I’m deleting all of the comments that say “CO2 can’t be controlling the climate because, during ice ages, temperature change first.” This completely misunderstands the issue. I’ll let chatGPT explain it: https://chatgpt.com/share/67e2d889-cb1c-8004-9356-d5ed151ee465
If people want to push back on these posts, that’s fine, but please do more research before peddling ideas that have been debunked many, many times in the past.
Hi Dan, so AI is "already smart enough to outsmart climate science deniers"?
I just used AI to get this (direct quote from chatGPT):
"People deserve to hear the full picture, not just the one-sided narrative pushed by mainstream media and political institutions.
The key message is:
✔ Climate is always changing—human influence exists, but it's not a crisis.
✔ Adaptation is far more effective than extreme emissions cuts.
✔ Energy poverty is the real threat—bad policies harm the world’s poorest.
✔ Alarmism leads to economic destruction while doing little for the environment.
✔ Innovation and prosperity solve problems, not fear-based regulations."
That's all from chatGPT. Hmmm.
The use of "science deniers" is really dated, and quite frankly, embarrassing. I'm embarrassed for you. There's an old saying somewhere about if you have to use ad hominems to support your position, then you have no position worth supporting.
Nope. While Wikipedia may not be the ultimate authority, it's the default record of what's up to date. Actually, when I type "denialism" into my Chrome search bar, Google's AI response appears at the top, and its first linked reference is to Wikipedia! Excerpt (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denialism):
"In the sciences, denialism is the rejection of basic facts and concepts that are undisputed, well-supported parts of the scientific consensus on a subject, in favor of ideas that are radical, controversial, or fabricated.[3] The terms Holocaust denial and AIDS denialism describe the denial of the facts and the reality of the subject matters,[4] and the term climate change denial describes denial of the scientific consensus that the climate change of planet Earth is a real and occurring event primarily caused in geologically recent times by human activity.[5] The forms of denialism present the common feature of the person rejecting overwhelming evidence and trying to generate political controversy in attempts to deny the existence of consensus.[6][7]
"The motivations and causes of denialism include religion, self-interest (economic, political, or financial), and defence mechanisms meant to protect the psyche of the denialist against mentally disturbing facts and ideas; such disturbance is called cognitive dissonance in psychology terms.[8][9]"
Denying any of the following consensus propositions is within Wikipedia's definition: 1) The globe is warming; 2) it's primarily anthropogenic; 3) it's already costing money and grief around the world, out of proportion to many payers' private greenhouse emissions; and 4) the cumulative socialized cost will rise until the global economy is decarbonized one way or another. Those statements have already been redundantly verified. Of course, no one likes being told they're fooling themselves. It's easy to see why deniers feel insulted to be called that. Too bad. All they have to do is stop propagating denialism in public, and nobody will insult them! But deniers deny.
Gee, look at the wonderfully precise science-based statement made by AI: "studies show that about half or more of the total warming during past deglaciations came from increased CO₂ and other greenhouse gases." About half? Does that mean 40% or 60%? If less than 50%, then past deglaciations came about because of factors less influential than atmospheric CO2 levels. To claim that CO2 'controls' or climate is just very poor and largely erroneous science.
Bernie, you're mistaking "dominant control" for "sole control". No scientist claims that multiple other factors don't influence climate, whether stable or changing. For example, long before the role of CO2 became know, astronomical cycles were shown to initiate advances as well as retreats of continental ice sheets. Those in turn resulted in changes in planetary albedo, global temperatures, and atmospheric CO2: yes, CO2 is both a forcing and a feedback! Warming out of phase with the Milankovitch cycles must be controlled by some other initial forcing, for which the economically-driven transfer of fossil carbon to the atmosphere in 300 years is redundantly sufficient: i.e. "dominant control" is concisely correct.
Very nice presentation. What is not also pointed out that matters to society today is how much sea level has changed as a result of persistent temperature change. If one goes into the paleo record, the sensitivity is of order 15-20 meters of sea level change per degree change in the reconstructed temperature change in the past. For example, 20,000 years ago at the peak of the last glacial period, sea level was about 120 meters below its present value and global average temperature is estimated to have been 6 C or so below preindustrial. For the next 12,000 years, sea level rose at an average rate of a meter per century as global average temperature increased about 1 C every 20 centuries. This warming melted about 2/3 of the ice present on Earth at that time--present ice holds the equivalent of about 60 meters of sea level rise (~200 feet). Global average temperature increased about 1 C in the last 100 years and sea level rise to date was about .2 meters, and we are headed to another 2 C or so of warming this coming hundred years, suggesting that by the time we get to a new equilibrium, most of the present ice on land will be melted and sea level will be up by an amount that will flood virtually all coastal and near coastal areas--a huge impact on civilization.
Great post. Another point is how slow the rate of changes are in this graph. For example, the last dip started at 60 Mya and ends around 30 Mya. Temperature goes from about 94 F to 51 F. That's an average rate of change of -8 micro°C/decade. Our temperature change is about 25,000 times faster!
I think it is important to include periods when the earth’s temperature experienced some of its fastest temperature change when comparing to anthropogenic temperature changes. For example coming out of the last ice age, temperatures rose about 5 C in 5000 years, 0.01 C / decade which is only a factor of 20 slower than the recent warming rate due to human activity. This still makes the case that our rate of temperature change is unnatural and unprecedented without overstating things.
Dean, your "5000 years" should be more like 11-12,000 years, from the last glacial maximum about 23-22 kya to the start of the Holocene 11 kya. That doubles your factor of 20.
David, the typical interval between two data points in the PhanDA data is FIVE MILLION YEARS. You cannot possibly think we can compare that to a rise in the last century. The two measurements are totally incompatible.
It's a fair point. But notice I wrote AVERAGE rate of change in the past.
Some people see the big swings on the graph and think, wow, Earth's climate has been through large swings in the past, so why is now any different? But those "swings" aren't necessarily large at all.
You simply cannot compare the change in a century's worth of annual data to the change in data taken every five million years. And taking averages doesn't help in the slightest. They are incompatible datasets, they have NO relationship with each other.
Think of it this way. An equivalent rise to the century-long current rise could have happened many times in 5 million years … and yet it wouldn't show up in the slightest in the PhanDA dataset. There would be NO record of it in PhanDA.
Willis, I understand your comment, and I know people like you like to argue that there could have been a century's worth of equivalent warming (to today) somewhere in those 30 Myrs, or many, proving that it's possible our century's worth of warming is a natural fluctuation, not manmade.
That's just terrible science, and I'm not going there.
Andrew, for fun I asked Grok "Is it good science to compare a 100-year-long annual dataset with a dataset with five million years between data points?
Here's Grok's answer:
===
Comparing a 100-year annual time series with a time series that has five million years between data points is generally not good science for most purposes, as the vast difference in temporal resolution, scale, and context makes meaningful direct comparisons challenging and often misleading.
Bottom Line
No, it’s not good science to directly compare a 100-year annual time series with a five-million-year interval series in most cases—the scales and contexts are too disparate for meaningful results. You can use them together for specific purposes (e.g., long-term context or calibration), but only with rigorous methods that account for their differences. Otherwise, you’re comparing apples and fossils—interesting, but not scientifically sound.'
===
Grok specifically notes the issue I raised, that there could easily be a century's worth of warming that's hidden in your data. It says:
===
Statistical and Methodological Challenges:
Sampling Bias: The 100-year series has dense, evenly spaced data, while the five-million-year series is sparse, with gaps potentially hiding critical events (e.g., rapid climate shifts like the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, ~55 Mya, lasted ~200,000 years, Science, 2005).
Averaging Effects: Long-term data often averages over millennia per point, smoothing out variability the 100-year series captures. For instance, a five-million-year point might average a warm period and an ice age, while the 100-year series shows yearly spikes.
Statistical Validity: Direct correlation or regression between datasets with such different resolutions is problematic—statistical methods assume comparable sampling frequencies. Techniques like spectral analysis might reveal shared cycles (e.g., Milankovitch in both), but direct point-to-point comparison is meaningless (Statistical Methods in the Atmospheric Sciences, Wilks, 2011).
===
So I fear that both Grok and I disagree strongly with your claim.
David, I don't "like to argue" that. I don't have to argue it at all.
It's a simple scientific fact. Temperature is FRACTAL, and as Mandelbrot showed, climate is fractal as well. You are claiming that we an take two temperature readings FIVE MILLION years apart and compare that to a 100-year annual record.
Can't be done, and I'm shocked that you think it's good science to compare the two.
The derivative is not comparable time periods with different lengths. The data supporting the graph is not measured at the level of months, rather it's at the level of millions of years. You cannot compare the current instantaneous value with the historical time averaged value.
Of course; everyone knows this. But I didn't take derivatives, I took large scale changes. The point is just because you see a large change in a paleo-graph doesn't mean it's significant.
I don't understand this claim. Are you are saying that if the earth cools gradually by say 25°C as in PhanDA, it's not "significant" because it happened slowly?
By that standard, coming out of the last Ice Age is also not "significant" because the warming was only on the order of 0.005°C per year …
When did it become true that slow changes are not significant because they're slow? The closing of the Darien Gap took millions of years, but it made a big difference to the global climate.
"Are you are saying that if the earth cools gradually by say 25°C as in PhanDA, it's not "significant" because it happened slowly?"
I didn't say that at all. I said (or implied) that idiots like Joe Rogan look at this graph and see a large decrease starting at some point, but don't consider the time interval of the change. So they think, look at that huge change, so many degrees, and if that can happen then that can be happening today!! Which is just dumb denialism.
Again, I'm not seeing why a 25°C warming would not be significant, when we're told that another degree of warming is an existential threat to humanity.
And I don't believe that the speed of the change is the huge danger as is often claimed, with people saying "We and the environment won't have time to adapt!! That was a change in five million years, this is the change in a century!!"
Temperatures in areas where humans happily live can go from -25°C to +25°C in six months every year and things go well. A six-month swing of 50°C is not uncommon in the northern hemisphere
But people claim if it suddenly tomorrow started going from -24°C to +26°C every six months (putting us half a degree over the dreaded 2°C warming threshold), suddenly that's a major threat to continued human existence? …
Sorry, but that dog won't hunt. People would barely notice.
Willis, you just want to argue, using the same old denialist tropes that were addressed decades ago. I'm not interested.
"Temperatures in areas where humans happily live can go from -25°C to +25°C in six months every year and things go well. A six-month swing of 50°C is not uncommon in the northern hemisphere.
"But people claim if it suddenly tomorrow started going from -24°C to +26°C every six months (putting us half a degree over the dreaded 2°C warming threshold), suddenly that's a major threat to continued human existence? …"
To wit. How long have you been on the Web? 20 years? More? It's incredible that you haven't learned anything in all that time, and can only repeat the same exhausted, unscientific arguments. Do you even try to learn???
PS: Looking at a "large-scale change" in °C per year as you've done IS a derivative. The definition of the derivative is the change in the value of some function over time. The length of time over which you take the derivative is up to you.
That's not the definition of a derivative. The derivative of a function is the *instantaneous* rate of change at every point. It's not just the change over any time interval.
My apology for my lack of clarity. You are correct, a calculated differential dx/dt is an instantaneous rate of change. I was talking abut first differences.
In computational terms, the differential is generally approximated by the first difference. It gives us, not the instantaneous rate of change, but the rate of change over the step size of the time series. It's the best approximation of the differential we have. And you're right. Strictly speaking, it's not a differential. But it's used as such all over climate science.
Suppose we have a time series called "somets". In R, the function diff(somets) gives us the best approximation of the differential.
On the other hand, the function diff(somets,12) gives us the year-to-year first difference, with each point representing the annual rate of change. It's what we'd have as a first difference if our data was actually annual.
Your data has an average time step of 5 million years. So the function diff(PhanDA) give us the best approximation of the derivative using a five million year timestep.
Great post about a fantastic paper. It is too bad people don't understand it, don't appreciate it, and/or don't believe it.
Maybe we need to try and help them at least appreciate the implications of that last graph. For example, if we stayed at our present level of ~420 ppm CO2. The earth's equilibrium temperature - mother nature's equilibrium temperature at 420 ppm over many millennia is 18.5 C. Our present 5-year average GMST is 15 C, 1.3 C above a preindustrial GMST of 13.7 C. In other words, at our present level of CO2 we have a warming potential of 3.5 C hotter than it is right now. That reflects how far we have managed to drive the earth's natural system out of equilibrium in 150 years. What part don't you understand???
Hotter than expected sooner than expected is my mantra. Plus it will take centuries to cool down even with optimal countermeasures. Those climate change deniers, like cockroaches are always with us. But unlike cockroaches they will not survive what's coming.
I appreciate the elegance of your reply. Surely you see that I didn't call them insects but only likened them to cockroaches in their dogged persistence. I doubt if many readers would have been misled. I wonder also if I did any great disservice to my cause whatever that may be. I should remark at not only the elegance of your reply but it's incisive brevity. I would do well to learn from your example.
On second thought I think you are right. I should have chosen some other referent that didn't carry such a slighting comparison. I will apply the golden rule next time and try to do better.
Like citing variability over very short periods ("but it is snowing", "but the "pause"") as evidence climate change has nothing to do with humans and is 'normal' (therefore no action required) citing conditions back before humans were around is a perspective that is misleading.
Good reasons to think agriculture depended on the extraordinary and unusual climate stability of The Holocene and the emergence of civilisations depended on that. That stability has already been lost. During that critical time Earth's climate was NOT highly variable compared to what had gone before the Holocene. And yet even the much smaller changes within that period were enough to affect the rise and fall of those civilisations.
And, whilst not so warm relative to most of Earth's history it was significantly warmer (as well as more stable) than most of the time that homo sapiens has existed as a species.
The lesson I think we should draw from Earth's variable climate history is that climate is highly susceptible to change and therefore susceptible to human influences; this specific study confirms the significance of GHG concentrations to that susceptibility. And what happens at the scale of human lifetimes - what humans living now have experienced and can expect to experience in their lifetimes is what matters most to human decision making.
What drives Joe Rogan, Mel Gibson,and other non-scientist science-deniers? Here's a theory and some history:
Darwin explained survival of the fittest as evolution's mechanism. Though by the 80's we knew it wasn't the full story, e.g. horizontal gene transfer, nonetheless a horizontal domain transfer took Darwin's mechanism deeply into American business (Ayn Rand intermediating). If it's survival of the fittest, we have to be free to survive, and fitness score-keeping is wealth maximization (fueled in the post-Friedman 80's by EVA and LBOs, but that's a longer story).
Reagan and HW Bush were conservative leaders who recognized that betting the ranch on prices (the ranch being society's capital stock) periodically requires re-alignment of prices with societal welfare. Along these lines, we met ozone and acid rain challenges in the 90's, the latter with a market mechanism now used by Europe for co2. Also, Jim Hansen warned Congress on climate in 1988 - helping get us in-the-room for international climate negotiations beginning with conservative Presidents. So science had salience with conservatives last century, and even some like Paulson, McCain, and occasionally Graham, this century.
Yet conservatives no longer conserve, as we know. Why? An LNG tanker fueling up for an Asia voyage is the picture worth a thousand words on that one. Would we abscond with the remaining atmospheric space for stable climate even though a quarter of the radiative-forcing molecules up there now are ours? Even though we are <5% of population and our corporations have 64% of global equity market cap (MSCI ACWI, 2/25)? Yes, LNG is a climate bomb and we are co-ercing Asia to buy it instead of Chinese cleantech - the planet's best carbon budget management tool right now.
Mel Gibson might remember Jesus. We the richest get the combustion benefit but we socialize damage costs among the world's poorest. Church Lady might say "well isn't that just divine?"
Does it matter that IMF models indicate the world is much richer with energy transition than without? Does it matter that models indicate the same for America, though our government stopped running the numbers (fyi, see recent UCLA carbon tax paper)? No.
Faced with facts - Joe Rogan, Mel Gibson, and MAGAphiles as a group, say simply - KILL CLIMATE FACTS! Having lived in Asia - and worked with most of its Governments as they sought to get smarter, plan longer term, and develop university-to-VC foodchains like ours - Asian business sees their break coming. Trump 2.0 tariffs, anti-university, don't-say-climate (in Florida!), market-failing beats externality-pricing, >RE =<cost=Marxism, and no-allies-needed...how can the US share of MSCI AWCI trend anything but lower over time? Employment and productivity, ditto.
Some will certainly benefit (think Harold Hamm), but who pays if making America dumber turns out, well, dumb?
The pace of change commentary reminds of the Reid Surface in geology, which describes the behavior of crustal rock in response to geologic stresses delivered at different rates. At a very slow rate, rocks can be seen to deform dramatically over time without breaking - something you can see in the folded sediments revealed by highway cuts all over the place. But at a rapid pace, such as with quick movement along a major fault, the crust simply shatters in an "earthquake." The Surface is simply the depth at which the shattering starts/stops; with rapid movements, the crust shatters a long way down. As our environment may do with rapid climate change.
So, you are deleting all comments that disagree with ChatGPT? That's a new one.. You do realize ChatGPT reads only the LLM's that its programmers have put in. There is very little if anything in the LLM's that includes viewpoints from highly qualified scientists who happen to believe climate change is natural . It includes scientifically derived proof that temperature rises first, warms the oceans, which then puts more CO2 into the atmosphere. Without that in the LLMs, of course chatGPT will tell you what you want to hear. I'm cancelling my subscription to your substack, which I know doesn't bother you much.
Thanks for leaving voluntarily, if you actually think “CO2 can’t be controlling the climate because, during ice ages, temperature change first.” That's no longer a logically defensible claim, so its perseverance evinces denialism by Wikipedia's definition (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denialism). The less denialism posted here, the better. IMHO, of course.
Correlation is not causation, and that graph plots temperature changes of 20* C over millions of years, and we are talking of a temperature change of only a couple degrees over a 150 years that began at the end of an ice age which is being correlated to human industrialization. Another correlation that should be considered is the weakening of Earth's magnetosphere, the increasing velocity of the wandering north pole and the fact that all weather on Earth is under far more influence of the sun than humans. And I am not talking about visible light from the sun, but the constant barrage of charged solar particles that form the earth-solar electric circuit. These charged particles, in new research ignored by the IPCC shows strong correlation to changes in the electromagnetic flux of the solar wind to storms and lightning strikes on earth. Also, new research is beginning to reveal the ionic nature of weather. But this will not get much light as it contradicts the narrative.
The fact is, no single graph can prove anything for or against this eugenics driven AGW belief. Graphs are mathematical devices that can be manipulated to present what you want, therefore are unreliable as proof of anything. What really matters is a good Baconian understanding of the mechanisms involved, and this AGW does not have. Co2 is a heavier than air gas and wants to fall to ground where it is consumed by plants and helps them grow. More plants equate to cooler ground temperatures. Predictions based on this model reveals temperatures are not keeping in line with increasing atmospheric Co2, ice still hasn't disappeared from the poles. Modus Tollens.
If you really believe that human industrialization is the cause of a threatening change in climate, then rather than put onerous policies on the masses, you should take the profits from those who got wealthy from this industrialization to build the energy structure that are Co2 neutral. Those same wealthy hypocritical elites who fly around on private jets that spew far more Co2 into the atmosphere in one trip than the average family produces in a month. AL Gore's family got rich off of oil. If he was truly sincere, he should feel some guilt for his wealth, but he doesn't. Instead, he trades carbon credits and makes millions per year and continues to fly around on a private jet.
Valentina Zharkova has produced a model that has a 95% accuracy, far greater accuracy than any global warming model. Her model based on eigen vectors and velocity of magnetic field lines in solar flares suggests that we are in fact heading into a Grand Solar Minimum that will see global temperatures drop by 3*C or more over the next 10 years. These GSM have a history of being correlated to societal collapses, increases in diseases, famine and death. Historically, warming periods have produced increases in populations and the building of empires.
Personally, I'd take a warming planet over a cooling one, but we as humans do not have that choice. All we can do is prepare for what we think comes next.
"Daemon Nice" (hmm, could be an AI): "If you really believe that human industrialization is the cause of a threatening change in climate, then rather than put onerous policies on the masses, you should take the profits from those who got wealthy from this industrialization to build the energy structure that are Co2 neutral."
Of course, if we do anything like that through our government, producers will have to charge higher prices or get out of the fossil carbon business. Consumers will migrate to other energy sources as they grow cheaper. How about if we tax fossil fuel producers per tonne, dividend the collected tax back to all consumers in equal amounts periodically, and let the market build out the carbon-neutral economy?
Ah, but then there's "Those same wealthy hypocritical elites who fly around on private jets that spew far more Co2 into the atmosphere in one trip than the average family produces in a month. AL Gore's family got rich off of oil. If he was truly sincere, he should feel some guilt for his wealth, but he doesn't. Instead, he trades carbon credits and makes millions per year and continues to fly around on a private jet."
Uh, now we see what flag you're flying. You're choosing what to believe out of spite: whatever "Al Gore" is for, you're against! You know Gore's not a climate scientist, don't you? His personal energy consumption has approximately zero implications for the physics of global climate change. Gore at least acknowledges the global "free" market's ancient propensity to socialize every transaction cost it can get away with, between both buyers and sellers. Hence the tragedy of the global climate commons. He did say in public recently, that ‘Investors now realise fossil fuels aren’t the future’ (https://www.thetimes.com/business-money/companies/article/al-gore-investors-now-realise-fossil-fuels-arent-the-future-5q3gw03p8). Anyway, it's been 25 years since Gore lost the Presidential election by 537 votes out of 5,825,043, and a SCOTUS intervention. Current efforts by entrepreneurs, NGOs and governments large and small around the world, to bring the price of renewables below that for fossil energy everywhere, are what matters going forward.
Agenda driven? Well, yes. My agenda is to collectively cap the rising trend of global heat content as soon as politically feasible, because otherwise it's a ongoing, open-ended disaster. I believe my agenda is shared by a global consensus of reality-dwellers. What's your agenda, other than "whatever Al Gore is for, I'm against"?
Only a fool assumes as you have about me. Pointing out Al Gore's hypocrisy is not evidence of me being against whatever he is against. It is me pointing out hypocrisy.
There is no heat building up, and if you weren't prone to such shallow thinking you might see past the propaganda that has convinced you of a scientific theory driven by a political agenda from an international organization built by eugenicists with the intention of a one world government. Read the Principles and policies of UNESCO.
Heh. No assumption necessary, Daemon. That's some swivel-eyed, tinfoil-hatted conspiracism right there in your very words! Not nice at all! Only a fool would trouble to respond to you any further. I am not one.
Thank you for a helpful and informative contribution. My greatest wish today is that policy and its implementation will act upon the science. The US is the world's largest CO2 emitter: presently it is turning away from science and climate/environmental polices. I dare not try to calculate the uncertainty.
Brianna, LWE wrote "The US is the world's largest CO2 emitter". There are are multiple ways that's strictly true: for example, the US is still by far the world's largest cumulative emitter (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co2-emissions-region?stackMode=absolute). Decarbonizing the US economy won't bring an end to global warming by itself, but it will reduce global greenhouse emissions substantially. Why would we wait for China to decarbonize itself first?
So, according to this, we are withing twenty million years of a major extinction event? Look at all of the temperature shifts that killed nothing. Also, our methods for measuring "aggregate global temperature" are a joke, but even though trust has been lost, the climate apocalypse fear monger data shows temperature rise over the past 150 years to be less than one degree F(well within standard deviation). You folks have lost all trust and credibility.
You used a lot of words to say that you didn't understand (and probably didn't read) the paper and certainly don't understand the implications of the current rate of change compared to earlier times.
This has nothing to do with me. They did not mention the rate of change or the previous rate of change and, according to them, that is the most important input. Also, if we can not trust the constantly changing formula for "aggregate global temperature" is the current hypothetical rate of change just opinion. The scientific method is all about testing theories and being able to replicate the tests with almost identical results. "Climate scientists" have never done that, and consensus is not a scientific data point. If they do not agree with climate change hysteria, they do not get funded. Peer reviewed journals have failed to produce reliable data or science over the past twenty years. The China COVID virus came from a lab, but nobody would publish the story. Catastrophic global warming apocalypse hysteria is a hoax. Nearly ten time the number of people die every year from cold.
Insulting me and inventing "what I think I know" is ignorant. Is irrelevant and ignorant. Be better and please try to refute absolutely anything I have said with facts/real science.
How does the current rate of change compare to the rate of change 200 million years ago. That is not discussed in the article. What is the current rate of change? The "implications" are 100% subjective and there is no causal data in the article. Perhaps you are projecting. Perhaps the current global temperature is 100% subjective. They have changed the methodology every five years for decades.
Do you really expect Prof. Dessler to recapitulate the entire 200-year history of climate science in a single blog post? You can look up the answers to your questions yourself. All the relevant scientific documents are available on line, but be wary of A.I.-generated search returns. It helps to possess some scientific meta-literacy (h/t J. Nielsen-Gammon), so you know what sources are more credible. Of course, there's really no substitute for putting as much time in as Prof. Dessler and his professional peers each have, to learn all that is known about climate and how it changes. Fortunately, they've been working on your questions for decades, and have reached a strong consensus. That's called "intersubjective verification", a foundation of modern science.
"Subjective"? Yes, it's in the definition. Nonetheless, science is the only way of understanding reality and predicting the future we've invented, that works better than divination with a sheep's liver. Good enough for me to advocate prompt collective decarbonization of the US and global economies, if not for you!
There is only about a fifteen year old"history" of climate science. The "subjective soft science was coined during Barry Obama's presidency: the third and fourth term of the Shrub Bush presidency. .
"Consensus" is not a scientific term and soft sciences, like climate change have never been able to predict anything. Al Gore made thousands of dire predictions and zero of them have come true. "Inter subjective verification," is also non-scientific. What is "modern science?" Science with zero predictive value. Is that science or just a political narrative?
Peer-reviewed science journals have become a punch line and "experts" who take grants from the federal government do jot generally care about science. I'm pretty sure climate change has been setting fire to Tesla dealerships and cars lately. Prove it has not.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away" (PK Dick).
"The first rule is you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool" (R Feynman).
Science builds a view of reality by careful observation and intersubjective verification, conducted by trained, mutually disciplined, competitively skeptical peers. Anyone can participate if they're willing to put the effort in, and humble enough to acknowledge how easy it is to fool themselves.
Intersubjective verification, i.e. "peer review" broadly defined, exposes biases introduced by even trained individuals to the unsparing scrutiny of their professional competitors, who cleanse each other's work of all but the verifiable evidence. In contrast, your hostile comment reveals a view of reality distorted by ignorance and spite. For example, whoever told you "consensus isn't science" was trying to fool you, because science can't advance without consensus. And you know Al Gore isn't a peer climate scientist, don't you? They're not responsible for what he says, nor have they ever taken instructions from him. Regardless, he lost his last election 25 years ago!
Do you really think you're smarter than the aggregate of the thousands of people around the world who've undergone the years of training and discipline Andrew and Zeke have? That's hardly skeptical! It's possible that education in the 200 year history of climate-related physical (i.e. "hard") science might resolve your cognitive dissonance, but only if you're willing. Many educated climate realists recommend "The Discovery of Global Warming" by Spencer R. Weart, a physicist and science historian with the American Institute of Physics (an umbrella organization for the American Physical Society, American Meteorological Society, and other professional scientific associations). It's free to read online (https://history.aip.org/climate/index.htm), or you can purchase a paperback edition, the latest published in 2008. The web version is more dynamic, however.
Ignorance is treatable, and replacing it with knowledge may overcome spite. We can hope, at least.
I'll self-describe myself as a "climate skeptic" just so no one else has to.
I hadn't actually seen this discussion until I got the newsletter in my inbox this morning. I think what the newsletter (Devin) and most of the folks on here that are agreeing are missing is that the historical record speaks to the existence (actually, the apparent non-existence) of "tipping points". Based on what I've read, the claim is that CO2 and temperature is highly correlated. That means you don't have to worry about some scary "tipping point" at 520 ppm CO2 or whatever that causes the climate to run away and the planet to turn into Venus. Consequently you "only" have to worry about something that's much more predictable. I put "only" in quotes: if you think the predicted changes are terrifying then ok, be terrified. A lot of people don't think they sound so terrifying and are likely well within the limits of what humans can adapt to almost without noticing it.
Or put differently, if you want to maintain "climate hysteria" you had better be able to maintain the suggestion that there are unknown tipping points in the climate at an atmospheric CO2 level not too much higher than the present.
What is clear in the paper is not that there is a tipping point in the temperature, but that there is strong evidence of one in the rate of change of temperature.
Well, since neither Drs. Dessler or Hausfather are seeking to maintain "climate hysteria", they're off the hook. As for the "lot of people don't think they sound so terrifying and are likely well within the limits of what humans can adapt to almost without noticing it": apparently "a lot" of people don't realize growing numbers of other people are already "adapting" to anthropogenic climate change by the loss of their homes, livelihoods and lives. And just why are the lukewarmers so confident they won't have to adapt all-too-noticeably themselves?
Y'all can continue to be terrified...There is no way, no how that you are going to convince me that we are living in "terrifying" times. For a field so hellbent on "science", it appears to be lost here. Can anyone point out here the fact that as the climate has gradually warmed over the past few thousand years that humans have progressively thrived accordingly? And for all those who want things colder, so as to "reduce the speed of climate change", to what period would be more optimal? The 6th century (AKA the dark ages)? The 1700's? The 1800's? Nobody has ever answered this question! Please answer this question before employing yet again another ad hominem about how stupid the skeptics (myself included) are.
'There is no way, no how that you are going to convince me that we are living in "terrifying" times.'
OK, Scott, we get it. I, for one, won't waste my time trying, but will address the hypothetical uncommitted lurker instead. While I might not be "terrified", I'm sufficiently convinced that only collective intervention in the energy market can bring fossil carbon emissions to zero without inevitable mass death and misery. I'll do what I can to ensure you're outvoted in the next US elections.
One question about figure 2. Cause what I can see there, and what climate skeptics will probably focus on too, is that you also have many fast up and downs that didn't create massive extinction, and that you also have massive extinction events in periods with no big changes of temperature.
Is it because I'm missing or misunderstanding something?
Btw, I understand and agree with the point that even if life is resilient maybe human life is not so much. Nice post
Fast is a bit relative on a graph where the x-axis spans half a billion years. You'd have to look at each a bit more in depth to determine what the rates of change are.
Its not my personal area of expertise, but OWID has a good page with descriptions of the estimated cause of the five historical mass extinction events. At least two are associated with periods of intense volcanism (and associated climate change), one silicate weathering, and one from massive plant CO2 uptake and sequestration: https://ourworldindata.org/mass-extinctions
I’m deleting all of the comments that say “CO2 can’t be controlling the climate because, during ice ages, temperature change first.” This completely misunderstands the issue. I’ll let chatGPT explain it: https://chatgpt.com/share/67e2d889-cb1c-8004-9356-d5ed151ee465
If people want to push back on these posts, that’s fine, but please do more research before peddling ideas that have been debunked many, many times in the past.
Proof indeed that AI is already smart enough to outsmart climate science deniers.
Hi Dan, so AI is "already smart enough to outsmart climate science deniers"?
I just used AI to get this (direct quote from chatGPT):
"People deserve to hear the full picture, not just the one-sided narrative pushed by mainstream media and political institutions.
The key message is:
✔ Climate is always changing—human influence exists, but it's not a crisis.
✔ Adaptation is far more effective than extreme emissions cuts.
✔ Energy poverty is the real threat—bad policies harm the world’s poorest.
✔ Alarmism leads to economic destruction while doing little for the environment.
✔ Innovation and prosperity solve problems, not fear-based regulations."
That's all from chatGPT. Hmmm.
The use of "science deniers" is really dated, and quite frankly, embarrassing. I'm embarrassed for you. There's an old saying somewhere about if you have to use ad hominems to support your position, then you have no position worth supporting.
'The use of "science deniers" is really dated...'
Nope. While Wikipedia may not be the ultimate authority, it's the default record of what's up to date. Actually, when I type "denialism" into my Chrome search bar, Google's AI response appears at the top, and its first linked reference is to Wikipedia! Excerpt (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denialism):
"In the sciences, denialism is the rejection of basic facts and concepts that are undisputed, well-supported parts of the scientific consensus on a subject, in favor of ideas that are radical, controversial, or fabricated.[3] The terms Holocaust denial and AIDS denialism describe the denial of the facts and the reality of the subject matters,[4] and the term climate change denial describes denial of the scientific consensus that the climate change of planet Earth is a real and occurring event primarily caused in geologically recent times by human activity.[5] The forms of denialism present the common feature of the person rejecting overwhelming evidence and trying to generate political controversy in attempts to deny the existence of consensus.[6][7]
"The motivations and causes of denialism include religion, self-interest (economic, political, or financial), and defence mechanisms meant to protect the psyche of the denialist against mentally disturbing facts and ideas; such disturbance is called cognitive dissonance in psychology terms.[8][9]"
Denying any of the following consensus propositions is within Wikipedia's definition: 1) The globe is warming; 2) it's primarily anthropogenic; 3) it's already costing money and grief around the world, out of proportion to many payers' private greenhouse emissions; and 4) the cumulative socialized cost will rise until the global economy is decarbonized one way or another. Those statements have already been redundantly verified. Of course, no one likes being told they're fooling themselves. It's easy to see why deniers feel insulted to be called that. Too bad. All they have to do is stop propagating denialism in public, and nobody will insult them! But deniers deny.
"human influence exists"
Debunks:
"CO2 can’t be controlling the climate because, during ice ages, temperature change first."
Proof indeed that AI is already smart enough to outsmart climate science deniers, twice now, thanks to Scott. Kudos.
Gee, look at the wonderfully precise science-based statement made by AI: "studies show that about half or more of the total warming during past deglaciations came from increased CO₂ and other greenhouse gases." About half? Does that mean 40% or 60%? If less than 50%, then past deglaciations came about because of factors less influential than atmospheric CO2 levels. To claim that CO2 'controls' or climate is just very poor and largely erroneous science.
Bernie, you're mistaking "dominant control" for "sole control". No scientist claims that multiple other factors don't influence climate, whether stable or changing. For example, long before the role of CO2 became know, astronomical cycles were shown to initiate advances as well as retreats of continental ice sheets. Those in turn resulted in changes in planetary albedo, global temperatures, and atmospheric CO2: yes, CO2 is both a forcing and a feedback! Warming out of phase with the Milankovitch cycles must be controlled by some other initial forcing, for which the economically-driven transfer of fossil carbon to the atmosphere in 300 years is redundantly sufficient: i.e. "dominant control" is concisely correct.
C'mon, Bernie, you know all this!
Very nice presentation. What is not also pointed out that matters to society today is how much sea level has changed as a result of persistent temperature change. If one goes into the paleo record, the sensitivity is of order 15-20 meters of sea level change per degree change in the reconstructed temperature change in the past. For example, 20,000 years ago at the peak of the last glacial period, sea level was about 120 meters below its present value and global average temperature is estimated to have been 6 C or so below preindustrial. For the next 12,000 years, sea level rose at an average rate of a meter per century as global average temperature increased about 1 C every 20 centuries. This warming melted about 2/3 of the ice present on Earth at that time--present ice holds the equivalent of about 60 meters of sea level rise (~200 feet). Global average temperature increased about 1 C in the last 100 years and sea level rise to date was about .2 meters, and we are headed to another 2 C or so of warming this coming hundred years, suggesting that by the time we get to a new equilibrium, most of the present ice on land will be melted and sea level will be up by an amount that will flood virtually all coastal and near coastal areas--a huge impact on civilization.
Great post. Another point is how slow the rate of changes are in this graph. For example, the last dip started at 60 Mya and ends around 30 Mya. Temperature goes from about 94 F to 51 F. That's an average rate of change of -8 micro°C/decade. Our temperature change is about 25,000 times faster!
I think it is important to include periods when the earth’s temperature experienced some of its fastest temperature change when comparing to anthropogenic temperature changes. For example coming out of the last ice age, temperatures rose about 5 C in 5000 years, 0.01 C / decade which is only a factor of 20 slower than the recent warming rate due to human activity. This still makes the case that our rate of temperature change is unnatural and unprecedented without overstating things.
Dean, your "5000 years" should be more like 11-12,000 years, from the last glacial maximum about 23-22 kya to the start of the Holocene 11 kya. That doubles your factor of 20.
How about we split the difference? Using proxy data from Osman et al., https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03984-4 , I see a 5 C rise over about 8,000 years, between 19 kya to 11 kya.
If you want to look at shorter periods, e.g., between 12.5 and 10.5 kya, I see a 2 degree rise over 2000 years, equalling the .01 C / decade.
Further, if you use the modeled data by Osman, it comes close to a 6 C rise over 6000 years between 17 kya and 11 kya.
David, the typical interval between two data points in the PhanDA data is FIVE MILLION YEARS. You cannot possibly think we can compare that to a rise in the last century. The two measurements are totally incompatible.
w.
It's a fair point. But notice I wrote AVERAGE rate of change in the past.
Some people see the big swings on the graph and think, wow, Earth's climate has been through large swings in the past, so why is now any different? But those "swings" aren't necessarily large at all.
Thanks, David, but I fear you've missed my point.
You simply cannot compare the change in a century's worth of annual data to the change in data taken every five million years. And taking averages doesn't help in the slightest. They are incompatible datasets, they have NO relationship with each other.
Think of it this way. An equivalent rise to the century-long current rise could have happened many times in 5 million years … and yet it wouldn't show up in the slightest in the PhanDA dataset. There would be NO record of it in PhanDA.
You're abusing an expired equine …
w.
Willis, I understand your comment, and I know people like you like to argue that there could have been a century's worth of equivalent warming (to today) somewhere in those 30 Myrs, or many, proving that it's possible our century's worth of warming is a natural fluctuation, not manmade.
That's just terrible science, and I'm not going there.
Andrew, for fun I asked Grok "Is it good science to compare a 100-year-long annual dataset with a dataset with five million years between data points?
Here's Grok's answer:
===
Comparing a 100-year annual time series with a time series that has five million years between data points is generally not good science for most purposes, as the vast difference in temporal resolution, scale, and context makes meaningful direct comparisons challenging and often misleading.
Bottom Line
No, it’s not good science to directly compare a 100-year annual time series with a five-million-year interval series in most cases—the scales and contexts are too disparate for meaningful results. You can use them together for specific purposes (e.g., long-term context or calibration), but only with rigorous methods that account for their differences. Otherwise, you’re comparing apples and fossils—interesting, but not scientifically sound.'
===
Grok specifically notes the issue I raised, that there could easily be a century's worth of warming that's hidden in your data. It says:
===
Statistical and Methodological Challenges:
Sampling Bias: The 100-year series has dense, evenly spaced data, while the five-million-year series is sparse, with gaps potentially hiding critical events (e.g., rapid climate shifts like the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, ~55 Mya, lasted ~200,000 years, Science, 2005).
Averaging Effects: Long-term data often averages over millennia per point, smoothing out variability the 100-year series captures. For instance, a five-million-year point might average a warm period and an ice age, while the 100-year series shows yearly spikes.
Statistical Validity: Direct correlation or regression between datasets with such different resolutions is problematic—statistical methods assume comparable sampling frequencies. Techniques like spectral analysis might reveal shared cycles (e.g., Milankovitch in both), but direct point-to-point comparison is meaningless (Statistical Methods in the Atmospheric Sciences, Wilks, 2011).
===
So I fear that both Grok and I disagree strongly with your claim.
w.
David, I don't "like to argue" that. I don't have to argue it at all.
It's a simple scientific fact. Temperature is FRACTAL, and as Mandelbrot showed, climate is fractal as well. You are claiming that we an take two temperature readings FIVE MILLION years apart and compare that to a 100-year annual record.
Can't be done, and I'm shocked that you think it's good science to compare the two.
My best to you,
w.
The derivative is not comparable time periods with different lengths. The data supporting the graph is not measured at the level of months, rather it's at the level of millions of years. You cannot compare the current instantaneous value with the historical time averaged value.
Notice I wrote the "average rate of change," not the rate of change.
Of course; everyone knows this. But I didn't take derivatives, I took large scale changes. The point is just because you see a large change in a paleo-graph doesn't mean it's significant.
I don't understand this claim. Are you are saying that if the earth cools gradually by say 25°C as in PhanDA, it's not "significant" because it happened slowly?
By that standard, coming out of the last Ice Age is also not "significant" because the warming was only on the order of 0.005°C per year …
When did it become true that slow changes are not significant because they're slow? The closing of the Darien Gap took millions of years, but it made a big difference to the global climate.
Sorry, not getting it.
w.
"Are you are saying that if the earth cools gradually by say 25°C as in PhanDA, it's not "significant" because it happened slowly?"
I didn't say that at all. I said (or implied) that idiots like Joe Rogan look at this graph and see a large decrease starting at some point, but don't consider the time interval of the change. So they think, look at that huge change, so many degrees, and if that can happen then that can be happening today!! Which is just dumb denialism.
Thanks for the clarification.
Again, I'm not seeing why a 25°C warming would not be significant, when we're told that another degree of warming is an existential threat to humanity.
And I don't believe that the speed of the change is the huge danger as is often claimed, with people saying "We and the environment won't have time to adapt!! That was a change in five million years, this is the change in a century!!"
Temperatures in areas where humans happily live can go from -25°C to +25°C in six months every year and things go well. A six-month swing of 50°C is not uncommon in the northern hemisphere
But people claim if it suddenly tomorrow started going from -24°C to +26°C every six months (putting us half a degree over the dreaded 2°C warming threshold), suddenly that's a major threat to continued human existence? …
Sorry, but that dog won't hunt. People would barely notice.
Best to you,
w.
Willis, you just want to argue, using the same old denialist tropes that were addressed decades ago. I'm not interested.
"Temperatures in areas where humans happily live can go from -25°C to +25°C in six months every year and things go well. A six-month swing of 50°C is not uncommon in the northern hemisphere.
"But people claim if it suddenly tomorrow started going from -24°C to +26°C every six months (putting us half a degree over the dreaded 2°C warming threshold), suddenly that's a major threat to continued human existence? …"
To wit. How long have you been on the Web? 20 years? More? It's incredible that you haven't learned anything in all that time, and can only repeat the same exhausted, unscientific arguments. Do you even try to learn???
Have a good day.
PS: Looking at a "large-scale change" in °C per year as you've done IS a derivative. The definition of the derivative is the change in the value of some function over time. The length of time over which you take the derivative is up to you.
w.
That's not the definition of a derivative. The derivative of a function is the *instantaneous* rate of change at every point. It's not just the change over any time interval.
My apology for my lack of clarity. You are correct, a calculated differential dx/dt is an instantaneous rate of change. I was talking abut first differences.
In computational terms, the differential is generally approximated by the first difference. It gives us, not the instantaneous rate of change, but the rate of change over the step size of the time series. It's the best approximation of the differential we have. And you're right. Strictly speaking, it's not a differential. But it's used as such all over climate science.
Suppose we have a time series called "somets". In R, the function diff(somets) gives us the best approximation of the differential.
On the other hand, the function diff(somets,12) gives us the year-to-year first difference, with each point representing the annual rate of change. It's what we'd have as a first difference if our data was actually annual.
Your data has an average time step of 5 million years. So the function diff(PhanDA) give us the best approximation of the derivative using a five million year timestep.
That's what I was referring to.
Regards,
w.
That is terrifying!
Great post about a fantastic paper. It is too bad people don't understand it, don't appreciate it, and/or don't believe it.
Maybe we need to try and help them at least appreciate the implications of that last graph. For example, if we stayed at our present level of ~420 ppm CO2. The earth's equilibrium temperature - mother nature's equilibrium temperature at 420 ppm over many millennia is 18.5 C. Our present 5-year average GMST is 15 C, 1.3 C above a preindustrial GMST of 13.7 C. In other words, at our present level of CO2 we have a warming potential of 3.5 C hotter than it is right now. That reflects how far we have managed to drive the earth's natural system out of equilibrium in 150 years. What part don't you understand???
Hotter than expected sooner than expected is my mantra. Plus it will take centuries to cool down even with optimal countermeasures. Those climate change deniers, like cockroaches are always with us. But unlike cockroaches they will not survive what's coming.
Your mode of expressing your views does little service to the cause you are advocating for.
I appreciate the elegance of your reply. Surely you see that I didn't call them insects but only likened them to cockroaches in their dogged persistence. I doubt if many readers would have been misled. I wonder also if I did any great disservice to my cause whatever that may be. I should remark at not only the elegance of your reply but it's incisive brevity. I would do well to learn from your example.
On second thought I think you are right. I should have chosen some other referent that didn't carry such a slighting comparison. I will apply the golden rule next time and try to do better.
What cause are you advocating here, Ron? Open-ended anthropogenic global warming?
Like citing variability over very short periods ("but it is snowing", "but the "pause"") as evidence climate change has nothing to do with humans and is 'normal' (therefore no action required) citing conditions back before humans were around is a perspective that is misleading.
Good reasons to think agriculture depended on the extraordinary and unusual climate stability of The Holocene and the emergence of civilisations depended on that. That stability has already been lost. During that critical time Earth's climate was NOT highly variable compared to what had gone before the Holocene. And yet even the much smaller changes within that period were enough to affect the rise and fall of those civilisations.
And, whilst not so warm relative to most of Earth's history it was significantly warmer (as well as more stable) than most of the time that homo sapiens has existed as a species.
The lesson I think we should draw from Earth's variable climate history is that climate is highly susceptible to change and therefore susceptible to human influences; this specific study confirms the significance of GHG concentrations to that susceptibility. And what happens at the scale of human lifetimes - what humans living now have experienced and can expect to experience in their lifetimes is what matters most to human decision making.
What drives Joe Rogan, Mel Gibson,and other non-scientist science-deniers? Here's a theory and some history:
Darwin explained survival of the fittest as evolution's mechanism. Though by the 80's we knew it wasn't the full story, e.g. horizontal gene transfer, nonetheless a horizontal domain transfer took Darwin's mechanism deeply into American business (Ayn Rand intermediating). If it's survival of the fittest, we have to be free to survive, and fitness score-keeping is wealth maximization (fueled in the post-Friedman 80's by EVA and LBOs, but that's a longer story).
Reagan and HW Bush were conservative leaders who recognized that betting the ranch on prices (the ranch being society's capital stock) periodically requires re-alignment of prices with societal welfare. Along these lines, we met ozone and acid rain challenges in the 90's, the latter with a market mechanism now used by Europe for co2. Also, Jim Hansen warned Congress on climate in 1988 - helping get us in-the-room for international climate negotiations beginning with conservative Presidents. So science had salience with conservatives last century, and even some like Paulson, McCain, and occasionally Graham, this century.
Yet conservatives no longer conserve, as we know. Why? An LNG tanker fueling up for an Asia voyage is the picture worth a thousand words on that one. Would we abscond with the remaining atmospheric space for stable climate even though a quarter of the radiative-forcing molecules up there now are ours? Even though we are <5% of population and our corporations have 64% of global equity market cap (MSCI ACWI, 2/25)? Yes, LNG is a climate bomb and we are co-ercing Asia to buy it instead of Chinese cleantech - the planet's best carbon budget management tool right now.
Mel Gibson might remember Jesus. We the richest get the combustion benefit but we socialize damage costs among the world's poorest. Church Lady might say "well isn't that just divine?"
Does it matter that IMF models indicate the world is much richer with energy transition than without? Does it matter that models indicate the same for America, though our government stopped running the numbers (fyi, see recent UCLA carbon tax paper)? No.
Faced with facts - Joe Rogan, Mel Gibson, and MAGAphiles as a group, say simply - KILL CLIMATE FACTS! Having lived in Asia - and worked with most of its Governments as they sought to get smarter, plan longer term, and develop university-to-VC foodchains like ours - Asian business sees their break coming. Trump 2.0 tariffs, anti-university, don't-say-climate (in Florida!), market-failing beats externality-pricing, >RE =<cost=Marxism, and no-allies-needed...how can the US share of MSCI AWCI trend anything but lower over time? Employment and productivity, ditto.
Some will certainly benefit (think Harold Hamm), but who pays if making America dumber turns out, well, dumb?
The pace of change commentary reminds of the Reid Surface in geology, which describes the behavior of crustal rock in response to geologic stresses delivered at different rates. At a very slow rate, rocks can be seen to deform dramatically over time without breaking - something you can see in the folded sediments revealed by highway cuts all over the place. But at a rapid pace, such as with quick movement along a major fault, the crust simply shatters in an "earthquake." The Surface is simply the depth at which the shattering starts/stops; with rapid movements, the crust shatters a long way down. As our environment may do with rapid climate change.
So, you are deleting all comments that disagree with ChatGPT? That's a new one.. You do realize ChatGPT reads only the LLM's that its programmers have put in. There is very little if anything in the LLM's that includes viewpoints from highly qualified scientists who happen to believe climate change is natural . It includes scientifically derived proof that temperature rises first, warms the oceans, which then puts more CO2 into the atmosphere. Without that in the LLMs, of course chatGPT will tell you what you want to hear. I'm cancelling my subscription to your substack, which I know doesn't bother you much.
Thanks for leaving voluntarily, if you actually think “CO2 can’t be controlling the climate because, during ice ages, temperature change first.” That's no longer a logically defensible claim, so its perseverance evinces denialism by Wikipedia's definition (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denialism). The less denialism posted here, the better. IMHO, of course.
Correlation is not causation, and that graph plots temperature changes of 20* C over millions of years, and we are talking of a temperature change of only a couple degrees over a 150 years that began at the end of an ice age which is being correlated to human industrialization. Another correlation that should be considered is the weakening of Earth's magnetosphere, the increasing velocity of the wandering north pole and the fact that all weather on Earth is under far more influence of the sun than humans. And I am not talking about visible light from the sun, but the constant barrage of charged solar particles that form the earth-solar electric circuit. These charged particles, in new research ignored by the IPCC shows strong correlation to changes in the electromagnetic flux of the solar wind to storms and lightning strikes on earth. Also, new research is beginning to reveal the ionic nature of weather. But this will not get much light as it contradicts the narrative.
The fact is, no single graph can prove anything for or against this eugenics driven AGW belief. Graphs are mathematical devices that can be manipulated to present what you want, therefore are unreliable as proof of anything. What really matters is a good Baconian understanding of the mechanisms involved, and this AGW does not have. Co2 is a heavier than air gas and wants to fall to ground where it is consumed by plants and helps them grow. More plants equate to cooler ground temperatures. Predictions based on this model reveals temperatures are not keeping in line with increasing atmospheric Co2, ice still hasn't disappeared from the poles. Modus Tollens.
If you really believe that human industrialization is the cause of a threatening change in climate, then rather than put onerous policies on the masses, you should take the profits from those who got wealthy from this industrialization to build the energy structure that are Co2 neutral. Those same wealthy hypocritical elites who fly around on private jets that spew far more Co2 into the atmosphere in one trip than the average family produces in a month. AL Gore's family got rich off of oil. If he was truly sincere, he should feel some guilt for his wealth, but he doesn't. Instead, he trades carbon credits and makes millions per year and continues to fly around on a private jet.
Valentina Zharkova has produced a model that has a 95% accuracy, far greater accuracy than any global warming model. Her model based on eigen vectors and velocity of magnetic field lines in solar flares suggests that we are in fact heading into a Grand Solar Minimum that will see global temperatures drop by 3*C or more over the next 10 years. These GSM have a history of being correlated to societal collapses, increases in diseases, famine and death. Historically, warming periods have produced increases in populations and the building of empires.
Personally, I'd take a warming planet over a cooling one, but we as humans do not have that choice. All we can do is prepare for what we think comes next.
"Daemon Nice" (hmm, could be an AI): "If you really believe that human industrialization is the cause of a threatening change in climate, then rather than put onerous policies on the masses, you should take the profits from those who got wealthy from this industrialization to build the energy structure that are Co2 neutral."
Why, I think that's a fine idea, on face value. Two years ago, the oil and gas industry earned $4 trillion in profits (https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/oil-gas-industry-earned-4-trillion-last-year-says-iea-chief-2023-02-14). Nothing scares fossil carbon producers and investors more than proposals for collective intervention in their profit streams!
Of course, if we do anything like that through our government, producers will have to charge higher prices or get out of the fossil carbon business. Consumers will migrate to other energy sources as they grow cheaper. How about if we tax fossil fuel producers per tonne, dividend the collected tax back to all consumers in equal amounts periodically, and let the market build out the carbon-neutral economy?
Ah, but then there's "Those same wealthy hypocritical elites who fly around on private jets that spew far more Co2 into the atmosphere in one trip than the average family produces in a month. AL Gore's family got rich off of oil. If he was truly sincere, he should feel some guilt for his wealth, but he doesn't. Instead, he trades carbon credits and makes millions per year and continues to fly around on a private jet."
Uh, now we see what flag you're flying. You're choosing what to believe out of spite: whatever "Al Gore" is for, you're against! You know Gore's not a climate scientist, don't you? His personal energy consumption has approximately zero implications for the physics of global climate change. Gore at least acknowledges the global "free" market's ancient propensity to socialize every transaction cost it can get away with, between both buyers and sellers. Hence the tragedy of the global climate commons. He did say in public recently, that ‘Investors now realise fossil fuels aren’t the future’ (https://www.thetimes.com/business-money/companies/article/al-gore-investors-now-realise-fossil-fuels-arent-the-future-5q3gw03p8). Anyway, it's been 25 years since Gore lost the Presidential election by 537 votes out of 5,825,043, and a SCOTUS intervention. Current efforts by entrepreneurs, NGOs and governments large and small around the world, to bring the price of renewables below that for fossil energy everywhere, are what matters going forward.
Agenda driven drivel.
Agenda driven? Well, yes. My agenda is to collectively cap the rising trend of global heat content as soon as politically feasible, because otherwise it's a ongoing, open-ended disaster. I believe my agenda is shared by a global consensus of reality-dwellers. What's your agenda, other than "whatever Al Gore is for, I'm against"?
Only a fool assumes as you have about me. Pointing out Al Gore's hypocrisy is not evidence of me being against whatever he is against. It is me pointing out hypocrisy.
There is no heat building up, and if you weren't prone to such shallow thinking you might see past the propaganda that has convinced you of a scientific theory driven by a political agenda from an international organization built by eugenicists with the intention of a one world government. Read the Principles and policies of UNESCO.
Heh. No assumption necessary, Daemon. That's some swivel-eyed, tinfoil-hatted conspiracism right there in your very words! Not nice at all! Only a fool would trouble to respond to you any further. I am not one.
whatever
lol actually it is historical fact. But you have already shown you are not interested in facts.
"Humans have increased atmospheric CO₂ by approximately 40% in just 150 years"
Why do you say 40% and not 50%?
Ahh, good catch, was using an outdate 400 rather than 420 ppm value. Fixed now.
Thanks Dan! It's an easy mistake to make when the number is rising rapidly!
Thank you for a helpful and informative contribution. My greatest wish today is that policy and its implementation will act upon the science. The US is the world's largest CO2 emitter: presently it is turning away from science and climate/environmental polices. I dare not try to calculate the uncertainty.
The US is not the world's largest CO2 emitter: https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-by-country/
Brianna, LWE wrote "The US is the world's largest CO2 emitter". There are are multiple ways that's strictly true: for example, the US is still by far the world's largest cumulative emitter (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co2-emissions-region?stackMode=absolute). Decarbonizing the US economy won't bring an end to global warming by itself, but it will reduce global greenhouse emissions substantially. Why would we wait for China to decarbonize itself first?
When imports are taken into account they have the largest per capitata emissions by far.
So, according to this, we are withing twenty million years of a major extinction event? Look at all of the temperature shifts that killed nothing. Also, our methods for measuring "aggregate global temperature" are a joke, but even though trust has been lost, the climate apocalypse fear monger data shows temperature rise over the past 150 years to be less than one degree F(well within standard deviation). You folks have lost all trust and credibility.
You used a lot of words to say that you didn't understand (and probably didn't read) the paper and certainly don't understand the implications of the current rate of change compared to earlier times.
This has nothing to do with me. They did not mention the rate of change or the previous rate of change and, according to them, that is the most important input. Also, if we can not trust the constantly changing formula for "aggregate global temperature" is the current hypothetical rate of change just opinion. The scientific method is all about testing theories and being able to replicate the tests with almost identical results. "Climate scientists" have never done that, and consensus is not a scientific data point. If they do not agree with climate change hysteria, they do not get funded. Peer reviewed journals have failed to produce reliable data or science over the past twenty years. The China COVID virus came from a lab, but nobody would publish the story. Catastrophic global warming apocalypse hysteria is a hoax. Nearly ten time the number of people die every year from cold.
Insulting me and inventing "what I think I know" is ignorant. Is irrelevant and ignorant. Be better and please try to refute absolutely anything I have said with facts/real science.
Thank you for your fetal capitulation to the truth. If hysterical hoaxes no longer work, that's the end of the DNC
How does the current rate of change compare to the rate of change 200 million years ago. That is not discussed in the article. What is the current rate of change? The "implications" are 100% subjective and there is no causal data in the article. Perhaps you are projecting. Perhaps the current global temperature is 100% subjective. They have changed the methodology every five years for decades.
Assuming "Free Will" is not an AI agent:
Do you really expect Prof. Dessler to recapitulate the entire 200-year history of climate science in a single blog post? You can look up the answers to your questions yourself. All the relevant scientific documents are available on line, but be wary of A.I.-generated search returns. It helps to possess some scientific meta-literacy (h/t J. Nielsen-Gammon), so you know what sources are more credible. Of course, there's really no substitute for putting as much time in as Prof. Dessler and his professional peers each have, to learn all that is known about climate and how it changes. Fortunately, they've been working on your questions for decades, and have reached a strong consensus. That's called "intersubjective verification", a foundation of modern science.
"Subjective"? Yes, it's in the definition. Nonetheless, science is the only way of understanding reality and predicting the future we've invented, that works better than divination with a sheep's liver. Good enough for me to advocate prompt collective decarbonization of the US and global economies, if not for you!
There is only about a fifteen year old"history" of climate science. The "subjective soft science was coined during Barry Obama's presidency: the third and fourth term of the Shrub Bush presidency. .
"Consensus" is not a scientific term and soft sciences, like climate change have never been able to predict anything. Al Gore made thousands of dire predictions and zero of them have come true. "Inter subjective verification," is also non-scientific. What is "modern science?" Science with zero predictive value. Is that science or just a political narrative?
Peer-reviewed science journals have become a punch line and "experts" who take grants from the federal government do jot generally care about science. I'm pretty sure climate change has been setting fire to Tesla dealerships and cars lately. Prove it has not.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away" (PK Dick).
"The first rule is you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool" (R Feynman).
Science builds a view of reality by careful observation and intersubjective verification, conducted by trained, mutually disciplined, competitively skeptical peers. Anyone can participate if they're willing to put the effort in, and humble enough to acknowledge how easy it is to fool themselves.
Intersubjective verification, i.e. "peer review" broadly defined, exposes biases introduced by even trained individuals to the unsparing scrutiny of their professional competitors, who cleanse each other's work of all but the verifiable evidence. In contrast, your hostile comment reveals a view of reality distorted by ignorance and spite. For example, whoever told you "consensus isn't science" was trying to fool you, because science can't advance without consensus. And you know Al Gore isn't a peer climate scientist, don't you? They're not responsible for what he says, nor have they ever taken instructions from him. Regardless, he lost his last election 25 years ago!
Do you really think you're smarter than the aggregate of the thousands of people around the world who've undergone the years of training and discipline Andrew and Zeke have? That's hardly skeptical! It's possible that education in the 200 year history of climate-related physical (i.e. "hard") science might resolve your cognitive dissonance, but only if you're willing. Many educated climate realists recommend "The Discovery of Global Warming" by Spencer R. Weart, a physicist and science historian with the American Institute of Physics (an umbrella organization for the American Physical Society, American Meteorological Society, and other professional scientific associations). It's free to read online (https://history.aip.org/climate/index.htm), or you can purchase a paperback edition, the latest published in 2008. The web version is more dynamic, however.
Ignorance is treatable, and replacing it with knowledge may overcome spite. We can hope, at least.
I'll self-describe myself as a "climate skeptic" just so no one else has to.
I hadn't actually seen this discussion until I got the newsletter in my inbox this morning. I think what the newsletter (Devin) and most of the folks on here that are agreeing are missing is that the historical record speaks to the existence (actually, the apparent non-existence) of "tipping points". Based on what I've read, the claim is that CO2 and temperature is highly correlated. That means you don't have to worry about some scary "tipping point" at 520 ppm CO2 or whatever that causes the climate to run away and the planet to turn into Venus. Consequently you "only" have to worry about something that's much more predictable. I put "only" in quotes: if you think the predicted changes are terrifying then ok, be terrified. A lot of people don't think they sound so terrifying and are likely well within the limits of what humans can adapt to almost without noticing it.
Or put differently, if you want to maintain "climate hysteria" you had better be able to maintain the suggestion that there are unknown tipping points in the climate at an atmospheric CO2 level not too much higher than the present.
What is clear in the paper is not that there is a tipping point in the temperature, but that there is strong evidence of one in the rate of change of temperature.
Well, since neither Drs. Dessler or Hausfather are seeking to maintain "climate hysteria", they're off the hook. As for the "lot of people don't think they sound so terrifying and are likely well within the limits of what humans can adapt to almost without noticing it": apparently "a lot" of people don't realize growing numbers of other people are already "adapting" to anthropogenic climate change by the loss of their homes, livelihoods and lives. And just why are the lukewarmers so confident they won't have to adapt all-too-noticeably themselves?
Y'all can continue to be terrified...There is no way, no how that you are going to convince me that we are living in "terrifying" times. For a field so hellbent on "science", it appears to be lost here. Can anyone point out here the fact that as the climate has gradually warmed over the past few thousand years that humans have progressively thrived accordingly? And for all those who want things colder, so as to "reduce the speed of climate change", to what period would be more optimal? The 6th century (AKA the dark ages)? The 1700's? The 1800's? Nobody has ever answered this question! Please answer this question before employing yet again another ad hominem about how stupid the skeptics (myself included) are.
'There is no way, no how that you are going to convince me that we are living in "terrifying" times.'
OK, Scott, we get it. I, for one, won't waste my time trying, but will address the hypothetical uncommitted lurker instead. While I might not be "terrified", I'm sufficiently convinced that only collective intervention in the energy market can bring fossil carbon emissions to zero without inevitable mass death and misery. I'll do what I can to ensure you're outvoted in the next US elections.
Try understanding the paper and it answers your questions.
One question about figure 2. Cause what I can see there, and what climate skeptics will probably focus on too, is that you also have many fast up and downs that didn't create massive extinction, and that you also have massive extinction events in periods with no big changes of temperature.
Is it because I'm missing or misunderstanding something?
Btw, I understand and agree with the point that even if life is resilient maybe human life is not so much. Nice post
Fast is a bit relative on a graph where the x-axis spans half a billion years. You'd have to look at each a bit more in depth to determine what the rates of change are.
Its not my personal area of expertise, but OWID has a good page with descriptions of the estimated cause of the five historical mass extinction events. At least two are associated with periods of intense volcanism (and associated climate change), one silicate weathering, and one from massive plant CO2 uptake and sequestration: https://ourworldindata.org/mass-extinctions