Is Global Warming a Complete Hoax?

In the story the wolf eventually came...

In our last thrilling episode, I suggested we could take back California, expand our donor base, and regain a foothold on campus -- if we were to offer some sensible global warming solutions. Compared to the political cost of not acting, my proposed solutions are a screaming bargain even if the global warming alarms are a complete hoax.

As expected, I got pushback in the comments. For example, Dave wrote:

Given that the establishment have proven themselves inveterate liars, and there was proven fraud in promulgating AGW, and the prediction of these fraudsters changed 180deg, why on God's green Earth should anybody believe a word they say about anything?

Why indeed?

I could say -- indeed, I did say -- that we should offer a reasonable solution to global warming for purely political expediency. The amount of propaganda pushing the global warming narrative dwarfs the budget of any conceivable political campaign by a few orders of magnitude. To match the propaganda effort, we would have to buy all the legacy television networks, news magazines, major newspapers, and satellite and cable TV providers. We would have to build a few hundred new universities, including some high dollar universities of Ivy League quality. We would have to either defund PBS or somehow take it over. Every red state would need to add global warming deprogramming sessions to the requirements for public teacher recertification.

And even if we did somehow do all these things, it would still take generations to offset the effects of already consumed propaganda -- by which time we might start seeing some noticeable effects of global warming.

Oh yes, that's your other problem: global warming is not a complete hoax.

• Yes, the Left has made all sorts of exaggerated dire predictions which have been proven wrong.

• Yes, the Left has announced arbitrary points of no return for CO2 levels.

• Yes, the media have used global warming as their favorite fnord for the past few decades.

• And yes, the Left is using global warming as an excuse for looting the treasury and taking away all sorts of liberties.

To say that the Left has been Crying Wolf is a grave understatement. It's more like the Left has recorded an album of William Shatner screaming "Wooooooolf!!" with background music by L. Ron Hubbard, and has used that album to replace the national anthem at all public events and school openings.

Prior to the invention of AutoTune, this was the worst album ever recorded

But recall again how "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" ended. The wolf came.

In our case the question of how soon the wolf will come is hard to answer. It may come after economical fusion reactors are being produced, in which case a wait and see attitude would be quite appropriate. Indeed, waiting until emergency measures are needed is better than going into premature panic mode as the Democrats currently advocate.

But I prefer avoiding emergency measures altogether.

And since saving our country from insane woketards is insufficient motivation for giving up on failed talking points, I guess I'll have to go into the science a bit.

The Conspiracy that Wasn't

Some of the Republican talking points are sound. Others have a silliness coefficient in the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez range. For example, whereas the Left is milking the global warming issue for all it's worth, they did not invent the issue. Global warming worries are not a communist plot. Svante Arrhenius sounded the first alarm back in 1896. The Left didn't jump on board the issue until the 1980s. Jimmy Carter's energy policy was pretty much the same as Trump's: tap into our immense supply of dirty oil shale in order to achieve energy independence. The main difference is that Carter wanted to spend billions of tax dollars to develop the technology. Trump simply needed to allow the oil companies to act, as the private sector had finally figured out how to profitably get energy from oil shale in the interim.

Does anyone here seriously think the midwits who run the Democratic Party are capable of pulling off an 80 year stealth campaign before showing their hand? Are they truly patient, devious, and intelligent enough to fool the hard science community into believing a nonsense theory and then finally begin to reap the political rewards 80 years later? If so, go take a long walk. Listen to some mellowtational music on SomaFM. Breathe. Think.

• Even the Fabians weren't that patient. Yes, they were clever enough to sponsor promising lefties early in their careers, and they took a step-by-step approach towards creating the modern welfare state. But their actions were visible from the start, and clearly pushing things leftward.

• Rudi Dutschke's Long March Through the Institutions has been a long term project, but it entailed putting conscious leftists in position of institutional power from the beginning. That is, there were small pay-offs right from the start, not 80 years of absolutely nothing political.

Repeated warnings from the scientific community can be found well before Al Gore or other lefty politicians decided to milk the issue. Watch Planet of the Humans. It includes clips from a 1950s documentary warning about global warming. Or read this paper by John von Neumann from 1955. (The discussion of global warming begins on the eighth page.) If you think von Neumann some kind of communist conspirator, you need to hit the books. John von Neumann was so anti communist that at one point he called for preemptive nuclear war to blast the Soviets before they could catch up to us.

So why did global warming go from the occasional warning from the hard science departments to becoming an international obsession? Was it because Al Gore made it his signature issue? Or was it because the scientific community started warning harder as more of the world industrialized?

I cannot give a definitive answer, but I can say I was reading about the issue years before I ever heard of Al Gore. And I was not alone. The science fiction community was talking about the issue in the 1970s. Watch the movie Soylent Green. It came out in 1973, and starred the not-very-communist Charlton Heston. The dystopian future presented included global warming.

Part of what drove interest in global warming among science fiction geeks was the Mariner space probes. Back in the 1940s and 50s, science fiction writers -- including those who did their homework -- wrote stories taking place on a swampy Venus. Such speculation was not unreasonable. Even though Venus is closer to the sun than Earth, Venus receives roughly the same amount of solar energy as Earth thanks to its bright cloud cover . Then the Mariner space probes showed us that Venus is hotter than Hell, thanks to the greenhouse effect. This was a major bummer for those yearning for a nearby planet to colonize. And it got all space exploration geeks thinking about global warming.

True, musing about another ice age was also going on in the science fiction community during the 70s. Check out this quote from one of Jerry Pournelle's Galaxy magazine columns from 1974¹. [footnote]

Another doom, the rising levels of carbon dioxide which convert our planet into a sterile hothouse, falls to quantitative analysis: it's true enough that the levels of CO2 in our atmosphere have risen since 1900, but not so sharply as all that; and before they can get to a point where they do any real damage, we'll have run out of fossil fuels to burn. It's true we should concern ourselves with the climatic future of the planet -- there's evidence that we'd be in one now, if it were not for all the fuels we've burned and the heat we've introduced. But that too is something we can deal with, provided we don't lose faith in ourselves.

Take heed. The not-very-Communist² Dr. Pournelle was acknowledging the existence of human caused global warming back in 1974. He was not in a panic about it because he thought we were offsetting a dangerous cooling trend, and that we would run out of fossil fuels before we could do real damage. His position was basically the same as the modern Lukewarm School of Global Warming, and it may be correct.

Maybe.

But let us keep in mind his statement about running out of fossil fuels. He was writing at the time of gas lines. US oil production was on the way down. People were freaking out about running out of oil. Today, US oil production is over 30% higher than when Pournelle wrote that article. Also, China has gone from poverty stricken communist backwater to national socialist industrial super power -- powered by coal. The oil industry has gotten way better at extracting more oil from a conventional oil field and now we have the technology to access energy locked in oil shale.

The world has changed dramatically -- and carbon dioxide levels have gone up over 27% -- since that article was written. It would be interesting to go through his blog to see if his position on global warming changed over the decades.

Speculation vs. Settled Science

The first order effects of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are rock solid settled science. The theory does not require complicated hard-to-debug computer models. It does not require modeling the day-to-day weather at all. The results fall out from basic theories of radiation as a function of temperature, and measurements of the opacity of various gases to long wave infrared radiation.

Fortunately, the first order effects from human added CO2 are not that big. If the direct temperature changes from human added CO2 are uniformly distributed, then we have little to worry about for the next century or so. The Lukewarm School of global warming would be correct. We could wait until Mr. Fusion comes on the market.

But will the temperature changes be uniformly distributed? The Earth's primary greenhouse gas is not carbon dioxide; it's water vapor. The relative contribution of carbon dioxide is thus small over most of the planet.

There are two places on the planet where there is very little water vapor in the air: the polar regions. Really cold air holds very little water vapor even when the relative humidity is 100%. (That's why static electricity is such a bother in the winter, and why your skin gets dry when you warm that cold air up in your home.) I could be wrong, but my semi informed intuition tells me that the direct effects of carbon dioxide additions should be most dramatic in the coldest parts of the world. This has two benefits:

1. Some of the barely inhabitable parts of Canada and Russia would become more pleasant.

2. Tropical storms should decrease in severity. Hurricane winds are powered by temperature differences. Yes, a warmer world might result in more hurricane rainfall, but the winds should be less violent.

Alas, there is a downside: ice melting. We don't need to turn the Earth into a "sterile hothouse" in order to melt enough ice to raise the ocean levels. We might not even have to affect the average temperature in areas south of the Mason-Dixon line in order to produce an ocean rise. Even if the result is a net increase in the amount of usable land, look at the number of people who live very close to sea level. Check out the populations of Bangladesh and the Nile Delta.

Those are the potential first order effects: possibly expensive at some point, but manageable. It's the second and third order effects that have informed people freaking out.

Remember what I wrote about water vapor being the primary greenhouse gas? One fear is that the small direct temperature increase from carbon dioxide will increase the water vapor content in the atmosphere which adds to the greenhouse effect, which leads to yet more water vapor in a runaway positive feedback loop. On the other hand, more water vapor in the air will likely add more cloud cover, and clouds reflect sunlight. So we have both positive and negative feedback loops.

But wait! There's more! There are vast amounts of carbon dioxide dissolved in seawater. Warm up the oceans and they will release some of that carbon dioxide like a warm Pepsi -- only better tasting.

And check out the Arctic tundra. It's covered with snow much of the year. Snow reflects light. Reduce the snow cover duration and more light gets absorbed. Worse yet, there are mass quantities of methane trapped in the permafrost. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas (though it doesn't stay in the atmosphere as long as carbon dioxide). Warm up the tundra enough and that methane gets released. Massive methane burps are already happening in Siberia. (Whether those burps are caused by global warming or scientists have just started noticing them is unknown to me.)

Positive or negative. Which feedback loops dominate? This is a hard question, one which cannot be answered with chalkboard mathematics. This is where you have to model the entire planet's weather in order to get an answer. But you cannot model Earth's weather with great fidelity. The boundary conditions alone require gigabytes of data, and that's before taking vegetation into account. The equations of fluid dynamics are chaotic all the way down to the butterfly wing level. Any computer model of the Earth's weather is going to involve some crude approximations.

What scientists are doing is making crude models of the Earth's climate, tweaking parameters in order to get them to behave somewhat like the real climate, and then seeing what happens when the models are run with higher levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Whether such results are good enough is an interesting but difficult question. Calling such results Settled Science, is quite a stretch. I'll score that one for the Republican talking points.

On the other hand, the only way to definitively answer the question is to run the experiment. The problem with that is that we live in the test tube. The Science isn't Settled, but it is unsettling.

On the gripping hand, the experiment has been run...over a different range of carbon dioxide levels. If the system was as unstable as some activists would have you believe, the Earth would have gone into thermal runaway a long time ago. Either Young Earth Creationism is correct, or the planet has sufficient negative feedback loops -- when carbon dioxide levels are between 200 and 280 parts per million. We are now at over 410 parts per million. This is way outside anything experienced over the past 800,000 years, based on Antarctic ice cores. Caution is reasonable.

Conclusions

Yes, humans can affect the climate, and that's a Good Thing -- up to a point. As Patrick Moore likes to point out, life has been sequestering carbon for a very long time. Humanity might be saving nature by releasing some of that carbon back into the atmosphere. Those ice ages over the past million years could have been Earth going into a death coma.

But how much is enough? We are already well above the peak carbon dioxide levels of the past 800,000 years. Ice core CO2 measurements are direct measurements, not some iffy proxy like world temperature vs. bristlecone pine ring thickness.

And even if the eventual optimum level is well above what we have already done to the atmosphere, a good case can be made for gradualism. Change, even good change, requires time for adaptation. Moving a coastal city rapidly is very expensive. It takes time for a new fertile river delta to form upstream of the delta that is now under the sea. And, more importantly, wild plants and animals need time to find the new locations for their optimal habitats. Thanks to the existence of now 8 billion humans and their farm animals, many wild plant and animal species are dangerously fragile.

So, does that mean that the Democrats are correct to prematurely panic?

Absolutely not! As I wrote in the previous post, bad environmentalism can be worse than no environmentalism. Better to panic when the time comes than to panic now. Between now and then we will have some better alternative energy technology.

If I were rich and my country wasn't going insane, I'd be working on some of that technology myself. For science geeks such as yours truly, developing energy alternatives is a double plus fun problem. I'd love to be in charge of a lab working on super high efficiency solar cells and cheap durable batteries.

But I'm not rich. and the climate science geeks are fomenting a panic among the college educated. The insane Left is cashing in on that panic, and it's going to destroy this country long before global warming becomes a serious problem. So though I have some personal reservations about nuclear fission, I suggest a serious look at next generation nuclear fission for two reasons:

1. There is a small but significant chance we might need to decarbonize our economy quickly, and this is the fastest viable solution.

2. The political demand for decarbonizing our economy soon is enormous, and enough people are willing to sacrifice the American Way in order to do it that America is going to die real soon if we don't deal with the issue.

In conclusion, if you are really really really scared of nuclear power, stick to the current Republican talking points, and hope that gaining West Virginia can offset losing yet more of California. Good luck finding non woke colleges for your children. Good luck controlling the military when the educated officer corps thinks you are even more foolish than the Biden Administration whackjobs.

Otherwise, act on my previous post. It's easy to be Greener than Al Gore.

Update: even if you still convinced the global warming is a hoax, there is another reason for developing alternatives to fossil fuels: they are running out.

The Aenean Challenge

1. "How Long to Doomsday?” Galaxy, June 1974, republished in A Step Farther Out

2. As in, he co-authored the textbook on how to bankrupt the Soviet Union using high tech. Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative was an implementation of this strategy.