the top five states for EV registrations — with just over 139,100 EVs as of this April” sounds great but not mentioned is that this is less than one half a percent of total registrations.

The point of his commentary was that New York must do more to encourage the transition.  He listed “key pieces to the puzzle” that need to be addressed:

  1. Will our electric generation also be climate-friendly?
  2. Can our electric distribution infrastructure handle the increase in demand?
  3. How and where will we charge these new EVs?
  4. Can we improve the speed and convenience of chargers? and
  5. Will we effectively address any associated environmental concerns related to the materials needed to construct EVs, as well as the safe disposal of components?

He argued that these issues need to be resolved:

The demand for this enhanced effort is immediate, as Central New York is currently poised for a significant transformation. It must happen now. Consider that Micron is bringing nearly 50,000 jobs and a host of supplier businesses to the region over the next two decades. This requires an infrastructure that can support a massive new amount of electrified passenger vehicles, as well as the medium- and heavy-duty trucks expected to make up an increasingly large share of the EV fleet.

If we delay, we risk falling short during this critical time to strengthen our economy, attract a talented workforce, improve our environment, and lead New York’s advance into a clean energy future.

Personally, I don’t think that the EV transition will strengthen our local economy because the significant costs necessary to support it will divert money away from our economy.  No one is claiming that the vehicles, batteries, and charging infrastructure will be constructed here so all that money will go elsewhere.  I also doubt that EV infrastructure will be a significant factor for attracting a talented workforce.

Affordable Housing and Climate Crises

There was a third related commentary: Affordable housing & climate crises present opportunity for CNY to lead on page 4.  The author of this commentary was Dara Kovel who is CEO of Beacon Communities.  That Boston based organization claims to be an industry leader in affordable and mixed-income housing development.

She argued that: “The twin challenges of expanding access to affordable housing and combating climate change present a unique opportunity that New York can’t afford to let slip away.”  The commentary was little more than an advertisement for the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority’s (NYSERDA) Carbon Neutral Portfolio Support program that is “working with real estate owners, developers and manufacturers who are willing to take the lead in designing, building and operating low-carbon and carbon-neutral buildings through its Commercial New Construction Program”. 

She argues that this renovation should include existing public housing developments and describes the state program.  She explains:

My company, Beacon Communities, an industry leader in affordable and mixed-income housing development in the Northeast and MidAtlantic, is proud to be the first developer in New York to participate in this program.

Supported by up to $250,000 in state funding, we’re working with Syracuse-based Northeast Green Building Consulting and Ithaca’s Taitem Engineering to review our entire 2.5 million-square-foot New York housing portfolio and design a blueprint to make all existing buildings as clean and resilient as possible while meeting clean energy requirements in new projects.

She concludes:

This is an exciting and critical time for the state and specifically for Central New York. We’re at a tipping point when it comes to both housing needs and climate change, and we should use every tool at our disposal to build the new, green communities of the future. We can’t afford to waste this moment — or this opportunity — to make positive change.

Discussion

I think all three commentaries deserve rebuttals but they don’t deserve much time.  As I noted Kriesel’s characterization of the climate change issue was simplistic and shallow.  Her belief that individuals can make a difference is rebutted by Lomborg.  Lichtenstein claims that readers of the paper should be motivated to support EV infrastructure because it will support the Micron semi-conductor plant proposal.  I find that a stretch.  Moreover, he did not really address the costs to implement the infrastructure required.  Kovel argued that expanding access to affordable housing is important and gloms on to New York’s Climate Act building electrification efforts as a rationale.

Cynic that I am, I note that all three authors have biases in their backgrounds that I think drive their opinions.  Kriesel is a politician and is catering to a particular constituency when she repeats the climate crisis narrative.  The only thing missing was a promise to pass legislation if elected.  Mark Lichtenstein is a professional environmentalist.  His entire career has been devoted to sustainability.  In addition to his role as the executive operating and chief sustainability officer at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry he is “the founder and principal of Embrace Impatience Associates, and the principal of Lichtenstein Consulting, providing training and consultation on board development, circular economy, communications, conflict management, environmental finance, facilitation, leadership, negotiation, recycling, resiliency, and sustainability.”  Kovel is CEO of Beacon Communities a real-estate developer that is using state money to re-develop its holdings under the guise of disadvantaged community support.  It is entirely appropriate to upgrade affordable housing but I worry that the administrative costs of a Boston-based developer will reduce the amount of money spent on the housing needs.

Conclusion

I was encouraged that I got the opportunity to present my explanation why I believe the ambitions for solar technology will do more harm than good to the readers of the Syracuse Post-Standard.  On the other hand, it was frustrating to read three flawed commentaries the following week.  Because there are restrictions on frequency of guest opinions I could not comment on those flaws.  All three have inherent flaws.  Moreover, the biased opinions of a naïve politician, a professional environmentalist whose career depends on a crisis, and a rent-seeking crony capitalist are evident with a bit of research but I doubt that many readers will take the time.

Expert’s view of solar energy’s potential in NY is far too sunny

I have not published my commentary.  It was based on the post Five Reasons New Yorkers Should Not Embrace a Solar Energy Future and is included here for your information.

The June 12, 2023, commentary “Five reasons New Yorkers should embrace a solar energy future” by Richard Perez, Ph.D., claims to “clarify common misunderstandings about solar energy and demonstrate its potential to provide an abundant, reliable, affordable and environmentally friendly energy future for New York.” I disagree with his reasons.

Perez claim the Earth receives more solar energy than the total annual energy consumption of all economies, combined, in a week but ignores that availability when and where needed is a critical requirement. In New York, the winter solar resource is poor because the days are short, the irradiance is low because the sun is low in the sky, and clouds and snow-covered panels contribute to low solar resource availability.

“Solar technology is improving” is another claimed reason but solar energy in New York is limited because of the latitude and weather so there are limits to the value of technological improvements. If it is so good, then why does deployment rely on direct subsidies?

While solar energy may not have environmental impacts in New York, that does not mean that there are no impacts. Instead. they are moved elsewhere, likely where environmental constraints and social justice concerns are not as strict. The rare earth metals necessary for solar, wind and battery technology require massive amount of mining and the disposal of all the solar panels are significant unconsidered environmental issues.

Perez dismisses land use issues because “a 100% renewable PV/wind future for New York would require less than 1% of the state’s total area.” There is no mandate that solar developments meet the Department of Agriculture and Markets prime farmland protection goal. Projects approved to date have converted 21% of the prime farmland within project areas to unusable land. There is no requirement for utility-scale solar projects to use tracking solar panels, so more panels are required than originally estimated.

Perez claims that “utility-scale solar electricity has become the least expensive form of electricity generation” but that only refers power capacity (MW). When you consider the relative amount of energy that can be produced annually, the storage needed to provide energy when the sun isn’t shining, the shorter life expectancy of PV panels, transmission support service requirements and the need for a new dispatchable, emissions-free resource, then the cost of solar energy provided when and where needed is much higher than conventional sources of electricity.

The suggestion that a system depending on solar energy will be more dependable than the existing system would be laughable if it were not so dangerous. The reliability of the existing electric system has evolved over decades using dispatchable resources with inherent qualities that support the transmission of electric energy. The net-zero electric system will depend upon wind and solar resources hoping they will be available when needed, additional resources to support transmission requirements, and a new resource that is not commercially available. This is a recipe for disaster because if the resource adequacy planning does not correctly estimate the worst-case period of abnormally low wind and solar energy availability then the energy needed to keep the lights on and homes heated will not be available when needed most. People will freeze to death in the dark.

Wildfire Smoke in New York

I have been an air pollution meteorologist for over 40 years and the recent wildfire smoke event is unprecedented in my career.  Not surprisingly the usual suspects have claimed that there is a link to climate change.  This article addresses whether this event is linked to climate change.

I have a page of other examples of weather affected by climate change claims that fail upon close examination.  I have been following the rationale that uses examples like this for the Climate Leadership & Community Protection Act (Climate Act) since it was first proposed and have written over 300 articles about New York’s net-zero transition. The opinions expressed in this post do not reflect the position of any of my previous employers or any other company I have been associated with, these comments are mine alone.

June Air Pollution Episode

On June 7, 2023 the smoke and air quality impacts of wildfires in Quebec and Ontario were very high in New York State.  I live in the Central New York region and I can attest that you could smell the smoke and taking a deep breath made me want to cough.  The following information from the New York Department of Environmental Conservation summarize the air quality index observations.

Satellite imagery shows the location of the fires.  Note this is for the day after the data listed above.

Climate Change Links

Per usual whenever there is unusual weather there are claims that climate change was a factor:

The smoke was coming from Canada, where more than four hundred wildfires are currently burning. We do not know what caused many of them—a dropped cigarette, lightning, a downed electrical wire—but they are raging through the boreal forests of British Columbia, Alberta, and now Quebec. Wildfires are nothing new in these woodlands, but these are much earlier and larger than usual. And, like so many recent fires, they are directly linked to weeks of anomalous extreme heat. Climate change has created longer, hotter summers; worsened droughts; and fuelled vast bark-beetle infestations that have killed billions of trees.

Consider the claims: wildfires are earlier and larger than usual and directly linked to weeks of extreme heat.  In order to associate these with the climate change narrative then the claim that these are unusual compared to the past.  Tony Heller writing at Real Climate Science does a great job combing through historical accounts of weather events.  In this case he described Dark Days In New England that included the following:

05 Jun 1903, 1 – New-York Tribune at Newspapers.com

He found a list of similar historic “dark days” that affected New York and New England earlier than this event in May 1706, May 1780, and June 1903.  Other similar events occurred in 1716, 1732, 1814, 1819, 1836, 1881, and 1894. 

A published paper provides detail about the 1780 dark day in New England.

When considering the claim that climate change’s higher temperatures contribute to these wildfires that have obviously been happening in the Northeastern US for centuries is that in the 1700’s temperatures were much colder.  The Little Ice Age lasted from the fourteenth century until the mid 1800’s. 

Wildfires are a complex phenomenon and the media does not tell the whole story.  Roger Pielke, Jr. explains discusses aspects of wildfires that he sees as missing in the public discussion.  He makes the following points in his article.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has not detected or attributed fire occurrence or area burned to human-caused climate change but does see a potential effect on fire weather in the USA: 

The IPCC expresses “medium confidence” (about 50-50) that in some regions there are positive trends in conditions of “fire weather”: “There is medium confidence that weather conditions that promote wildfires (fire weather) have become more probable in southern Europe, northern Eurasia, the USA, and Australia over the last century”

Globally, emissions from wildfires has decreased globally over recent decades, as well as in many regions.  He explains:

Canada — the focus of extensive fire activity this week polluting the air in the eastern U.S. and elsewhere — has not seen an increase in fire activity in recent decades, as you can see in the figure below, showing official data.

He concludes:

What you should take from it is the following:

  • Wildfire globally has decreased in recent decades;
  • Still, some regions have seen increases;
  • Neither Canada nor Quebec have not seen such increases this century;
  • Fire incidence across Canada is lower today than in centuries past.

Conclusion

Just because there is an extreme weather-related event that is unprecedented in one’s experience that does not mean that there is any evidence of climate change.  In this example, as with all the similar events I have researched, there is little to no suggestion that climate change could possibly be related to the event.  There were similar days of heavy smoke in the Northeastern US during the Little Ice Age which directly contradicts the narrative that the current warm period is any kind of a factor in these wild fires.