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,