Thursday, May 02, 2024
Why climate change ISN'T going to end the world and why we need to stop obsessing about net-zero, according to Cambridge University professor
Young people are terrified that climate change will destroy Earth by the time they grow up, but the world is not actually ending, argues Cambridge professor Mike Hulme.
Humanity is not teetering on a cliff's edge, he says, at risk of imminent catastrophe if we don't reach net-zero carbon emissions by a certain date.
And he has made it his mission to call out the people who claim we are.
In his most recent book, Climate Change Isn't Everything, Hulme argued that belief in the urgent fight against climate change has shot far past the territory of science and become an ideology.
Hulme, a professor of human geography at the University of Cambridge, dubs this ideology 'climatism,' and he argues that it can distort the way society approaches the world's ills, placing too much focus on slowing Earth from warming.
The problem, he said, is this narrow focus takes attention away from other important moral, ethical, and political objectives - like helping people in the developing world rise out of poverty.
DailyMail.com spoke with Hulme about why he thinks climatism is a problem, how it should be balanced out, and what keeps him hopeful about the future of humanity.
As with other 'isms' - like cubism or romanticism - ideologies provide a way of thinking about things, explained Hulme.
'They're like spectacles that help us to make sense of the world, according to a predefined framework or structure,' he said
To be clear, Hulme does not claim that all ideologies are wrong.
'We all need ideologies, and we all have them - whether you're a Marxist or a nationalist, you're likely to hold an ideology of some form or other,' he added.
As Hulme sees it, many journalists, advocates, and casual observers of climate change have become devotees of climatism, inaccurately attributing many events that happen in the world as being caused by climate change.
He gives the examples of a fire, flood, or damaging hurricane.
'No matter how complex a particular causal chain might be, it's a very convenient shorthand to say, 'Oh, well, this was caused by climate change,'' Hulme said.
'It's a very shallow and simplistic way, I would argue, to try to describe events that are happening in the world.'
Researchers have shown that warming oceans do lead to more frequent and more severe storms: Twice as many cyclones now become category 4 or 5 as they did in the 1970s, scientists have found, and Atlantic storms are three times as likely to become hurricanes.
Hulme doesn't argue that the effects of climate change are not happening, though, just that stopping climate change won't stop disasters from happening altogether.
'Fundamentally, we're going to have to deal with hurricanes, and we're not going to deal with them just by cutting our carbon emissions,' he said.
The solutions, he argues, will include better forecasting, better early warning systems, better emergency plans, and better infrastructure.
'There are all sorts of things that we can do to minimize the risks and dangers of hurricanes, that are way more effective in the short term than trying to cut our carbon emissions,' said Hulme.
The danger of climatism, he pointed out, is that it leads people down a false chain of events: If all of these things happening in the world are caused by climate change, then all we have to do is stop climate change, and all the other things will stop themselves.
'So whether it's Putin's war, or whether it's the Hamas-Israel conflict in Gaza, whether it is a hurricane hitting Miami - if all of these things are caused by climate change, let's get rid of climate change,' said Hulme.
'And that clearly is a very inadequate way of thinking about the complexities of most of the problems we we face in the world today.'
This distorted thinking can make people forget about other important concerns, he argues.
As an example, Hulme points to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): 17 areas that the world's governments have identified as top priorities for humanity.
The SDGs include building peace and justice, eradicating poverty, reducing child mortality, and ensuring clean sanitation and water for billions of people on the planet.
'These are really important goals, and the danger is if we obsess about just climate change, if we think that climate change holds the key to wellbeing and a better future, we take attention away from interventions that will make progress on the sustainable development goals,' he said.
As an example, Hulme points to Western European governments that are not willing to put money into the transition away from open wood burning cookers in many rural villages in the global south, which cause very high mortality levels, particularly amongst women and children.
'Liquid petroleum gas (LPG) is much cleaner, much more efficient, much easier for women and girls to get access to,' he said. 'But in the name of climate change, well, we can't put money into LPG transition, because that's a fossil fuel.'
Others are coming around to see things his way, though.
'LPG for clean cooking can and should be permitted as a transitional fuel to save lives in the short-term until we can provide universal access to alternative low-emissions clean cooking systems,' experts from the World Bank and Columbia University wrote in March.
A number of benchmarks should have been met by 2020, according to climate scientists in 2016: Renewable energy - mainly wind and solar - should have made up at least 30 percent of the world's electricity supply, and no additional coal-fired power plants should have been approved after that date.
If society were to put climate change priorities into their proper proportions then, Hulme said it would still be on the list.
It just wouldn't be the only item on the list, and it wouldn't be at the top.
'There's 17 SDGs, and two of them are related to climate. So that begins to rebalance, or re-proportion, the amount of effort and attention we might wish to pay,' said Hulme.
Beyond these mixed up priorities, Hulme also takes issue with what he sees as an obsession with deadlines: 'There's this idea of the ticking clock counting down to Ground Zero - we've only got five years, 10 years, two years - however long different commentators put the deadline.'
He calls this line of thinking 'deadline-ism,' a sort of sub-ideology of climatism, and he says he finds it unhelpful.
'It's like holding a gun to your head and saying, 'You've only got three seconds to make a decision.'
And under those circumstances, most human beings would not make a very good decision,' he said.
Perhaps even worse, it has the potential to undermine the gravity of the true threat posed by climate change.
One danger of deadlines can be that they cultivate a sense of fatalism: 'Well, if we've only got three more years, clearly we're not going to solve it in three years time. So what the heck, let's give up,' Hulme said.
The other danger is cynicism: The average person sees deadlines come and go, but the world is still here, and as far as most people can tell, climate disaster has not befallen us.
'We've had many of these supposedly decisive years, said Hulme. 'And you know, it's not surprising that people may become somewhat cynical or fatigued by this type of rhetoric.'
Hulme's critics have argued that he is over-egging the pudding - that his picture of climatism as a rampant and harmful ideology is overstated or inaccurate.
'[Hulme's] claim that mainstream climate policy pays no attention to social and economic context and to non-climate priorities is simply not credible,' wrote development economist Simon Maxwell in his review of Climate Change Isn't Everything.
'It is certainly true that the climate and development worlds have in the past run on parallel and poorly connected tracks. That was probably true in the 2000s,' Maxwell wrote. 'But today? The literature is awash with references to climate compatible development, climate-smart development, climate-resilient development, just transition, and many other formulations of the same kind.'
Hulme disputed the idea that he is over-egging the pudding on climatism - after all, the whole basis of his argument is that climatists are the ones making a bigger deal out of it than they should be.
'I'm quite happy to have an argument or discussion about whether I'm over-egging the pudding, as opposed to the people who I think are over-egging the pudding,' he said, pointing to his deep experience in the field.
'I've been observing concerns about how climate change is talked about, framed, and reacted to in public for many, many years.'
And this public framing has led to a phenomenon called 'eco-anxiety,' which Hulme said he sees among his students at Cambridge University
'They have absorbed these claims of tipping points, and they take these things literally, and feel that there is no future for them because the climate is going to go out of control,' he said. 'They feel that it will be too late, and everything will collapse.'
As an educator of young adults, and as someone who has studied climate change over a 40-year career, Hulme sees a pastoral dimension to his role.
'I see people unnecessarily going down a spiral of despair and hopelessness that I find deeply concerning and worrying,' he said.
Part of what makes this so unfortunate is that he still sees many reasons to feel hopeful about the future.
Chief among them, the irrepressible ingenuity and spirit of humans and their social formations.
'Despite what I've just said about mental health and eco-anxieties, the vast majority of humans have this irrepressible spirit,' Hulme said.
He emphasized that the risks associated with climate change are important things to attend to.
'We do need smart climate policies, whether it's mitigation or adaptation,' he said.
'We need energy transitions away from carbon-emitting energy sources, and that energy transition is going to come through innovation. It's going to come through smart people doing smart things more efficiently, with the human ingenuity and creativity that we've been granted, making use of the material resources that the planet offers.'
In the end, it's faith in humanity that Hulme holds on to.
But he's a realist, too.
'For good or ill, through the last 200 years of human development, we've set in motion this resetting of the climate system, and we're not going to eliminate that any time soon,' he said. 'We've got to accept the fact that there is going to be residual climate change for a long, long time to come.'
Bad things are going to happen, Hulme acknowledged, and the climate will continue to change. But smart mitigations can shave off some of the worst excesses of that changing climate.
'That doesn't mean we give up,' he said. 'It's never too late to do the right thing. There is no cliff edge, after which we all fall down.'
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Researchers Find Arctic Region Was Warmer ~10,000 Years Ago Than Today
The European Institute for Climate and Energy (EIKE presents its latest climate video on its YouTube channel
Examined today is a paper appearing in the journal Nature Communications titled: “Seasonal sea-ice in the Arctic’s last ice area during the Early Holocene.”
The authors looked at sea ice in the region of the Lincoln Sea, bordering northern Greenland and Canada, which “will be the final stronghold of perennial Arctic sea ice in a warming climate.”
According to the paper, “Modelling studies suggest a transition from perennial to seasonal sea ice during the Early Holocene, a period of elevated global temperatures around 10,000 years ago.”
The researchers have found “marine proxy evidence for the disappearance of perennial sea ice in the southern Lincoln Sea during the Early Holocene, which suggests a widespread transition to seasonal sea ice in the Arctic Ocean.”
“Seasonal sea-ice conditions were tightly coupled to regional atmospheric temperatures,” the authors stated.
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Climate Change Is Normal and Natural, and Can't Be Controlled
NASA claimed that “Earth is warming at an unprecedented rate” and “human activity is the principal cause.” Others proposed spending trillions of dollars to control the climate. But are we humans responsible for climate change? And what can we do about it?
“The climate of planet Earth has never stopped changing since the Earth’s genesis, sometimes relatively rapidly, sometimes very slowly, but always surely,” says Patrick Moore in Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom. “Hoping for a ‘perfect stable climate’ is as futile as hoping the weather will be the same and pleasant, every day of the year, forever.”
In other words, climate change is normal and natural, and you can forget about controlling it.
For instance, a major influence of weather and climate are solar cycles driven by the Sun’s magnetic field over periods of eight to 14 years. They release varying amounts of energy and produce dark sunspots on the Sun’s surface. The effects of solar cycles on Earth vary, with some regions warming more than 1°C and others cooling.
Climatic changes occur as a result of variations in the interaction of solar energy with Earth’s ozone layer, which influences ozone levels and stratospheric temperatures. These, in turn, affect the speed of west-to-east wind flows and the stability of the polar vortex. Whether the polar vortex remains stable and close to the Arctic or dips southward determines whether winters in the mid-latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere are severe or mild.
In addition to solar cycles, there are three Milankovitch cycles that range in length from 26,000 to 100,000 years. They include the eccentricity, or shape, of Earth’s elliptical orbit around the Sun. Small fluctuations in the orbit’s shape influence the length of seasons. For example, when the orbit is more like an oval than a circle, Northern Hemisphere summers are longer than winters and springs are longer than autumns.
The Milankovitch cycles also involve obliquity, or the angle that Earth’s axis is tilted. The tilt is why there are seasons, and the greater the Earth’s tilt, the more extreme the seasons. Larger tilt angles can cause the melting and retreat of glaciers and ice sheets, as each hemisphere receives more solar radiation during summer and less during winter.
Finally, the rotating Earth, like a toy top, wobbles slightly on its axis. Known as precession, this third Milankovitch cycle causes seasonal contrasts to be more extreme in one hemisphere and less extreme in the other.
Moving from outer space to Earth, ocean and wind currents also affect the climate.
For instance, during normal conditions in the Pacific Ocean, trade winds blow from east to west along the Equator, pushing warm surface waters from South America towards Asia. During El Niño, the trade winds weaken and the warm water reverses direction, moving eastward to the American West Coast. Other times, during La Niña, the trade winds become stronger than usual, and more warm water is blown towards Asia. In the United States and Canada, these phenomena cause some regions to become warmer, colder, wetter, or drier than usual.
In addition to El Niño and La Niña, there is also the North Atlantic Oscillation, which is driven by low air pressure in the North Atlantic Ocean, near Greenland and Iceland (known as the sub-polar low or Icelandic low), and high air pressure in the central North Atlantic Ocean (known as the subtropical high or Azores High). The relative strength of these regions of low and high atmospheric pressures affects the climate in the Eastern United States and Canada and in Europe, affecting both temperatures and precipitation.
Similarly, Hadley cells are the reason Earth has equatorial rainforests that are bounded by deserts to the north and south. Because the Sun warms Earth the most at the Equator, air on either side of the Equator is cooler and denser. As a result, cool air blows towards the Equator as the warm, less dense equatorial air rises and cools, releasing moisture as rain and creating lush vegetation. The rising, drier air reaches the stratosphere blowing north and south to settle in regions made arid by lack of atmospheric moisture.
These and other phenomena influencing our climate are well beyond the control of humans.
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California’s Perpetual Drought Is Manmade and Intentional
The California Department of Water Resources (DWR) last week released its next five-year plan for the State Water Project—Update 2023. After years of meetings, California’s premier water agency has decided to focus on “three intersecting themes: addressing climate urgency, strengthening watershed resilience, and achieving equity in water management.”
Water supplies for California’s 40 million people and the planet’s most productive agriculture have third- to fifth-level priority.
There is nothing new here, except to publicly admit to betraying the public trust. Really?
Over several decades, the public has been deceived into voting for water bonds that have little new water in them—phony promises to build new water storage and aqueducts. About 12 percent of bond funds are spent on new water storage. The rest of the bond funds have been squandered on scores of local and special-interest environmental projects, e.g., tearing down four Klamath-area dams—killing fish to save them—and opposing substantial new water projects, e.g., raising Shasta Dam and building Auburn Dam.
Further, by California law, water must be equitably distributed, pumped “equally”—half to human beings (if you count agriculture) and half to fish (the water-short Pacific Ocean, 187 quadrillion gallons). During the big rains of 2024, about 90 percent of the water was flushed to the Pacific through the gills of perhaps a half dozen delta smelt.
Farmers call it a manmade drought.
The politicos halted humans “taking” water, “diverting” it, from fish. Under the U.S. Constitution, the taking of private property requires just compensation—not mass confiscation. Water rights are a complex species of property.
“Our findings show that atmospheric river activity exceeds what has occurred since instrumental record keeping began,” said Clarke Knight, a U.S. Geological Survey research geographer.
Still, DWR scheduled 2024 meetings of the Drought Resilience Interagency & Partners (DRIP) Collaborative for April, July, and October.
The DRIP fantasy continues despite a deluge of 2024 water from two winters of giant “rivers in the sky” dumping excesses of water and creating massive floods and landslides.
Recent massive atmospheric rivers, Ark events, are small compared to ancient monster storms that occurred long before human beings had any impact whatsoever on climate, let alone weather.
Despite plentiful rainfall, DWR continued to limit pumping from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta to Central Valley agriculture to 30–40 percent to protect native fish. Nonnative bass are likely the greatest dangers to native fish. DWR insisted that its ability to move water south has been “impacted by the presence of threatened and endangered fish species.”
Those water districts’ contractors, paying the full cost of State Water Project (SWP) water, thought otherwise.
Jennifer Pierre, general manager of the State Water Contractors, stated: “While we are glad to see this modest allocation, it is still far below the amount of water we need. There is a lot of water in the system, California reservoirs are full, and runoff from snowpack melt is still to come. Even in a good water year, moving water effectively and efficiently under the current regime is difficult.”
California’s drought fixation is entirely manmade. In the past, in wet years, the waters of the Sacramento River, greater than the mighty Colorado, turned the Central Valley into an inland sea.
For over a century, California visionaries followed the lead of the Mesopotamians, Assyrians, Romans, and Nabataeans as well as the Aztecs before them. C.R. Rockwood, William Mulholland, Michael O’Shaughnessy, Gov. Pat Brown, and Gov. Ronald Reagan built dams and aqueducts to store and distribute water and to provide flood protection and hydroelectricity “too cheap to meter.”
As I have said before, California wastes tens of billions of dollars’ worth (at a conservative $100–$200 an acre-foot) of precious fresh water to save handfuls of delta smelt and “restore” salmon runs where salmon never ran before.
As I’ve also mentioned before, tyrannical water police order city folk, who use only 8 percent of California’s water, to drink recycled toilet water and to live on 55 gallons a day. The serfs may bathe every other Saturday whether they need it or not. California demands that its residents take a water conservation pledge: And to the utopia for which it stands. Neighbors turn neighbors in for “wasting” water, not to mention life, liberty, and property.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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