A great heat dome explanation/graphic, Andrew. The simple truths of high to low movement of heat transfer and fluid pressure has got to be grasped by all.
Have become a cooldowner. Every method to mitigate heat 🥵 is my current interest. Then it gets cold. And I forget. One day it might not get cold.
As a retired forecaster I applaud your explanation of how summer anticyclones lead to heat waves. Winter anticyclones cause settled but often cloudy weather, with low stratocumulus, stratus or even fog beneath a temperature inversion that can be as low as 1,000 feet. The warmest places can be mountain tops that project from the cloud top into brilliant sunshine, warmer air and low humidity.
Thanks, Andrew, for reposting that. As a thermodynamicist -- that doesn't study atmospheric science very closely -- I'm wondering if you have a numerically-precise definition for a heatwave. Is it based on relative increases in temperature or on precise, absolute temperatures? If it's the latter, then as you said with the "rising tide" analogy, climate change that creates higher average temperatures create more heatwaves. However, if it's the former, that an increase in higher average temperatures doesn't. I'm asking because this clearly
affects the meaning/interpretation of much of the article. :-)
there is no single definition of a "heat wave" (in fact, people can't even agree on whether heatwave is one or two words). but it is usually defined to be temperatures over some number of days that exceed some percentile temperature of a baseline period (e.g., 3 days of temps above 95th percentile). b/c climate change pushes temps up, it will increase the number of days above the 95th percentile.
Sweet! This is like the different implications of sea ice extent metrics.
The NSIDC's description of "sea ice extent" included any area with at least 15% sea ice. This meant that the weird Arctic Ocean storm in 2012 that pushed the ice to one side of the Ocean could "compress" the floating ice such that the record smallest area was covered.
That 15% threshold is apparently an artifact of combining satellite measurement with human perception on the ground, but doesn't tell us what it means for heat flow to the atmosphere or effective albedo or number of polar bears that drown or when you need an icebreaker to cross the water, etc.
The reason I don’t like sea ice extent as a metric is that it changes when you change the resolution used for the estimate… which was a challenge when we were trying to do model/observation comparisons…
I remember being focused on sea ice *volume*, but that was when there a noticeable amount of multi-year ice. Now I just think of the remnant thick ice as curious historic residue.
Ah! Andrew and Marcus, I have just seen this interaction.
The post says 'Climate change has an amplifying effect on heatwaves.'and the paper is about how climate change 'would' affect 'risk' of heatwaves. Yes, increasing temperatures, humidity and dry soils increase intensity of heatwaves. However, to be clear, it is not proven that changes in atmospheric dynamics are caused by climate change.
I recently had an interaction with a denier who pointed to the Rousi paper that dmeonstrates the increase in intensity in European heatwaves is significantly affected by blocking due to the recent increases in double jet streams; responsible for 50% of the temperature increase in Western Europe heatwaves with the other 50% from climate change.
I regurgitated that as the jet stream is controlled by temperature differential between the Artic and Tropic this is a consequence of climate change. However, as she delightedly schooled me, this could be natural variation and models suggest that rising temps in the tropics would lead to a decrease in double jets.
I urge caution climate scientists in the media to make this clear when explaining the increase in persistence and intensity of heatwaves and not to point solely to anthropogenic climate change, it gives grist to the deniers mill.
Every heatwave starts with natural variability. Climate change makes it more severe by raising the base level that natural variability is acting on. Unless climate change is making natural variability smaller, then this does not contradict the claim that climate change is making heat waves worse.
Hiya, the argument is that natural variablity and not climate change is responsible for the difference between the expected warming and the observed in Europe; that climate scientists shouldn’t imply that the rise in persistence and intensity of European heatwaves is largely caused by climate change when recent changes over decades in atmospheric dynamics have been shown to be responsible for 100% of the European increase over global average.
However, I’ve just become aware of the paper by Roldan-Gomez about reduction in aerosols being largely responsible for the changes in atmospheric dynamics so this natural variation argument is looking less convincing.
Climate change is absolutely increasing the intensity of heatwaves in Europe and everywhere else. Identifying other things that are having an impact does not contradict that.
Nice and easy to understand explainer Andy. Living near the coast, I add that the warming of the Gulf of Mexico has led to warmer overnight lows and higher daytime humidity which have worsened the human impact of heat waves.
What a brilliant way to describe "the distinction between 'fiat' and 'mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon'?" No, I don't think Hansen wants dictatorship - he's too sensible for that (we all wish him well).
The only mutual coercions that have worked well have been:
(1) national defense against violent enemies (survival instincts),
(2) response to acute emergencies (climate change is based on this)
(3) the price mechanism in all forms of political economy.
"Emergencies" can wane - like Covid, Ebola and HIV did.
Price mechanisms are a permanent part of human behavior since starting for humans 2.4 million years ago when Homo habilis evolved. Habilis was a "handyman", making implements that he bartered with co-existing hunter-gatherers (mainly robustus types including Homo ergasta). We see the price mechanism working in most primates, some birds and even amongst Europeans - subject to EU red tape, taxes and subsidies of course.
Unfortunately the "fiat" is imposed via skillfully "disguised exogenous coercion". Perpetrators disguise their coercion because people know that "benevolent dictatorship" usually leads to tyranny. The UN spends hundreds of $billions coercing weaker nations into a collectivist response.
A classic example of "disguised exogenous coercion" is the EU's method of using trade agreements to legally impose their climate change ideology on "victim countries". Australia just signed an EU trade agreement and Australian taxpayers are being forced to spend $millions per month sending unelected public servants to Europe (business class, luxury hotels) to laisse with EU officials, eat out at Paris restaurants, watch Wimbledon tennis - the usual junket. The EU intentionally and skillfully seduces public servants and politicians to pass into the laws of their "victim countries" these EU trade agreements and their concomitant regulations, including the EU's right to impose penalties for non-compliance. It's quite scandalous.
The UK is a victim of relict EU coercive laws that prevent the UK from pursuing their national best interests during hard times for the UK poor. For example, the UK can't stop illegal boat arrivals due to EU human rights laws that the UK foolishly passed into British Laws (as if British Law was inadequate?). Similarly, the UK has been banned by relict EU climate change laws from developing their huge onshore domestic gas reserves that were discovered 17 years ago and the EU forced the holes to be filled with concrete. Mindless lunacy.
Britain cannot even develop their known British North Sea oil-gas resources by these self-inflicted "EU fiats", so, the UK imports expensive gas from Norway's North Sea oilfields. Norway wisely refused to join the EU socialist collective and is now amongst the richest societies in history, with the largest sovereign wealth fund. Many UK pensioners have died overnight from cold because they could not afford gas heating or feeding their old electricity meters with coins. Most of these poor deaths are declared, under EU rules, as having died from 'natural causes'. A few Coroner's courts document what really caused their deaths and it is a tragedy.
Germany's pro-Russia past leader, Angela Merkel, who grew-up in communist East Germany speaking Russian like a Starina, imported gas from Russia and her friend Putin (who was head of KGB in East Germany) and nobody in the EU even mentioned the geopolitical foolishness of her policies. Only Trump called her out, but he just upset everyone. It took Ukrainian underwater drones offshore Sweden to destroy the Russian gas pipelines and stop the Merkel insanity.
This disguised exogenous coercion by the "coalition of the subversives" is starting to be seen for what it is. Namely, a Fabian socialist device to impose a collectivist ideology on unwitting communities. Fabianism has always proven to be sub-optimal and ends up hurting the poorest sector of nations the most - like the many UK examples.
It would be like USA demanding all trading partners "drill baby drill" if they want to trade with America. For freedom-loving decent Americans, such a constraint on freedom of others would never be countenanced.
Just a note about the 25% "optimum sweet spot" for renewables. There are limited locations near existing major power transmission lines that can hook-into the grid fairly cheaply. 25% may come from that geometry? Building new transmission lines into remoter areas for renewables only is horrendously expensive and these remote renewables can't carry the capital cost, maintenance costs and control costs of dedicated lines without taxpayer subsidies that get added to the nation's tax burden. This is why taxes are rising while renewables are driving up power bills by 38% in Australia and this industry is impoverishing our next 2 generations.
Rooftop solar and batteries is different, largely driven by subsidies plus wealthy home-owning people installing technologies to "get off-grid" (I can't do that). My very wealthy neighbor has a massive rooftop and battery setup that cost him $35,000 (after $11,000 in government subsidies that I'm paying via my taxes). He is saving $2,500 to $3,000 pa net because he still has to pay grid connection charges plus some very expensive power during cloudy weather plus paying for people to clean his rooftop solar panels (a dangerous job).
So, in my superannuation savings, I put $35,000 into a single term deposit when he installed this massive solar system. I now have $41,000 in that account and in 10 years time, it should be about $65,000 after tax for my retirement (if I live). I will have paid around $30,000 in extra electricity charges more than my neighbour like-for-like. Overall, $35,000 net.
In 10 years, my neighbour will have saved a minimum of $30,000 at today's grid power charge rates or $45,000 of savings at the projected higher power costs here in renewables-dense Australia. And he'll still have partly worn-out, dust/salt-ingrained or hail-damaged solar panels on his roof plus a regular new member of his virtual family, called the "battery-control serviceman" who is not cheap. I can see the serviceman from my window as I write.
Conclusion: Overall, my wealthy neighbour will have saved more money than I can make by saving my retirement money in a bank account. I don't have the house and funds to do likewise.
If this renewables nirvana ever reduces grid electricity costs, my neighbour will achieve less savings - but he'll still be a fair bit ahead of me in 10 years time.
Staying on-grid is for us poorer people and the wealthy people deserve to use their wealth to game the subsidized system. They must be better, more deserving people to get so rich. And they make the rules.
Hi Andrew, Your substack is very good. On heat waves: is the cool air which sinks from the upper atmosphere (above a high pressure as in your diagram) any warmer than average for than altitude? This would make it warmer than otherwise after it sinks and compresses towards the earth's surface. GregB
I would never criticize serious scientists of being members of the "Malevolent Greed" that is milking government subsidies. I applaud the seriousness and scholarship of climate scientists on substack and elsewhere. It has been gullible governments that have misallocated humanity's limited capital (don't get me started on modern monetary theory) which risks a global financial crisis. Luckily Europe and North America are pulling back from the brink of that economic abyss.
I'm a reasonable economist and an average scientist with a 50-year career in industry, having never received a cent from government. I can see that "collective" processes stimulated by government subsidies and regulations have almost always led to poor outcomes. We can't tax or subsidize our way to success because there are many "sticky fingers" harvesting the subsidies. I know a few of the subsidy-harvesters personally and they have become very wealthy. When governments are throwing around taxpayer's cash, some people know how to harvest it quite legally.
Collective decarbonization is a noble and important mission but the cost has been excessive and damaging the poor. We must find a better way to reduce CO2 and I think nuclear base load will play a role as technologies improve. Being a realpolitik economist-scientist, I can also see coal-fired power being the optimal solution in some jurisdictions for at least the rest of this century. We are talking about people's lives.
Personally, I'm just an unaligned voter of no special note (it shows, doesn't it?). I have occasionally been involved in lobbying Federal and State governments in Australia on industrial, technological and economic issues but only twice about climate science, including presentations to a previous Prime Minister. On the second occasion with the Prime Minister, I was wrong and admitted it when truth became evident. I've been happy to be proven wrong, but my score card is a bit better than average.
I started lobbying in 1980 about tariff policies on drill steels and in 1981, lobbied both Federal and State government about Australia's bans on uranium, including coordinated public education campaigns that led to a genuinely good outcome for all concerned.
I co-drafted a very mediocre paper to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Geneva in the early 1980s.
In 1998-2000, I was the leader of a team of senior environmental scientists that delivered an environmentally excellent release of excess water from a cyanide tailings dam damaged by a cyclone (hurricane) in Queensland that threatened to burst and flood downstream factories and houses. We used a shrimp species as a sentinel species, and we developed a new technology for lowering antimony in tailings water prior to discharge into an environmentally significant river. Our team won a national environment award in 2000 for that success and members of the team published papers at UN conferences in USA and Europe. One of the team became a "go-to expert" on cyanide spills including a big spill in PNG.
I keep that environmental award on my desk and I shared quite a few beers with the 250 workers at the meatworks that was immediately downstream of that damaged cyanide tailings dam. If I had run for mayor, I had the meatworkers vote in the bag.
Thank you, Mr. Levy. That gives me a better understanding of your cognitive motivation. To reciprocate: I have an MS degree in Environmental Science with a 'minor' in Economics, and was two years into a Doctoral program in Ecology and Evolution before changing careers, subsequently earning an MS in Computer Science. I spent the next 30 years working in federal science laboratories. My salary was paid with tax money, for which I do not apologize, because pure scientific research is a public good, and must be supported with public funds. It's not so much that *I'm* a public good, but I was proud to earn my living supporting the centuries old, transgenerational, international, collective scientific enterprise!
In 1988 I happened to be working at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, James Hansen's home institution, when he made his June 23rd announcement to Congress. I had no difficulty with his physical-science case - it wasn't "rocket science" except literally - and witnessed the nominal rocket scientists (remote sensing, geophysics, and ecology types, mostly) I worked with quickly come to agreement with him.
With my Environmental Economics background, I saw AGW as a classic tragedy of the commons, which requires "mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon" to mitigate. I fully expected the US to embark on a collective effort to decarbonize our economy with alacrity. When it initiated but then abandoned the effort, I began reading the verifiable documentation on efforts to forestall collective intervention in fossil fuel profits. I watched an entire bespoke-disinformation industry grow sophisticated on mere $billions in carbon capital: a minor fraction of investors' total ROI, re-invested to protect the rest. According to *New Yorker* reporter and *Dark Money* author Jane Mayer, among many respected journalists and academics, it's the principal reason the US economy isn't substantially decarbonized already. AFAICT, they're right!
Hence my abiding interest in political decarbonization obstructionism, despite being nine years retired. I'll address your points individually:
IL: "I can see that 'collective' processes stimulated by government subsidies and regulations have almost always led to poor outcomes. "
MA: Maybe, but the plunging LCOE+ for renewable energy plus storage is a net social benefit.
IL: "We can't tax or subsidize our way to success because there are many 'sticky fingers' harvesting the subsidies. I know a few of the subsidy-harvesters personally and they have become very wealthy. When governments are throwing around taxpayer's cash, some people know how to harvest it quite legally."
MA: Sorry, there's simply no alternative to "mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon", i.e public intervention in the otherwise-'free' market, to drive capital and consumers to cap the warming short of civilization-ending levels: that's basic common-pool resource economics. Yes, some private parties are skilled at diverting or profiting from public investments, but targeted subsidies in multiple countries around the world have nonetheless driven a "green vortex" of market responses in carbon-neutral innovation and manufacturing efficiency, as demonstrated by the *plunging LCOE+ of RE in the past quarter-century*. Evidently, not all that subsidy money was misappropriated!
IL: "I'm a reasonable economist and an average scientist..."
MA: Me too.
IL: "...with a 50-year career in industry, having never received a cent from government."
MA: So? Presumably that's because, while Australia is a major exporter of uranium ore, it has maintained a strict federal ban on civilian nuclear power plants since the late 1990s, rather than subsiding them. Not something to boast about, really. Anyway, CSIRO reports that any future path toward nuclear power in Australia would require massive, unprecedented taxpayer subsidies to be commercially viable. For now, the winners are fossil fuel producers and investors.
IL: "Collective decarbonization is a noble and important mission but the cost has been excessive and damaging the poor. "
MA: That's *wholly subjective* on your part: *purely ideological rhetoric*. I, for one, would prefer taking fees directly from fossil carbon producers per ton, and letting them raise their prices as much as they dare or forego profit. Since consumers rich or poor are already paying all they will bear for fuels, they'd start switching to alternatives, now cheaper without subsidies in many markets. More effectively than subsidies for RE and EVs, carbon fees on producers would drive down the ROI for carbon capitalists directly, prompting them to disinvest. Carbon producers would go out of business, matching supply with dwindling demand. Poor people would benefit from cheap renewable, storable, portable electricity without socializing their own marginal climate-change costs. That's a win for everyone but carbon capitalists, and if 100% of the producer fees were dividended (everyone gets the same amount) to federal taxpayers periodically, there'd be no opportunity for diversion or graft!
Alas, US voters have not been favorably disposed toward even revenue-neutral carbon taxes. That left bare Democratic majorities in both legislative houses and a Democratic POTUS to enact the "Inflation Reduction" Act of 2022, subsidizing RE and battery development, and consumer electrification, especially EVs. Even that was too much collective intervention for Mr. Levy's Republican ideological allies in our current government!
Do either of us really have anything more to say, Mr. Levy?
You've encapsulated it very well Mal. We are seeing which political economy route works best: The Adam Smith profit motive or James Hansen collective good by fiat.
In the race of life, always back the horse named self-interest... at least you know it's trying.
Good grief! You may be done here, but I'm not. For hypothetical lurkers:
What kind of economist are you? Do you not grasp the distinction between 'fiat' and 'mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon'? 'Fiat' is imposed by dictators! Who's going to do that for the entire globe? Do you think 'fiat' is what Hansen is calling for? Do you think he dreamed up the idea of *democratically* imposing a carbon fee on producers all by himself? How can you not understand that decarbonization is even now being driven by both *public investment* and *private market response*, i.e. the *profit motive*, resulting in net *public good*?
Above all, Ian, how can you not recognize that the socially *unrestrained* profit motive is the root cause of global warming? Common-pool resource tragedies aren't new with Capitalism, they're as old as the ancient 'free' market's freedom to socialize every transaction cost it can get away with, the sellers profiting thereby! Just how much social cost should the rest of us be expected to let them get away? How much private cost socialization should we let our fellow consumers get away with?
Ian, you won that national environmental award simply for cooperating with democratically enacted restraints on your employers' profits, to keep them out of legal trouble. If there were no environmental protection regulations, you and your team would never have been paid for the work!
"We are seeing which political economy route works best"? It's the one Adam Smith and Garrett Hardin travel together!
But it's never too late to realize one's error. Jerry Taylor is a *former* Libertarian and VP of the Cato Institute, co-founded by Charles Koch. Taylor spread a lot of denialism early in this century on behalf of wealthy conservative donors. He changed his mind in 2014, he said in an interview, when his friend Jonathan Adler, of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, wrote a paper that opened his eyes (https://theintercept.com/2017/04/28/how-a-professional-climate-change-denier-discovered-the-lies-and-decided-to-fight-for-science/):
"'Just because the costs and the benefits are more or less going to be a wash,' [Adler] said, 'that doesn’t mean that the losers in climate change are just going to have to suck it up so Exxon and Koch Industries can make a good chunk of money.'"
Taylor expressed regret for his failure of due diligence, and for recruiting his own brother to mercenary denialism:
"I also introduced one of my brothers, James Taylor, to the folks at the Heartland Institute. Heartland's rise to dominate market share in climate denialism largely occurred under my brother. Boy do I regret that."
I’m hoping Artemis and other lunar landings install long-term temperature recording equipment, including in the shallow lunar soil. How would climate scientists blame western economies if, as I suspect, we find that the lunar atmosphere warms and cools similar to earth’s atmosphere?
My journey started in 1975 when I handled NASA’s lunar rock samples and studied their petrology. I became the mineral economist for a uranium company and, inter alia, studied the economics of climate policies from 1980 until 2007, focusing on nuclear versus coal-fired power technologies.
My worst fears about climate policies have arisen. We've spent too much for too long (over 50 years) achieving too little that has unfairly hurt working families. The statistics suggest that renewables work best up to 25% of supply (needs installed capacity around 70% due to intermittency) but only when there is reliable base load electricity from coal, nuclear or large-scale hydro, with gas and hydro peakas. Given the multiple renewable contracts, switching and inertia stabilizing challenges, the grids have grown too complex, expensive and unreliable for the challenges ahead. Most jurisdictions are building more base load to balance grids.
Distortions from gullible government subsidies have caused a major misallocation of our limited capital. I regret that decent scientists got embroiled in economics and politics when there is a component of malevolent greed behind the push for these damaging subsidies.
Our next two generations have been bequeathed an unproductive debt burden that means unfairly high taxes just to repay interest on debts for projects that never delivered greater productivity. Luckily humans are adapters and innovators but the opportunity cost of the recent climate-reaction era has been extraordinarily large.
Thank you for that link to the right part of the IPCC report. Yes, the IPCC is great science. Some wags say it is the best science that money can buy.
Science is never absolutely correct, not even "PROVED LAWS". For example, the unusual orbits of Mercury hinted to some sceptics that Newton's LAWS may not be correct. However, mainstream science went off looking for an extra planet called Vulcan to explain Mercury's orbits. And even Einstein's equations have some "tiny" discrepancies being researched.
Earth is a living, dynamic planet due to the interaction between geological and cosmological forces and events. Solar system variations are not yet fully understood. Viz. unexpected findings from both NASA's Parker probe and ISRO's Aditya-L1 probe. We can't fully explain the contractions and expansions of the heliosphere, which correspond with some changes in climate trajectories. Space weather is a young science.
Some of us suspect the Sun plays a bigger role than assumed. I’m studying the results from the Apollo 15 lunar expedition which accidently left the only thermocouple ever to record lunar atmospheric temperatures over a 4 year period. That thermocouple, TG11A, was left at 35cm depth in the lunar dust which is porous and holds the lunar atmospheric gases.
Does anyone in the IPCC say anything about the following facts?
Lunar surface temperatures in TG11A ross and fell as follows:
1. ROSE steadily by 2 degrees from late August 1971 until peaking in mid April 1974
2. Stabilized and
3. FELL slightly until the reliable TG11A readings ceased on 1/1/75.
4. Less reliable readings during H1 1975 show a decreasing trend until batteries died in mid 1975.
Earth surface temperatures also rose and fell during the same period:
1. ROSE by 0.25 degrees from late 1971 until peaking in late 1973, early 1974
2. FELL by 0.25 degrees until reaching a local minimum in late 1974, early 1976.
NASA's suggestion in the excellent paper Nagihara et al (2018) is that the astronaut's footprints could have caused heating is plausible. However, my own tests on dust samples show that albedo affects would have stabilized within weeks, and the first few weeks of temperature data from TG11A show a short-term heating, similar to my readings.
My study has zero funding other than from my wife and me. I have to use kitchen thermometers and manual data collection of the thousands of data. This experiment needs to be done multiple times using data collection equipment and different mixtures of gases. I've got some retirement savings that can fund that scientific experiment as long as my health holds.
Reference:
Nagihara, S., Kiefer, W. S., Taylor, P. T., Williams, D. R., & Nakamura, Y. (2018). Examination of the
long-term subsurface warming observed at the Apollo 15 and 17 sites utilizing the newly restored heat flow experiment data from 1975 to 1977. Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, 123, 1125–1139. https://doi.org/10.1029/2018JE005579
Heh! I just looked at Mr. Levy's history on TCB (https://substack.com/@minecs). Some of his remarks are witty, but AFAICT he's actually opposed to collective decarbonization, e.g. this from last April:
"Weak economies are the No.1 cause of premature deaths and renewables are a major cause of weakening economies."
"Some of us suspect the Sun plays a bigger role than assumed."
"Us"? Should the rest of us assume you're conducting an elaborate poe? If not, I see your problem: if you think natural science starts by assuming its conclusions, you're obviously not well trained in it. Two centuries of advancing climate-related science did not merely *assume* the Sun was not a factor in global warming on Earth since 1850: it *empirically demonstrated* and *intersubjectively verified* that since the end of the Little Ice Age, there is no secular trend in solar output that could contribute to the demonstrated, verified secular trend of global heat content. Nor is there an observed warming trend over the same interval on any other planetary body in the solar system.
For those of *us* who are humble enough to be suspicious of our facile assumptions, "The first rule is you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool" (R. Feynman). Anyone who tells you "consensus isn't science" is trying to fool you: without *intersubjective verification* by trained, mutually disciplined peers, there could be no scientific progress. Science isn't perfect, it's just a better way of distinguishing verifiable truth from specious falsehood than any our culture has invented since divination with entrails. All because it's a *collective*, *skeptical* undertaking!
"Some of us suspect the Sun plays a bigger role than assumed."
Uh, you do realize that there are people who have monitored what the sun has been doing over the past few decades (with reasonable sunspot proxies for centuries before that). We don't have to look at any moon or Mars or Jupiter to know what the sun has been doing, we just LOOK AT THE SUN. There is a suite of dedicated satellites called the Heliophysics System Observatory that monitors all sorts of solar output. India and China and Europe are in on it with their own satellites, too, and all of those solar scientists talk to (and argue with) each other on a regular basis.
The fingerprint for warming due to increased greenhouse gases is that THE TROPOSPHERE HAS WARMED WHILE THE STRATOSPHERE IS COOLED. Cranking up the sun would heat the stratosphere, too.
Monitoring the heat on the surface of the moon is great for understanding the regolith and the thermal "weathering" of that body, but we don't need it to explain Earth's warming when we can look at the sun and monitor the chemical and thermal properties of our much more complex atmosphere directly.
Excellent comment, but you might want to edit it and replace the 2nd occurrence of 'troposphere' to 'stratosphere'. Just a little friendly 'peer review' 8^D!
I’m hoping Artemis and other lunar landings install long-term temperature recording equipment, including in the shallow lunar soil. How would climate scientists blame western economies if, as I suspect, we find that the lunar atmosphere warms and cools similar to earth’s atmosphere?
My journey started in 1975 when I handled NASA’s lunar rock samples and studied their petrology. I became the mineral economist for a uranium company and, inter alia, studied the economics of climate policies from 1980 until 2007, focusing on nuclear versus coal-fired power technologies.
My worst fears about climate policies have arisen. We've spent too much for too long (over 50 years) achieving too little that has unfairly hurt working families. The statistics suggest that renewables work best up to 25% of supply (needs installed capacity around 70% due to intermittency) but only when there is reliable base load electricity from coal, nuclear or large-scale hydro, with gas and hydro peakas. Given the multiple renewable contracts, switching and inertia stabilizing challenges, the grids have grown too complex, expensive and unreliable for the challenges ahead. Most jurisdictions are building more base load to balance grids.
Distortions from gullible government subsidies have caused a major misallocation of our limited capital. I regret that decent scientists got embroiled in economics and politics when there is a component of malevolent greed behind the push for these damaging subsidies.
Our next two generations have been bequeathed an unproductive debt burden that means unfairly high taxes just to repay interest on debts for projects that never delivered greater productivity. Luckily humans are adapters and innovators but the opportunity cost of the recent climate-reaction era has been extraordinarily large.
"The statistics suggest that renewables work best up to 25% of supply (needs installed capacity around 70% due to intermittency) but only when there is reliable base load electricity from coal, nuclear or large-scale hydro, with gas and hydro peakas."
----
That is outdated analysis. Battery technology and chemistry are improving rapidly, even as the price per kWh is dropping. Look it up. The Chinese (who graduate 1.3 million engineers every year) are pioneering adaptation technology to handle the behavior of modern power sources. There are solutions to the need to maintain large scale grid inertia without needing fuel plants. Solar, wind and battery are excellent low maintenance alternatives to fuel-dependent thermal plants and giant dams. The biggest problems with increasing demand are procedural and transmission and distribution issues.
Here in Texas, the ERCOT grid has kept up with increasing peak demand (due to both hotter days and a growing population) because of the combination of wind, solar and batteries AND AT MUCH CHEAPER RATES THAN BEFORE RENEWABLES WERE ADDED.
"Distortions from gullible government subsidies have caused a major misallocation of our limited capital."
----
Do you have ANY IDEA how much blood and treasure the USA has spent prosecuting wars over access to oil? Those wars go on the public credit card, but the private oil and gas companies reap the benefits. The oil&gas industry has been subsidized orders of magnitude more than any other industry. The amount of money used to promote clean, modern transportation and power generation is the merest fraction of the government giveaways to those powerful companies
Forget about greenhouse gases: Outdated combustion technology has been polluting our lungs (and the lungs of every critter in the vicinity) with PM2.5 and radioactive particulates for centuries. Fossil fuels are pulled out of the ground and then *burned*, after which they have to extract more (and so on and so on), and have polluted waterways around the world in the process.
Meanwhile, around the world solar farms and wind farms and battery banks have more than paid for themselves BECAUSE THEY DON'T HAVE TO KEEP BUYING FUEL TO PRODUCE ELECTRICITY. Unlike traditional thermal plants, they use virtually no water and they're relatively inexpensive to maintain.
"How would climate scientists blame western economies if, as I suspect, we find that the lunar atmosphere warms and cools similar to earth’s atmosphere?"
----
Scientists have long known about the Greenhouse Effect based on how it manifests on other planets. This is why Venus is hotter than Mercury, even though Mercury is closer to the Sun. Earth and its moon pretty much follow the same track in the sky, and are exposed to the same fluctuations in solar output, so I would expect some small signal component to be shared between the two bodies, but the atmospheric density and chemistry makes a giant difference among all of the bodies in our solar system.
We also know that the global temperatures have swung through a large range in our planet's past even though the sun's output has grown steadily over the last 4 billion years. There are multiple varying influences ("control knobs") over the planet's temperatures, including Milankovitch Cycles, the distribution of the continents, and the greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere.
"Distortions from gullible government subsidies have caused a major misallocation of our limited capital. I regret that decent scientists got embroiled in economics and politics when there is a component of malevolent greed behind the push for these damaging subsidies."
This nonsense is approaching swivel-eyed. While decent scientists are embroiled in economics and politics willy-nilly, your suspicion of malevolence by collective decarbonization advocates is misplaced. We know little about your politics, but perhaps your adherence to the "baseload" dogma, and over-amplification of intermittency, is to be expected given your background, as is your disregard for the declining LCOE+ of renewable energy and battery storage globally.
As with nuclear and fossil fuels, private investors in carbon-neutral energy may be motivated by greed, i.e. profit. Public investments OTOH, e.g. subsidies for RE development and consumer electrification, are achieving immense public good, by decarbonizing the global economy with alacrity, to cap the cumulative social cost of rapidly rising GMST as low as can be achieved. That's in spite of the $trillion/year or so in explicit subsidies for fossil fuel production and consumption around the world, pushed by producers and investors with malevolent greed, along with their abundantly documented, decades-long propaganda campaign to obstruct collective intervention in their profits. You appear to be their willing victim.
Thank you Andrew for your article, which does so well to describe the meteorology of heatwaves. Please may I ask, what do you think of this addition description, for the recent British and European heatwave, which takes into account the greenhouse effect, please:
In clear-sky heatwave conditions, incoming shortwave infrared solar heat, passes through the atmosphere, to the Earth, heating the Earth, the Earth then re-radiates this heat, upwards into the atmosphere, as longwave infrared heat, which then heats carbon dioxide molecules in the atmosphere, which then re-radiate their longwave infrared heat, in all directions, including back to Earth, thereby, heating the atmosphere, and heating the Earth even more, all of which, is what the distressing adverse greenhouse effect is, so that, in this distressing adverse heatwave, there is a resonant combination, of natural incoming solar heat, combined with, additional greenhouse heat, caused by the current intensity of the greenhouse effect, caused by the current concentration of carbon dioxide in our finite air atmosphere, so that, this distressing adverse heatwave is the greenhouse effect live.
The only "normal" is change. When people blame everything on humans, they devalue their otherwise valid hypotheses. We cannot claim that humans have definitely caused ALL warming since the end of the Little Ice Age because the climate has warmed and cooled many times during the current interglacial time during this moderately long ice age. Even in recent history, the Minoan Warming was probably hotter than today.
However, CO2 is a significant contributing factor and it is a factor that humans can change. Unfortunately, humanity is trying to change CO2 emissions at an immense cost that could have been used to slow population growth rates in countries without cheap electricity. Rapid population growth is the root cause and it appears that cheap electricity gives people work, study and "other entertainments" at nights....leading to ZPG very quickly. And the sad truth is that coal power suits most 3rd world countries best.
We are in a dilemma, wrapped in obfuscations, but impoverishing the next 2 generations with debts is "almost certainly" one of the greatest mistakes we have ever made, second only to putting pineapple on pizzas.
Did I miss the <kidding> tags? Assuming you're serious:
"We cannot claim that humans have definitely caused ALL warming since the end of the Little Ice Age..."
Maybe you can't, but 'we', i.e. IPCC Working Group I, can. Chapter 2 (Section 2.3.1.1.2) of the full AR6 WG1 report places the end of the Little Ice Age in the mid-to-late 19th century, between 1850 and 1900. And the WG1 Summary for Policy Makers states (https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGI_SPM.pdf, section A.1.3):
"The likely range of total human-caused global surface temperature increase from 1850–1900 to 2010–2019 is 0.8°C to 1.3°C, with a best estimate of 1.07°C [2.01 ˚F]. Over this period, it is likely that well-mixed greenhouse gases (GHGs) contributed a warming of 1.0°C to 2.0°C, and other human drivers (principally aerosols) contributed a cooling of 0.0°C to 0.8°C, natural (solar and volcanic) drivers changed global surface temperature by –0.1°C to +0.1°C, and internal variability changed it by –0.2°C to +0.2°C."
IOW, roughly all the warming since the end of the LIA is human-caused. Are you telling us WG1 is fooling itself, and you know better? Maybe, but my money's on WG1.
And how do you justify your claim that "the Minoan Warming was probably hotter than today"? Please cite peer-reviewed sources. Next:
"humanity is trying to change CO2 emissions at an immense cost that could have been used to slow population growth rates in countries without cheap electricity. Rapid population growth is the root cause..."
Huh? The biggest cost of decarbonizing the global economy is the loss of profit to fossil fuel producers and investors. <snark>Won't somebody think of the poor producer's children?</s> And I = fn(P,A,T): since 1850, population (P) has increased along with atmospheric CO2, but so has per-capita affluence (A), while the evolving technology (T) of energy extraction from fossil fuels accelerated the changes in both P and A. All three are root causes of anthropogenic global warming (I)! But while global total fertility rate was over 5 in the mid-1960s, it has steadily fallen since then, and is now barely above replacement rate.
"impoverishing the next 2 generations with debts is 'almost certainly' one of the greatest mistakes we have ever made, second only to putting pineapple on pizzas.".
Ah, OK, you *are* joking 8^D! [Edit: by his history on TCB, he seems not to be joking! MA]
Removing the entire population of Africa (1.6 billion) would do less to reduce CO2 emissions than removing one million of the highest consumers on the planet.
Very clearly explained. As we all know, the climate is warming since the little ice age. If this was the only driver, every day would be fractionally warmer than the previous year. But we have weather that fluctuates and disguises this underlying warming trend. And the feedback loops, including CO2, will create new record heatwaves periodically, like in the 1930s and like today perhaps.
It's true that GMST has risen since the mid-1800s, after several slightly cooler centuries in the northern hemisphere. How is that a 'driver' of global warming today? Do you think there's some kind of 'normal' GMST the earth 'naturally' returns to after every perturbation? How would that be determined?
The warming trend since the mid-1800s is almost certainly over 100% due to anthropogenic GHG emissions: natural forcings are slightly negative (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.261553698).
A great heat dome explanation/graphic, Andrew. The simple truths of high to low movement of heat transfer and fluid pressure has got to be grasped by all.
Have become a cooldowner. Every method to mitigate heat 🥵 is my current interest. Then it gets cold. And I forget. One day it might not get cold.
As a retired forecaster I applaud your explanation of how summer anticyclones lead to heat waves. Winter anticyclones cause settled but often cloudy weather, with low stratocumulus, stratus or even fog beneath a temperature inversion that can be as low as 1,000 feet. The warmest places can be mountain tops that project from the cloud top into brilliant sunshine, warmer air and low humidity.
Thanks, Andrew, for reposting that. As a thermodynamicist -- that doesn't study atmospheric science very closely -- I'm wondering if you have a numerically-precise definition for a heatwave. Is it based on relative increases in temperature or on precise, absolute temperatures? If it's the latter, then as you said with the "rising tide" analogy, climate change that creates higher average temperatures create more heatwaves. However, if it's the former, that an increase in higher average temperatures doesn't. I'm asking because this clearly
affects the meaning/interpretation of much of the article. :-)
there is no single definition of a "heat wave" (in fact, people can't even agree on whether heatwave is one or two words). but it is usually defined to be temperatures over some number of days that exceed some percentile temperature of a baseline period (e.g., 3 days of temps above 95th percentile). b/c climate change pushes temps up, it will increase the number of days above the 95th percentile.
We wrote a paper showing how climate would impact heatwaves under a number of different definitions (back in CMIP5 days): https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2018EF000943
very nice paper!
Sweet! This is like the different implications of sea ice extent metrics.
The NSIDC's description of "sea ice extent" included any area with at least 15% sea ice. This meant that the weird Arctic Ocean storm in 2012 that pushed the ice to one side of the Ocean could "compress" the floating ice such that the record smallest area was covered.
That 15% threshold is apparently an artifact of combining satellite measurement with human perception on the ground, but doesn't tell us what it means for heat flow to the atmosphere or effective albedo or number of polar bears that drown or when you need an icebreaker to cross the water, etc.
The reason I don’t like sea ice extent as a metric is that it changes when you change the resolution used for the estimate… which was a challenge when we were trying to do model/observation comparisons…
I remember being focused on sea ice *volume*, but that was when there a noticeable amount of multi-year ice. Now I just think of the remnant thick ice as curious historic residue.
This will come in handy in the comments on NYTimes articles 8^).
Ah! Andrew and Marcus, I have just seen this interaction.
The post says 'Climate change has an amplifying effect on heatwaves.'and the paper is about how climate change 'would' affect 'risk' of heatwaves. Yes, increasing temperatures, humidity and dry soils increase intensity of heatwaves. However, to be clear, it is not proven that changes in atmospheric dynamics are caused by climate change.
I recently had an interaction with a denier who pointed to the Rousi paper that dmeonstrates the increase in intensity in European heatwaves is significantly affected by blocking due to the recent increases in double jet streams; responsible for 50% of the temperature increase in Western Europe heatwaves with the other 50% from climate change.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-31432-y
I regurgitated that as the jet stream is controlled by temperature differential between the Artic and Tropic this is a consequence of climate change. However, as she delightedly schooled me, this could be natural variation and models suggest that rising temps in the tropics would lead to a decrease in double jets.
I urge caution climate scientists in the media to make this clear when explaining the increase in persistence and intensity of heatwaves and not to point solely to anthropogenic climate change, it gives grist to the deniers mill.
Every heatwave starts with natural variability. Climate change makes it more severe by raising the base level that natural variability is acting on. Unless climate change is making natural variability smaller, then this does not contradict the claim that climate change is making heat waves worse.
Hiya, the argument is that natural variablity and not climate change is responsible for the difference between the expected warming and the observed in Europe; that climate scientists shouldn’t imply that the rise in persistence and intensity of European heatwaves is largely caused by climate change when recent changes over decades in atmospheric dynamics have been shown to be responsible for 100% of the European increase over global average.
However, I’ve just become aware of the paper by Roldan-Gomez about reduction in aerosols being largely responsible for the changes in atmospheric dynamics so this natural variation argument is looking less convincing.
https://jowaller.substack.com/p/yes-natural-variability-is-involved
Climate change is absolutely increasing the intensity of heatwaves in Europe and everywhere else. Identifying other things that are having an impact does not contradict that.
Heat waves used to be fun until they weren't. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBYiczVcbko
When heat waves were "cool"
https://youtu.be/AuyDdio6I94?si=j_Tg-6h6qhxEXOf3
Nice and easy to understand explainer Andy. Living near the coast, I add that the warming of the Gulf of Mexico has led to warmer overnight lows and higher daytime humidity which have worsened the human impact of heat waves.
Mal
What a brilliant way to describe "the distinction between 'fiat' and 'mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon'?" No, I don't think Hansen wants dictatorship - he's too sensible for that (we all wish him well).
The only mutual coercions that have worked well have been:
(1) national defense against violent enemies (survival instincts),
(2) response to acute emergencies (climate change is based on this)
(3) the price mechanism in all forms of political economy.
"Emergencies" can wane - like Covid, Ebola and HIV did.
Price mechanisms are a permanent part of human behavior since starting for humans 2.4 million years ago when Homo habilis evolved. Habilis was a "handyman", making implements that he bartered with co-existing hunter-gatherers (mainly robustus types including Homo ergasta). We see the price mechanism working in most primates, some birds and even amongst Europeans - subject to EU red tape, taxes and subsidies of course.
Unfortunately the "fiat" is imposed via skillfully "disguised exogenous coercion". Perpetrators disguise their coercion because people know that "benevolent dictatorship" usually leads to tyranny. The UN spends hundreds of $billions coercing weaker nations into a collectivist response.
A classic example of "disguised exogenous coercion" is the EU's method of using trade agreements to legally impose their climate change ideology on "victim countries". Australia just signed an EU trade agreement and Australian taxpayers are being forced to spend $millions per month sending unelected public servants to Europe (business class, luxury hotels) to laisse with EU officials, eat out at Paris restaurants, watch Wimbledon tennis - the usual junket. The EU intentionally and skillfully seduces public servants and politicians to pass into the laws of their "victim countries" these EU trade agreements and their concomitant regulations, including the EU's right to impose penalties for non-compliance. It's quite scandalous.
The UK is a victim of relict EU coercive laws that prevent the UK from pursuing their national best interests during hard times for the UK poor. For example, the UK can't stop illegal boat arrivals due to EU human rights laws that the UK foolishly passed into British Laws (as if British Law was inadequate?). Similarly, the UK has been banned by relict EU climate change laws from developing their huge onshore domestic gas reserves that were discovered 17 years ago and the EU forced the holes to be filled with concrete. Mindless lunacy.
Britain cannot even develop their known British North Sea oil-gas resources by these self-inflicted "EU fiats", so, the UK imports expensive gas from Norway's North Sea oilfields. Norway wisely refused to join the EU socialist collective and is now amongst the richest societies in history, with the largest sovereign wealth fund. Many UK pensioners have died overnight from cold because they could not afford gas heating or feeding their old electricity meters with coins. Most of these poor deaths are declared, under EU rules, as having died from 'natural causes'. A few Coroner's courts document what really caused their deaths and it is a tragedy.
Germany's pro-Russia past leader, Angela Merkel, who grew-up in communist East Germany speaking Russian like a Starina, imported gas from Russia and her friend Putin (who was head of KGB in East Germany) and nobody in the EU even mentioned the geopolitical foolishness of her policies. Only Trump called her out, but he just upset everyone. It took Ukrainian underwater drones offshore Sweden to destroy the Russian gas pipelines and stop the Merkel insanity.
This disguised exogenous coercion by the "coalition of the subversives" is starting to be seen for what it is. Namely, a Fabian socialist device to impose a collectivist ideology on unwitting communities. Fabianism has always proven to be sub-optimal and ends up hurting the poorest sector of nations the most - like the many UK examples.
It would be like USA demanding all trading partners "drill baby drill" if they want to trade with America. For freedom-loving decent Americans, such a constraint on freedom of others would never be countenanced.
Just a note about the 25% "optimum sweet spot" for renewables. There are limited locations near existing major power transmission lines that can hook-into the grid fairly cheaply. 25% may come from that geometry? Building new transmission lines into remoter areas for renewables only is horrendously expensive and these remote renewables can't carry the capital cost, maintenance costs and control costs of dedicated lines without taxpayer subsidies that get added to the nation's tax burden. This is why taxes are rising while renewables are driving up power bills by 38% in Australia and this industry is impoverishing our next 2 generations.
Rooftop solar and batteries is different, largely driven by subsidies plus wealthy home-owning people installing technologies to "get off-grid" (I can't do that). My very wealthy neighbor has a massive rooftop and battery setup that cost him $35,000 (after $11,000 in government subsidies that I'm paying via my taxes). He is saving $2,500 to $3,000 pa net because he still has to pay grid connection charges plus some very expensive power during cloudy weather plus paying for people to clean his rooftop solar panels (a dangerous job).
So, in my superannuation savings, I put $35,000 into a single term deposit when he installed this massive solar system. I now have $41,000 in that account and in 10 years time, it should be about $65,000 after tax for my retirement (if I live). I will have paid around $30,000 in extra electricity charges more than my neighbour like-for-like. Overall, $35,000 net.
In 10 years, my neighbour will have saved a minimum of $30,000 at today's grid power charge rates or $45,000 of savings at the projected higher power costs here in renewables-dense Australia. And he'll still have partly worn-out, dust/salt-ingrained or hail-damaged solar panels on his roof plus a regular new member of his virtual family, called the "battery-control serviceman" who is not cheap. I can see the serviceman from my window as I write.
Conclusion: Overall, my wealthy neighbour will have saved more money than I can make by saving my retirement money in a bank account. I don't have the house and funds to do likewise.
If this renewables nirvana ever reduces grid electricity costs, my neighbour will achieve less savings - but he'll still be a fair bit ahead of me in 10 years time.
Staying on-grid is for us poorer people and the wealthy people deserve to use their wealth to game the subsidized system. They must be better, more deserving people to get so rich. And they make the rules.
Hi Andrew, Your substack is very good. On heat waves: is the cool air which sinks from the upper atmosphere (above a high pressure as in your diagram) any warmer than average for than altitude? This would make it warmer than otherwise after it sinks and compresses towards the earth's surface. GregB
Mal
I would never criticize serious scientists of being members of the "Malevolent Greed" that is milking government subsidies. I applaud the seriousness and scholarship of climate scientists on substack and elsewhere. It has been gullible governments that have misallocated humanity's limited capital (don't get me started on modern monetary theory) which risks a global financial crisis. Luckily Europe and North America are pulling back from the brink of that economic abyss.
I'm a reasonable economist and an average scientist with a 50-year career in industry, having never received a cent from government. I can see that "collective" processes stimulated by government subsidies and regulations have almost always led to poor outcomes. We can't tax or subsidize our way to success because there are many "sticky fingers" harvesting the subsidies. I know a few of the subsidy-harvesters personally and they have become very wealthy. When governments are throwing around taxpayer's cash, some people know how to harvest it quite legally.
Collective decarbonization is a noble and important mission but the cost has been excessive and damaging the poor. We must find a better way to reduce CO2 and I think nuclear base load will play a role as technologies improve. Being a realpolitik economist-scientist, I can also see coal-fired power being the optimal solution in some jurisdictions for at least the rest of this century. We are talking about people's lives.
Personally, I'm just an unaligned voter of no special note (it shows, doesn't it?). I have occasionally been involved in lobbying Federal and State governments in Australia on industrial, technological and economic issues but only twice about climate science, including presentations to a previous Prime Minister. On the second occasion with the Prime Minister, I was wrong and admitted it when truth became evident. I've been happy to be proven wrong, but my score card is a bit better than average.
I started lobbying in 1980 about tariff policies on drill steels and in 1981, lobbied both Federal and State government about Australia's bans on uranium, including coordinated public education campaigns that led to a genuinely good outcome for all concerned.
I co-drafted a very mediocre paper to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Geneva in the early 1980s.
In 1998-2000, I was the leader of a team of senior environmental scientists that delivered an environmentally excellent release of excess water from a cyanide tailings dam damaged by a cyclone (hurricane) in Queensland that threatened to burst and flood downstream factories and houses. We used a shrimp species as a sentinel species, and we developed a new technology for lowering antimony in tailings water prior to discharge into an environmentally significant river. Our team won a national environment award in 2000 for that success and members of the team published papers at UN conferences in USA and Europe. One of the team became a "go-to expert" on cyanide spills including a big spill in PNG.
I keep that environmental award on my desk and I shared quite a few beers with the 250 workers at the meatworks that was immediately downstream of that damaged cyanide tailings dam. If I had run for mayor, I had the meatworkers vote in the bag.
[Warning: long! MA].
Thank you, Mr. Levy. That gives me a better understanding of your cognitive motivation. To reciprocate: I have an MS degree in Environmental Science with a 'minor' in Economics, and was two years into a Doctoral program in Ecology and Evolution before changing careers, subsequently earning an MS in Computer Science. I spent the next 30 years working in federal science laboratories. My salary was paid with tax money, for which I do not apologize, because pure scientific research is a public good, and must be supported with public funds. It's not so much that *I'm* a public good, but I was proud to earn my living supporting the centuries old, transgenerational, international, collective scientific enterprise!
In 1988 I happened to be working at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, James Hansen's home institution, when he made his June 23rd announcement to Congress. I had no difficulty with his physical-science case - it wasn't "rocket science" except literally - and witnessed the nominal rocket scientists (remote sensing, geophysics, and ecology types, mostly) I worked with quickly come to agreement with him.
With my Environmental Economics background, I saw AGW as a classic tragedy of the commons, which requires "mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon" to mitigate. I fully expected the US to embark on a collective effort to decarbonize our economy with alacrity. When it initiated but then abandoned the effort, I began reading the verifiable documentation on efforts to forestall collective intervention in fossil fuel profits. I watched an entire bespoke-disinformation industry grow sophisticated on mere $billions in carbon capital: a minor fraction of investors' total ROI, re-invested to protect the rest. According to *New Yorker* reporter and *Dark Money* author Jane Mayer, among many respected journalists and academics, it's the principal reason the US economy isn't substantially decarbonized already. AFAICT, they're right!
Hence my abiding interest in political decarbonization obstructionism, despite being nine years retired. I'll address your points individually:
IL: "I can see that 'collective' processes stimulated by government subsidies and regulations have almost always led to poor outcomes. "
MA: Maybe, but the plunging LCOE+ for renewable energy plus storage is a net social benefit.
IL: "We can't tax or subsidize our way to success because there are many 'sticky fingers' harvesting the subsidies. I know a few of the subsidy-harvesters personally and they have become very wealthy. When governments are throwing around taxpayer's cash, some people know how to harvest it quite legally."
MA: Sorry, there's simply no alternative to "mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon", i.e public intervention in the otherwise-'free' market, to drive capital and consumers to cap the warming short of civilization-ending levels: that's basic common-pool resource economics. Yes, some private parties are skilled at diverting or profiting from public investments, but targeted subsidies in multiple countries around the world have nonetheless driven a "green vortex" of market responses in carbon-neutral innovation and manufacturing efficiency, as demonstrated by the *plunging LCOE+ of RE in the past quarter-century*. Evidently, not all that subsidy money was misappropriated!
IL: "I'm a reasonable economist and an average scientist..."
MA: Me too.
IL: "...with a 50-year career in industry, having never received a cent from government."
MA: So? Presumably that's because, while Australia is a major exporter of uranium ore, it has maintained a strict federal ban on civilian nuclear power plants since the late 1990s, rather than subsiding them. Not something to boast about, really. Anyway, CSIRO reports that any future path toward nuclear power in Australia would require massive, unprecedented taxpayer subsidies to be commercially viable. For now, the winners are fossil fuel producers and investors.
IL: "Collective decarbonization is a noble and important mission but the cost has been excessive and damaging the poor. "
MA: That's *wholly subjective* on your part: *purely ideological rhetoric*. I, for one, would prefer taking fees directly from fossil carbon producers per ton, and letting them raise their prices as much as they dare or forego profit. Since consumers rich or poor are already paying all they will bear for fuels, they'd start switching to alternatives, now cheaper without subsidies in many markets. More effectively than subsidies for RE and EVs, carbon fees on producers would drive down the ROI for carbon capitalists directly, prompting them to disinvest. Carbon producers would go out of business, matching supply with dwindling demand. Poor people would benefit from cheap renewable, storable, portable electricity without socializing their own marginal climate-change costs. That's a win for everyone but carbon capitalists, and if 100% of the producer fees were dividended (everyone gets the same amount) to federal taxpayers periodically, there'd be no opportunity for diversion or graft!
Alas, US voters have not been favorably disposed toward even revenue-neutral carbon taxes. That left bare Democratic majorities in both legislative houses and a Democratic POTUS to enact the "Inflation Reduction" Act of 2022, subsidizing RE and battery development, and consumer electrification, especially EVs. Even that was too much collective intervention for Mr. Levy's Republican ideological allies in our current government!
Do either of us really have anything more to say, Mr. Levy?
You've encapsulated it very well Mal. We are seeing which political economy route works best: The Adam Smith profit motive or James Hansen collective good by fiat.
In the race of life, always back the horse named self-interest... at least you know it's trying.
Cheers
Good grief! You may be done here, but I'm not. For hypothetical lurkers:
What kind of economist are you? Do you not grasp the distinction between 'fiat' and 'mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon'? 'Fiat' is imposed by dictators! Who's going to do that for the entire globe? Do you think 'fiat' is what Hansen is calling for? Do you think he dreamed up the idea of *democratically* imposing a carbon fee on producers all by himself? How can you not understand that decarbonization is even now being driven by both *public investment* and *private market response*, i.e. the *profit motive*, resulting in net *public good*?
Above all, Ian, how can you not recognize that the socially *unrestrained* profit motive is the root cause of global warming? Common-pool resource tragedies aren't new with Capitalism, they're as old as the ancient 'free' market's freedom to socialize every transaction cost it can get away with, the sellers profiting thereby! Just how much social cost should the rest of us be expected to let them get away? How much private cost socialization should we let our fellow consumers get away with?
Ian, you won that national environmental award simply for cooperating with democratically enacted restraints on your employers' profits, to keep them out of legal trouble. If there were no environmental protection regulations, you and your team would never have been paid for the work!
"We are seeing which political economy route works best"? It's the one Adam Smith and Garrett Hardin travel together!
But it's never too late to realize one's error. Jerry Taylor is a *former* Libertarian and VP of the Cato Institute, co-founded by Charles Koch. Taylor spread a lot of denialism early in this century on behalf of wealthy conservative donors. He changed his mind in 2014, he said in an interview, when his friend Jonathan Adler, of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, wrote a paper that opened his eyes (https://theintercept.com/2017/04/28/how-a-professional-climate-change-denier-discovered-the-lies-and-decided-to-fight-for-science/):
"'Just because the costs and the benefits are more or less going to be a wash,' [Adler] said, 'that doesn’t mean that the losers in climate change are just going to have to suck it up so Exxon and Koch Industries can make a good chunk of money.'"
Taylor expressed regret for his failure of due diligence, and for recruiting his own brother to mercenary denialism:
"I also introduced one of my brothers, James Taylor, to the folks at the Heartland Institute. Heartland's rise to dominate market share in climate denialism largely occurred under my brother. Boy do I regret that."
A cautionary tale for all who hear it!
I’m hoping Artemis and other lunar landings install long-term temperature recording equipment, including in the shallow lunar soil. How would climate scientists blame western economies if, as I suspect, we find that the lunar atmosphere warms and cools similar to earth’s atmosphere?
My journey started in 1975 when I handled NASA’s lunar rock samples and studied their petrology. I became the mineral economist for a uranium company and, inter alia, studied the economics of climate policies from 1980 until 2007, focusing on nuclear versus coal-fired power technologies.
My worst fears about climate policies have arisen. We've spent too much for too long (over 50 years) achieving too little that has unfairly hurt working families. The statistics suggest that renewables work best up to 25% of supply (needs installed capacity around 70% due to intermittency) but only when there is reliable base load electricity from coal, nuclear or large-scale hydro, with gas and hydro peakas. Given the multiple renewable contracts, switching and inertia stabilizing challenges, the grids have grown too complex, expensive and unreliable for the challenges ahead. Most jurisdictions are building more base load to balance grids.
Distortions from gullible government subsidies have caused a major misallocation of our limited capital. I regret that decent scientists got embroiled in economics and politics when there is a component of malevolent greed behind the push for these damaging subsidies.
Our next two generations have been bequeathed an unproductive debt burden that means unfairly high taxes just to repay interest on debts for projects that never delivered greater productivity. Luckily humans are adapters and innovators but the opportunity cost of the recent climate-reaction era has been extraordinarily large.
Thank you for that link to the right part of the IPCC report. Yes, the IPCC is great science. Some wags say it is the best science that money can buy.
Science is never absolutely correct, not even "PROVED LAWS". For example, the unusual orbits of Mercury hinted to some sceptics that Newton's LAWS may not be correct. However, mainstream science went off looking for an extra planet called Vulcan to explain Mercury's orbits. And even Einstein's equations have some "tiny" discrepancies being researched.
Earth is a living, dynamic planet due to the interaction between geological and cosmological forces and events. Solar system variations are not yet fully understood. Viz. unexpected findings from both NASA's Parker probe and ISRO's Aditya-L1 probe. We can't fully explain the contractions and expansions of the heliosphere, which correspond with some changes in climate trajectories. Space weather is a young science.
Some of us suspect the Sun plays a bigger role than assumed. I’m studying the results from the Apollo 15 lunar expedition which accidently left the only thermocouple ever to record lunar atmospheric temperatures over a 4 year period. That thermocouple, TG11A, was left at 35cm depth in the lunar dust which is porous and holds the lunar atmospheric gases.
Does anyone in the IPCC say anything about the following facts?
Lunar surface temperatures in TG11A ross and fell as follows:
1. ROSE steadily by 2 degrees from late August 1971 until peaking in mid April 1974
2. Stabilized and
3. FELL slightly until the reliable TG11A readings ceased on 1/1/75.
4. Less reliable readings during H1 1975 show a decreasing trend until batteries died in mid 1975.
Earth surface temperatures also rose and fell during the same period:
1. ROSE by 0.25 degrees from late 1971 until peaking in late 1973, early 1974
2. FELL by 0.25 degrees until reaching a local minimum in late 1974, early 1976.
NASA's suggestion in the excellent paper Nagihara et al (2018) is that the astronaut's footprints could have caused heating is plausible. However, my own tests on dust samples show that albedo affects would have stabilized within weeks, and the first few weeks of temperature data from TG11A show a short-term heating, similar to my readings.
My study has zero funding other than from my wife and me. I have to use kitchen thermometers and manual data collection of the thousands of data. This experiment needs to be done multiple times using data collection equipment and different mixtures of gases. I've got some retirement savings that can fund that scientific experiment as long as my health holds.
Reference:
Nagihara, S., Kiefer, W. S., Taylor, P. T., Williams, D. R., & Nakamura, Y. (2018). Examination of the
long-term subsurface warming observed at the Apollo 15 and 17 sites utilizing the newly restored heat flow experiment data from 1975 to 1977. Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, 123, 1125–1139. https://doi.org/10.1029/2018JE005579
Heh! I just looked at Mr. Levy's history on TCB (https://substack.com/@minecs). Some of his remarks are witty, but AFAICT he's actually opposed to collective decarbonization, e.g. this from last April:
"Weak economies are the No.1 cause of premature deaths and renewables are a major cause of weakening economies."
Not a poe, IOW. He's fair game!
"Some of us suspect the Sun plays a bigger role than assumed."
"Us"? Should the rest of us assume you're conducting an elaborate poe? If not, I see your problem: if you think natural science starts by assuming its conclusions, you're obviously not well trained in it. Two centuries of advancing climate-related science did not merely *assume* the Sun was not a factor in global warming on Earth since 1850: it *empirically demonstrated* and *intersubjectively verified* that since the end of the Little Ice Age, there is no secular trend in solar output that could contribute to the demonstrated, verified secular trend of global heat content. Nor is there an observed warming trend over the same interval on any other planetary body in the solar system.
For those of *us* who are humble enough to be suspicious of our facile assumptions, "The first rule is you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool" (R. Feynman). Anyone who tells you "consensus isn't science" is trying to fool you: without *intersubjective verification* by trained, mutually disciplined peers, there could be no scientific progress. Science isn't perfect, it's just a better way of distinguishing verifiable truth from specious falsehood than any our culture has invented since divination with entrails. All because it's a *collective*, *skeptical* undertaking!
"Some of us suspect the Sun plays a bigger role than assumed."
Uh, you do realize that there are people who have monitored what the sun has been doing over the past few decades (with reasonable sunspot proxies for centuries before that). We don't have to look at any moon or Mars or Jupiter to know what the sun has been doing, we just LOOK AT THE SUN. There is a suite of dedicated satellites called the Heliophysics System Observatory that monitors all sorts of solar output. India and China and Europe are in on it with their own satellites, too, and all of those solar scientists talk to (and argue with) each other on a regular basis.
The fingerprint for warming due to increased greenhouse gases is that THE TROPOSPHERE HAS WARMED WHILE THE STRATOSPHERE IS COOLED. Cranking up the sun would heat the stratosphere, too.
https://science.nasa.gov/sun/exploration/
Monitoring the heat on the surface of the moon is great for understanding the regolith and the thermal "weathering" of that body, but we don't need it to explain Earth's warming when we can look at the sun and monitor the chemical and thermal properties of our much more complex atmosphere directly.
Excellent comment, but you might want to edit it and replace the 2nd occurrence of 'troposphere' to 'stratosphere'. Just a little friendly 'peer review' 8^D!
Thanks! Done.
I’m hoping Artemis and other lunar landings install long-term temperature recording equipment, including in the shallow lunar soil. How would climate scientists blame western economies if, as I suspect, we find that the lunar atmosphere warms and cools similar to earth’s atmosphere?
My journey started in 1975 when I handled NASA’s lunar rock samples and studied their petrology. I became the mineral economist for a uranium company and, inter alia, studied the economics of climate policies from 1980 until 2007, focusing on nuclear versus coal-fired power technologies.
My worst fears about climate policies have arisen. We've spent too much for too long (over 50 years) achieving too little that has unfairly hurt working families. The statistics suggest that renewables work best up to 25% of supply (needs installed capacity around 70% due to intermittency) but only when there is reliable base load electricity from coal, nuclear or large-scale hydro, with gas and hydro peakas. Given the multiple renewable contracts, switching and inertia stabilizing challenges, the grids have grown too complex, expensive and unreliable for the challenges ahead. Most jurisdictions are building more base load to balance grids.
Distortions from gullible government subsidies have caused a major misallocation of our limited capital. I regret that decent scientists got embroiled in economics and politics when there is a component of malevolent greed behind the push for these damaging subsidies.
Our next two generations have been bequeathed an unproductive debt burden that means unfairly high taxes just to repay interest on debts for projects that never delivered greater productivity. Luckily humans are adapters and innovators but the opportunity cost of the recent climate-reaction era has been extraordinarily large.
"The statistics suggest that renewables work best up to 25% of supply (needs installed capacity around 70% due to intermittency) but only when there is reliable base load electricity from coal, nuclear or large-scale hydro, with gas and hydro peakas."
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That is outdated analysis. Battery technology and chemistry are improving rapidly, even as the price per kWh is dropping. Look it up. The Chinese (who graduate 1.3 million engineers every year) are pioneering adaptation technology to handle the behavior of modern power sources. There are solutions to the need to maintain large scale grid inertia without needing fuel plants. Solar, wind and battery are excellent low maintenance alternatives to fuel-dependent thermal plants and giant dams. The biggest problems with increasing demand are procedural and transmission and distribution issues.
Here in Texas, the ERCOT grid has kept up with increasing peak demand (due to both hotter days and a growing population) because of the combination of wind, solar and batteries AND AT MUCH CHEAPER RATES THAN BEFORE RENEWABLES WERE ADDED.
"Distortions from gullible government subsidies have caused a major misallocation of our limited capital."
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Do you have ANY IDEA how much blood and treasure the USA has spent prosecuting wars over access to oil? Those wars go on the public credit card, but the private oil and gas companies reap the benefits. The oil&gas industry has been subsidized orders of magnitude more than any other industry. The amount of money used to promote clean, modern transportation and power generation is the merest fraction of the government giveaways to those powerful companies
Forget about greenhouse gases: Outdated combustion technology has been polluting our lungs (and the lungs of every critter in the vicinity) with PM2.5 and radioactive particulates for centuries. Fossil fuels are pulled out of the ground and then *burned*, after which they have to extract more (and so on and so on), and have polluted waterways around the world in the process.
Meanwhile, around the world solar farms and wind farms and battery banks have more than paid for themselves BECAUSE THEY DON'T HAVE TO KEEP BUYING FUEL TO PRODUCE ELECTRICITY. Unlike traditional thermal plants, they use virtually no water and they're relatively inexpensive to maintain.
"How would climate scientists blame western economies if, as I suspect, we find that the lunar atmosphere warms and cools similar to earth’s atmosphere?"
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Scientists have long known about the Greenhouse Effect based on how it manifests on other planets. This is why Venus is hotter than Mercury, even though Mercury is closer to the Sun. Earth and its moon pretty much follow the same track in the sky, and are exposed to the same fluctuations in solar output, so I would expect some small signal component to be shared between the two bodies, but the atmospheric density and chemistry makes a giant difference among all of the bodies in our solar system.
We also know that the global temperatures have swung through a large range in our planet's past even though the sun's output has grown steadily over the last 4 billion years. There are multiple varying influences ("control knobs") over the planet's temperatures, including Milankovitch Cycles, the distribution of the continents, and the greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere.
"Distortions from gullible government subsidies have caused a major misallocation of our limited capital. I regret that decent scientists got embroiled in economics and politics when there is a component of malevolent greed behind the push for these damaging subsidies."
This nonsense is approaching swivel-eyed. While decent scientists are embroiled in economics and politics willy-nilly, your suspicion of malevolence by collective decarbonization advocates is misplaced. We know little about your politics, but perhaps your adherence to the "baseload" dogma, and over-amplification of intermittency, is to be expected given your background, as is your disregard for the declining LCOE+ of renewable energy and battery storage globally.
As with nuclear and fossil fuels, private investors in carbon-neutral energy may be motivated by greed, i.e. profit. Public investments OTOH, e.g. subsidies for RE development and consumer electrification, are achieving immense public good, by decarbonizing the global economy with alacrity, to cap the cumulative social cost of rapidly rising GMST as low as can be achieved. That's in spite of the $trillion/year or so in explicit subsidies for fossil fuel production and consumption around the world, pushed by producers and investors with malevolent greed, along with their abundantly documented, decades-long propaganda campaign to obstruct collective intervention in their profits. You appear to be their willing victim.
Thank you Andrew for your article, which does so well to describe the meteorology of heatwaves. Please may I ask, what do you think of this addition description, for the recent British and European heatwave, which takes into account the greenhouse effect, please:
In clear-sky heatwave conditions, incoming shortwave infrared solar heat, passes through the atmosphere, to the Earth, heating the Earth, the Earth then re-radiates this heat, upwards into the atmosphere, as longwave infrared heat, which then heats carbon dioxide molecules in the atmosphere, which then re-radiate their longwave infrared heat, in all directions, including back to Earth, thereby, heating the atmosphere, and heating the Earth even more, all of which, is what the distressing adverse greenhouse effect is, so that, in this distressing adverse heatwave, there is a resonant combination, of natural incoming solar heat, combined with, additional greenhouse heat, caused by the current intensity of the greenhouse effect, caused by the current concentration of carbon dioxide in our finite air atmosphere, so that, this distressing adverse heatwave is the greenhouse effect live.
The only "normal" is change. When people blame everything on humans, they devalue their otherwise valid hypotheses. We cannot claim that humans have definitely caused ALL warming since the end of the Little Ice Age because the climate has warmed and cooled many times during the current interglacial time during this moderately long ice age. Even in recent history, the Minoan Warming was probably hotter than today.
However, CO2 is a significant contributing factor and it is a factor that humans can change. Unfortunately, humanity is trying to change CO2 emissions at an immense cost that could have been used to slow population growth rates in countries without cheap electricity. Rapid population growth is the root cause and it appears that cheap electricity gives people work, study and "other entertainments" at nights....leading to ZPG very quickly. And the sad truth is that coal power suits most 3rd world countries best.
We are in a dilemma, wrapped in obfuscations, but impoverishing the next 2 generations with debts is "almost certainly" one of the greatest mistakes we have ever made, second only to putting pineapple on pizzas.
Did I miss the <kidding> tags? Assuming you're serious:
"We cannot claim that humans have definitely caused ALL warming since the end of the Little Ice Age..."
Maybe you can't, but 'we', i.e. IPCC Working Group I, can. Chapter 2 (Section 2.3.1.1.2) of the full AR6 WG1 report places the end of the Little Ice Age in the mid-to-late 19th century, between 1850 and 1900. And the WG1 Summary for Policy Makers states (https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGI_SPM.pdf, section A.1.3):
"The likely range of total human-caused global surface temperature increase from 1850–1900 to 2010–2019 is 0.8°C to 1.3°C, with a best estimate of 1.07°C [2.01 ˚F]. Over this period, it is likely that well-mixed greenhouse gases (GHGs) contributed a warming of 1.0°C to 2.0°C, and other human drivers (principally aerosols) contributed a cooling of 0.0°C to 0.8°C, natural (solar and volcanic) drivers changed global surface temperature by –0.1°C to +0.1°C, and internal variability changed it by –0.2°C to +0.2°C."
IOW, roughly all the warming since the end of the LIA is human-caused. Are you telling us WG1 is fooling itself, and you know better? Maybe, but my money's on WG1.
And how do you justify your claim that "the Minoan Warming was probably hotter than today"? Please cite peer-reviewed sources. Next:
"humanity is trying to change CO2 emissions at an immense cost that could have been used to slow population growth rates in countries without cheap electricity. Rapid population growth is the root cause..."
Huh? The biggest cost of decarbonizing the global economy is the loss of profit to fossil fuel producers and investors. <snark>Won't somebody think of the poor producer's children?</s> And I = fn(P,A,T): since 1850, population (P) has increased along with atmospheric CO2, but so has per-capita affluence (A), while the evolving technology (T) of energy extraction from fossil fuels accelerated the changes in both P and A. All three are root causes of anthropogenic global warming (I)! But while global total fertility rate was over 5 in the mid-1960s, it has steadily fallen since then, and is now barely above replacement rate.
"impoverishing the next 2 generations with debts is 'almost certainly' one of the greatest mistakes we have ever made, second only to putting pineapple on pizzas.".
Ah, OK, you *are* joking 8^D! [Edit: by his history on TCB, he seems not to be joking! MA]
Removing the entire population of Africa (1.6 billion) would do less to reduce CO2 emissions than removing one million of the highest consumers on the planet.
CO2 use per capita:
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/co2-emissions-per-capita.webp
Top 10: Saudi Arabia, UAE, Australia, US, Canada, Russia, S. Korea, Singapore, China, Japan
No African country made the top thirty.
Very clearly explained. As we all know, the climate is warming since the little ice age. If this was the only driver, every day would be fractionally warmer than the previous year. But we have weather that fluctuates and disguises this underlying warming trend. And the feedback loops, including CO2, will create new record heatwaves periodically, like in the 1930s and like today perhaps.
It's true that GMST has risen since the mid-1800s, after several slightly cooler centuries in the northern hemisphere. How is that a 'driver' of global warming today? Do you think there's some kind of 'normal' GMST the earth 'naturally' returns to after every perturbation? How would that be determined?
The warming trend since the mid-1800s is almost certainly over 100% due to anthropogenic GHG emissions: natural forcings are slightly negative (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.261553698).