Fact checking the fact checkers on my Prager U video Posted by curryja by Judith Curry

All things considered, planet earth is doing fine. Humans are doing better than any other time in history. Over the last hundred years, when temperatures have warmed by about two degrees Fahrenheit

Fact checking the fact checkers on my Prager U video

Posted on May 26, 2024 by curryja | 11 Comments

by Judith Curry

Last January, I visited Prager U in California.  I recorded several videos.  Science.feedback.org has done a fact check on my 5 minute video, which is the topic of this post

Here is information about Prager U.

Here are links to my two videos.

The Good News About Climate Change 

Stories About Us: Climate Scientists Can’t Intimidate Me

JC’s Prager U text

Let’s start with the good news.

All things considered, planet earth is doing fine.  Humans are doing better than at any other time in history.  Over the last hundred years, when temperatures have warmed by about two degrees Fahrenheit:

• Global population has increased by 6 billion people

• Global poverty has substantially decreased

• And the number of people killed from weather disasters has decreased by 97% on a per capita basis.

We are obviously not facing an existential crisis.

Anyone who tells you that we are, is not paying attention to the historical data.  Instead, they are concerned about what “might” happen in the future, based on predictions from inadequate climate models, driven by unrealistic assumptions.

I offer this positive diagnosis after a lifetime of study on the issue. Until recently, I was a professor of climate science and Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

But it’s not all good news.

The biggest problem with climate change is not climate change, per se, it’s how we’re dealing with it.

We’re attempting to control the uncontrollable, at great cost, by urgently eliminating fossil fuels. We’ve failed to properly place the risks from climate change in context of other challenges the world is facing.

Climate change has become a convenient scapegoat.  As a result, we’re neglecting the real causes of these problems.

There are countless examples, but let me give you just one.

Lake Chad in Africa is shrinking. Nigeria’s president Muhammadu Buhari blames it on you-know-what.  “Climate change,” he pronounced, “is largely responsible for the drying up of Lake Chad.”

But it’s not.

Yes, the initial water level decline was caused by long droughts in the 1970s and 1980s. But the lake has remained virtually empty over the past two decades, even while rainfall has recovered. During this time, rivers flowing into the lake from Cameroon, Chad, and Nigeria have been diverted by government agencies to irrigate inefficient rice farms.

In short, climate change has little to do with the declining water level of Lake Chad. Rather, bad human decisions do. Climate Change is just a convenient excuse, hiding poor management and governance.

Blaming every major weather disaster on man-made global warming defies common sense, as well as the historical data record.

For the past 50 years, the global climate has been fairly benign.  In the US, the worst heat waves, droughts and hurricane landfalls  occurred in the 1930s – much worse than anything we’ve experienced so far in the 21^st century.

Population growth, where and how people live, and how governments manage resources are much more likely to create conditions for a disaster than the climate itself. We’ve always had hurricanes, droughts and floods, and we always will.

Maybe you think I’m being too cavalier about the dangers we face. Isn’t it true that 97% of scientists agree that humans are causing dangerous climate change?

Well, here’s what all climate scientists actually agree on:

• The average global surface temperature has increased over the last 150 years.

• Humans are adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels.

• And carbon dioxide emissions have a warming effect on the planet.

However, climate scientists disagree about:

• How much warming is associated with our emissions

• Whether this warming is larger than natural climate variability.

• And how much the climate will change in the future.

There’s a lot that we still don’t understand about how the climate works.  Ocean circulation patterns and variations in clouds have a large impact. But climate models do a poor job of predicting these.  Variations in the sun and volcanic eruptions also have a substantial impact, but these are simply unpredictable.

The fact is, we can’t predict the future climate. It’s simply not possible. And everybody should acknowledge that. And every scientist does.

While humans do influence the climate, we can’t control the climate. To think we can is the height of hubris, the Greek word for overconfidence.

What we can do is adapt to whatever mother nature throws our way. Human beings have a long history of being very good at that. We can build sea walls, we can better manage our water resources, and implement better disaster warning and management protocols.

These are things we can control.

If we focus on that, there’s every reason to be optimistic about our future.

I’m Judith Curry for Prager University.

Science.feedback.org

Here is the link to the ‘factcheck’

The ‘fact checkers’ include Ella Tilbert, Georg Feulner, Ian Richardson, Kerry Emanuel.

“Verdict:  MISLEADING”

“Claim:  Climate scientists disagree about how much warming is associated with our emissions and whether this warming is larger than natural climate variability from the sun and volcanic eruptions”

“Key takeaway:  Scientific evidence shows that modern global warming is primarily driven by increasing CO2 emissions from human activities. There is no evidence that solar variations or volcanic activity are substantial drivers of recent climate change.”

Their objections are focused on two of my statements:

“However, climate scientists disagree about . . .  whether this warming is larger than natural climate variability.”

“But climate models do a poor job of predicting these.  Variations in the sun and volcanic eruptions also have a substantial impact, but these are simply unpredictable.”

I could cite hundreds of papers published in refereed science journals that question whether the recent warming is larger than natural climate variability (many of these papers have been discussed on this blog).  The IPCC chooses to ignore these papers.  This does mean that disagreement among scientists does not exist.  In fact, the IPCC AR4 and AR5 conclusions about attribution are framed in terms of “most of the warming” and “more than half of the global average surface temperature increase”.  So >50%.  Imagining 49% is not farfetched.  The IPCC AR4 talks about “unresolved internal variability” to justify using the relatively weak “most”.

With regards to the potential impact of future volcanic eruptions, the IPCC AR6 WG1 has this to say (Cross-Chapter Box 4.1):

“A low likelihood high impact outcome would be several large eruptions that would greatly alter the 21st century climate trajectory compared to SSP-based ESM projections.”

Plenty to disagree about on these topics (they didn’t mention natural internal variability, which IMO is the biggest deal).  But that is the point of my statement: SCIENTISTS DISAGREE (for details, see Chapter 8 of my book Climate Uncertainty and Risk).

JC comments

The fact checkers ignore the main points of my statement, and focus on trying to emphasize the consensus that natural climate variability doesn’t matter.

Since the fact checkers essentially ignored the rest of my statement, presumably they have no objections to these statements:

“All things considered, planet earth is doing fine.  Humans are doing better than at any other time in history.”

“We are obviously not facing an existential crisis.”

“The biggest problem with climate change is not climate change, per se, it’s how we’re dealing with it.”

“We’re attempting to control the uncontrollable, at great cost, by urgently eliminating fossil fuels. We’ve failed to properly place the risks from climate change in context of other challenges the world is facing.”

“Blaming every major weather disaster on man-made global warming defies common sense, as well as the historical data record.”

“Population growth, where and how people live, and how governments manage resources are much more likely to create conditions for a disaster than the climate itself. We’ve always had hurricanes, droughts and floods, and we always will.”

“However, climate scientists disagree about:

• How much warming is associated with our emissions

• And how much the climate will change in the future.”

“The fact is, we can’t predict the future climate. It’s simply not possible. And everybody should acknowledge that. And every scientist does. “

“While humans do influence the climate, we can’t control the climate. To think we can is the height of hubris, the Greek word for overconfidence.”

“What we can do is adapt to whatever mother nature throws our way. Human beings have a long history of being very good at that. We can build sea walls, we can better manage our water resources, and implement better disaster warning and management protocols.”

Seems they can’t refute these statements.

I’ll take that as a ‘win.’