Tales from the real front lines of climate wars

A friend sent me a video expressing doubts about all those big climate models. So why do I put climate on my list of three top global issues, above all else? In reply, I have come clean on how I came to be such a climate extremist NOW: ============================================================================ We all need to remember what we aren't sure of yet, and probe hard on our uncertainties, when the issue is one of life or death. But with climate, I have already done that, meeting the full demands of my conscience. Because I believe in the power of positive visualization (more for me than for most others!), I seriously would prefer to worry less about it, if I could justify that. But I cannot. The questions you cite about the big climate models are more than familiar to me. In actuality, in 2009, I started work in Senate Staff working for a Republican Senator on the Environment and Public Works Committee. I worked with the staff group under Senator Inhofe, who was THE leader of climate skepticism in the US. I attended all the hearings, and certainly listened carefully to all sides. I will never forget the day when I brought back to my cubby the full testimony of Prof. Happer of Princeton, who argued that CO2 only blocks SOME frequencies of light, and that failure to account for different frequency bands and absorption invalidated the big climate models. All of us serious professionals had studied the current IPCC reports on climate, but I remembered nothing form them to invalidate Happer's argument. For a day or two, I felt, "Hey, maybe I CAN join more completely with my friends on the committee!" I certainly enjoyed being a serious, honest outlier, as I have always been for my whole life in science. This was one of my most intense once-in-a-lifetime experiences. (Though it is weird how MANY unlikely once in a lifetime experiences I have had.) But my conscience then ordered me to consider what other evidence I might have. I remembered a computing conference at Argonne (held in Chicago) where I got to present a new mathematical algorithm, which I had developed, applicable to any differentiable big mathematical model. (I posted my ccapter later at http://www.werbos.com/AD2004.pdf.) At that conference, I was surprised to learn that my algorithm actually HAD been used by one and only one of the big climate models. Many people had told me that all the big climate models were basically just "airball models," never calibrated to hard core time-series data. This guy explained how he used my method (which he did not give proper credit for!!) to calibrate HIS climate model to real time-series. The same guy (Prof. Carl Wunsch at MIT) also appeared in a propaganda video a family member had sent me, attacking all climate stuff, in which this same guy Carl Wunsch appeared, attacking Gore. And so, to check my facts in an honest way, I called Wunsch out of the blue by telephone. (It is amazing how often phone calls from the US Senate do get answered.) I asked him whether Happer's story was true. I was VERY deeply surprised (quite a day!!) when Wunsch got very emotional. I forget when I checked his web page, which also made part of the story clear. The folks who mace the tape basically snookered him, deliberately quoting him out of context, deliberately giving a grossly wrong impression. YES, he did have serious gripes about other climate models, and YES he was a bit of a curmudgeon. (Why else would he give more credit to folks closer to him than to a nonmember of the club developing an algorithm?) But NO, he did not mkae the equally biased assefrtions in the video or inHapper's testimony. Happer made strong statements about what is IN the climate models. "Sorry," said Wunsch, "but MY model certainly knows what a frequency is! And..." But even after all that, my position was: "OK, I believe the IPCC story is the best we have for now. But it only projects 5% loss in the 2100 GNP, with 75% probability, in the business as usual case. That's real, and market theory justifies a MODEST well-calibrated carbon fee, but NOT the Obama bill. INSTEAD, we should give priority to the security of fuel for cars and trucks, a much bigger national security priority anyway." I even drafted a bill to that effect, got it through Senate General Counsel, and brought it representing Specter to the Senate Majority Leader Reid. Reid had made many promises to Specter of what he would do if Specter changed parties, but Reid was a liar. The bill ( based on an upgrade of a bill from Inhofe and of Bush's EISA law) is posted at werbos.com/oil.htm. When the heartland institute started to schedule speakers saying "climate is only a 5% issue," and after I attended some great meetings at the Marshall Institute (and even spoke at one of their meetings, albeit of space and defense technology, another Specter are)... well... whatever. BUT THEN CAME ANOTHER LIFE CHANGING EXPERIENCE. IN 2009, I was on detail from my home institution, the NSF. NSF invited a crowd of us, late in 2009, to a large public talk back in Ballston (where I still live). The head of the Geosciences Directorate of NSF introduced Peter Ward as the nation's number one real frontline expert on the subject of mass extinctions of life on earth. There were a LOT of technical details I will spare you (until/unless you ask), but most of it was about field study techniques and results and ancient history. But he did show curves of past concentrations of CO2 by ... millennium... across the great extinctions. At the end of his talk, he showed us the current numbers, and the similarity. "It is my gut feeling that if we get 1000ppm, it will be a simple rerun. We all die." I knew the energy economics VERY well, enough to believe we ARE on a path to 1000ppm now. In many talks after that (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvteE6smrF0), I recalled that day. "The SMALLER shock for me was what he said. The BIGGER shock was the way the rest of the audience reacted. Some like it, some hated it. Was I the ONLY one who seriously honestly wanted to find out whether we are all going to die or not? Is he right or is he not? What is the truth? What will decide the outcome, how soon?" I spent a lot of time probing these questions, updating my understanding every year. And now, I am not relying much at all on those models your URL talks about. We have a lot of real, current time series data on Arctic and Antarctic, and new information on past extinctions in sources like Ward and Kirschvink and like Hazen (who probably would get respect from Inhofe!). As of THIS WEEK, I have gotten new information, which adds a few questions which DEMAND NEW RESEARCH, but which make me more worried than ever before, on a closer time schedule: http://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2021/08/new-information-on-what-we-know-about.html This isn't about left or right. It's about survival. Didn't Ayn Rand say something about survival? (I met a lot of "right" lobbyists who reminded me a lot of the Taggarts, especially in aerospace.) Folks who talked about reducing regulation, even as they jiggered FERC to try to impose MORE state monopoly and reduced competition! But Reid lied to Pickens as much as he lied to us. Best of luck,

New information on what we know about how soon and how climate change might kill us all

This actually has a happy ending, MAYBE, if you read through to the end and take action different from what all the current climate activists are talking about. This is what I sent today to some folks I hope will be willing and able to do something: ============================================================ MOST URGENT: https://www.coasttocoastam.com/guest/ward-peter-6323/ The "Save the World" podcast just now, on ocean currents and the threat of human extinction by the worst types of climate risk, was a great dialogue, informative to all of us, even those of us who have worked hard to track these issues for decades with real science. NOTE THE URL above. I call it "urgent", not because it requires urgent action directly in the policy world. Rather... it is about an important radio broadcast COMING SOON. Peter told us that this is a national broadcast going out to millions of people -- with a heavy right-wing tilt, but that is one of the important audiences which needs to understand what is going on. They may also be a good venue for understanding how space technology could play a crucial role in averting these risks. Metta will probably be posting today's discussion soon on her general web site, https://youtube.com/c/ToSaveTheWorld Two main take away points hit ME hardest today: (1) Many people naturally assume that the scenario of death by H2S must be further off in time than sea level rise and whatnot. (Ward has a new book, published in German, on that issue.) "After all, if the PT extinction happened over millions of years, shouldn't we expect it to take a long time now?" No. Not really. At werbos.com/Atacama.pdf, I even have a slide on how it can be done overnight in an aquarium!!! Microbes can proliferate VERY quickly, once the conditions in the water cross a tipping point. (I think of it as a hypersurface in state space.) We all agreed that knowledge in all aspects of these threats are far less than what they could and should be, with even a moderate NSF-level focused effort on the right questions (though it would help to have Navy or NOAA data on more dimensions of what is happening, BOTH near Arctic AND Antarctic). In point 5 of my proposed action strategy, http://www.werbos.com/climate_extinction_risk_and_solutions.htm, I include AQUARIUM LEVEL research to better understand exactly what the tipping point is. What are the conditions of regular chemistry (fertilization) and oxygen level (and maybe T and P, maybe) which separate conditions where the dangerous archaea go nuts and when they don't? And how fast do they go nuts when they do? We also agreed -- Peter can contact Lee Kump, one of the other crucial leading scientists on climate extinction, whose work is essential to all the issues we discussed today. We hope that he AND Peter can discuss these issues for Metta in a future podcast. (2) Stratified ocean is NOT ONLY about Antarctic/Humbolt/Pacific, what I have focused on the most. If the Gulf Stream conks out, it implies BOTH a freezing of Western Europe ("fimbulwinter") but ALSO stratified ocean in that region. Peter Ward, Lee Kump and I have all talked a lot about the "Great Dying", the Permian-Triassic mass extinction, based on H2S and radiation enough to kill every mammal on earth, based on H2S produced by archaea in the deep Pacific Ocean. But there was ANOTHER mass extinction, much smaller, based on H2S from the Arctic and North Atlantic, described in ANOTHER chapter in Ward's older book, Under a Green Sky. That was far less fatal. Large enough to wipe out all the LARGE mammals, but still leaving the mice and rats alone. (Or at least the aardvarks.) Such a small event, bad enough only to wipe out creatures like humans and cows, all over the earth. But since that is coming much sooner than what I have been talking about, maybe we should pay more attention. Most startling to me is how little we know about the TIMELINE for the cutting out of the Gulf Stream, to lead (immediately?) to fimbulwinter and stratified ocean in the local region. I was glad that Metta's guests expert in Arctic waters know that the changes in Gulf Stream due to fresh water pouring out more or less from Greenland is NOT the only (or even main ) effect we need to worry about, even though it was the dominant effect in the past. But when exactly will surface water temperatures, at the prevailing level of saltiness, cross the line to where heating does not increase the density of sea water any more? (That line is where the Gulf Stream conks out, a sharp tipping point coming soon.) HOW SOON? Is it decades or months? Or is it months for part of the year and just a few years for the whole year? We really need to know the exact timing, and control factors. ======================= =========================== By the way, we did discuss timing of what happens when H2S poison starts outgassing. I was very relieved for a few days when I first started reading this literature years ago, and learned that H2S outgassing from the oceans comparable to that of the worst mass extinctions in the past would still take a few thousand years to reach the level deemed as poisonous to humans. But as Peter Ward noted in the discussion today, people like Lee Kump worked out these aspects in some detail many years ago. The FIRST effect is a massive production of H2S byproducts in the atmosphere, some rising to the stratosphere, causing massive acid rain and radiation, within just a few decades, starting immediately. It is no coincidence that books depicting the Great Dying typically show drawings of barren muddy landscapes, trees mainly burned out and washed away. Phenomena like blindness and reproductive behavior disorders usually occur at H2S levels far less than outright death. Coming first to Western Europe? Best of luck. We really need it. Current COP26 work will do nothing to stop this, and the ocean economy mitigation efforts will either make this happen sooner (to EVERYONE) or have little effect; we do not yet know. See the R&D proposed under POINT 4 of http://www.werbos.com/climate_extinction_risk_and_solutions.htm. But better market design and other types of new technology could prevent these problems at no cost or even a profit, if only the right information could get to the right place? (See points 1 to 3 of http://www.werbos.com/climate_extinction_risk_and_solutions.htm, the kind of areas NSF actually hired me to work on from 1988 to 2015!). ============================================ Just for this blog post: I still believe that threats from bad syndromes on the emerging Internet of Things are even bigger and more imminent, but as I think over the Gulf Stream issue, I do start to wonder.Both might even come to a head in my own lifetime, old as I am!! Still, this was a break from new work crucial to the internet side, which requires science much harder than climate. After all, we had convection currents and aquaria in eighth grade science class! It amazes me how little our species seems to have digested that!! But getting the internet straight requires intelligent systems and quantum math beyond what they could teach me even in the Harvard PhD program in Applied math in the 1970s!!