Bad science and good intentions prevent effective climate action

Progress in Human Geography, 2011

Environmental Research Letters, 2009

Key message 1: climatic trends Recent observations confirm that, given high rates of observed emissions, the worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories (or even worse) are being realized. For many key parameters, the climate system is already moving beyond the patterns of natural variability within which our society and economy has developed and thrived. These parameters include global mean surface temperature, sea-level rise, ocean and ice sheet dynamics, ocean acidification, and extreme climatic events. There is a significant risk that many of the trends will accelerate, leading to an increasing risk of abrupt or irreversible climatic shifts.

IGDS Working Papers, 2019

Abstract: At the outset it needs to be said that, for the purposes of this analysis, I accept the core science of climate change. I’m not a climate sceptic. What I take issue with is the pseudo-science of climate mitigation. As climate scientists insist that climate change is largely human induced, and as they have no expertise in the analysis of human society, the mantle of climate mitigation has passed to orthodox economists. The problem is that orthodox economics is completely unable to analyse this complex real-world problem. Orthodox deductive theory is simplistic, static, short-run, and marginal (small changes), whereas climate mitigation is complex, dynamic, longrun, and non-marginal (very big changes). Economists have failed to develop the general dynamic theory necessary to effectively model the interaction between climate and human society over the next hundred or so years. Similarly, their static cost-benefit analysis is fatally flawed, as it cannot take into account future structural change. Mitigation economics is a pseudo-science. By applying the general dynamic theory that I’ve been developing for the past fifty years, I’ve been able to demonstrate that: • There will be a major structural change in the global economy during the second half of the twenty-first century. This will take the form of a technological paradigm shift—what I call the Solar Revolution—which will be more significant in its impact than the Industrial Revolution 200 years ago. The mitigation economists are completely unaware of this possibility, and assume no structural change over the next 100 to 200 years. Hence their models of the future are hopelessly wrong. • As mitigation economists’ calculations of the static costs of climate mitigation do not take the forthcoming technological paradigm shift into account, they are a massive underestimate of the true dynamic costs—in the order of a multiple of 90! • The climate action proposed by the mitigation economists will, owing to the huge resistance of market forces, require the establishment of a global command system, along the lines of the old USSR. This will be needed to prevent the defection of individuals, organisations, and countries pursuing their own interests. Such a system, which would outlaw inconvenient market forces, will cause ‘technological lock-in’, which would prevent the emergence of the Solar Revolution. The massive dynamic costs of climate mitigation are the foregone benefits of the new economic revolution. The great myth of our time, therefore, is that human agents can establish a global mitigation system capable of reversing the effects of climate change while ensuring continued prosperity. Since I first calculated the dynamic costs of mitigation in 2008, the Great Climate-Mitigation Myth has grown to huge proportions. Unless we explode this myth, it will lead to the collapse of human civilization during the lifetime of our grandchildren.

Journal of Scientific Exploration, 2015

This booklet poses and answers 20 questions about climate change, followed by a section on "Basics of Climate Change." If it had been published by an activist environmentalist organization, it could safely be ignored as a self-confessed piece of propaganda. But it can hardly be ignored since it comes from the top scientific institutions in the United States and Britain and might therefore be presumed to provide the most judicious available assessment of its chosen subject. Nevertheless, it is propaganda, not a scientific assessment. It argues from authority and distorts evidence in doing so. The very term "climate change" in this context is rhetorical sleight of words. Until a few years ago, "global warming" was the universally used shorthand for human-caused (anthropogenic) global warming (AGW). But since there has been no appreciable warming globally for the last 15 years or so, the critics of carbon emissions have been using the term "climate ch...

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2010

Legal scholarship has come to accept as true the various pronouncements of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other scientists who have been active in the movement for greenhouse gas (ghg) emission reductions to combat global warming. The only criticism that legal scholars have had of the story told by this group of activist scientists-what may be called the climate establishment-is that it is too conservative in not paying enough attention to possible catastrophic harm from potentially very high temperature increases. This paper departs from such faith in the climate establishment by comparing the picture of climate science presented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other global warming scientist advocates with the peer-edited scientific literature on climate change. A review of the peer-edited literature reveals a systematic tendency of the climate establishment to engage in a variety of stylized rhetorical techniques that seem to oversell what is actually known about climate change while concealing fundamental uncertainties and open questions regarding many of the key processes involved in climate change. Fundamental open questions include not only the size but the direction of feedback effects that are responsible for the bulk of the temperature increase predicted to result from atmospheric greenhouse gas increases: while climate models all presume that such feedback effects are on balance strongly positive, more and more peer-edited scientific papers seem to suggest that feedback effects may be small or even negative. The cross-examination conducted in this paper reveals many additional areas where the peer-edited literature seems to conflict with the picture painted by establishment climate science, ranging from the magnitude of 20 th century surface temperature increases and their relation to past temperatures; the possibility that inherent variability in the earth's non-linear climate system, and not increases in CO 2 , may explain observed late 20 th century warming; the ability of climate models to actually explain past temperatures; and, finally, substantial doubt about the methodological validity of models used to make highly publicized predictions of global warming impacts such as species loss.

2010

Global Environmental Change, 2013

ABSTRACT Over the past two decades, skeptics of the reality and significance of anthropogenic climate change have frequently accused climate scientists of “alarmism”: of over-interpreting or overreacting to evidence of human impacts on the climate system. However, the available evidence suggests that scientists have in fact been conservative in their projections of the impacts of climate change. In particular, we discuss recent studies showing that at least some of the key attributes of global warming from increased atmospheric greenhouse gases have been under-predicted, particularly in IPCC assessments of the physical science, by Working Group I. We also note the less frequent manifestation of over-prediction of key characteristics of climate in such assessments. We suggest, therefore, that scientists are biased not toward alarmism but rather the reverse: toward cautious estimates, where we define caution as erring on the side of less rather than more alarming predictions. We call this tendency “erring on the side of least drama (ESLD).” We explore some cases of ESLD at work, including predictions of Arctic ozone depletion and the possible disintegration of the West Antarctic ice sheet, and suggest some possible causes of this directional bias, including adherence to the scientific norms of restraint, objectivity, skepticism, rationality, dispassion, and moderation. We conclude with suggestions for further work to identify and explore ESLD.

2003

2020

The Global Warming Potential (GWP) is widely used to compare the climate change effects of various greenhouse gases. Although GWP has an established role in international climate agreements, GWP does not describe any specific identifiable impact of greenhouse gas emissions on climate. It is argued here that GWP is unphysical, unintuitive, arbitrary, ignores the time dependence of emission sources, and is in some cases misleading. Therefore it has no place in describing the effects of climate change mitigation strategies beyond a 20 year horizon. This paper argues for the broader use of global mean temperature change trajectories in educating policy makers and the public about greenhouse gas control, thereby making climate policy discussions more scientifically rigorous while demystifying the criteria upon which policy choices are made. Examples provided include multiyear emissions, venting versus flaring of natural gas, electric power generated by natural gas versus coal, European gas supply by LNG versus pipeline, European electric power by imported gas versus coal, and livestock reduction. All results and any errors in this report are the responsibility of the author. Cover image: "Rainbow Swash" liquefied natural gas tank, Boston, Massachusetts,

Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 2019

This article is part of a WIREs Climate Change special collection of Opinion articles entitled "Is it too late (to stop dangerous climate change)?" View the full collection: http://wires.wiley.com/ WileyCDA/WiresCollection/id-80.html