A site calling itself Issues and Insights reports,
Lake Erie and Lake Superior — two of the five that make up the Great Lakes — broke records for water levels this May. Lakes Michigan and Huron could follow suit.
Naturally, climate change is getting the blame. “We are undoubtedly observing the effects of a warming climate in the Great Lakes,” says Richard Rood, a University of Michigan climate scientist.
But just a few years ago, climate scientists were insisting that a warming climate would cause water levels to decline.
They go on to cite several examples from a few years ago of scientists pointing to low lake levels as a phenomenon explained by climate change.
If I were a climate scientist, I would be saying something like, “People, just pay attention to the Greenland ice sheet. That’s what matters, not weather blips. If you keep scapegoating anthropogenic climate change for every weather blip, you’re just going going to lose credibility.”
I’d add, “and the Antarctic ice is doing the same thing, so we know it’s not just some weird Greenland phenomenon”.
Well said both of you.
It would also help if climate activists would stop demonizing anyone that has different ideas about how best to respond. The Breakthrough Institute is an organization specifically created to develop responses to global warning. Yet if you google critics of this institute you’d think they were nothing but shills for Exon.
All too often climate activists come across as religious fanatics rather then concerned people. I find this to be a great turn off.
“All too often climate activists come across as religious fanatics rather then concerned people.”
Selection effect?
I think that climate “alarmists” are their own worst enemies. Their exaggerations and double standards give credence to the idea that it’s all just a hoax. Alarmists rightly point out that an unusually cold winter doesn’t disprove global warming. But those same people will then turn around and claim that this or that weather incident is proof of anthropogenic climate change.
These people are asking us to spend a significant chunk of the nation’s GDP to solve the problem, yet they’ve given us no reason to trust them with our money.
How much ice did we melt in our last New Green Deal, and how do we tell folks we cannot refreeze it?
The climate alarmists are not trying to convince the sort of people who read websites like this one. So they don’t care if their exaggerations, double-standards, hiding of evidence, refusal to respond to reasoned disagreement, etc., cause them to lose credibility with the sort of people who read this website.
More to the point – if you announce things because you are pondering your own credibility and trying to generate attention to yourself, you are already wrong.
They don’t need advice about credibility. They need a change of heart.
> People, just pay attention to the Greenland ice sheet. That’s what matters, not weather blips.
I’m not sure that’s what matters either. For the last 5 million years our climate has been dominated by the cycles of the cryosphere (i.e. glaciation). The collapse of the Greenland ice sheet could just mean a return to 41 kyr cycles instead of our current 100 kyr cycles.
The question should be what is the baseline without the excess CO2 and how will the cycles of the cryosphere change with the new levels. Any models or discussions that don’t reference the LR04 Benthic Stack are making bad assumptions, in my opinion.
It’s not just, perhaps even mostly, CO2 any more. Around 2008, warming from CO2 started a self-reinforcing liberation of environmental methane, previously trapped in water clathrates and permafrost, which a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. AFAIK, this isn’t in the models because nobody knows how much there is, but global warming is proceeding much faster than anticipated and this is one of the most likely reasons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis
How can you say that global warming is proceeding much faster than anticipated, when warming has been systematically slower than model predictions for 30 years now?
I don’t know what data you’re looking at, but I’m seeing evidence that the last ~45 years of predictions were pretty much on track. But the last few years seem to have been significantly hotter than predicted, which is what you’d expect if methane release has been self-reinforcing for about a decade.
hyperlink failed. see https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-well-have-climate-models-projected-global-warming
I guess I have to admit that the recent spike in temperature makes the predictions look better. I’ve been assuming that the spike was caused by a strong El Nino and temperature will go back down to a lower baseline. You seem to think it’s not just a temporary spike. I guess we’ll see. I still don’t think it’s right to say that temperature is increasing faster than anticipated. The temperature spike is within the bounds of the temperature projections, so is within the anticipated range.
@MikeW: When engineers are trying to figure out whether a process is within normal variation or starting to deviate, they use a method called “statistical process control” (SPC). Apparently the past five years have been the five hottest on record. Any ordinary SPC analysis would say “intervention is necessary”.
https://www.climatecentral.org/gallery/graphics/the-10-hottest-global-years-on-record
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_process_control
Jay – that’s a completely different subject. I was only addressing your contention that temperatures have been increasing faster than anticipated.
Jay, I think we are both criticizing the predictive power of the current climate models but we are emphasizing different things.
You saying that modelling the atmospheric components of climate is inaccurate since the release of methane trapped in ice is now becoming dominant (over CO2).
That may very well be true but it is independent and different than my point that the Cryosphere, and the factors that make up the 120 meters of sea-level change every 100,000 years, have not disappeared. All of these models make the assumption that the Atmosphere is not only the key factor but the only factor. That is a mistake, in my opinion.
We are at a point in time that the climate should be at about peak temperatures/sea-levels even if mankind didn’t exist. In terms of Milankovich Cycles we are about the time when the inversion to glacial accumulation should be occurring. That is the baseline.
When it comes to trapped methane, you also have to explain what happened to the methane in the last 3 or 4 peaks in the LR04 graph https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f7/Five_Myr_Climate_Change.svg
All the Atmosphere centric models imply positive feedback loops that spin out of control. Something terminates glaciation and something else kick-starts it again. These factors seem to counteract the positive feedback of albedo at peak ice and the positive feedback of increased CO2, CH4, and possibly water vapor at min ice (now). We don’t understand the causation well but the synchronization with Milankovitch Cycles is pretty close to irrefutable though the change from 41 kyr cycles to 100 kyr is still a mystery.
When it comes to trapped methane, you also have to explain what happened to the methane in the last 3 or 4 peaks in the LR04 graph
Not really. The methane exists and is bubbling out at increasing rates, according to scientists who are there looking at it. Presumably there’s a natural history behind it, but that doesn’t change its effect on the climate. Any theory that says it isn’t there or isn’t bubbling out at increasing rates can be safely regarded as falsified.
Yes really. The point of looking at the last few similar peaks in the LR04 graph is that the same conditions occurred recently and did not cause positive feedback with accelerated warming.
I’m not at all trying to refute bubbling methane, I’m trying to reconcile current climate data with very strong paleoclimate data.
Its a very fair assumption to claim that methane has been accumulating for the last million years with 100 kyr cryocycles and what is different is now is that increased anthropogenic CO2 concentrations has caused this trapped methane to be released for the first time in 1 million years.
What isn’t fair is to make that assumption without even talking about what happened in the most “recent” similar peaks.
As another analogy, talking about the size and shape of the North American Great Lakes becomes richer when compared to the last 8 or so times they were re-shaped/re-created in the last million years.
Greenland may not be the climate hysterics’ best bet.
Its weather conditions and melt rates are modulated by the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, the degree to which ice is covered by snow, and geothermal activity. There is certainly no evidence of rising temperature trends there, and every likelihood that more recent higher temperatures will plummet again when the AMO turns cold again just as they did after the high temperature phase in the thirties. Meanwhile, looking to the Danish Meteorological Institute’s annual report, we can see for the second year running, the Greenland ice sheet has been increasing at close to record levels.
But complex causal factors reside in every climate story.
Journalists, politicians, and the hysteria industry are all doing quite well playing the climate amnesia game. NASA is busy adjusting its unadjusted data. And the electric utilities love solar and wind because the increase residential electricity rates enormously.
When surveyed most Americans sensibly would not be willing to throw very much money at climate change. People who worry about human-caused climate change are willing to pay higher energy bills to help stop it, but only up to 5 percent higher, or about $5 on the average American energy bill. The average American is thus much more sensible and rational than the self-styled experts and elitists.
But common sense does not rule US policy. Conformism to the received wisdom of peer-groups explains about 85% of the attitudes and actions of bureaucrats, 90% of journalism, and 95% of academics. One sees very little evidence of any experts being able to think for themselves. These rates are undoubtedly higher but I am plagued with a fit of optimism today. At any rate, we would all be much better off just establishing a dictatorship by three random Walmart shoppers.
“If you keep scapegoating anthropogenic climate change for every weather blip, you’re just going going to lose credibility.” They are not concerned about loss of credibility since they believe they are in possession of undisputed truth that nobody can deny.
So, pretty much like everyone else?
I presented a scientific paper at a conference in the spring of 1972 in Houston Texas that bears on this subject. I fit a univariate parsimonious time series model to each of the Great Lakes water levels The data was monthly for most of the twentieth century up until 1970. This work was done with a Professor of Hydrology at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and my major professor at Madison, Charles C. Holt. At any rate, a standard Box-Jenkins ARIMA Times series model provided an adequate description of the data provided one small wrinkle was made to the standard model. Namely, the introduction of a heterskedastic monthly error term, presumably reflecting an underlying seasonal in rainfalls and resulting runoffs in the Great Lakes basin. It would be interesting to see if such models made outsized errors over more recent periods. Lake levels have fluctuated at great deal over history sparking an interest in the question whether the present is really different from the past. May guess it probably isn’t but one would have to do the work.
Dr Kling
you are not going to get much economics out of this thread, unless you are interested in seeing how long it takes for trolls to show up. Remember: in climate change thread combat, no statement or subclause goes uncontested.
Did you see this is SSC’s June links?
“The regular market is a prediction market on asset values, so if asset values correlate with something we care about, we can use the market to predict how it will turn out. This is the principle behind Schlenker and Taylor on climate change, where they measure the prices of complex financial derivatives relating to air conditioning demand. They find that past investors did a good job predicting the extent of future (now present) climate change, mostly by trusting the IPCC predictions and ignoring doubters. Related: global warming skeptics could bet against future air conditioning demand and make a killing if they’re right – are they trying this?”
Seems like a point in favor of climate change models if true.
> Seems like a point in favor of climate change models if true.
My response is that there are different degrees of skepticism. The problem with the “denier” or “hoax” labels is that they don’t decouple the various assumptions built into each position.
My skepticism is not that global warming exists, it is that:
1. global warming equals catastrophic climate change
2. the contribution of Atmospheric factors (CO2, MH4, H2O/clouds) is assumed to be independent of the Cryosphere/Milankovich-Cycles
3. the current models do not accurately predict the impact of CO2 centric interventions because of #2
I would argue that global warming is not an output of the current climate models but a built-in assumption. There is nothing wrong with that assumption, it is plausible and it is backed by evidence. Plausibility, however, does not equal truth.
It may turn out that Catastrophic Climate Change is correct. If/when models accurately incorporate Cryosphere/Milankovich-Cycles, we may find that the expected glacial accumulation phase should have been well underway and is acting to buffer the effects of increasing CO2 concentrations. Either way, the current models ignore this baseline.
The heating/cooling market futures match the warming evidence trends. Do long-term markets support the idea of Catastrophic Climate Change? Is the current science good enough to falsify an opposite claim/hypothesis such as “global warming will be a long-term benefit to mankind and the biosphere”?
> Do long-term markets support the idea of Catastrophic Climate Change?
Via Marginal Revolution, “Homes exposed to sea level rise (SLR) sell at a 7% discount relative to observably equivalent unexposed properties equidistant from the beach.””
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/12/sunday-assorted-links-145.html
Are rising sea levels an example of catastrophic climate change compared to plain-Jane global warming?
The former Canadian government was betting on an ice-free arctic as a boon for Canada (as do/did many northern countries):
The Need to Defend Our New Northwest Passage
Both of your links are good examples of the market betting on global warming. I’m not trying to nitpick, I just think “catastrophic” means something more serious. At least 9/11 size in impact and I think the consensus is that the impact of climate change is much more significant than 9/11.
You might be right. Maybe 30-year bond prices, education investment, and individual retirement planning capture expectations of catastrophic climate change. I think I’d bet against the consensus on the catastrophic part, if the consensus is demonstrable.
I am thinking that any discussion of climate change on this blog would be a total waste of time, and only serve to make people a little more stupid.
I am right.
I get a short daily newsletter from Foreign Policy magazine. This was in today’s issue:
“An unprecedented summer hail storm hit Guadalajara, Mexico, burying streets and cars in ice despite the 88-degree temperatures. “Then we ask ourselves if climate change is real. These are never-before-seen natural phenomenons,” said Enrique Alfaro, the state governor.”