A Large Dose of Common Sense on Climate Offered by This Climate Scientist
Judith Curry, the climate scientist, recently delivered the 2024 Annual Lecture to the Global Warming Policy Foundation. It revolved around the same issues she addressed in her excellent "Climate Uncertainty and Risk“ that I reviewed here. Her talk is less than 28 minutes in length and is stuffed full of critical facts and observations regarding global warming. Her work has made a difference, I think, as the public has become ever more aware of what all the climate hype is really about, which is money and power.
The full video may be viewed below, Curry provides the transcipt here and what I suggest are some of the most insightful parts follow the video:
Toward the beginning of the lecture, Curry lays out the basics:
Mixing politics and science is inevitable on issues of high societal relevance, such as climate change. However, there are some really bad ways to do this, and we’re seeing all of these with the climate change issue.
Policy makers misuse science by demanding scientific arguments for desired policies, funding a narrow range of projects that support preferred policies, and using science as a vehicle to avoid ‘hot potato’ policy issues.
Scientists misuse policy-relevant science by playing power politics with their expertise, conflating expert judgment with evidence, entangling disputed facts with values, and intimidating scientists whose research interferes with their political agendas.
Apart from politicization, arguably the biggest issue is that we have oversimplified both the climate change problem and its solution. The UN has framed climate change as a tame and simple problem, with an obvious solution that is demanded by the science. The precautionary principle has been invoked, in context of speaking consensus to power.
However, climate change is better characterized as a wicked problem, with great complexity and uncertainties, and clashing societal values. When viewed as a tame problem, the climate change problem is framed as being caused by excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which can be solved by eliminating fossil fuel emissions. Both the problem and solution are included in a single frame, whereby the science demands this particular solution. This framing dominates the UN negotiations on climate change.
There’s another way to view the climate change problem and its solutions. This framing views climate change as a complex, wicked problem. This framing of the problem also includes natural causes for climate change such as the sun, volcanoes and slow circulations in the ocean.
This framing is provisional, acknowledging that our understanding is incomplete and that there may be unknown processes influencing climate change. While the UN’s framing is about controlling the climate, this other framing acknowledges the futility of control, focusing on managing the basic human necessities of energy, water and food. Economic development supports these necessities while reducing our vulnerability to weather and climate extremes…
So how did we come to the point where the world’s leaders and much of the global population think that we urgently need to reduce fossil fuel emissions in order to prevent bad weather? Not only have we misjudged the climate risk, but politicians and the media have played on our psychological fears of certain types of risks to amp up the alarm…
Activist communicators emphasize the manmade aspects of climate change, the unfair burden of risks on poor people, and the more immediate risks of severe weather events. The recent occurrence of an infrequent event such as a hurricane or flood elevates perceptions of the risk of low probability events. This then translates into perceptions of overall climate change risk. And so, our perceptions of climate risk are being cleverly manipulated by propagandists.
In spite of the recent apocalyptic rhetoric, the climate “crisis” isn’t what it used to be. Circa 2013 with publication of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report, the extreme emissions scenario RCP8.5 was regarded as the business-as-usual emissions scenario, with expected warming of 4 to 5 degrees Celsius by 2100.
Now there is growing acceptance that RCP8.5 is implausible, and the medium emissions scenario is arguably the current business-as-usual scenario according to recent reports issued by the Conference of the Parties since 2021. Only a few years ago, an emissions trajectory that followed the medium emissions with 2 to 3 degrees Celsius warming was regarded as climate policy success. As limiting warming to 2 degrees seems to be in reach, the goal posts have been moved to reduce the warming target to 1.5 degrees.
And, as Curry concludes her remarks, she offers a big dose of common sense:
In terms of politics, the UN strategy is deeply polarizing, whereas the strategy on the right seeks to secure the common interest of communities.
Once you separate energy policy from climate policy, the way forward for energy policy is fairly straightforward. A more pragmatic approach to dealing with climate change drops the timelines and emissions targets, in favor of accelerating energy innovation. The goal is abundant, secure, reliable, cheap & clean energy.
The energy transition can be facilitated by: accepting that the world will continue to need & desire much more energy; developing a range of options for energy technologies; removing the restrictions of near-term targets for CO2 emissions; and using the next 2-3 decades as a learning period with intelligent trial and error. All technologies should be evaluated holistically for abundance, reliability, lifecycle costs and environmental impacts, land and resource use. Without focusing on CO2 emissions, odds are that this strategy will lead to cleaner energy by the end of the 21st century than by urgently attempting to replace fossil fuels with wind and solar power.
It doesn't get much smarter than this and the time is ripe for the practicality Curry offers.
#Curry #ClimateChange #Renewables #GreenEnergy #ClimateCrisis #CO2