I largely agree with your writing on this subject. However, you don't include other greenhouse gases like methane and nitrous oxide. Although nitrous oxide is becoming an increasing concern and the subject of discussions, it's methane which is the really salient gas. Unfortunately, the IPCC decided to use weighted GWP's of methane, because it was seen as a more temporary and remediable problem, breaking down in the atmosphere within 12 to 15 years- and it's never clear which GWP they are using for which models. This was a huge mistake in terms of modelling, because even relatively cautious sources acknowledge that as a greenhouse gas it's 80 times as potent as CO2- and current impacts should be king, when projecting forwards.
And here we come to the hub of the matter. If we look back to 1840, then methane levels were just under 800 ppb. Today, they have more than doubled. To clarify my point on weighting, the IPCC assesses GWP for methane over 20, 100 and 500 year periods. The problem is that the IPCC doesn't explicitly state what value of GWP it uses in RCP 8.5 for methane, only that it includes very high levels of methane. That's another problem. The IPCC treats RCP 8.5 as the business as usual model, when 8.5 is only useful as an academic reference point for measuring effects in models. There is literally no way any future real world scenario could fulfil the conditions set out in RCP 8.5.
I look at more rational estimates of temperature, like the Nordhaus DICE model, although some of the scenarios like Rocky Road can be useful for assessing worst case scenarios given changing geopolitical conditions. The key variable is innovation- investments in innovation can have a huge outsized effect compared to investments in the likes of solar and wind, although both the Copenhagen Consensus and Project Drawdown (representing a political economic range of affiliations) both rate wind as a sound investment. It tends to peak in efficiency at around 30% of total energy generation, beyond which energy storage and infrastructure costs increasingly make it a bad investment. Here is the UK, our government had to increase the strike price tendering offers for future wind price contracts by a whopping 70%. We're at 40%, currently- although the UK is uniquely suited for wind energy generation.
My key point would be that the only parts of the world which have remained largely flat over the past 170 years for agricultural land usage are Europe, Russia and India (the latter partly for religious reasons, one presumes, given the greater availability of grazing land compared to cropland). I can't see Africa, Asia, Russia or South and Central America giving up their meat, can you?
Is inclusion of other greenhouse gases needed? As you pointed out CH4 has 80X the greenhouse effect as CO2. And the 800 ppb increase since pre-industrial times is equivalent to a 64 ppm increase in CO2 added on to the 140 ppm increase, When working on this I would see "adjusted CO2 levels" that accounted for these other gases. But they tracked the CO2 rise very well and so the story told by CO2 by itself would be the same as adjusted CO2 so that would just add complexity for no benefit.
From reading this post I get the impression that you have looking into this looking for confirmation of a pre-existing belief. Like you reference the IPCC, This is a political document and deals with the very messy world of science and politics. This is the last place you would go to understand the science.
I looked up the DICE model. It is an economic model, it does not give temperature forecasts, As I think I noted in my posts, the temperature trend since the mid-1970's is really very linear. The effect of greenhouse gases on temperature is roughly logarithmic and greenhouse gas emissions should rise with world GDP, whose growth is exponential. The log of an exponential trend is linear, so you would expect a linear trend and that is what 50 years of experience has shown. If you extrapolate the 50-year trend another 75 years to 2100 you get 2.5 degrees of warming from pre-industrial, which is about what it being predicted. This is what the 1967 model predicted and every model since then given an assumed exponential CO2 equivalent rise based in the previously industrialized countries.
But most of the world even in the 1980's when GW became a thing was not industrialized. They were going to industrialize and their exponential growth in GW gas production would add onto our own exponential increase to deflect the previous linear temperature response upward to 3 or 4 degrees of warming. This was a real fear in the 1990's and 2000's when political climate denialism became a think. I wasn't worried 20 years ago as I saw global warming as a fall-back solution to our American Crisis if Peak Oil did not do the trick. I had written in 2004 about how a green energy leading sector could play a role in the solution whose arguments I recapitulate (and update) here:
My default pre-existing belief was originally that of climate alarmism. For at least a couple of decades I trusted the better legacy media to deliver me an accurate picture on climate, without recognising that an exaggerated position on climate was very much in their interest. As I encountered the more rational sceptical sources, those who accept global warming but see no climate apocalypse in our immediate future, I began to go to the scientific material in far greater depth.
It's funny. You describe exactly my method for extrapolating out from the DICE model, although admittedly I cheated with an AI for the actual calculations. I also thought the estimates for economic growth were rather conservative, especially in terms of technological growth. In particular, I foresee great potential in the coming AI job apocalypse. Contrary to expectations, most of the job losses seem to be occurring at the white collar level, especially for cognitive repetitive tasks or in roles like white collar distribution management. Unlike 'learn to code' this cohort will have a larger percentage of people in the cognitive top 10%. From a policy perspective it would be greatly in both our countries interests to promote masters degrees for specific subjects related to engineering and entrepreneurship, perhaps even going as far as partial public funding- masters in certain degrees represent the highest ROI by far most people are ever going to get from higher education and swift reallocation of highly cognitive labour is likely to pay dividends in the long run.
I completely agree with observation on science and politics mixing at the IPCC, but don't understand the point you're trying to make. The UN is a deeply ideological entity, in favour of greatly increased state power (with much of said state power ceded to the supranational layer) at expense of the market, and this is doubly true of the IPCC which tends to attract Leftist ideologues (at least at the political layer). Of course, there are exceptions. The IMF and the World Bank are both economically liberal, but in a sea of political ideology which yearns for greater state intervention and power.
So my point would be that if there was a political bias, it would tend towards alarmism. To be fair, I do think there is good point to be made that at the scientific layer there will a necessary caution and conservatism. There are probably many climate-related phenomenon which are currently classified as low confidence, which will probably turn out to be moderately true. But generally, I would classify the UN as anti-market, but not necessarily anti-capitalist. Insofar as it is business friendly, it is friendly towards those interests which align with their political agenda, most notably through ESG, which can best be described as a Trojan horse aiming to subvert finance towards the developmental approach to alleviating poverty.
Development played a very small role in the raising of one billion people out of absolute poverty between 2000 and 2012. If you've read William Easterly's White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good then you'll know that the largesse of the central planning approach was an abject failure. What did work was technological innovation and the iterative processes of the market.
I agree with you on the Hubert Peak. Much of my obsession with climate from my teens onwards was initially based on the belief in the exhaustion of finite resources. It's only in the past five to ten years that I became familiar with 'The Bet', or more recently Marian Tupy's book on Superabundance.
'This is the last place you would go to understand the science.'- Where would you suggest? I already read Nature, Science Direct and go direct to academic papers (although admittedly I skim, and generally only focus on the abstract/introduction the conclusion, the graphs and the maths).
I'm sure you've heard of the Great Filter? Sudden temperature change is not a great filter, much as there are many superficially alarming sources which would argue the contrary. What tends to happen with filtering events is that a number of highly unusual events usually converge to create a cumulative and compounding wave. A few years back there was a great example from Carnegie Science. They experimented on coral found in an inland lagoon. They used hydrogen peroxide to negate pH changes from ocean acidification. The coral recovered- it could handle temperature rise, but was greatly weakened by the combination of temperature rise and pH change at the same time. This later proved true in the real world. The Great Barrier Reef has recovered. Only a relatively small volume of the coral was resistant to temperature rise, ocean acidification and other pollution all at the same time, but enough was to repopulate in a relatively small space of time. Interestingly, it appears that temperature rise might eventually lead to more coral globally, a rise in abundance- very early coral formations have been found in cooler waters, whilst existing coral adapts to changing environment.
I particularly loathe the disingenuous sites which deal with species loss, particularly those that pay particular attention to large mammal species. It's only because they convinced me that the world was going to become hell because of climate change. They substitute climate effects for human effects. Human's have been a profound effect ever since Homo Erectus, and this trend has only accelerated since the beginning of the agricultural age. With population growth, wilderness habitats have been eliminated completely, or in many instances have been pushed to the point of being precarious and precious rarities. Here's a great source from Our World in Data on the subject:
Of course, this species loss is deplorable. We should be furthering efforts to sample DNA and store it in gene banks. At the same time, attempts to prevent human flourishing and the rise out of absolute poverty as a secondary effect of protecting either climate or environment at scale are morally repugnant, at worst a crime against humanity. A part of me, the dark, deeply suspicious part, suspects that at least a part of plant-based agenda is an attempt to reclaim land currently used for farming in the developing world for forests and carbon sequestration.
I'm perfectly willing to acknowledge that in my correction from a completely distorted picture on climate, I might have strayed a bit a little the other way, but I've also become a lot more aware of the economic side of the equation, which tends to argue against more drastic action on climate- so it's not the science that I actually dispute, but actions which might cause humanitarian harms. Still, it might create a subconscious bias in my arguments, which doesn't necessarily extend to my actual understanding of the science. During the pandemic I was one of a very small percentage of people who managed to adapt and change position and new data and science emerged, never joining either of the highly polarised groups.
A while back I ran across a 2022 World Food Programme Report. I was specifically interested in 'food insecurity', the worst kind of euphemism. As per my expectations, war accounted for 80% of all food insecurity globally during 2022. The remainder was equally split between food insecurity caused by economic shock and food insecurity caused by extreme weather, potentially linked to climate change. My point would be this- the source has since been rewritten, deemphasising the threat of economic shock and elevating the risks caused to humans from climate change.
My problems with this are twofold. I don't think it's healthy from a utilitarian perspective to downplay risks as part of a policy agenda. Second, exaggerating the risks and impacts of climate change is only going to backfire over the long-run. It was a criticism made by the scientists who wrote the 2018 interim report- whether deliberate or through scientific ignorance the misreading of the main graph and shifting an irrevocable harm threshold from 2053 to 2030, is going to cause many to disbelieve climate science when doom and gloom predictions don't materialise in 2030. Of course, the scientists castigating letter to the main prestige press media went largely unnoticed and unremarked.
I largely agree with your writing on this subject. However, you don't include other greenhouse gases like methane and nitrous oxide. Although nitrous oxide is becoming an increasing concern and the subject of discussions, it's methane which is the really salient gas. Unfortunately, the IPCC decided to use weighted GWP's of methane, because it was seen as a more temporary and remediable problem, breaking down in the atmosphere within 12 to 15 years- and it's never clear which GWP they are using for which models. This was a huge mistake in terms of modelling, because even relatively cautious sources acknowledge that as a greenhouse gas it's 80 times as potent as CO2- and current impacts should be king, when projecting forwards.
And here we come to the hub of the matter. If we look back to 1840, then methane levels were just under 800 ppb. Today, they have more than doubled. To clarify my point on weighting, the IPCC assesses GWP for methane over 20, 100 and 500 year periods. The problem is that the IPCC doesn't explicitly state what value of GWP it uses in RCP 8.5 for methane, only that it includes very high levels of methane. That's another problem. The IPCC treats RCP 8.5 as the business as usual model, when 8.5 is only useful as an academic reference point for measuring effects in models. There is literally no way any future real world scenario could fulfil the conditions set out in RCP 8.5.
I look at more rational estimates of temperature, like the Nordhaus DICE model, although some of the scenarios like Rocky Road can be useful for assessing worst case scenarios given changing geopolitical conditions. The key variable is innovation- investments in innovation can have a huge outsized effect compared to investments in the likes of solar and wind, although both the Copenhagen Consensus and Project Drawdown (representing a political economic range of affiliations) both rate wind as a sound investment. It tends to peak in efficiency at around 30% of total energy generation, beyond which energy storage and infrastructure costs increasingly make it a bad investment. Here is the UK, our government had to increase the strike price tendering offers for future wind price contracts by a whopping 70%. We're at 40%, currently- although the UK is uniquely suited for wind energy generation.
My key point would be that the only parts of the world which have remained largely flat over the past 170 years for agricultural land usage are Europe, Russia and India (the latter partly for religious reasons, one presumes, given the greater availability of grazing land compared to cropland). I can't see Africa, Asia, Russia or South and Central America giving up their meat, can you?
Is inclusion of other greenhouse gases needed? As you pointed out CH4 has 80X the greenhouse effect as CO2. And the 800 ppb increase since pre-industrial times is equivalent to a 64 ppm increase in CO2 added on to the 140 ppm increase, When working on this I would see "adjusted CO2 levels" that accounted for these other gases. But they tracked the CO2 rise very well and so the story told by CO2 by itself would be the same as adjusted CO2 so that would just add complexity for no benefit.
From reading this post I get the impression that you have looking into this looking for confirmation of a pre-existing belief. Like you reference the IPCC, This is a political document and deals with the very messy world of science and politics. This is the last place you would go to understand the science.
I looked up the DICE model. It is an economic model, it does not give temperature forecasts, As I think I noted in my posts, the temperature trend since the mid-1970's is really very linear. The effect of greenhouse gases on temperature is roughly logarithmic and greenhouse gas emissions should rise with world GDP, whose growth is exponential. The log of an exponential trend is linear, so you would expect a linear trend and that is what 50 years of experience has shown. If you extrapolate the 50-year trend another 75 years to 2100 you get 2.5 degrees of warming from pre-industrial, which is about what it being predicted. This is what the 1967 model predicted and every model since then given an assumed exponential CO2 equivalent rise based in the previously industrialized countries.
But most of the world even in the 1980's when GW became a thing was not industrialized. They were going to industrialize and their exponential growth in GW gas production would add onto our own exponential increase to deflect the previous linear temperature response upward to 3 or 4 degrees of warming. This was a real fear in the 1990's and 2000's when political climate denialism became a think. I wasn't worried 20 years ago as I saw global warming as a fall-back solution to our American Crisis if Peak Oil did not do the trick. I had written in 2004 about how a green energy leading sector could play a role in the solution whose arguments I recapitulate (and update) here:
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/how-going-to-green-energy-can-lead
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/some-thoughts-on-industrial-policy
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/a-different-way-to-look-at-solar
My default pre-existing belief was originally that of climate alarmism. For at least a couple of decades I trusted the better legacy media to deliver me an accurate picture on climate, without recognising that an exaggerated position on climate was very much in their interest. As I encountered the more rational sceptical sources, those who accept global warming but see no climate apocalypse in our immediate future, I began to go to the scientific material in far greater depth.
It's funny. You describe exactly my method for extrapolating out from the DICE model, although admittedly I cheated with an AI for the actual calculations. I also thought the estimates for economic growth were rather conservative, especially in terms of technological growth. In particular, I foresee great potential in the coming AI job apocalypse. Contrary to expectations, most of the job losses seem to be occurring at the white collar level, especially for cognitive repetitive tasks or in roles like white collar distribution management. Unlike 'learn to code' this cohort will have a larger percentage of people in the cognitive top 10%. From a policy perspective it would be greatly in both our countries interests to promote masters degrees for specific subjects related to engineering and entrepreneurship, perhaps even going as far as partial public funding- masters in certain degrees represent the highest ROI by far most people are ever going to get from higher education and swift reallocation of highly cognitive labour is likely to pay dividends in the long run.
I completely agree with observation on science and politics mixing at the IPCC, but don't understand the point you're trying to make. The UN is a deeply ideological entity, in favour of greatly increased state power (with much of said state power ceded to the supranational layer) at expense of the market, and this is doubly true of the IPCC which tends to attract Leftist ideologues (at least at the political layer). Of course, there are exceptions. The IMF and the World Bank are both economically liberal, but in a sea of political ideology which yearns for greater state intervention and power.
So my point would be that if there was a political bias, it would tend towards alarmism. To be fair, I do think there is good point to be made that at the scientific layer there will a necessary caution and conservatism. There are probably many climate-related phenomenon which are currently classified as low confidence, which will probably turn out to be moderately true. But generally, I would classify the UN as anti-market, but not necessarily anti-capitalist. Insofar as it is business friendly, it is friendly towards those interests which align with their political agenda, most notably through ESG, which can best be described as a Trojan horse aiming to subvert finance towards the developmental approach to alleviating poverty.
Development played a very small role in the raising of one billion people out of absolute poverty between 2000 and 2012. If you've read William Easterly's White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good then you'll know that the largesse of the central planning approach was an abject failure. What did work was technological innovation and the iterative processes of the market.
I agree with you on the Hubert Peak. Much of my obsession with climate from my teens onwards was initially based on the belief in the exhaustion of finite resources. It's only in the past five to ten years that I became familiar with 'The Bet', or more recently Marian Tupy's book on Superabundance.
'This is the last place you would go to understand the science.'- Where would you suggest? I already read Nature, Science Direct and go direct to academic papers (although admittedly I skim, and generally only focus on the abstract/introduction the conclusion, the graphs and the maths).
I'm sure you've heard of the Great Filter? Sudden temperature change is not a great filter, much as there are many superficially alarming sources which would argue the contrary. What tends to happen with filtering events is that a number of highly unusual events usually converge to create a cumulative and compounding wave. A few years back there was a great example from Carnegie Science. They experimented on coral found in an inland lagoon. They used hydrogen peroxide to negate pH changes from ocean acidification. The coral recovered- it could handle temperature rise, but was greatly weakened by the combination of temperature rise and pH change at the same time. This later proved true in the real world. The Great Barrier Reef has recovered. Only a relatively small volume of the coral was resistant to temperature rise, ocean acidification and other pollution all at the same time, but enough was to repopulate in a relatively small space of time. Interestingly, it appears that temperature rise might eventually lead to more coral globally, a rise in abundance- very early coral formations have been found in cooler waters, whilst existing coral adapts to changing environment.
I particularly loathe the disingenuous sites which deal with species loss, particularly those that pay particular attention to large mammal species. It's only because they convinced me that the world was going to become hell because of climate change. They substitute climate effects for human effects. Human's have been a profound effect ever since Homo Erectus, and this trend has only accelerated since the beginning of the agricultural age. With population growth, wilderness habitats have been eliminated completely, or in many instances have been pushed to the point of being precarious and precious rarities. Here's a great source from Our World in Data on the subject:
https://ourworldindata.org/large-mammals-extinction
Of course, this species loss is deplorable. We should be furthering efforts to sample DNA and store it in gene banks. At the same time, attempts to prevent human flourishing and the rise out of absolute poverty as a secondary effect of protecting either climate or environment at scale are morally repugnant, at worst a crime against humanity. A part of me, the dark, deeply suspicious part, suspects that at least a part of plant-based agenda is an attempt to reclaim land currently used for farming in the developing world for forests and carbon sequestration.
I'm perfectly willing to acknowledge that in my correction from a completely distorted picture on climate, I might have strayed a bit a little the other way, but I've also become a lot more aware of the economic side of the equation, which tends to argue against more drastic action on climate- so it's not the science that I actually dispute, but actions which might cause humanitarian harms. Still, it might create a subconscious bias in my arguments, which doesn't necessarily extend to my actual understanding of the science. During the pandemic I was one of a very small percentage of people who managed to adapt and change position and new data and science emerged, never joining either of the highly polarised groups.
A while back I ran across a 2022 World Food Programme Report. I was specifically interested in 'food insecurity', the worst kind of euphemism. As per my expectations, war accounted for 80% of all food insecurity globally during 2022. The remainder was equally split between food insecurity caused by economic shock and food insecurity caused by extreme weather, potentially linked to climate change. My point would be this- the source has since been rewritten, deemphasising the threat of economic shock and elevating the risks caused to humans from climate change.
My problems with this are twofold. I don't think it's healthy from a utilitarian perspective to downplay risks as part of a policy agenda. Second, exaggerating the risks and impacts of climate change is only going to backfire over the long-run. It was a criticism made by the scientists who wrote the 2018 interim report- whether deliberate or through scientific ignorance the misreading of the main graph and shifting an irrevocable harm threshold from 2053 to 2030, is going to cause many to disbelieve climate science when doom and gloom predictions don't materialise in 2030. Of course, the scientists castigating letter to the main prestige press media went largely unnoticed and unremarked.