I sometimes try to imagine what it would be like if I still believed in the climate threat... Then I would read articles like this one and try to find something meaningful in it. Perhaps even read it and believe that I HAD found something meaningful in it... until somebody asked! Then, I would go back to this article looking for the hard data of the impending catastrophe I thought I had read, and realize that the article doesn't have any.........
Their recipe is so classical:
First a title to imply that they really have lots of solid data to present to us, and an introduction that confidently claims that "The Earth is changing faster than at any point in human memory as a result of human-caused global heating".
Then, they say that the current warming started in the mid-1800s "when we began burning fossil fuels at an industrial scale", without mentioning that the CO2 emissions were minute up until the 1950s and 60s, when they exploded. The warming thus started long before any significant CO2 emissions, and the connection they want us to believe in is therefore false. But they didn't lie!...
After having made the false connection, they say what the greenhouse effect "causes hotter temperatures, rises in sea level, disruption to ecosystems and more extreme weather.
Scientists have forecast that if the world passes 2C of heating above pre-industrial levels, the consequences will be catastrophic for billions of people around the world." But this is just talk... No data has yet been presented!
Finally, after all this introduction, when the reader already has been told exactly what to expect, we go into the actual data... And what data do they have? A temperature increase of about 1 °C since the end of the Little Ice Age, CO2 rise, some modest ice loss and a sea level rise of 7 cm in 30 years (2.5 mm/yr, 25 cm/century)... No data over the beginning of the alleged eco-system disruption, the extreme weather or anything at all to indicate the impending catastrophic consequences for billions of people!
Surely, if such data existed, they would have been overjoyed to show them!... But of course, they don't. There IS no measurable increase in droughts, heavy rainfall, storms, tornadoes, forest fires, crop loss or ANYTHING that's bad and climate related... Instead, we have crop gains, a greening world, reducing poverty and improving human health and life length all around! The article, however, asserts that if the entire Antarctic icecap would melt, this would "prove catastrophic for global sea level rise"... carefully avoiding to mention that at the melt-off rate given – 150 gigatonnes/yr – this would take 177,000 years... That's almost two ice ages from now! Will people even be people at that time?
The Guardian ends their article with a little box saying "If there were ever a time to join us, it is now". Oh Guardian... I guess there wasn't ever a time to join you!
All this talk about "sea level rise creating masses of refugees"...
Sea level rise is measured in millimeters per year. It is currently said to be very fast, at over 3 mm/yr... Well, say it's 4 mm, to make it extreme! That's 4 cm in a decade, 40 cm in a century. In a CENTURY!....
How many houses that people live in today are more than 100 years old? Very few, right? 40 cm of sea level rise means the sea line moves a number of meters inland. But the sea line already changes a lot, between high tide and low tide, normal tide and super full moon tide, not to mention storms that always happen now and then! Thus, nobody builds a house JUST by the water line. And thus, by the time it's time to demolish your house and build a new one, because the old one is approaching 100 years of age and is falling apart, you'll build your new house a few more meters inland and you'll be fine for another 100 years.
Even the worst, most extreme outcome of the worst, most extreme IPCC scenario, predicts less than 90 cm sea level rise in 100 years:
"But some countries are already below the sea level in large areas!", you may say. True, but they're managing, and we're still talking about a very small and slow change here. Plenty of time to adjust your strategies.
"But the sea rises faster in some areas than in others!", you may say. True. But even if it's 40 cm (or 90 cm) in 50 years instead of in 100 years, that's STILL plenty of time to adapt and move your buildings inland.
"But some countries, like Bangladesh or Djibouti, don't really have much room to move inland! They are already over-populated, and large parts of their territory will be lost if the sea rises!", you may say. Well, this is a very interesting argument, isn't it? Let's talk about that!
So we agreed that moving your house a few meters every 50 or 100 years is not really a big problem in itself, and certainly nothing that should be termed "fleeing". But what if that space is already occupied? What if the entire country is already full? Then, you would want to settle a few meters into the next country, wouldn't you? But you can't... because you're not a citizen there. So it seems to me that the real problem here is not actually the sea, but our human idea of "national territory". Had this slow sea level rise happened in the Stone Age, nobody would even have noticed it! Nobody would live long enough to see any change with their own eyes, and buildings didn't stand for more than a few years, anyway (if even). And of course, there were no countries! People kept moving around with the changing conditions all the time. In fact, since the last glacial maximum, around 18,000 years ago, the sea level is said to have risen with astonishing 130 m, and the Stone Age saw over 30 such glacials come and go. With every one of them, people would have had to move large distances. And if we didn't have national territories, we would, too!
The term "anthropogenic climate crises" gets a new meaning, doesn't it? Yes, we created the crisis, but not by changing the climate!... By building a rigid social structure that cannot handle a changing climate. So wouldn't it be fair to discuss changing the system as a way to solve the problem? Instead of sending billions of dollars to countries for lowering or not increasing their CO2 emissions, maybe we could discuss a system of land sharing? That if the sea has eaten 20 square kilometers of a country, this could be shared between the nearby inland countries, so that the net loss will be maybe just 2 square kilometers or so instead?
"But this will never happen!", you may say. If so, I must object that this argument falls rather flat, if at the same time, you want to stop climate change...! THAT, if anything, will never happen! But let alone climate change, even just the idea of the entire world stopping using fossil fuels while they are still abundant, cheap and easily available is something I could easily argue "will never happen!"... but alarmists still invest a lot of money and efforts into this, don't they! Why the preference for one 'impossible thing' over another? If you think about it, 'countries' are something that has only existed for a split second in the history of humanity; There's nothing saying that this system will necessarily be the one prevailing to the end of time. And fossil fuels, on the other hand, save lives. With their help, some regions in the world have doubled or tripled their life length, and cut child mortality down to a fraction of what it used to be... But that's the thing you say we will give up more easily?
Obviously, it would be much more convenient for us all if the sea level stayed exactly where it is, no doubt about that. And so, if indeed human activities affect the sea level, then this is something that should be factored in, when we decide on our line of action. However, I say "factored in", because as mentioned, there are other factors! The extended life length and reduced child mortality must be factored in, too! The questions we must ask ourselves are therefore e.g. "Is it better for Djibouti that the sea level stays exactly where it is, and they remain on a life expectancy of 67 years and a child mortality of 57 per 1,000? Or indeed, that the latter values worsen? Or is it better that they use fossil fuels to reach Swedish style life expectancy of 83 years and child mortality of 3 per 1,000, and then solve the possible land problem if and when it happens some several hundred years into the future?"
And in any case, just because sea level rise could, indeed, become an inconvenience in some places, this does not in any way justify the alarmist and greatly misleading talk of "masses of refugees"!... There won't be any masses of refugees as a consequence of sea level rise. There could only possibly be problems with over-population of certain areas as national territories shrink, which could be solved by a more pragmatic approach to national territories, or indeed by the use of levees and other technologies, as is already happening in e.g. the Netherlands and New Orleans.
I’m from Sweden, but I’ve spent a large number of years in Kenya, where I first came to work with biogas and do my share in saving the world. I now have two children with a Kenyan man. I hear them playing in the next room as I write this, here in beautiful Chaka, Nyeri, by the foot of Mount Kenya.
I first came to Kenya in 2005, 27 years old, as a part of my master project for Chalmers University of Technology. They had allowed me to start my master project early because of how very motivated I was. Once here, it immediately started changing my perspectives. Since then, it’s like a whole new universe has opened up in my mind… I really recommend it to anyone! For the first time, I could look at my own Western culture from the outside, and that’s the only way you can really see it. “I can imagine fish have no word for ‘water’”, as Terry Pratchett had a character say, in his book Small Gods. One major thing that I thus came to realize about my culture is this:
We have forgotten that money means lives!
In Sweden, we look down on money as something filthy and corrupting, I came to see. To us, it’s a matter of how many cars you can have, and how often you can buy a new mobile phone. Things to brag about to your neighbors, making them jealous. But “money can’t buy you happiness”, we say. I once told a Swede that in Kenya, they truly believe that it can, and the Swede annoyed me a bit by expressing ridicule for the silly Kenyans… But who is silly, really? Because for the great majority of people in the world, money is not about cars and mobile phones!... It’s about how long you live, and how many children you lose.
On Our World in Data, you can see an amazing animated map of how life expectancy has changed in the world over time, all the way back from 1543 (although it was only the UK that apparently collected such data at that time). The color codes start from 20 – 30 years, and amazingly, as late as the 1950s, several countries in especially Africa were still in this category! Many more were in the 30 – 40 years category, as were both Sweden and the US back in the 1800s:
Here is a chart with some of the countries, as well as the world:
We can see that the US was a good half century before the world in surpassing a life expectancy of 50 years. Then, Japan caught up with them and surpassed them, despite their disastrous dip of the atomic bombs in WW2. India and Kenya are slightly behind the average but coming strongly. Kenya has a tragic recession from what I assume is HIV/AIDS starting in 1991, and when I first came here in 2005, life expectancy was still below 55 years, which I remember shocked me and grieved me. Little did I imagine what a remarkable recovery she was to make in the one and a half decades that followed!
The interesting thing about this chart is that, apart from the blows from such things as the atomic bombs and HIV/AIDS, it could almost have been a chart over CO₂ emissions, couldn’t it? The two look almost the same! Rising at almost the same time, in almost the same rate…
The world’s energy problem Without cheap, safe, low-carbon energy sources at scale we are stuck between the alternatives of high greenhouse gas emissions and energy poverty
Here is a quote from the summary:
“The energy problem that receives most attention is the link between energy access and greenhouse gas emissions. But the world has another global energy problem that is just as big: hundreds of millions of people lack access to sufficient energy entirely, with terrible consequences to themselves and the environment.”
Here is one of the graphs from the report, showing the correlation between CO₂ emissions and GDP:
And here is a part of another image, showing the link between GDP and Life Expectancy, as well as with Child Mortality:
But when talking with especially the Green Party members in Sweden, where I have many friends since I was a member there myself for 18 years, they often categorically deny that the burning of fossil fuels has had anything to do with this extraordinary and unprecedented boom in life-length seen in the past few hundred years. They say that it’s the discovery of penicillin and other modern medicine that is behind most of it. But tell me, how would that explain the above differences between the countries then? Isn’t penicillin equally discovered in Kenya as it is in the US, yet Kenyans still live 15 years shorter? Why do 21 countries still have a life expectancy below 60 years, and why are almost all of them in Africa? The bottom record is held by Central African Republic, with a life expectancy of only 51 years.
To put it in yet another way, here is a screenshot from an excellent presentation called “200 Years of Global Change” by Hans Rosling, the famous Swedish “statistician entertainer”, at the IPCC’s release of their 2013 report AR5, in Stockholm:
He shows the population from the poorest billion on the left to the richest billion on the right. Then, underneath, he has put how much energy each billion utilize in a year, and of what kind. The black blocks are fossil carbon fuels, coal, oil etc. Purple is nuclear energy, green is biofuels and orange is solar and wind power. “The halo of the rich”, as Rosling commented when placing this tiny little block on top of the richest billion’s stack. Over the energy blocks, Rosling then places seven white blocks symbolizing the seven million children under the age of 5 dying each year. (I can console you that this number has gone down significantly since then. It’s now “only” around 5.5 million per year (although even this number puts the <3 million COVID-19 deaths in a new perspective, doesn’t it?).) As you can see, the child deaths make a curve exactly mirroring the energy consumption curve. Rosling’s comment, at timestamp 16:24 in the video is:
“If you burn coal, you save children. Did you hear?... You burn coal – you save children.”
His words, not mine. Worth noting is that the late Hans Rosling was a firm believer that climate change was a major threat to humanity, and his presentation starts with him praising the new IPCC report. He thus draws this conclusion about the use of fossil fuels and child deaths very much in spite of his personal conviction on climate change, not in line with it. These are the best conclusions, since if at all he is biased, his bias would be directed the other way and thus couldn’t be the cause of this conclusion, as is otherwise so very common in the world.
Just the other week, one of my Green Party friends posted on Facebook a link to some article claiming that the combustion of oil was behind some 20% of all deaths in the world. I commented that this was a greatly unfair way of putting it, as the same oil had also saved so many especially children’s lives, and expanded our life expectancy so much. In fact, how many of those people that the oil allegedly killed would have even been alive at that time, if it hadn’t been for that same oil? How many would have died decades earlier, or not even been born, as their parents would have died before the age of 5? The poster found this too dumb to even respond to (he later revealed), but another Green Party friend of ours picked up the ball and said you can’t reason that way. It wasn’t the oil in itself that saved all those people, it was just the energy. If the energy had come from some other source, the positive effects would have still happened, but without the negative effects that the oil brings.
And of course, I had no objections to this! If the energy had come from some other source, the positive effects would have still happened. But first of all, this does not take away the fact that it still was the oil (and the coal and the gas) that did bring about these positive effects, in the real scenario that actually happened. The “other energy source” scenario is interesting but hypothetical. It didn’t happen that way. So to fairly gauge the effects of fossil fuels on human health, we must evaluate the different aspects by themselves: How much energy do they bring? How easily accessible is the energy? How much does it cost? How practical is it to handle? How clean is it? And how many lives does a certain amount of accessible, cheap and easy-to-handle energy save? How many lives does the pollution take? I haven’t made careful calculations on this, but just looking at the charts above, as well as Rosling’s presentation, it is clear without a shadow of a doubt to me that fossil fuels have saved a great many more lives than they have taken, and that they still do. If you burn coal, you save children.
(It’s funny to remember what a novel thought this was to me, when some probably right-wing sympathizer first pointed it out to me some two decades ago… He said that most things had actually become better and better in the world in the 1900s. Poverty had reduced and health and life-length improved, etc. So how bad could the oil be?... I almost doubted this, at first! In my world-view, people were living shorter and shorter because of environmental destruction and pollution, and they were becoming poorer and poorer because of oppression and inequality in the world… This was the impression I had gotten from my leftist and environmentalist parents and friends. But I looked into the data, and slowly, little by little, I came to accept it. I still want to limit pollution mind you! Especially since much of it accumulates. Thus with time, the bad effects increase more than the good effects. But I had to change my perspective that industrialism was an almost pure evil, to that it was actually an immense and almost pure blessing.)
My second objection to the “other energy source” scenario must be that even if we could go back in time, say, and with our current knowledge about the dirtiness of oil and other carbon fuels try some alternative energy source, it is far from certain that this would even work. The Green Party friend promoted wind power as a great alternative “more reliable than nuclear energy” etc (which he justified in a very funny way). Well, Elsa* has already, in other parts of this book, talked about wind power and its environmental and health problems. In the context of poverty and life-length however, the most important aspect of it is probably that it fluctuates all the time. Every hour and every day, the output from wind power is different from another hour and another day, not just for the single plant but also for all of Sweden, for example. This is, of course, an impossible situation for any kind of industry. Thus, industrialization could definitely not have happened the way it did, with just swapping fossil fuels for wind power! For industrialization to be able to work on wind power alone, we would need techniques for energy storage and power transmission over large distances for smoothing of the fluctuations, that even today are not invented.
I will translate this pic... but anyway, it's a graph by the Swedish Power Grid showing the production of wind power in Sweden for two recent winters.
But let us leave the past: Could we transition to a renewable-energy based industrialism from this day forward? And could those countries that are still hustling on a life expectancy of some 50, 60 years do the rest of their much desired life-length expansion and child death reduction based on these new energy sources? Well, we would hope so, wouldn’t we. But fact remains that these techniques are not there yet. Don’t get me wrong, I’m doing my best to spread the biogas technology here in Kenya! This already has the potential of saving many lives here in a short time. Just the smoke from cooking fires with firewood and charcoal is estimated to kill some 22,000 Kenyans every year, many of whom are children. (COVID-19 has now killed around 2,000 Kenyans as of 28 March 2021, just as a comparison. The population is 50 million.) Biogas burns without smoke or soot and is thus harmless for the lungs. It also gives an excellent organic fertilizer which preserves the soil, and since it takes much less time to maintain the digester than the collection of firewood takes, it can give especially women the chance to find some form of income, thus reducing poverty. Solar panels are also big here, especially in such remote areas where no power grid is expected in yet another 10 or so years. This helps children study in the evenings – another very important factor for reducing poverty. And money means lives, as we recall.
But all of this is still on a low level of development. What really boosts GDP and thus life length is large-scale industrialism, and as stated, this cannot yet be achieved on solar and wind power, and certainly not on biogas, since there just isn’t enough feed material around to produce enough biogas for this. Biogas is great for household solutions and small businesses, but not a solution for industry. Millions of brilliant engineers are out there right now working on solutions for a future industry based on renewable energy, but let’s face it:
With every year that industrialism and economic growth delays, children die. Young and middle-aged people die.
I’m a stout environmentalist. I love nature and I care for the world. I changed my entire life once to save it, when moving from Sweden to Kenya. But our ambitions to save the world should not be based on lies. Don’t tell me that the combustion of oil takes more lives than it saves, when this is not true. Don’t tell me it’s a piece of cake; we can just do it all on renewable energy instead, when the necessary techniques for this, despite our best efforts, are not yet invented.
And we may never invent them. It is possible that the golden age for humanity has already passed. When we finally do run out of fossil fuels (and rare metals and other finite materials that we use), it is possible that our industries will be less economical and efficient all over, and that life will be harder and shorter again as a result. We may never reach the era of Star Trek, and whatever we might want to believe in this regard is irrelevant. In the meantime, let us boldly look with open eyes at what we do know. Which is that fossil fuels save more lives than they take, certainly before we factor in climate change. So many of my friends and former political colleagues – as well as celebrity Greta Thunberg – talk as if it is just sheer stupidity that stops people from simply ending the use of fossil fuels, right now! Greta pronounces the words “money” and “economic growth” in her speech to the UN as if they were the dirtiest words she knows. (But at least she refuses to believe that her audience is evil, which is sweet of her!) Well, here’s the news for Greta and all of her Western World followers:
People are neither evil, nor stupid. They just want to live, that’s all. And fossil fuels save lives. Look no further: This is the reason why it is so hard to give up fossil fuels, even though most leaders now say they want to. Even if we believe that climate change might lead to disasters some time in a distant future – which I personally don’t – it would still be extremely hard for the people alive today to want to sacrifice their own lives, and the lives of their own children right now, for the sake of some other children some time in the future.
It would help us all if my fellow environmentalists would follow in Hans Rosling’s admirable footsteps and just accept this, the tremendous upside of the fossil fuels. Without necessarily giving up their criticism of them in other respects! From there, we could start discussing the best way forwards. A discussion based on reality, not on some hypothetical alternative scenario that may sound ever so pleasant, but which isn’t real.
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* Elsa Widding. This text is going to be a chapter in her book, The Climate Circus, which I'm currently translating.
“Despite knowing that life is so much more than money and gold I fall in line like a good boy, and close my eyes to my guilt and others’ My heart is heavy and my head is bent, my steps echo grey and empty The snow lies black and toxic on the roofs I turn on my TV and sleep it off
And when the acid rain falls, I put up my umbrella…”
A freely translated song by The Lost Generation that I fell in love with when first I heard it. It’s so heavy and melancholic! It captured so well the feeling I had...
I have later realized that this is the lefties’ idea of how rich people are, or the greenies’ idea of how “normal people” are… and that they’re wrong. The rich or normal are not closing their eyes to any guilt. They’re not FEELING any guilt!... It is these “progressive” people’s idea that they SHOULD be feeling guilt, and so they wrongly assume that they do. The progressives also feel this guilt, themselves, and so naturally – but wrongly – expand their feeling to all of human kind.
Our hearts were heavy and our heads bent… not theirs. And I truly, genuinely believed that this depended on them closing their eyes to reality!... Because I felt that this was how it had happened for me… That one day, I opened my eyes to all the misery in the world, and all the pain came gushing in… and ever since that day, I was carrying all the grief of the world. Those who didn’t hadn’t yet opened their eyes.
But you know what, it doesn’t have to be that way! Because I still have my eyes open to all the misery in the world… but my heart is not heavy and my head not bent! It is a fantastic world we’re living in! And an absolutely fantastic time!... Sure, there’s lots of misery in the world, but it’s only a tiny, tiny part of it. And most of it is actually part of life, part of nature, part of what makes life so fantastic! Death, for instance. Suffering, dangers and death are parts of nature, and included in the things that make life fantastic. But just look at how much we have actually reduced these, over the last few hundred years!... We humans defy nature by having a survival-rate to adult age of more than 50%!... This is unmatched. In Sweden, this rate is over 99%... which is insane. And fantastic!
And if you look at it that way, there is of course no reason at all to grieve. On the contrary, these are times for celebration.
The funny thing is that you seem to have surpassed me in grieving, now!... This was NOT a development I saw coming 10 years ago, that I can tell you! But now, you “normal people” are walking around feeling guilt over the climate and are all worked up over Covid-19!... You think it’s a tragedy that 200,000 Americans – most of them already near their deaths – have died in Covid-19, and you think I’m cold and lacking of empathy because I don’t. But how could I, when I’ve already been aware for over a decade that 20,000 children die every day from poverty, and I’ve found peace with that knowledge? That’s 7 million dead children every year, and pretty much ALL those deaths could have been prevented if resources had been there… I used to feel THAT was a tragedy… but I’ve gotten over it! I’ve realized that 20,000 per day, in a population of 8 billion, is after all extremely little. No other organisms have a youngling mortality that low! People never had it before. 200 years ago, more than half of all children died before they were 5 years old.
Also, I’ve lived for several years now in a country where the child mortality is skyrocketing compared to Sweden, and I can see that it doesn’t mean that people are walking around suffering. Quite the opposite! They have much more peace and happiness in their everyday life than the Swedes have. I would have gladly lived here the rest of my life, if they only hadn’t harassed me so much for my white skin.
And so it appears to me that the great tragedy is not death, but the modern Westerners’ attitude to death. Which probably springs from the fact that we have too little death in our lives, rather than too much. Had we had more of it, we would be wise enough not to grieve so much, but instead to celebrate every day that we are alive.
I’ve become like the guy in the song, who puts up his umbrella when the acid rain falls. But I don’t close my eyes, I don’t bend my head and I don’t grieve!... My eyes are completely open, as I’m singing and dancing in the rain.
This is how it went, as far as I now to the best of my ability remember it.
Almost 20 years ago I struggled to awaken the awareness of the public to the increased greenhouse effect. This was in the days when it was totally weirdo style to believe in such a risk! It was only the Green Party who did, and not even all among them. By the way, they were around 4% of the Swedish population, and I wasn't even a member yet. I had only seen an episode of "World of Science" (Swedish factual TV show) talking about this.
With time, the awareness about the greenhouse effect slowly grew, and in the Green Party and other environmental organisations it became an established fact.
Then I went to Chalmers University of Technology to study, and among other things I learned, on a molecular level, how the greenhouse effect works. In a computer lab for example, I learned that 95% of the greenhouse effect comes from water vapor, which regulates itself in the atmosphere. It surprised me to some extent that I had never heard this before.
Then in one course, they invited a climate skeptic, who gave a guest lecture he called:
"Climate change - Science, politics or religion?"
On top of showing how the "climate movement" actually resembled religion in a number of ways (the lurking doom's day, repent from sin and and you shall be saved, strong, charismatic leaders,...) he gave a few, it seemed to me, pretty strong arguments as to why the climate hysteria was exaggerated, and to how it was in fact technically impossible to foresee how the climate would change, regardless of what we did, or didn't do. When asked by a person in the audience what he thought we should spend our efforts on, he said that we should prepare ourselves for climate changes in either directions, since the only thing we could be sure of was that climate would always keep changing.
We were supposed to hand in some kind of summary of the lecture of one page, and so I handed in a page with what I thought were the strongest arguments for the climate hysteria being exaggerated. I got a vague and somewhat funny response from the examiner... She said, roughly, that it didn't at all need to be that way, and that many of my classmates were much more critical. (Which is a silly thing to say... To accept a notion that over-throws everything you've until now believed in and fought for, hardly makes you uncritical! It makes you open-minded and very self-critical.) I got interested and asked her to send me these other students' papers so that I could read them. Then she said that she couldn't give out other students' work without their permission. So I asked her to please ask their permission. (Why wouldn't they give it? Wouldn't most of us only be happy if our work could be of interest to anybody, other than the teacher?) But she replied that I could ask them myself instead. But the course was over so I wouldn't see them again, and I didn't know their names and much less their e-mail addresses, nor did I know who had written about this particular topic! So I asked her if I could at least have their e-mail addresses then, so that I could ask them, but I didn't get them. Weird behavior!! ...Wasn't it?
Then in 2006 Al Gore's movie came, and suddenly the whole world turned around! This could have been happy days for me, when I finally obtained redress for all my thankless work... if only I hadn't just started turning around in the opposite direction. Figures!
Quite soon I was made aware that Al Gore used a gigantic presentation scam in his movie, which I recount here. (In short he talks as if the temperature curve follows the carbon dioxide level curve, when in fact it is the other way around.) And you know, when somebody makes such a huge mistake, whether intentionally or unintentionally, it becomes hard to trust anything of what that person says.
I now started pressuring all my tutors for an answer about how it really was with this climate change thing. Most of them said it wasn't their field. One of the tutors in the course where we handled the greenhouse effect said: "Well, it's hard to imagine what else could be causing it!", which is about the same answer as believers in God gives to the origin of life... My master thesis examiner, Göran Petersson, turned out to be a convinced skeptic.
Let me give you some background to Göran Petersson. He is now way above retirement age, but carries on working at Chalmers in what seems to be an unimpeded pace. He is a committed environment advocate! He is one of the few among my tutors who was consequently using his findings and expertise to try and influence the social development through debate articles, TV appearances etc. He rounded off his course plans by writing that if also it wouldn't go so well on the exam, we shouldn't let this bring us down. A life-long commitment could often be as useful to the environment, if not more, than the ability to cram large amounts of facts in a short time!... Meaning he assumed we were there in his course (of which at least one was compulsory) to save the environment, rather than to get good grades or a fine job! He encouraged students to do political activism in the university, and complained that there was far too little of that, these days.
He was also one of those who killed the acidification hype. You see, a few decades before the climate beat, the acidification beat swept across Sweden. All environmental problems could then be blamed on acidification, which was very convenient since most of the acidification came from down the continent and the UK, and so we didn't have to change anything ourselves. Göran Petersson and his colleague Olle Ramnäs then walked in another direction and managed to show that the forest death that we observed was, to the largest part, caused by tropospheric ozone, from our own domestic traffic.
If Göran Petersson was now a convinced climate skeptic, this was an opinion of grave significance to me.
I went to some sort of panel debate at Chalmers... Some 6 or 7 researchers held a short presentation each about their work concerning the climate change. One of them was from the IPCC. All the speakers agreed in large about the climate threat, if they also had slightly different angles and figures. The audience, which consisted mostly of employees and students at Chalmers, was more skeptical. Several of them brought up the issue of Al Gore's turned around causality argument with temperature and carbon dioxide, and the man from IPCC said (revealing some impatience) that he couldn't understand what difference it made, since we knew that at least there was a causality relation in the direction that Al Gore said as well!... Which I found provokingly ignorant! On the whole, he was the one of them who made the most careless and unscientific impression. But this may have been because he was not a researcher himself... but only summarized research? This round of presentations anyway obviously didn't convince the audience, and it didn't convince me.
Later, my supervisor in my master project, secondary school teacher and biogas expert Björn Martén, said that it probably was the nuclear power lobby that was behind the climate hype... Because the only thing that could quickly replace our present consumption of fossil fuels, without forcing us to cut down on our energy usage and thus our lifestyle, was nuclear power! My subsequent studies in the renewable energy field has confirmed this.
Eight years have passed since this time. Still nothing has managed to really convince me! Ok, so I haven't been actively looking into it either, but still. Then, a few weeks back, I started discussing climate with an online friend on Skype. He said there had been a complete scientific consensus in this since 1992, and that since then it had only been an issue of the uneducated very slowly getting it. But the highly educated skepticism that I had experienced around me at Chalmers was, as you can see, one and a half decade later...
I told my Skype buddy about Göran Petersson, and he said he was interested in reading some of what he had published in the field. So I contacted Göran again (something I've done many times over the years, for various reasons), and he sent me this (translated by me):
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Here is my critical review of carbon dioxide in the parliament (with links to some earlier reports):
I forwarded it to my Skype buddy but I haven't heard from him again. When I clicked into climate4you myself, one of the first links I found was "The BIG picture". There I found, among other things, these pictures:
Global temperature over 420'000 years. The dotted line is the modern temperature. What's inside the little read box is shown in more detail in the graph below. From: climate4you.com
Top graph: Global temperature 10'000 years back, up until 1850.
Bottom graph: Carbon dioxide rate 10'000 years back, up until 1777.
Since the data above comes from ice cores, the last few hundred years are not there. In the caption of the original graph you can read that the carbon dioxide levels have since then risen to around 395 ppm (which is way off the chart) and that temperature has risen to about the same levels as they were in the medieval warm period.
From: climate4you.com
Note that the normal state of the earth is ice age, with around 7 degrees lower temperatures than now.
Note how well the temperature increase of the latest 100 years, up to medieval temperatures, blends in with the temperature fluctuations of all times, and doesn't look at all special.
Note how the climate has been unusually stable for unusually long in the last 10'000 years, but how it has still fluctuated more in this time than what we've seen in the last 100 years. In the Minoan warm period, and twice before that in this 10'000 year period, it was 0.75 degrees warmer than now, and 8'000 years ago the temperature rose 2 degrees, just as fast as it is rising today.
Note, of course, how the carbon dioxide curve, in this shorter time perspective than that of Al Gore, doesn't at all follow the temperature curve...! It seems highly uncertain to claim that that last 100 year temperature increase must be caused by the increase in carbon dioxide rate... I mean, what were all the earlier fluctuations caused by?
Note how you can clearly see that even in the year 1850, where the ice core data ends, the temperature had already started rising!... Isn't that funny though? The industrial revolution had barely even started in 1850, so the temperature increase began BEFORE the industrial revolution!... In fact, even the IPCC says that up until 1915 the concentration of anthropogenic carbon dioxide and other green house gases could hardly have had any effect at all. That's more than 100 years after the temperature started going upwards.
In reports and presentation materials, the IPCC, without exception, make all their graphs about the last 100 years (which are not seen above). To show these last 100 years, without putting them into the above perspective, seems to me like severe misrepresentation of data.
I went to a Green Party congress a few weeks ago. Greenpeace was there! They were lobbying for us to support a motion to use our governmental energy company to phase out brown coal mining in Germany (because a Swedish government owned company owns some brown coal assets there) which I supported. I took the opportunity to discuss the above images with some of them. To my grief they were all totally confused, and said that this was not consistent with what they had previously seen. Which could be explained by them previously only having seen Al Gore's temperature and carbon dioxide curves over 650'000 years, and IPCC's many graphs concerning only the last 100 years. I asked the activists if they knew how large a part of the total greenhouse effect is caused by water, but they had lots of trouble even understanding the question, and when they did they had no clue of the answer. I also spoke to another Green Party member who said that he had heard that the temperature was higher now than in millions of years before, which you can see is absolutely not the case!!... Even if the temperature should rise the predicted 3 degrees in total, it would make it higher than in the last 10'000 years, true, but not higher than in the last 420'000 years. Should it go up 5 degrees it would be. Then maybe it would be higher than in millions of years. But that is still only a hypothetical scenario!
The Greenpeace activists said over and over that it was only some percent of all researchers who opposed the consensus notion (and that Göran Petersson must be in this percent). They said that if you checked who financed these few percent it was most often the oil industry (which is not true about Göran). One of them tipped me off to check out what Hans Rosling has to say in the matter, which of course I immediately did as soon as I got home, because Hans Rosling is a big idol of mine. The things he has taught me! This was the best of him I could find in this topic:
19 min
And OH MY DISAPPOINTMENT when he too makes a logical somersault, almost as big as Al Gore's!!... So he says that he's going to talk about the climate over 300 years, 100 years back and 200 years forwards. He shows a graph from the IPCC report, showing how the sea levels have risen in the last 100 years, according to various sources with strong agreement, and says (here it comes):
"So as I read it: Today the question 'Does human change climate - yes or now?', that's over. That is set. The big question nowadays is 'How much will it change?'" (at time-stamp 5:21 in the movie above. Watch from 3:34 for background.)
What??!! But that's not at all what the graph is showing!! The graph only shows that the climate is changing, not that it is the humans who are making it change! Maybe he is not basing the conclusion on the graph but on something else entirely, but on what then, and if so, why does he say "as I read it"? Clearly the most likely interpretation at hand to the listener must be that he bases the conclusion on the graph he is showing and talking about, and if so the conclusion is all wrong! Because as we have seen, climate has always been changing, and the last 100 years are not at all unusual.
The rest of the video presents, in itself interesting, statistics about energy consumption distributed over different sources of energy and over different income groups in the world, but this I already knew.
Then I found this article in Wall Street Journal, talking about the 97% myth. It says that sure, scientists are in agreement that the climate is getting warmer, and that humans have an influence on the climate, but that no 97% of them think that humans are causing the larger part of the warming, or that the situation is alarming! Now of course the Wall Street Journal doesn't feel like the most reliable source in the world, but it does link to other sources, and among them a petition with 31'000 signatures by scientists, having signed a statement that "there is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere". 31'000! That's quite a lot... And scientists who don't even like to sign petitions...
Here is a survey, found via the above article, which clearly shows that the degree of agreement is far below 97%. More precisely, the scientists were very sure that we have a global warming going on, but far less sure that humans cause the larger part of it.
The scientists were asked to answer on a scale of 1-7 (where 1 is the lowest and 7 the highest) how sure they are of, in the top image, that the climate is changing, and in the bottom image, that humans are causing the largest part of the change. On the question of whether the climate is at all changing, 67% have answered with a 7, and 87% have answered with either a 7 or a 6. On the question of whether it is humans causing it only 35% answered with a 7, and 67% with either a 7 or a 6. The mean value of the answers of the bottom question is 5.7, and no less than 16% actually answered 4 or less, where 4 thus is the middle option. Ok, so they are clearly leaning towards the affirming side, but it is still far less than a 97% consensus!... At least consensus with certainty... Further, this is just a survey, so the scientists were asked to make a subjective guess about the answer to the questions, not to give an answer based on their own research. And funnily enough, they gauge the technical abilities to predict the climate far lower than their certainty that humans cause the larger part of the climate change...
But ok. Maybe it is as the majority of the scientists after all are guessing. And maybe the IPCC knows something that I don't, which shows with 95% certainty that the temperature will rise with minimum 3 and maximum 5 degrees because of anthropogenic greenhouse gases. This could be the case! But let me ask you something: If this is the case, why is it so very hard to find the evidence of this? Why is it super easy to find graphs showing that the temperature has increased in the last 100 years (as if anybody doubted this), but quite impossible to find the data that they build their 3-5 degrees increase estimate on? And why are there such severe fallacies and logical somersaults among some of the primary advocates of the idea? And why are so many of the most enthusiastic advocates of radical climate politics totally clueless about basic facts concerning climate and carbon dioxide? Why do they harbor so many misconceptions, like that it's warmer now than in millions of years, or that water is an insignificant greenhouse gas? And why is the press saying that 97% of scientists are sure of an opinion that they really aren't sure of?...
This reminds me of the time just after the Swedish minister of foreign affairs, Anna Lind, was murdered. Almost immediately a person was arrested, and I found it odd that everywhere in the press and on TV he was referred to as "the murderer of Anna Lind", despite the police stating that he was "suspected with reason" (rough translation by me) which according to the same press and TV channels was a low degree of suspicion. How could everybody be so sure, when even the police, who were the only ones who had actually investigated it, were not? And the public was soon equally sure. Everybody talked about "the murderer of Anna Lind", and how relieving it was that he had been caught. I remember talking on the phone one evening with a law student friend of mine, and he also said this:
"They caught Anna Lind's murderer now at least, that's a relief". I replied after some hesitation:
"Yeah, I'm also starting to accept this now... Up until now I have been feeling that 'Wait until the trial is over, he is only suspected with reason yet', but I'm also starting to believe now that it is actually him..."
It was only a day or two after this conversation that this person was released, and a totally different person was arrested, as "suspected with probable reason" (another translation by me), which is much stronger, and later was also convicted!... If you wish to be conspiracy-theoretical you might suspect that this first person, who received some damage compensation for his trouble, had been held in arrest just to keep the population calm and happy while they were looking for the real murderer!
Well, it feels the same way now. Everybody is convinced of what is about to happen, but nobody can present any evidence for it. And I don't want to fall for it again, and start believing it me too, without evidence! So please, is there anybody who has evidence? NOT showing that the temperature has risen over the last 100 years, I already know this, but that it is somewhat certain that it will continue to rise with a total of 3-5 degrees due to anthropogenic release of greenhouse gases! If so, please show them to me, I ask.
In 2006 Al Gore presented the movie An Inconvenient Truth. In this he lobbied for the notion that the increased greenhouse effect, with global warming as a result, was a problem of catastrophic dimension. And the opinion of the world shifted to his will.
But Al Gore made an unforgivable mistake in his presentation.
On the board he drew up a curve showing how the carbon dioxide rate has varied in the atmosphere during the last 650'000 years. Underneath this curve he showed how the temperature has varied during the same 650'000 years. He pointed out that the curves followed each other quite well. Then he said: "When the concentration of carbon dioxide is high, the temperature goes up".
Then he went on to show where the carbon dioxide concentration was today, and where it would be in a near future, in less than 50 years. He put on a great show demonstrating how very, very high it was, by going up in a lift machine and complaining about his vertigo...
When he continued talking, he expressed himself as if he was talking about the temperature, even though it was in fact the carbon dioxide he was talking about. As if these two were one and the same thing! As if it didn't matter which one of those you talked about, because they were exactly identical anyway!
But they aren't. First of all, you can see already from the two curves that they don't always follow each other. They are similar to each other, but deviate sometimes for a few thousands of years. Secondly, and more importantly, it is so, according to all serious sources, that it is the carbon dioxide curve that follows the temperature curve, and not the other way around! This is among other things due to the permafrosts that thaw up when temperatures are high, releasing carbon dioxide that is otherwise bound there, and the reduced solubility of gases in water with higher temperature, making the oceans release more carbon dioxide otherwise dissolved there.
At a panel debate at Chalmers University of Technology where I studied, this was put forth from several in the audience (which consisted mostly of employees and students at the university). A representative of the IPCC in the panel then said that he could not understand what difference this would make! Because if we know that an increase in temperature leads to an increase in carbon dioxide rate AND that an increase in carbon dioxide rate leads to an increase in temperature, all the more reason to be concerned! Then the problem rather becomes even bigger than what Al Gore showed!
But that's of course not how it is. The direction of the causality makes a world of difference. Let me illustrate this with an example. It is as if I would say:
"If it rains the ground gets wet. Therefore, if I go out and pour a number of buckets of water on the ground it will start to rain!"
No, that's not the case! The first sentence is right, but the second one is wrong. The error occurs because the causality has the opposite direction, namely that it is the raining that leads to the wetness of the ground, not the wetness of the ground that leads to rain.
Now of course it may be so that there exists a causality in the other direction as well! If I pour out a very large amount of water on the ground perhaps the humidity of the air as the water evaporates is increased to much that it actually, in some cases, triggers some little rainfall. But even if that is so, the strength of this causality has nothing to do with the strength of the opposite causality. The rule rain => wet ground, is very strong, whereas the rule wet ground => rain, is very weak. And if nobody before has poured any water on the ground right here, so that all the wetness of the ground historically has come from rain, and you draw up curves of how the the ground wetness and the rainfall have varied here, you will be able to see how the curves follow each other very neatly historically. But the moment I start experimenting with pouring water on the ground from a different source, the curves will deviate from one another. There is no reason to believe that they would keep co-varying just as nicely, now that I've suddenly brought in a new phenomenon into the statistics, a whole new significant factor causing an increase in one of the parameters, wetness on the ground!
And this is exactly how it is in the case of carbon dioxide and temperature. The rule temperature => carbon dioxide is very strong. Historically the carbon dioxide curve has therefore followed the temperature curve well, if also not perfectly, as there are also other factors influencing the carbon dioxide rate. The rule carbon dioxide => temperature on the other hand doesn't at all need to be as strong. At least Al Gore doesn't present any data indicating that it is, since the data he does present, according to all the experts I've heard commenting on the two curves, is explained by the causality directed temperature => carbon dioxide. Now we know that we have introduced a new phenomenon into the statistics, namely anthropogenic, industrial production of carbon dioxide, the like of which has never been seen, and there is therefore no reason to believe that the temperature and carbon dioxide curves will continue following each other. Rather they should deviate from each other as from that moment. This makes Al Gore's little show with the lift machine and the vertigo fall flat.
All this due to the direction of causality. Therefore it worries me that a representative of the IPCC, by his own accord, cannot understand what difference the direction of the causality makes, in this case responsible for the historical congruence of the temperature and carbon dioxide curves, since we know that there is a causality in both directions anyway!... If he cannot understand this, he understands very little of how scientific data must be read, and then I don't give much for whatever else he might have to say.
Likewise, after such a presentation scam, I don't give much for whatever else Al Gore might have to say.
