Debunking Ridley and Peiser’s WSJ Climate Guide
Been in a serious car accident? Well, thank you for your contribution to increasing the GDP by needing a new automobile, requiring extensive health care, and creating a job for the person replacing you at work while you go through rehabilitation.
Sound absurd? It should. But when people claim climate change will be beneficial, that is basically the way they’re counting. Rising sea level creates the need to build replacement buildings at higher elevations, forests dying around you create the need to rebuild homes destroyed by wildfire, and the growing aridity in the southwestern US creates the need for new desalination plants.
Will there be life as climate change goes on? Yes, at least for most humans, though not for many species that will be struggling to survive outside the climatic conditions in which they evolved. But for us, the conditions will be increasingly different than those on which we have built our civilization, some so different large numbers of people will be forced to relocate or emigrate or will need to live only in air-conditioned buildings for a significant portion of the year.
What Matt Ridley and Benny Peiser present in their November 27th WSJ op-ed, “Your Complete Guide to the Climate Debate” were interpretations of the science that vary from misleading to simply inconsistent with observations and scientific understanding. By cherry-picking, they made arguments at odds with the international scientific assessments that have been unanimously accepted over the last 25 years by the world’s 190+ participating nations as the best understanding available.
For starters, the historically rapid decade-to-decade warming that has been going on since the 1960s clearly contradicts Ridley and Peiser’s false claim that recent warming has been very slow. Observations prove them wrong; the World Meteorological Organization has announced that 2011–2015 is the hottest five-year period on record, and 2015 is virtually guaranteed to be the hottest year on record as a very large El Nino again boosts human-induced warming. In addition, six studies published just this year by leading scientific experts have debunked the supposed “pause” or “hiatus” in global warming. This comes as no surprise to those of us that knew from the outset that climate change critics created the pause by deceptively starting their trend line in a year made exceptionally warm due to a very large El Niño in the late 1990s — that large, short-term variation in the global average temperature is now being regularly exceeded in years without the added warming of an El Niño.
Then there’s extreme weather. Rather than being unchanging, the UN reports that the incidence of extreme weather has doubled in the last decade, causing over 600,000 deaths and impacting hundreds of millions. Ridley and Peiser mention that it has been warmer in the past, as though natural warming means humans can’t also contribute to warming. In fact, past warming is a major reason to be especially concerned about human-induced climate change. The changes in Earth’s past climate were not just random occurrences, but a response to particular factors such as volcanic eruptions or changes in the timing and pattern of incoming solar radiation affecting the planet’s energy balance. That the climate was much warmer in the past when the global CO2 concentration was higher has also made clear that the climate responds to changes in atmospheric composition. So, far from being a reason for relief, Earth’s history of climate change is a compelling reason to limit how much we alter the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Continuing, Ridley and Peiser falsely conclude that the Antarctic ice sheet is growing based on observations that the volume of ice may be increasing, but the set of satellite observations of changes in the mass of ice present has been found that to be decreasing. These two different results can be seen as consistent if one allows for a decrease in the density of the ice, a situation that is very evident for the Greenland Ice Sheet as surface meltwater carves holes through the ice and the incidence of icequakes increases.
Ridley and Peiser also suggest that the climate “sensitivity” is decreasing; that is, the amount of warming we can expect from ongoing carbon emissions is decreasing. Scientists have used a wide range of approaches to answer the question of how much warming will result from a doubling of the carbon dioxide concentration, a level that we are on an emissions path to reach during the second half of the 21st century. The estimates of global warming once the oceans have a chance to warm tend to cluster around roughly 3ºC (~5.5ºF), with the range being about +/-50% around this central value. While 3ºC warming may not seem like much, that much warming would bring us about halfway to the global average temperature prevailing when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and palm trees grew near the poles. And recall that 3ºC cooling would bring us about halfway to the temperature experienced during the last glacial maximum when ice sheets more than a mile deep covered much of North America. Temperature variations of this size may seem modest when they occur in only a region for only a short time, but when the whole world responds in this way for years to centuries and beyond will be catastrophic for the environment and society.
Much of Ridley and Peiser’s op-ed goes beyond the science. Their selective reliance on the economic analyses of Richard Tol goes against a broad, international consensus that comes to very different conclusions. To suggest that a 3.5ºC change in global average temperature (so over half way back to the climate enjoyed by the dinosaurs) would have no significant effect is simply absurd.
Drawing from reconstructions since the peak of the Last Glacial Maximum 20,000 years ago, sea level rose 20 meters (about 65 feet) for each one degree C increase in global average temperature. If one only looks ahead a couple of decades, maybe sea level rise can be managed in most locations. But with three out of four of the world’s major cities built on coastlines just above sea level, Tol must be counting the jobs and benefits resulting from building levees and actually re-locating populations rather than using those resources for improving overall well-being.
Ridley and Peiser make similarly misleading statements in discussing renewable energy and the prospective Paris agreement. Contrary to Ridley and Peiser, the US Energy Information Administration released figures showing that the levelized cost of solar is now in many regions on a par with gas and coal (not to mention the anecdotal point that I am, in essence, earning a guaranteed 9% after-tax return on my investment in a prepaid lease for rooftop solar).
Similarly, in many areas wind power is already competing on price with fossil fuels. One result of Paris is that Bill Gates will be leading a charge, along with 19 nations (including the US), to double renewable investment. This is sure to make renewables even more competitive, and is not even counting the very large and very expensive environmental and societal costs and disruptions that emissions of CO2 are causing.
We can at least agree that hundreds of millions throughout the world need to have more abundant access to energy. Right now, those in developing nations with access to at least some of the suggested fossil-fueled energy are ending up being exposed to air pollution (both indoor and outdoor) that is resulting in millions of deaths through direct health impacts and a much larger impact due to chronic illness, developmental impacts of children, and more. There is no reason for those in developing nations to go through these and the many health effects that were earlier (and to some extent still are being) experienced in the industrial nations.
Developing nations are insisting on the much better outcome that renewables can provide. For example, China is set to install an amount of clean energy equal to the entire US’s electricity system over the next few years and India has pledged to quadruple its clean energy output. Clearly those actually in charge of bringing power to the poor simply do not want the future that Ridley and Peiser suggest be imposed on them — they want more energy, but not at the expense of their people’s health and our shared environment.
Regarding the prospective agreements that may come out of Paris, Ridley and Peiser are far too pessimistic. The fact is that leaders are meeting in Paris to chart a new long-term global course for the world’s energy system. For many reasons, the world’s peoples want and envision a future that greatly increases reliance on clean energy technologies replacing reliance on dirty fuels. The bottom-up approach that has countries bringing their best offers opens up opportunities for nations to design their transitions in the most creative and economical ways, taking advantage of the rapid advances of technology to over time plan for greater and greater actions.
These efforts will build support for the sorts of public-private partnerships being spearheaded by Bill Gates, and send a clear signal to the free market that clean energy is the smart investment for our planet’s future, and for one’s bottom line whether in the public or private sector. Fossil fuels have only been attractive because their use has relied on using our atmosphere and environment as a free dumping place — simply not counting their full costs and impacts. Human aspirations are insisting on better approaches, just the type of clean energy systems that have been emerging across the global economy.
We don’t know how this will all play out, but following Ridley and Peiser’s advice and aiming for the deteriorating world that will result from continued reliance on fossil fuels will literally be like following the lemmings over the cliff.
