What percentage of Americans agree with the science of climate change? It’s a trickier question than you might think.

As a topic of rigorous study for decades, you’d think we’d have a relatively straightforward answer. We know from a 2014 report, for example, that the US is the single largest haven for climate denial when put up against every other country surveyed, including Russia. We also know, thanks to painstaking work by a number of dedicated teams, what Americans think on this issue down to the county level. Upon closer inspection, however, several factors emerge to complicate the pursuit of a uniform tally.

What you’ll notice right off the bat when canvassing the available data is how discrepant the figures can be from group to group. This is due in part to differences in methodology of course, but especially to how the questions in a survey are phrased. As has long been understood, even slight variations in the wording of a question can materially affect the results of a given poll.

Consider the following five statements:

• The climate change we are currently seeing is largely the result of human activity. (Source)
• Climate change is caused entirely or mostly by human activities. (Source)
• Global warming is caused mostly by human activities. (Source)
• Almost all climate scientists agree that human behavior is mostly responsible for climate change. (Source)
• Human action has been at least partly causing global warming. (Source)

Would it surprise you to learn that outcomes differed, in some cases dramatically as we’ll see in a moment, for each of the above statements? When creating an opinion poll, word choice matters. Notice how some of the pollsters chose to use ‘climate change’ (less specific), while others opted for ‘global warming’ (more specific). These terms are not equivalent, and the decision to use one over the other most certainly will impact the results. I also count at least five adverbs above, each carrying its own set of connotations to a reader. Variation in terminology and phrasing is perhaps the single biggest reason for the discernible spread across different polling groups and why direct comparisons should be avoided.

Before we dive into some of the more recent polling data, we first need to identify which question we actually want the answer to. Do we wish to know how many people concur with the science, or how many dispute it? It’s not a simple matter of finding one of these percentages and then substracting it from 100 to get to the other, either, since most polls carve out a space for the undecideds by including selections like “I don’t know” or “Not sure.” Some respondents may also leave some questions blank.

Let’s assume we want to know the portion of the public that concurs with the science. Here an important distinction arises: by “the science,” do we mean (1) the climate is changing, or (2) the climate is changing due to human activity. Many surveys break these out separately. As we might expect, more people have historically co-signed (1) than (2), clinging to the bunkum that any observed change is part of natural climate variability. It could be argued that (2) is the one that matters because it speaks to the question of scientific consensus. Sure, rejecting either statement makes one a climate ‘denialist‘, but only those who affirm both are in agreement with the plurality of scientists in the field. Getting (1) right and (2) wrong is akin to earning partial credit on an exam, in the same way as saying organisms change over time while rejecting the evolutionary mechanism of Darwinian selection.

Furthermore, those who fall into this camp are generally no more keen on altering their behaviors or advocating that others do the same, or championing effective climate policy, such as scaling back on fossil fuel burning — an irrefragably human endeavor — in favor of renewables than those who reject both statements. They’re just as likely to have swallowed and to pass on the same misinformation and suspect sources, and therefore just as motivated to brick popular discourse on the topic and hinder the path to a sustainable future. For these reasons, when people ask, ‘what percentage of Americans accept climate change,’ what we’re really — or should be — after is (2). Keep this distinction top of mind as we delve into the polling.

On to the Data

There are several groups doing this work, but at the top of the list is the Climate Change Communication team at Yale, whose mission is to tackle the gap between what scientists and the public know. You can always find their latest opinion maps here, where they break down US sentiment in terms of Beliefs, Risk Perceptions, Policy Support, and Behaviors all the way down to the county level. According to their most recent survey data from fall 2021 (just posted last week!), they found that 72% of US adults think “global warming is happening,” while 57% think “global warming is mostly caused by human activities.” Their data also show that only 14% of US adults outright answer “No” to the question of whether global warming is happening at all, while 30% think it is but that the change is natural.
 

 
To see how these numbers have changed, the Yale team conducted the same poll five years earlier. For 2016, the equivalent figures are 53% who agreed that global warming is caused mostly by human activities and 70% who agreed that global warming is happening without regard for cause. So we’ve seen some incremental progress in that time. To get a glimpse of just how dramatically the numbers can vary based on linguistic choices, a poll conducted by Pew that same year found that just 27% of US adults accept the scientific consensus, concurring with the statement that “almost all scientists agree that human behavior is mostly responsible for climate change.” That’s a remarkable discrepancy between Yale and Pew, but one that’s no doubt best explained by the discrepant language: “almost all” is more binding than “mostly,” and, absent other relevant information known by the participant, likely to net fewer endorsements. Again, wording matters.

Next let’s turn to two surveys given mere days apart in November 2018 that arrived at wildly different outcomes. Monmouth University published a poll that year which found that 78% of Americans agree “that the world’s climate is undergoing a change that is causing more extreme weather patterns and the rise of sea levels” (up from 70% in their Dec. 2015 poll), but that only 29% agree that the change is “caused more by human activity” than “by natural changes in the environment, or by both equally” (compared to 27% in their Dec. 2015 poll). This result is more in line with Pew’s data from two years earlier. A 2018 survey from the University of Chicago, however, found that 71% (7 in 10 Americans) “think climate change is happening” and 60% (6 in 10) “think climate change is caused entirely or mostly by human activities.” That’s more than double Monmouth’s number, illustrating the extent to which study design can touch the final result.

At the top end of the spectrum, a Resources for the Future survey from August 2020 found that 82% of Americans “believe human action has been at least partly causing global warming.” Compared to the rest of the polling data I have in front of me and even after accounting for sampling error, RFF’s results paint the rosiest picture of US public opinion to date, coming in 22 percentage points higher than University of Chicago’s 2018 poll and a full 25 points higher than Yale’s latest poll. Here again, we probably have RFF’s more relaxed phrasing to thank for that.

To sum up, there’s no clear-cut answer to how many Americans accept or deny climate change, as so much depends on how you word the question and the methodological decisions made at the outset. Based on survey and polling results dating back to the Paris accord, the portion of America that considers recent warming anthropogenic in origin — my barometer of choice for gauging climate literacy — ranges anywhere from 27% to 82%. That’s an absolutely massive gap, a reflection of the unique language and design choices used in each poll. As we’ve seen, mild alterations in syntax can completely rewrite the national map.

But since “it depends” is an unsatisfying answer, I recommend the following approach. Instead of fruitless attempts to homogenize results from different polls to come up with a ‘true’ figure, track the trendline of a single group that’s been gathering reliable data for a while, such as the climate comms team at Yale. Based on their data, public acceptance of human-caused climate change has ticked slowly upward over the last decade or so, with slightly fewer than 6 in 10 (57%) Americans currently answering the question correctly. Yale’s numbers are usually the ones I cite because I trust their methodology and because I see respected experts in the field regularly citing their work. Theirs is as solid a dataset as you’re likely to find, and offers regional granularity to boot.

Feature image credit: Getty Images

 
 
Today I want to bring attention to a trio of climate-focused stories that push against the notion that climate change is something with which future generations must contend as opposed to something that is ongoing and all around us. These are stories that might easily escape notice amid the noisy inundation of climate reporting. Each takes place in the U.S., and each presages the kinds of events we can expect to see more of so long as global temperatures continue on their current trajectory. Seemingly ripped straight from the world of apocalyptic science fiction, they’re illustrative of the fact that the climate our parents and grandparents grew up in is gone, and probably not coming back.

Death Valley Breaks All-Time Temperature Record

On Friday we set a new record for the hottest temperature ever reliably recorded on Earth. Readings hit 130°F (54.4°C) in Death Valley, California, ever so slightly eclipsing the previous record taken just last year on August 16, 2020. In case that didn’t hit you the way it should: this is the single highest air temperature we’ve ever witnessed anywhere on this planet. I’ve literally been telling everyone I can about this. I even told my cab driver yesterday (no joke). I think you should, too.

The milestone occurred in the wake of one of the hottest heat waves ever experienced in the Pacific Northwest, an event scientists say was made at least 150 times more likely thanks to human influence of the climate. What’s worse, not only has our influence tipped the scales in favor of similarly intense heat dome events across the U.S., such events, when and where they do occur, are now 3 to 5 degrees warmer on average than they would be without that influence — say, prior to the Industrial era. Caught in the “loaded dice” scenario in which we now find ourselves, what was once infrequent and rare has become ordinary and expected.

The North American continent as a whole, meanwhile, registered its hottest June on record as states all across the Southwest, Mountain West, and Northwest turned in a string of record-breaking events over the course of the month. Between June 25 and 30 alone, a total of around 175 record highs were recorded in Northern California, Oregon, Washington, and Idaho, with some temperatures breaking the previous record by more than 5 degrees. Even Canada notched a new national temperature record three days in a row, topping out at 121 degrees on June 29.

It has been so searingly hot in fact that officials from Las Vegas to Phoenix cautioned that making contact with the pavement could result in third-degree burns. (Imagine how this changes the calculus of something as simple as walking your dog.) In Seattle, bridges were shut down twice a day for scheduled “cooling baths.” What? Yes.

It’s important to put these events in perspective, and in particular to refute the notion that these are one-off outliers disconnected from the climate crisis. Intuitively, if the average temperature of the planet is increasing, we should expect to see both an increase in the temperature values of daily minimums and maximums (i.e. the coolest and warmest readings over the course of a day at a particular location), as well as an uptick in the ratio of record hot to record cold days. In short, our days should get warmer over time, and we should set more hot records compared to cold records. These constitute important predictions of human-caused warming, and one of the clearest signals of climate change that we experience directly.
 

 
This is indeed what we’ve observed. Consistent with predictions based on climate physics, not only has the distribution of record hot days versus record cold days been shifting towards more and more hot records, but the values of both daily minimums and maximums are trending higher as well. In fact, for the United States we see that recent decades show twice as many hot records as cold records, whether we isolate the data to daytime or nighttime temperature. Regardless of where we live, our days are generally getting warmer, and we’re setting hot temperature records more often than cold temperature records. The trend is toward a planet that’s hotter, drier, and less hospitable to species adapted to environments with a more stable climate.1

Climate researcher and Skeptical Science alum Kevin Cowtan breaks it all down in the video below.
 

 
As Cowtan explains, global warming does not mean cold weather goes away or that record cold days will no longer occur, only that the relationship between hot and cold will change (climate is the average weather). Specifically, the prediction is that the ratio of record cold to record hot days will decrease. Better than simply looking at the absolute number of hot and cold daily records since temperature tracking began is to look at the proportion of hot to cold records over time. Again, when we do this we see a clear pattern of hot-record events outcompeting cold-record events. And climate change’s tendency to “rig” the meteorological dice makes the recent roasting of the Pacific Northwest more likely to occur.

Our Roads Are Crumbling From the Heat

One of the more alarming stories to come out of the Pacific Northwest episode this past month is the impact of the excess heat on our nation’s roads and highways. During the closing weeks of June, roads in Washington state and Oregon literally crumbled under the stress of the prolonged heat bout.

The problem: aging infrastructure built for a fundamentally different climate. Most of our roads were originally built several decades ago, and without climate change in mind. Engineers typically used historical weather records to inform the design of a city’s roads. Now, it’s clear we should be using climate models instead.
 

 
Fortunately, it sounds like we possess the technical know-how to design our roads to withstand the extreme heat currently laying siege to the Northwest. Concrete and asphalt roads in Phoenix, for example, haven’t suffered from these issues in recent years because they were designed to be more heat-resilient. Revamping the rest of the country’s existing infrastructure in order to make it compatible with our present and future climate will require huge public investment at the federal and state levels.

The buckling roads out west are a warning of what’s to come if we fail to prepare now for a tomorrow that’s hotter and drier. As with climate change more generally, this is not a matter of lacking the relevant information or technology, but of political will and resource priorities. Excerpts:
 

“When it gets really, really abnormally hot, like it hasn’t been that hot before in quite a long time, it expands so much that it runs into the adjacent slab. There’s no more room to expand, they just push up against each other and then they pop up” Muench says.

Asphalt is a different beast entirely. “Asphalt is a viscoelastic material, which is temperature-dependent. So, the hotter it is, the more fluid-like it is,” Muench says. If it gets hot enough, some asphalt roads can become soft or deform like Play-Doh, forming ruts when cars and trucks drive over them.

Both asphalt and concrete roads can be designed to withstand heat. “We already know how to adjust materials to behave in hotter places,” Muench says. “That’s why Phoenix isn’t falling apart — it’s not Armageddon there because it’s hotter.”

“The problem is that when some of these roads in Washington state were being designed, using those materials or design techniques would have been overkill — the area doesn’t normally get as hot as Phoenix, so there was no need to build with extreme heat in mind. Now, that calculus might be changing.”

Rising Seas and the Surfside Condo Collapse

Amid widespread coverage of the horrific condo collapse in South Florida, I’ve seen comparatively little discussion of the role that climate change undoubtedly played in the destruction. (The Wikipedia page, for example, hasn’t a single mention of the word ‘climate’ as of this writing.) And yet Florida is perhaps the most climate-vulnerable state in America, with the Miami area in particular a showcase for sea level rise. Since construction of Champlain Towers South was first completed in 1981, the local sea level has risen between 7 and 8 inches.
 

 
Along with Charleston, Norfolk, Savannah, and other major cities up and down the eastern seaboard, Miami has seen a marked uptick in flooding events from a gradually encroaching ocean. Today, high-tide flooding is more or less a part of life in low-lying Miami-Dade, even on perfectly sunny days, due to climate change. The abundance of saltwater such nuisance flooding introduces to coastal infrastructure carries clear implications for its structural integrity and overall longevity.

Salt, a mineral, is inherently corrosive and, if left untreated, will eat away at certain materials over time. The brine-like residue left behind from repeated flooding in the region rots both concrete and rebar, the primary materials used in building construction. Whether this corrosion actually caused the collapse or merely expedited it remains unclear. Early reports, however, have traced the critical failures to the lower levels of the structure, including the underground garage, where the maintenance manager of the building reported seeing one to two feet of standing water every time flooding occurred in the area. All of that saltwater intrusion appears to have deteriorated the concrete and raised a number of inspection concerns in the years leading up to the collapse.

For an earlier piece, I looked at some of the institutional strengthening projects currently underway in Miami Beach, where engineers are literally raising the pavement to put more dirt underneath, a massively costly effort to safeguard against sea level rise and storm surges. In Norfolk, VA, rulers situated along the sides of the road help drivers gauge whether intersections and low-lying streets are safe to navigate at speed. At the 540-foot tall Ross Dam in Washington, engineers are lifting up hydroelectric facilities and other at-risk equipment. To better fortify our buildings, perhaps we can make creative use of beryllium (Be), an element that’s highly resistant to corrosion but due to its high cost has typically been reserved for applications like missiles and rockets.

Functionally, these are stopgap remedies that seek to adapt to the emergency rather than mitigate the underlying causes. And it’s still far from clear whether city boards and state planners are attuned to the scale of the threat climate change poses to communities at the forefront of this crisis.

Excerpts:
 

“Officials are still very early in their investigation into what caused the collapse, and initial signs point to potential issues at the base of the building, perhaps in its foundation, columns or underground parking garage. But some engineers are considering whether increasing exposure to saltwater could have played a role in weakening the building’s foundation or internal support system.

At the very least, experts say even the possibility should be a wake-up call to vulnerable communities across the United States: Climate change isn’t a far-future threat; it’s happening now, and with potentially deadly consequences.

Higher sea level increases the amount of saltwater building foundations are exposed to, Moftakhari told CNN. “Infrastructure like roads and foundations are not designed to be inundated by saltwater a couple of hours a day.”

Ben Schafer, a structural engineer at Johns Hopkins University said sea-level rise and saltwater intrusion — where underground seawater moves farther inland — typically threatens older coastal buildings like Champlain Towers South.

“The life of the structure would be greatly shortened,” Schafer told CNN. “It’s a corrosive environment. It’s not favorable for concrete or steel, which are your primary building materials.”

Schafer says that although climate change is already upon us, we have yet to do very much about it.

“People are still imagining that it will move slow,” he said. “The problem is much, much larger, and we need to be thinking much more broadly about how we equitably evacuate ourselves from some areas that won’t be available to us here in not so many years.”

As more parts of the world feel the dire impacts of climate change, Schafer says civil engineers such as himself also need to rethink how buildings are designed and how older buildings need to be reassessed to adapt to these changes.

“I don’t think we’ve owned up even to the scale of the problem,” Schafer said. “If you look at the median sea-level rise predictions and project that onto city maps, the scale of what we need to do is so far beyond the scale of what we’re so far considering.”

 
So yeah, shit is dire. Reading the latest climate reports, it’s hard to shake the feeling that we’re living in a Dune novel. Though the planet Arrakis also happens to be the third planet from its star, we’d like to think the in-universe similarities end there. And yet the wasteland-esque elements so popular in science fiction seem to keep making their presence felt outside our front door.

In addition to being predictable downstream effects of human-caused planetary warming, the foregoing are all highly visible manifestations of the new climate regime that’s now intruding in our daily life from coast to coast. These can’t simply be written off as outlier events when the fingerprints of climate change are all over them — when indeed, grounded as they are in basic physics, they’re direct predictions from the models themselves. Projections indicate that the frequency, duration, and intensity of extreme heat events and flooding from sea level rise will increase over the coming decades as average global temperature continues its ascent. How long until headlines like these are no longer noteworthy?
 

Further reading:

• Pacific Northwest heat wave was ‘virtually impossible’ without climate change, scientists find (analysis)
• Doctors Warn Of Burns From Asphalt As A Record-Breaking Heat Wave Envelops The West
• Global Warming Cauldron Boils Over in the Northwest in One of the Most Intense Heat Waves on Record Worldwide
• Northwest “heat dome” signals global warming’s march
• Why roads in the Pacific Northwest buckled under extreme heat
• Climate scientists say building collapse is a ‘wake-up call’ about the potential impact of rising seas
• When Mitigation Has Failed, Adapt
• Flooding of Coast, Caused by Global Warming, Has Already Begun
• It’s time to say it: We are in a climate emergency
• Is climate change happening faster than expected? A climate scientist explains.
• Climate change to worsen heat waves in Northern Hemisphere, studies warn

Feature image credit: Desert Safari by adrianvdesign
 

1. Meehl et al. published an updated study on US daily temperature records in 2016, confirming the 2:1 average decadal ratio of record hot to record cold days. For this later study, they also used climate models to project the ratio out to 2100. Their analysis showed that under a 3 °C warming scenario for the US, the ratio could reach as high as ∼15:1 ± 8.

   Other good resources for tracking record high temperatures versus record low temperatures can be found at Climate Signals, NOAA, and USGCRP.

 
 
Tell me if the following situation sounds familiar. You share a post calling attention to the issue of climate change. A friend or acquaintance jumps in to tell you that actually the science isn’t settled and there’s still debate about this or that. You respond by linking to one or more sources which address those talking points. They respond by linking sources of their own that say just the opposite. The exchange ends in a stalemate, as neither side is able to convince the other of the legitimacy of their chosen sources.

This “dueling sources” business tends to short-circuit popular debates over science more often than we’d like, but they needn’t end there. In fact, it usually takes minimal effort to sort out which sources to trust and which we should deem unreliable. And while it may be grandiose to expect that each party to a discussion will be objective enough to accept feedback on their own sources, we should be prepared to provide it in the event that there are receptive minds within reach.

What I want to offer here are some simple, broadly applicable methods you can use to help make heads or tails of competing information, particularly when it comes to questions of science. They will be especially useful for laypersons who lack the necessary expertise to debunk the arguments and data directly, which, let’s be honest, includes most of us. We don’t always have a resident expert on hand we can tag in to correct the record. What we can do instead is look for a few basic characteristics that can serve to either validate or impugn the reliability of a given source. Though this post hews closely to the topic of climate change, it should be readily exportable to other scientific issues where overwhelming agreement among scientists exists.

We should first recognize that when it comes to an issue as politicized as climate change, there will always be competing or contradictory sources. Americans have been sharply divided over climate change for decades now, thanks largely to fossil fuel interests funneling billions into campaigns committed to sowing doubt, denial, and uncertainty. Oil corporations like Exxon and Shell, despite knowing the relevant dangers, bankrolled thinktanks and lobby groups that continue to churn out misleading information at seemingly self-replicating rates. Suffice to say, if one wishes to stake out a particular position on climate change, they will find it trivially easy to track down sympathetic sources.

But just because anyone can furnish sources in a debate that agree with their view doesn’t mean all sources rest on equal footing. What matters is which of those sources hold up against the peer reviewed literature. Indeed, what matters most in science is the durability of an idea measured by its success in the peer review process. A theory that sounds good on paper may not survive the scrutiny of experts. For a theory to stand the test of time — as has the theory that humans are behind this current iteration of climate change — it must withstand rigorous empirical investigation by generations of experts who publish their findings in peer reviewed journals.

This means that the credibility of a given source is, or rather should be, a matter of empirical support. You should easily be able to determine whether a source is trafficking in well-sourced science from relevant experts (and if not, I’ll explain how in the next section). You should be able to take someone else’s sources and validate them against experts who practice and publish in the field, and they should be able to do the same for yours. If one person’s sources consistently cite individuals who are not experts in climate science, or rely on unpublished or speculative ideas, then neither those sources nor the person posting them ought to be considered trustworthy on the topic in question.

What often happens is that you get people with little knowledge of the science circulating articles by people who also aren’t experts in the topic, which then get taken up by an intricate web of consumers acting on confirmation bias who accept the information without any further interrogation because it supports what they already believe. This isn’t how we get to the truth.

We get to the truth by listening to what the experts have to say, and by querying the consensus of those experts, just as we would in any other context. If you want to know why you have a heart murmur, you’re probably going to lend more credence to your primary physician’s diagnosis than that of the barista at your local coffee shop. If you’re wondering why the brakes on your SUV aren’t working properly, you’re better off listening to a licensed mechanic than your coworker who has no experience working with cars.

It should be likewise for questions about climate change. Apart from going back to school and acquiring the necessary degree to understand and interpret the studies ourselves (unrealistic), we should look to what the best minds have concluded on such questions — to the people who are in the best position to render a verdict. Rarely do we possess the technical know-how to assess competing scientific claims, but we always have the option, if not the willingness, to consult those who do.

We can distill the foregoing to a battery of basic questions: Is the source drawing on relevant expertise? That is, has the author of the piece or founder of the website completed academic training in subjects relevant to climate science or are they citing peer reviewed research by experts who have? Can the ideas expressed be traced back to peer reviewed literature? Does the article link to studies or provide a journal reference or citation number? Does the website or group have a history of peddling unsourced or unverified claims? These are all questions that can be easily resolved with just a few minutes of careful reading and desk research.

That’s assuming, of course, you know what to look for. Thus far, the advice here has been mostly general in nature. Below I’ll walk through a real world example to illustrate how this works in practice.

Case Study

Let’s suppose the friend from earlier decides to chime in on one of your posts and proceeds to dispute whether there is a settled consensus on the causes of climate change. And let’s further suppose (since I get this one a lot) that they post a PragerU video, titled “Do 97% of Climate Scientists Really Agree?,” to make their point. This video argues, in a rather roundabout way, against the legitimacy of the commonly cited 97% consensus figure. But let’s ignore the actual arguments for now and instead apply the approach outlined earlier to see how this source stacks up.

Where do you start? I like to start with DeSmogBlog’s Climate Disinformation Database, as it contains extensive entries “on the individuals and organizations that have helped to delay and distract the public and our elected leaders from taking needed action to reduce greenhouse gas pollution and fight global warming.” Basically, if they’ve made contrarian noises about the science of climate change in a public forum, they’re in this database, receipts and all. In addition to their affiliations and publications, every single quote attributed to a person or organization is sourced and referenced in chronological order. When I see a name associated with a view that sounds fishy, this is my first pit stop.

For good measure, you might take a few minutes to cross-reference DSB with Wikipedia, SourceWatch, and RationalWiki. Usually there’s overlap, although DSB will typically have a much denser bio pertaining to climate change.

Let’s look at DSB’s entry for PragerU. It doesn’t take long to realize that this isn’t an academic institution as the ‘U’ in its name might suggest, but a right-wing organization with strong Judeo-Christian origins whose raison d’être is to rail against the American left. Its founder, Dennis Prager, is a conservative radio talk show host who denies climate change and sees environmentalism as a replacement for God. He has no educational background in STEM or any credentials related whatsoever to science.

After watching a handful of their videos, it’s probably not too difficult for one to conclude that PragerU is invested in pushing a conservative ideological agenda and is not a reliable resource on information about climate change, or any other science for that matter. This is not to say that conservative sources in general cannot be reliable on matters of science, only that we’d prefer to get our information from a more neutral or scientific source and not one so obviously invested in political outcomes.

But okay, you might say, PragerU is just the thinktank. It’s Alex Epstein who’s being held up as an expert in the video, so what about him? Well, turns out he’s no more of an expert than Dennis Prager. In fact, all Epstein has done in this space is write op-eds and books championing fossil fuels. What are his credentials? He didn’t study science in college, much less climate science. He has no STEM-related degree whatsoever, nothing but a bachelor’s degree in philosophy. He hasn’t published a single peer reviewed paper in a single journal relevant to climate science. It should go without saying that these are all red flags.

Sure, okay, so Epstein’s not an expert, but is he at least citing peer reviewed research? Does he name scientists who agree with the views he’s espousing? Are there study references or journal citations that appear under the video that allow the audience to follow up on Epstein’s claims? The answer to all of these is no. PragerU neglects to mention that Epstein is not a scientist, and all they include under the video are promotional links for their own products and other offerings.

But wait — when Epstein finally gets around to refuting the 97% consensus figure toward the end of the video, he does cite an “analysis” which showed that “less than 2% of papers” say that human beings are the main cause of recent warming. A citation is provided in tiny text at the bottom of the screen. It’s quite easy to miss as it appears for only a second, but it’s there nonetheless: “David Henderson — 1.6%, Not 97%, Agree that Humans are the Main Cause of Global Warming, Library of Economics and Liberty, March 1, 2014.”

Now we’re getting somewhere. The reference is not to a peer reviewed paper but a blog post on econlib.org by David Henderson. Who is he, one wonders? Yes, DSB has an entry on him, too. The late Henderson is an economist who, like Prager and Epstein, lacks any formal training in the subject of climate science. He served as chairman for the Global Warming Policy Foundation (SourceWatch link here), a lobby group that prides itself on combating climate-centric policy and contesting the underlying science, and whose average trustee age at the time of formation was 74. And the Library of Economics and Liberty, as far as I can tell, is merely a collection of libertarian blog posts. Birds of a feather, as they say.

Henderson’s blog post is so thin on the ground as to be comical. It’s not even his “analysis”; he says a commenter on one of his previous posts “sifted through” the data of one of the studies attesting to the 97% figure. He doesn’t link to the comment in question. He gives us no information whatsoever about this “Mark Bahner,” only that he came up with 64 studies, or 1.6%, that “claimed explicitly that humans are the main cause of global warming.” Henderson even admits to not checking the data for himself! He is simply passing along the conclusions of a lone commenter, who could be anyone from a paid coal lobbyist to a Russian troll. We’re given zero details about the methodologies said commenter used, or any data product that would allow others to replicate his results.

If I had to guess, this random netizen probably only counted the papers that explicitly say climate change is both real and human-caused in the summary abstract. But this is bound to be very few, since anthropogenic climate change is so broadly accepted that it’s unnecessary for the authors to state the obvious in such an overt fashion. One could make a similar “case” against any number of scientific theories, including the theory of evolution and gravitation. Biologists don’t begin each paper with an awkward declaration of their belief in common descent. Rather, most research extant seeks to iron out the details encompassed by major integrative ideas. Ironically, it’s the papers that reject or dispute the consensus that are easiest to spot, yet even there we only find an exceedingly small minority. (As it happens, Cook et al. 2013 raise these very same points.) At any rate, guessing is all we can do here because, again, Henderson offers no support for how these figures were reached. Of course, that didn’t stop him from putting said figures in a clickbait headline in the form of a bare assertion.

So that’s the “analysis” Epstein relies on in the PragerU video. Let’s briefly recap what we’re working with here. We have one non-expert (Henderson) circulating an unevidenced claim from an anonymous blog comment, which then gets picked up by an ideologically driven thinktank (PragerU) who hires a conservative ideologue lacking expertise in climate science (Epstein) to appear in a video casting doubt on the consensus of climate scientists. I doubt we could conceive of a more unreliable info-chain if we tried. Note that nowhere in this pipeline is relevant expertise present. What our few minutes of desk research should tell us, then, is that we shouldn’t trust this gaggle of usual suspects any more on questions about climate science than we would on questions concerning medicine and health.

What about the actual arguments raised in the PragerU video? Though the questionable nature of PragerU’s sourcing is reason alone to deem their content untrustworthy, I’ll go ahead and address them here strictly for purposes of completeness. Epstein’s main argument amounts to a gross non sequitur. He says that the upside of fossil fuels is that “they make modern life possible.” Undoubtedly true, but that has nothing to do with whether the 97 percent statistic regarding human-caused climate change is accurate or not. And it also singularly fails to address whether a civilizational transition to renewable and clean energy could also support modernized life. If “precision matters,” as he says, why so blatantly beg the question as he does here?

When Epstein does get around to addressing the question in the video’s title, he makes two embarrassing blunders. We’ve already covered the first one in which he cites, effectively, a blog comment rather than peer reviewed research. Second, he omits a crucial detail when discussing the Cook et al. 2013 study. The researchers broke their meta-analysis into two parts. In the first part, they used their own methodology to categorize the population of abstracts. In the second phase, they actually reached out to the authors of the papers themselves, asking them directly whether their paper endorsed the consensus on anthropogenic global warming. Both the third-party and self-rated methods returned a figure in excess of 97%.

That is, the second phase of the study served as a check on their own methodology, and ended up validating their result. Why Epstein and PragerU would omit this important detail is hardly a mystery, at least to those of us who understand how the denial machine works.

In response to the PragerU source, I would probably link to a Skeptical Science resource or my primer on climate change, which includes several links attesting to the overwhelming consensus of research pointing to human-caused climate change. Those links reference a number of peer reviewed meta-analyses, each relying on separate methodologies, that support the strong consensus, as well as published experts commenting on said consensus. It demonstrates that the consensus statistic was not derived from a single study (an inference the PragerU video leads you toward), but has been independently established by a range of different studies using a variety of different methodologies.

Oreskes 2004 was among the first; Doran and Zimmerman 2009 was another; Anderegg et al. 2010 another; previously mentioned Cook et al. 2013 another; Verheggen et al. 2014, Stenhouse et al. 2014, and Carlton et al. 2015 came after that. And finally, a kind of super meta-analysis was published in 2016 by a collaboration of several of the authors of the previous studies, which found that the consensus sits between 90 and 100 percent, depending on which scientific disciplines are queried.

Less robust studies include those by James Powell, former science advisor to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. Powell conducts his own analyses periodically, examining all the papers accepted for publication in a given period and determining how many rejected anthropogenic climate change. His first analysis looked at the literature from 1991-2012 and found that there have been 13,950 peer-reviewed papers on global warming published in the last 21 years by 33,690 different authors from over 20 different countries. Out of that population, just 24 are papers of dissent. That’s 0.17%. (If you drill down further, you find that of those 24, even fewer flat-out reject global warming, with the balance accepting that the earth is warming but demurring that humans are the cause.)

A similar analysis examining the period from November 2012 through December 2013 was performed in 2014, in which Powell found that 9,135 out of 9,136 authors accepted anthropogenic global warming. (The lone dissenter rejected the consensus not because of contrary evidence but because of economic and monetary concerns surrounding Russian markets.) Powell makes all of his data publicly available, with full references for each study that include the paper’s title, document number, and Web of Science accession number.

In short, the oft-mentioned consensus is based on several independent analyses, each attesting to the uniquely anthropogenic causes of current climate change. For a more reliable and more comprehensive presentation of the climate consensus than the one released by PragerU, I recommend the following video hosted by the edX platform. Note the copious references provided in the subjacent text.
 

 
Let us revisit our questions from earlier. Which of these sources should we consider reliable? Is it PragerU that features people like Alex Epstein who write op-eds for a living and offers no credible or reproducible research? Or is it rather outlets like Skeptical Science and educational platforms like edX that feature scientists who actually study climate for a living? If this question sounds easy, that’s because it is. The follow up question that should be posed to anyone using PragerU-style material to defend their view is this: why are you listening to unpublished, inexpert hacks like Epstein as opposed to practicing scientists?

More knowledgeable patrons of the science can take this exercise a step further and elaborate on why a certain source’s claims cannot be reconciled to the published literature. With enough working knowledge, they can cite specific papers, quote excerpts, and adduce graphs that empirically contradict the asserted claims. But it doesn’t require formal training to evaluate sources and identify the odd man out. All it takes is a modicum of Google sleuthing and sufficient interest in offering good-faith defenses of settled science. As someone who wades into these debates on a regular basis, I am constantly surprised by how effortless it is to debunk the prevalent talking points due to the vacuous nature of the claims themselves, the degree to which those making them eschew qualified voices, and the deliberate, heavy-handed deception involved throughout.

In the era of fake news and troll farms, efficient vetting of sources has taken on a newfound urgency. Granted, not all of the folks who produce the kind of articles and videos that get disseminated around Deniersville are genuine hacks, paid and propped up by the fossil fuel industry. Some are simply misguided and confused laypersons who have succumbed to confirmation bias and antiscience propaganda. In the end, though, it shouldn’t matter. If one’s claims cannot withstand empirical scrutiny, they should be dismissed, and one’s level of trust in that source should evaporate. Expertise matters. Peer review matters. Look for these two things and it will help you immensely in discerning what’s legitimate and what isn’t.

Further reading and resources:

• Skeptical Science
• The Debunking Handbook by John Cook and Stephan Lewandowsky
• Climate Consensus – the 97%
• Climate Central
• RealClimate
• The Washington Post’s Energy and Environment
• DeSmogBlog’s Climate Disinformation Database
• Climate Feedback
• CarbonBrief
• Climate Desk
• NASA Climate
• NASA GISS
• NOAA ESRL
• IPCC
• National Geographic Environment & Climate Change

 
 
The impacts of climate change fall disproportionately on vulnerable communities. We hear this repeated like a mantra, but it is simply an unfortunate fact that undeveloped nations have the least amount of resources to cope with a rapidly changing environment. In contrast with the Netherlands, thirty percent of which is below sea level and which has completely redesigned their cities in response, less moneyed nations lack the necessary capital to implement such comprehensive infrastructural overhauls. Even in the States, places like Newtok, Alaska and Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana are hopeless without bursts of federal assistance for mitigation, restoration or resettlement.

One of the more calamitous places to live in terms of vulnerability to climate is Bangladesh. Its three main threats include flooding, drought, and salinity. With its 700 rivers and thousands of miles of inland waterways, Bangladesh is uniquely susceptible to flash flooding during the rainy season. According to their government’s 2009 Climate Change Strategy and Action Plan, on any given year “approximately one quarter of the country is inundated.” And every four to five years, “there is a severe flood that may cover over 60% of the country and cause loss of life and substantial damage to infrastructure, housing, agriculture and livelihoods.” Even in Bangladesh, the report goes on to note, “it is the poorest and most vulnerable who suffer most because their houses are often in more exposed locations.”
 

 
The widespread erosion and flooding created by overflowing rivers is bad enough, but pales in comparison to the longer-term and more permanent threat of rising seas. Bangladesh is situated within the deltaic region formed by the confluence of the Ganges, Brahmaputra, and Meghna Rivers, and more than half of the country lies fewer than 5 meters (16 ft) above sea level. The gradually encroaching seas are forcing many communities — some of which have existed in their current state for centuries — to migrate inland.

The number of these so-called environmental migrants is expected to swell in the coming decades. Just three feet of sea level rise would plunge about 20 percent of Bangladesh underwater and potentially displace 30 million people. If the region sees five or six feet of sea level rise by the end of this century, a real possibility per the latest IPCC report, we’re talking about upwards of 50 million migrants.

While it may seem counterintuitive in a country surrounded by so much water, Bangladeshis also have to contend with periodic drought. This is mostly a function of the region’s climate profile, in which it receives too much moisture in monsoon season and too little during the dry months. Those most affected tend to live in the northwestern districts, as these areas typically receive less annual rainfall relative to other parts of the country. A prolonged shortage in rainfall can devastate local agriculture and ecosystems in the form of reduced crop growth and yield and the loss of livestock.

A more esoteric cause of Bangladesh’s water shortage woes that bears mentioning stems from its water-sharing agreements with bordering nations. Over fifty of the rivers flowing through Bangladesh territory are considered what are called trans-boundary rivers, the resources from which are shared with India and Myanmar. Both of these countries withdraw water upstream with the help of large-scale water management facilities, disrupting the river’s natural flow. Not only does this result in lower yields for Bangladesh during the dry season, but it also impacts groundwater recharge leading to an overall moisture loss in the northwest part of the state. The details of these agreements are politically complex, but it seems clear that Bangladesh is getting the short end of the stick here due to the climatic knife-edge on which much of the country exists.

Perhaps the most serious threat posed by droughts, however, is access to fresh drinking water. Currently, about 1.7 billion people — or one-quarter of the world’s population — live in countries that are water-stressed. Drought conditions such as those plaguing northwestern Bangladesh make potable water scarce and facilitate the spread of disease like malaria due to the stagnant pools of water left behind from the rainy season.

The logic is inescapable that a monotonically warming planet intensifies the conditions for millions of people living in Bangladesh. Climate change causes sea levels to rise, reducing the area of habitable land available to vulnerable communities. Climate change increases the amount of moisture in the air, accelerating the hydrological cycle, thereby leading to more (and more intense) precipitation events. At the same time, rising temperatures decrease the amount of moisture stored in soils. These and other readily observed trends exacerbate conditions in places prone to nuisance flooding and persistent drought like Bangladesh.

As if all of the above weren’t cause enough for alarm, the salinity of freshwater streams used by sea-proximate communities is increasing, which is now reportedly contributing to the higher incidence of miscarriages in the region. As the BBC writes, “When sea levels rise, salty sea water flows into fresh water rivers and streams, and eventually into the soil. Most significantly, it also flows into underground water stores – called aquifers – where it mixes with, and contaminates, the fresh water. It is from this underground water that villages source their water, via tube wells.”
 

 
Families living in the coastal zones are consuming three times more salt each day than inland families, and scientists believe this is having a measurable effect on miscarriage rates throughout the country. Apart from complicating pregnancies, excess salt intake also increases the risk of strokes and heart attacks and can cause hypertension in adults. We can expect to see more people suffering from these infirmities as more and more salt makes its way into freshwater basins.

In light of these developing horrors, what will we tell our kids and our grandkids when they ask why more wasn’t done to respond to the manifold risks brought on by climate change? What will we say to them when they ask us why we didn’t listen to the scientists? We told ourselves it didn’t matter.

As Trent Reznor intones in his song Zero Sum, “May God have mercy on our dirty little hearts.”
 

Further reading:

• How climate change could be causing miscarriages in Bangladesh
• Climate Change Impacts in Bangladesh
• The Unfolding Tragedy of Climate Change in Bangladesh

Feature image credit: DfID/Rafiqur Rahman Raqu

 
 
At the heart of social media lies a conspicuous paradox. While sites like Facebook have created more opportunities for human connection, their algorithms have a tendency to silo us in homogeneous spaces. The potential for engagement has never been greater, but the personalized nature of the newsfeed largely ends up reinforcing our own biases and ideological orientation. The more we tell Facebook and Google what we want to see through our clicks and shares, the more it skews our feed to serve up more of the same — be it cat videos or conspiracy theories. In the context of our political environment, this has mostly served to activate our tribalist impulses and sort us into angry, poorly informed partisans.

The obligation shared by Facebook and other social media proprietors to blunt the insularization of their platforms — otherwise known as the viewpoint diversity problem — remains a pressing topic for our time. Efforts to curate more cross-cutting news and crack down on fake news stories are democratically necessary, as is the increased pressure on these companies to monitor how their algorithms are being used and the degree to which they can be exploited by bad actors. But missing from the constant chatter of echo chambers and filter bubbles is something that won’t be solved by smarter algorithms. The problem is not just that people aren’t exposed to information that challenges their worldview, it’s that many would refuse to read and engage even if they were.

I’ve observed this for years in the debate over climate change. Presenting someone who doubts the science with accurate information rarely leads to a discussion of the merits of what was presented. It often devolves, rather, into a dispute over the merits of the source, followed by a repetition of the same shopworn misinformation that kicked off the exchange. A point by point debunking is only as useful as a recipient’s willingness to hear it. And if the link you offer raises partisan alarms, it’s liable to be dismissed out of hand. The Washington Post, The Guardian, Skeptical Science, hell, even NASA, doesn’t matter — once a particular source has been branded as suspect, that source is now off the table for consideration.

I stopped engaging with a certain family member on the issue once I realized he wouldn’t read the articles I was sending under threat of Guantanamo. For those for whom authenticity has become a measure of ideological compatibility, attempts to enlighten are futile. The mulish resistance to outside ideas and the mainstream press has grown more acute in the Trump Years — with open disdain for punditry coming from the top — but it was a virtual inevitability given the tribal nature of human behavior and the cognitive value we attach to closely held beliefs.

Algorithmic approaches can only do so much to compensate for shortcomings written in psychology, or to dislodge the rigid belief structures of low information consumers. Facebook and others could quite easily tune their news algorithm to ensure climate deniers are shown more factual stories in their feed. But this does nothing to ensure those same individuals won’t scroll right past them after seeing the headline and associated source. After all, safely ignoring information that threatens cognitive dissonance is precisely what generates echo chambers in the first place.

Liberals and conservatives alike are susceptible to such effects, and there’s more we all can do to cultivate a less partisan online experience. But for the people most in need of a richer, learned atmosphere — those given to grand conspiracizing and science denial, for instance — revamping the newsfeed is beside the point. That a particular headline or story agrees with the narrative they’re prepared to imbibe is all that matters.

How might we effect change in the short term? For people who take their cues from vested authorities, nothing will change unless those authorities begin to change their messaging. In the arena of climate change, this shift in signaling must come from conservative elites: from the Sean Hannities and Rush Limbaughs of the denial-o-sphere, from the opinion pages of the Murdoch press and Breitbart and WUWT, and any place else that doesn’t teach peer review or value expertise and intellectual honesty.

A sea change could also come about following a dramatic overhaul of who conservatives consider credible and what ideas they embrace. As David Roberts has argued, once rejecting climate science, socialized medicine, LGBTness, and the like are no longer part of the conservative playbook, we’ll see their relevance wane quickly. Unfortunately, this almost surely won’t happen so long as the incentive structures are so perversely misaligned, not just on the part of individuals — who might risk interpersonal blowback from deviating from their ideological cohort — but on the part of partisan elites and the media behemoths they represent.

Looking ahead, perhaps nothing short of a new intellectual renaissance will do, a revitalization of our innate curiosity and our unquenchable desire to understand the world around us. Only a society-engulfing recommitment to fact-conscious living, to free inquiry, to educational improvement, to acquiring knowledge for its own sake, and to objectivity and fairness can serve as a critical advance upon the blind partisanism and enculturated ignorance that so define our times.

This is why our Great Problem is not something Facebook, Google, and Big Data can solve alone. It’s not just about getting information in front of those who need to see it. It’s about fundamentally resculpting the epistemic resolve of ordinary Americans — a generational task if ever there was one.

Further reading:

• Why Facebook’s Changes Are Good News For Fake News And The Echo Chamber
• Blame the Echo Chamber on Facebook. But Blame Yourself, Too.
• This one weird trick will not convince conservatives to fight climate change
• How social media creates angry, poorly informed partisans
• America is facing an epistemic crisis
• The Problem Isn’t Disinformation, It’s Dismediation
• Review: The Demon-Haunted World

This post was featured on HuffPost’s Contributor platform.

Image credit: Stephen Lam/Getty Images

 
 
A recent episode of the Sam Harris podcast featured Joe Romm of ThinkProgress. Overall it was an excellent episode that over the course of two hours unpacks the scientific case for climate change like only Romm can.

We move from the obligatory — how we know humans are responsible — to how we course-correct — what I refer to as the “hard problem” of carbon mitigation. Romm importantly emphasizes that because we are to blame, we thereby hold the keys to the kingdom so to speak in terms of also being the solution. After all, the knowledge that our activities are behind the climate crisis entails the insight that scaling back or modifying those specific activities will reverse the damage already done. The ‘climate change is natural’ camp have no such insight on offer.

Speaking of uninformed palaver, he also takes on some of the common misconceptions and arguments parroted by think tanks and the uninitiated legions who spread them — with a much deserved shout-out to the folks at Skeptical Science who patiently and thoroughly correct the record for the rest of us. Finally, he covers the historical ground surrounding this debate and why it’s existed largely outside the scientific sphere.

How Much Is Too Much?

One point Sam raises that could have benefited from a more comprehensive response is the popular notion that ‘the planet has only increased in temperature by a few degrees, and hence is that really cause for concern’? The misconception here is that a few degrees constitutes a “small change in temperature.” It does not.

This intuition likely draws from our local conception of temperature. In the city or town where you live, it may vary by 20 degrees or more in a single day. What does this tell us about climate change? Not very much in fact. When we talk about climate change, we’re not talking about daily variation in a single spot on the globe, but about the average temperature trends of the globe as a whole. As the mean temperature of the planet moves steadily in one consistent direction, meaningful changes to the environment begin to occur in ways that just looking at a day-night cycle in Vancouver would miss out on.

So how much global temperature change matters? To answer this question, we need to know something about how climate has changed in the past, otherwise known as paleoclimatology. The first thing we learn from looking at historical variation is that it takes a pretty strong influence to tip the earth’s thermostat in either direction. Outside of major events like ice ages and sustained bursts of volcanic activity, the planet has tended to stay within a fairly tolerable range. For the last 7,000 years or so, sea levels have stabilized, and global temperatures haven’t moved more than plus or minus half a degree Celsius — up until recently. It’s probably not an accident that human civilization as we know it developed during this interval.

Even in the case of episodic events it can take a relatively long time for sizable changes in global temperature to manifest. Let’s take ice ages, the records of which leave their mark on proxies like ice cores and oxygen isotope data. A full ice age transition from a glacial maximum to the subsequent interglacial will typically undergo a total change of around 4-6 degrees C, and play out over the course of 5,000 years or more. Contrast that with our instrumental records, which report a gain of over 1 degree (1.1° Celsius or 2.0° Fahrenheit) in a single century, with two-thirds of that increase occurring only since 1975. This equates to roughly ten times the background rate of ice age-recovery warming. Small changes in global temperature matter, as does the rate at which they unfold.

Another high-stakes event, occurring 56 million years ago and known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), unleashed a total warming of between 5-8 degrees C, or as much as 16 degrees F. The prodigious release of carbon, and the associated rapid rise in temperature that resulted, transpired over the course of at least 8,000 years, or 15 times slower than the current rate of carbon release from anthropogenic outputs. A more recent study by Gutjahr et al 2017 corroborates these findings with ocean sediments, showing that a rate “of up to 0.58 petagrams of carbon [were] released each year over 50,000 years. About 10 petagrams of carbon are currently released every year from fossil fuel emissions.”

While the underlying causes of this unique period in climate history are still being sorted out (the latest evidence points to an uptick in volcanism), we can look at the effects of those causes in terms of the climate and planetary ecology and habitability. The PETM carbon perturbation led to massive ocean acidification that resulted in the largest deep-sea extinction event in the last 93 million years, killing off approximately 35-50% of all benthic (bottom-feeding) species. It took more than 200,000 years for the earth’s systems to recover, including 100,000 years for the oceans to rebalance.

We’re already seeing measurable impacts to ocean chemistry and marine biology from anthropogenic activities over the last few hundred years. All of the carbon the oceans have absorbed since Industrial times has reduced the ocean’s pH by 30%, creating grave concerns for marine life across the board, much of which rely on pH stability for their acid-soluble carbonate shells and skeletons.

Another crucial reason small shifts in global temperature are cause for alarm relates to the dynamics of ice sheets and their built-in implications for sea level rise. An increase in average terrestrial temperature creates a shift in the boundary between ice and land. Indeed, the observed change of “just” 2 degrees Fahrenheit since 1880 has already yielded costly ramifications in terms of ice sheet integrity and global sea level rise. The unprecedented melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, together with the thermal expansion of seawater, has raised sea level by a foot since the late 1800s.

The latest IPCC report projects another 1.6 ft (0.5 m)-3.2 ft (1 m) will come by the end of this century. Again, our intuition tends to balk at these numbers, to write them off as too small to warrant concern. Yet given that globally more than 150 million people live within that upper bound projection of sea level, this should be immediate cause for concern.

What’s more, these figures do not account for the possibility that tipping points are reached before we can scale back our emissions habit. A full-blown collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet alone would add another 10-13 ft (3-4 m). If Greenland and Antarctic losses begin to accelerate, we could see more significant rises still. In total, the Greenland ice sheet contains between 20 ft and 23 ft (6 m) of sea level rise, while the elephantine Antarctic ice sheet, if melted in its entirety, would raise sea level anywhere from 200 ft (61 m) to 240 ft (73 m). At the planet’s current population size, economic dangers and civil conflicts would emerge long before we approached these figures.

Thus what sounds trivial according to our intuition is actually, empirically speaking, quite consequential. Extrapolating seemingly minuscule changes in phenomena like CO2 concentration, mean temperature, and sea level rise to a global scale produces a constellation of near- and longer term concerns with the potential to disrupt the kind of society to which we’ve been accustomed these last few hundred years. Especially if business as usual emissions continue unimpeded, droughts and wildfires, supercharged hurricanes, increased flooding, sabotaged food chains and the extinction of keystone species, and a stalled polar jet stream — all acute indicators of a hastily warming planet — will serve as enduring reminders of how far we have pushed climate parameters outside the range for which much of global civilization is adapted.

Intuition is overrated. We know the degree to which our planet has changed, we know the time scales associated with changes of the past and the present, and we know how the planet has responded to similar changes in the past. All else equal, movement of one-degree Celsius is something we should sit down and talk about, as is a foot of sea level rise. When those changes occur at a faster clip than can be reconciled to historical data, with more expected in the future, it’s time to act.

Honing Our Language

Switching to an entirely different discussion in the podcast, Romm says at one point that he avoids using certain terms like ‘theory’ and ‘consensus,’ presumably in conversation with laypersons, because these terms have conventional meanings out of sync with their scientific meanings.

Regular readers of mine can probably guess how I feel about this, but here’s the thing — we shouldn’t apologize for using the language of science to communicate basic facts about reality. That far too much of our electorate is oblivious to the ways in which colloquial definitions in scientific parlance don’t always map to the formal definitions is largely a failure of our educational process and secondarily a product of decadeslong disinformation campaigns funded by the likes of Koch, Murdoch, ExxonMobil, and Shell and propped up by denier blogs like Breitbart and WUWT, inter alia.

The appropriate response shouldn’t be to cave to the bad-faith rhetoric peddled by obfuscationists, but to educate and inform, clearly and diplomatically, to dispel common myths and misconceptions no matter how deeply embedded, and also (this is key) to help the public understand the methods and means employed by misinformation channels. Knowing how denialist groups intend to manipulate you — and the various ways in which we are susceptible — can serve as a heat shield against future falsity.

One caveat, however: there is certainly a limit to how much jargon we should work into conversations outside the academy. Dropping high-level technical terminology or Latin designations of species and the like at every turn is ill-advised as well. The difficulty lies in balancing simplicity and clarity with scientific accuracy, which is why we should promote and support the journalists who get it right, of which there are many. Reward them for their effort by elevating content that cuts through the noise and conveys the latest research without sacrificing scientific integrity in the process.

Listen to the full episode here.

This post was featured on HuffPost’s Contributor platform.

Further reading: A Climate of Change

Feature image credit: Incoming by joeflowers

 
 
Like many others, I’ve been sounding off this week on David Wallace-Wells’ massive cover story for New York Magazine, titled “The Uninhabitable Earth.” According to the magazine itself it is now the most widely read article in the history of the publication. Not often does a science story attain this level of reach, especially amid a news cycle laser-focused on our horror show of an administration. That’s no small feat, and the author should be commended for sparking conversation on the most critical issue of our time. But what the magazine neglects to mention in their boast is that much of the engagement with the story has been of a critical rather than approbative nature — and not merely from the usual suspects but from many scientists as well.

Wells describes his article, based on a series of interviews with prominent climate scientists and researchers, as “a portrait of our best understanding of where the planet is heading absent aggressive action.” Over the course of 7,000 words, he explores what the world will look like by the end of this century and beyond if emissions continue apace and no collective large-scale mitigation strategies are employed — in effect the worst-case scenarios of future climate change.

The result is undeniably haunting as Wells chronicles one looming hazard after another in vivid fashion, from drought and famine, wildfires and flooding, heat waves and acidified oceans, coastal erosion and a shifting of borders to mass extinctions and higher rates of transmissible disease. To be sure, this is climate doom at its most serrated, designed to unsettle even the psychologically hardened. “No matter how well-informed you are,” he writes, “you are surely not alarmed enough.”

On one level, Wells is absolutely right. Most otherwise informed people do underestimate the gravity of climate change, and just as many undervalue what’s actually required to reverse the damage already done. And let us not forget the nearly half of Americans who reject the science altogether. Faced with these discrepancies, then, perhaps there’s something to be gained by examining the more pessimistic ends of the spectrum as derived from model projections, which are at least as probable as the best-case scenarios (e.g., keeping warming to between 1.5 and 2 C as specified under the Paris agreement). In contrast with climate coverage that customarily avoids straying too far from IPCC’s median outcomes, Wells sought to capture a future reality in which all goes to hell in a handbasket.

Unfortunately, in terms of its scientific accuracy and ability to galvanize torpid bystanders, Wells’ essay leaves much to be desired. Its scope and viral impact notwithstanding, it’s riddled with exaggeration, outright errors, and missing context. On several occasions the author misreports certain studies, misinterprets evidence, and missumarizes key data while needlessly skewing the narrative toward apocalypticism and fatalism. Taken together, the New York Magazine article represents a missed opportunity to relay the complexities of climate change in a way that is both accessible to the general public and faithful to our best scientific understanding.

I’ve carved out a separate section below for my initial teardown of some of the issues on the science side of things. But since my fingers only have so much stamina, it was nice to see a more authoritative assay provided by the folks at Climate Feedback — a kind of scientific watchdog group that review and score popular media stories related to climate change. They scored Well’s article a negative 0.7 as a measure of overall scientific credibility (read: not good). Many points that I missed upon a first reading of the text are captured in detail in their independent evaluation of the story, which concludes:
 

“While it is clear that ongoing warming of the global climate would eventually have very severe consequences, the concept of the Earth becoming uninhabitable within anywhere near the timescales suggested in the article is pure hyperbole. The author has clearly done very extensive research and addresses a number of climate threats that are indeed major issues, but generally the narrative ramps up the threat to go beyond the level that is supported by science.”

 
Reception among the climate and broader scientific community has generally been negative. Michael Mann took to Facebook to air his concerns, noting that Wells mischaracterizes the current state of research on methane feedbacks and completely misreports a recent study on satellite data in which necessary corrections were made that brought the University of Alabama in Huntsville’s dataset more in line with model simulations.

Eric Holthaus of Grist found another 14 errors and exaggerations, including Well’s discussion of human sensitivity to heat stress and elevated CO2, “reanimated” prehistoric pathogens, a “rolling death smog,” the causes of the Permian-Triassic extinction, the effects of climate change on tornadoes and hail, and intensity of past temperature changes (which I also mention below). Many other notable scientists have issued caveats of their own.

It bears pointing out that each of Wells’ mistakes are conspicuously in the same direction: that of amping up catastrophe and painting an overly bleak depiction of our prospects. Such a pattern is hardly a coincidence as it adds fuel to the “doomist” narrative he wished to create. So what was the objective behind this thematic decision?

It appears the author’s aim was to alchemize, through scare tactics and indiscriminate dread, a shared but broadly latent concern about climate change into dire calls for action — to toggle the zeitgeist from complacency to urgency. In this light, playing fast and loose with the science can be viewed as a necessary means to shake us out of our state of collective inertia.

But whether or not fear is an effective catalyst for achieving these goals — and the social science extant seems to suggest it isn’t — it should not come at the expense of scientific accuracy and public trust. Misconstruing the evidence and overplaying our hand always comes back to bite us, as fellow debunkers of the 1975 Newsweek story can earnestly attest. Yes, deniers will deny. It’s what they do, after all. But surely the solution isn’t to veer further away from the truth — to compromise on the facts?

Climate journalism has always had to toe that delicate line between accuracy and hyperbole. It’s a tough needle to thread, even for specialists fully versed in all of the social and political baggage the topic invokes. Yet Wells’ article, to my mind and to those throughout the climate and earth sciences community, is a clear example of actual alarmism in the popular press, and for that reason ought to be called out as such. As honest communicators and practitioners of the science, we cannot simultaneously push back against denialist charges of alarmism while turning a blind eye to the genuine cases that crop up.

Laying out the worst repercussions a deteriorating climate has in store for the planet isn’t necessarily a bad idea in principle (so long as it’s accompanied by solutions), but the underlying science, and the communication thereof, matter a great deal. Just as there’s danger in understating the risks, we should likewise be wary of overstatement. As John Timmer writes at Ars:
 

“While that means pushing back against alarmism, it also means pushing back against the people who argue that climate change doesn’t pose a risk. “Claims that there are no problems are just as bad (and perhaps worse) than over-egged claims,” Schmidt said. “To retain credibility, we have to tackle both. There are of course uncertainties in the science, but that neither means we know nothing, nor does it imply that anything goes.”

 
Finally, it should go without saying that pointing out the inaccuracies in this story does nothing to undermine either the manifold risks climate change poses or the urgency of those risks. The first and second order effects of climate change are serious enough to facilitate loss of sleep. As Dr. Mann and others have noted, there is no need to push the science further than current evidence can bear.

Bottom line: We should, every one of us, be deeply worried about present and future climate change. That this far-reaching story is plagued with exaggeration and specious language is not mutually exclusive with those concerns. It is possible to be both accurate and effective, and those who strike this balance should be rewarded for their efforts. Though more measured and nuanced approaches may suffer a decline in audience share as a result, they stand a better chance of avoiding the fate of denialist fodder and loss of public trust in science.

Suspect Science

1. Bangladesh
 

“Most people talk as if Miami and Bangladesh still have a chance of surviving; most of the scientists I spoke with assume we’ll lose them within the century, even if we stop burning fossil fuel in the next decade.”

 
The latest IPCC report projects that sea level will rise between a half meter (1.6 feet) and a full meter (3.2 feet) by the end of the century. What does this mean for Bangladesh, with over half of the country lying < 5 m above sea level? It means that many living along the coast will eventually have to migrate inland, but it will be gradual; 1 m of SLR will not displace coastal communities all at once, and certainly not by century-end.

In fact, the bigger problem for Bangladesh from a climate perspective is nuisance flooding: over three-fourths of the country lie within river deltas from the the three major rivers that flow into the country. Climate change increases moisture in the air and accelerates the hydrological cycle, leading to more (and more intense) precipitation events, wreaking continual havoc on regions prone to flooding, like Bangladesh.

The language here is much too sloppy to make proper sense of — a problem that courses through much of the piece. What does it even mean to say “we’ll lose them”? Bangladesh as a country will no longer exist? Ambiguous writing is ambiguous.

2. Methane Feedbacks
 

“…and the authors still haven’t figured out how to deal with that permafrost melt.”

 
The latest evidence suggests concerns over methane “timebombs” buried in permafrost are misplaced. Many commentators have tended to exaggerate the near-term threat of climate feedbacks involving the release of frozen methane.

The key questions involved are twofold: (1) how quickly the pulses will be released into the atmosphere (i.e., gradually over the course of centuries, released on sub-decadal timescales, sustained pulses), and (2) just how much methane is buried in the permafrost and deep sea hydrates.

The first is far more important because even if a lot of CH4 is buried in certain reservoirs, it has to actually make it into the atmosphere — without first being consumed or absorbed by marine life and other reservoirs — and it also has to be outgassed at a rate quicker than its natural atmospheric lifetime of roughly 10 years. So unless the methane pulses are on the order of sub-decadal timescales, it won’t make much of a difference for the long-term warming trend. This is why CO2 concentration is ultimately what matters.

A recent meta-analysis conducted by the U.S. Geological Survey and the University of Rochester concluded the following:

“This review paper provides a truly comprehensive synthesis of the knowledge on the interaction of gas hydrates and climate during the contemporary period. The authors’ sober, data-driven analyses and conclusions challenge the popular perception that warming climate will lead to a catastrophic release of methane to the atmosphere as a result of gas hydrate breakdown…not only are the annual emissions of methane to the ocean from degrading gas hydrates far smaller than greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere from human activities, but most of the methane released by gas hydrates never reaches the atmosphere. Instead, the methane often remains in the undersea sediments, dissolves in the ocean, or is converted to carbon dioxide by microbes in the sediments or water column.”

See other discussions and studies here, here, here, here, and here.

3. Albedo and cloud feedbacks
 

“The IPCC reports also don’t fully account for the albedo effect (less ice means less reflected and more absorbed sunlight, hence more warming); more cloud cover (which traps heat)…”

 
IPCC reports certainly do take into account albedo and other important feedbacks, like the thinning Arctic and Greenland ice masses, as do the models. And clouds can both absorb and reflect heat. (Cloud albedo can vary from less than 10% to more than 90%.) It depends on the physical properties of the cloud (e.g., height, thickness, radiative properties). For example, stratocumulus and other shallow clouds reflect incoming insolation and are thus negative forcing agents, while cirrus clouds operate primarily in the infrared range, allowing insolation to pass through to the surface but trapping upgoing radiation, making them positive forcing agents.

Thus, clouds have both shortwave (SWCRE) and longwave cloud radiative effects (LWCRE), with Section 7.2.1 of AR5 citing a net cooling effect when both are taken together. (More recent model results expect this to change to a net positive feedback as the planet grows warmer, however.)

Moreover, as Mark Maslin notes in his book Climate Change: A Very Short Introduction, 3rd ed., the physical basis of how clouds are represented (parameterized) in AOGCMs has greatly improved through the inclusion of cloud microphysical properties in the cloud water budget equations. While clouds still represent a significant source of uncertainty, studies suggest that even if the most extreme cooling (negative forcing) value is supplied for clouds, the warming factors (from GHGs) are still 3x larger.

4. Dramatic Temperature Shifts
 

“Each of these promises to accelerate warming, and the geological record shows that temperature can shift as much as ten degrees or more in a single decade.”

 
Is that so? 10 degrees in a single decade? C or F? Which period/event was that? I’ve not come across any change this dramatic in my reading of the literature, certainly not a global one, and I’m fairly certain there are rate-limiting factors that would make something like this impossible, especially sans human influence (not to mention that decadal timsescale resolution is all but out of reach for currently available paleoclimate proxies).

Edit: This claim apparently refers to the Younger Dryas, as reflected in the GISP2 ice core data from Greenland. As expected, the change in temperature was restricted to the North Atlantic region and thus was not a global event as vaguely implied here.

5. No More Primates?
 

“The last time the planet was even four degrees warmer, Peter Brannen points out in The Ends of the World, his new history of the planet’s major extinction events, the oceans were 260 feet higher, and the warming wiped out all but one species of European primates.”

 
The ‘one species’ claim sounds wrong on its face, though I’m too lazy to dive deeper. But given the generally amateurish presentation of the science on offer in the piece, I’m inclined to distrust it. (Edit: This claim was subsequently removed from the article, and the sentence in question is now accompanied by an asterisk acknowledging the errors.)

Further reading:

• Scientists explain what New York Magazine article on “The Uninhabitable Earth” gets wrong
• Fear Won’t Save Us: Putting a Check on Climate Doom
• Scientists challenge magazine story about ‘uninhabitable Earth’
• No, New York Mag: Climate change won’t make the Earth uninhabitable by 2100
• Stop scaring people about climate change. It doesn’t work.
• Why scare tactics won’t stop climate change
• On Hellishly Scary Climate Change Reporting, and How to Do It Better (mirrored from DeSmog Canada)
• Climate scientists push back against catastrophic scenarios
• Doomsday scenarios are as harmful as climate change denial
• Michael Mann Responds to ‘Uninhabitable Earth’

This post was featured on HuffPost’s Contributor platform.

Feature image via New Scientist

 
 
I almost waited to write this up until the decision was final. But given the deeply troubling reports from last week’s G7 summit, and multiple reports today that 45 indeed plans to follow through on his campaign promise to pull out of the agreement, this can’t wait. Let’s not pretend we don’t know what’s coming.

Nothing but hyperbole will do. There simply aren’t words for the vastitude of this error in judgment. Ignorance, left unchecked, is poison. Socrates called it “the only evil.” D’Holbach averred that man’s ignorance of Nature “appears to doom him to continual error.” Asimov warned of the “cult of ignorance” that was already manifest in the politics and culture of his time. Neil Postman worried in 1985 that “we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed.” And Carl Sagan cautioned endlessly of the “combustible mixture of ignorance and power” that threaten civilized democracy. In light of this week’s news, we can see the long crawl toward idiocy approaching a cresting point.

External link: Trump ready to withdraw US from Paris climate agreement, reports say

Further reading:

• ‘Climate Change Is Real’: Many U.S. Companies Lament Paris Accord Exit
• Businesses urge president to remain in Paris Agreement
• How Cities and States Reacted to Trump’s Decision to Exit the Paris Climate Deal
• Trump’s exit from Paris climate deal makes an already tough target harder to hit
• Paris Agreement: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)
• Our Future | Narrated by Morgan Freeman

This post was featured on HuffPost’s Contributor platform.

 
 
More than 200,000 gathered in DC for the People’s Climate March last month, with sister marches taking place in 370 cities across the nation. Accompanied by lively chanting and clever signage, activists, demonstrators and concerned citizens showed up en masse to communicate the importance of protecting our environment and our way of life from a rapidly changing climate. Many also came out in protest of Trump — who continues to dither on whether to pull out of the Paris accord — and an administration that sees climate funding as a “waste” of taxpayer money. More than anything else, it was a day dedicated to speaking out on behalf of future generations and jump-starting a more solution-focused conversation on climate.

Shortly before the march I put out a call on Facebook to watch for and promote coverage of bipartisan turnout. One of the reasons talk about climate change remains a hot-button issue in Washington — other than the hegemonic sway of the fossil fuel industry, of course — is that conservative voices who speak sensibly on the subject aren’t given any visibility. And that’s not because such voices don’t exist. At the grassroots level, and even in the halls of Congress, there are conservatives and evangelicals committed to shaking up the status quo. The more we prop up the bellwethers and nonconformists the sooner telling the truth about climate will be seen not as a contentious political act but as an essential public duty.

If last month’s Climate March is any indication, there are promising signs that the sea change we’ve been waiting for may already be underway. PBS NewsHour aired a story yesterday on the conservative face of the environmental movement, showcasing a number of conservative and evangelical activists who organized and demonstrated in DC. Meet the “Eco-Right,” as they’ve come to be called, a motley, big-tent community united by the conviction that climate change represents an existential risk and policy priority that transcends party lines.

We have Saskia De Melker, NewsHour videographer and journalist — and a good friend of mine — to thank for this story. As she writes on Facebook:
 

“It’s no surprise that climate change has been one among the many issues dividing Republicans and Democrats here in the U.S. But there are a growing number of conservative voices rising up to address climate change….. and they’re proposing solutions and talking about the issue in a way that resonates with those on the right side of the aisle.

Stephanie Sy, Laura J. Fong and I have spent loads of time these last couple months learning about and documenting the views and work of key leaders in this growing “eco-right” movement including young Christians and House Republicans, an influential Republican donor and Reagan’s Secretary of State George P. Shultz.”

 
One group they profile is Young Evangelicals for Climate Action, who see stewardship of the planet as a central obligation of their faith, along with the Christian concern for “the least of these.” The effort to harmonize the ethic of environmentalism and conservation with the Christian message places groups like YECA largely outside the evangelical mainstream. According to the latest Pew poll, just 28% of white evangelicals, for example, accept that rising temperatures are due to human activities, while 37% say there is no solid evidence the planet is even warming. Despite these cultural impediments, YECA leaders like Kyle Meyaard-Schaap hope to mobilize a new generation of climate-oriented evangelicals.

George Shultz, former secretary to Presidents Reagan and Nixon, and Andy Sabin, a moneyed GOP donor who hopes to one day bend Trump’s ear on climate-friendly policies, are interviewed as well. Shultz now heads up the Climate Leadership Council, an international research and advocacy group who recently published a conservative, Paris-compliant case for carbon dividends.

Perhaps the most exciting news on the bipartisan front is the Climate Solutions Caucus in the House. It was founded just last year by two representatives from Florida — one Republican and the other Democrat. New members must abide by the same pattern; in order to join, you must recruit someone from across the aisle. House membership currently sits at 38 representatives.

These are refreshing flickers of hope at a time when resentment and disillusionment seem more accessible options. We often wonder what progress we might have made were our elected leaders en bloc committed to taking climate change seriously. We consider where we’d be under a Congress in which wholesale denial of the underlying science didn’t dominate the thinking of one of the two major parties, a world in which caring about the environment wasn’t counted as a “liberal” cause. Building bridges across ideological lines has become more important than ever in forging this reality.

The recent Climate March is a single, albeit high-profile, measure of success, but if the right voices catch momentum we may soon find that sanity on climate has at last found a home among mainstream conservative thought. Faced with mounting ecological risk and a crisis with intergenerational ramifications, millennials of all stripes are no longer willing to sit idly by as we continue down the path of environmentally unsustainable energy sources long past their expiration date. Innovation and progress are well within the realm of plausibility, and it’s joint solutions that will get us there. Trump & Co. may be choosing to bury their head in the sand, but the increasingly bipartisan call to action is a story that can hardly be ignored.
 

External link: Rising conservative voices call for climate change action

Further reading:

• Christian Earth Day lessons: worship by protecting creation
• Republicans Offer to Tax Carbon Emissions
• Depressing Video Tracks Shift in Conservative Leadership on Climate

 
 
Every so often the Wall Street Journal publishes some thinly researched, headache-inducing column calling into question the conclusions of climate science. Like clockwork, it gets tons of clicks, the misinformation propagates, and the wider public is left none the wiser. Just when you think they might have dropped the act, another op-ed comes along as if to remind readers which side of the future they represent. This time they go after CO2 — the linchpin of human-caused climate change — in a piece titled “The Phony War Against CO2.”

It’s a woefully shallow column, almost throwaway in its brevity, with barely enough there to round out any assertions its authors seem to want to make. Their basic argument: a) CO2 is essential for life and b) More CO2 is a good thing for plants, agriculture and the planet overall. It shouldn’t take much digging around, or indeed much more than a course in introductory logic, to see that, while a) is true, b) does not follow from a). I doubt the “More is Better” philosophy will check out for anyone not already committed to denying climate change; the bulk of the Journal‘s readers cannot possibly be that dull.

We’ve been through this before, of course: the tireless “CO2 is Plant Food” trope has been peddled for years by conservatives bent on politicizing inconvenient science. I addressed this particular fallacy in an earlier essay:
 

“It’s of course true that CO2 is essential to life as we know it, but it does not follow that more is better. Alcohol is not hurriedly toxic but consume twelve beers in as many minutes and you’ll have newfound appreciation for the phrase ‘drink in moderation’. Steroids, as well, are naturally produced by the body, but adding prodigious amounts on top of that baseline can disrupt human physiology in myriad ways. Likewise, additional CO2 can stimulate plant growth, but dump too much carbon into the air and you alter the climate to the point that those plants can no longer survive.”

 
Plant varieties, like most organisms, are sensitive to temperature swings outside the range for which they have adapted. Spend too much time outside of that healthy range, and the plant is unable to grow properly. As the anthropogenic influx of CO2 is driving up global temperatures — about 2.0° F since 1880 — more CO2 threatens to expose more plant and crop varieties to temperature values beyond the nominal range.

In fact, it is well understood today that there is a warming threshold (varies by crop) beyond which agricultural yields no longer increase, but begin to decline sharply due to changes in precipitation, water availability, soil moisture and plant nutrient levels — all effects exacerbated by climate change.

Even without the factor of warming, the argument for more CO2 is still waylaid by the evidence. And that’s because the relationship between CO2 and botanical growth is only proportional up to a point. Studies have shown that too much CO2 leads to a reduction in photosynthesis, lower nitrogen uptake (another key ingredient for plant growth), and increased vulnerability to insects.

A recent study from scientists at the University of Washington quantifies the effects of more CO2 on a plant’s ability to take in carbon. Their research found that plant’s leaves tend to thicken — by as much as a third — with increased CO2. The thicker leaves are “less efficient in sequestering atmospheric carbon.” Under high future emissions scenarios, as plants are rendered less productive as a carbon sink, more carbon will be left in the atmosphere, to the tune of 6.39 billion tons, each year that concentrations rise.

Slight boosts to CO2 are usually harmless and often promote positive trophic response — or “greening” — especially under the controlled environments found in your average greenhouse. But eventually you run up against limits as offsetting variables come into play. Focusing strictly on CO2 is like thinking that eating more potassium alone will yield a well balanced diet. Like your body, the climate is a complex ecosystem shaped by a wide array of interdependent variables.

Climate Feedback reached out to climate scientists in their analysis of the story (as they typically do for the bigger denialist stories that go viral), and concluded the following:
 

“This commentary in the Wall Street Journal by Rodney Nichols and Harrison Schmitt tries to argue that CO2 emitted by humans is, overall, “beneficial”–particularly for agriculture. To do so, the authors ignore all the evidence of the negative impacts of increasing CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere (due to climate change and ocean acidification, for example). The commentary relies on claims that are not supported by any evidence, like the assertion that more CO2 in the atmosphere has helped to reduce poverty.

“The authors invite the reader to “check the facts” but do not apply that maxim to themselves. Instead of referring to published scientific research, the article draws heavily from information created by an advocacy group that exists to promote CO2 emissions as beneficial. Taken as a whole, the body of scientific evidence clearly shows that this is not the case.”

 
The Journal plays up the agriculture angle, but offers no peer-reviewed evidence to support their claims. The consensus among agriculturalists and plant and climate scientists is that any gains in crop growth from higher CO2 availability (and, as noted above, even this relationship holds only under ideal conditions in many cases) are far outweighed by the harmful impacts associated with CO2-induced warming.

Climate Feedback airs the same criticism, rejoining that the claim that additional CO2 will increase agricultural yields is directly refuted by IPCC’s AR5, which concluded that overall productivity is expected to be hindered significantly in response to additional warming.

As for the suggestion that increases in CO2 will aid us in the problem of feeding an overpopulated planet — a strained extrapolation if there ever was one — Wolfgang Cramer, Professor at the Mediterranean Institute for Biodiversity and Ecology (IMBE), had this to say:
 

“The article speaks about scientific questions under an “opinion” banner—as if questions about the role of CO2 in the Earth system could be a matter of opinions. Virtually every single point in the article can be easily proven wrong by referral to standard textbook knowledge. For the major final conclusion “With more CO2 in the atmosphere, the challenge [to feed additional 2.5 billion people] can and will be met.”, there is absolutely no scientific credibility, nor support in the scientific literature—it is pure fantasy.”

 
It should further be noted that neither of the two authors has formal training in this area to begin with, a significant problem when siding against science that was settled generations ago. Harrison Schmitt — the only one of the two with a background in science — hasn’t published anything climate-related that I can find. If he believes there are good grounds for doubting what we know about CO2 and its impacts on climate, he is more than welcome to bring those ideas to the peer-reviewed literature. That he would resort to firing off a few lazy paragraphs for the popular press rather than active engagement in the empirical process of science should speak to the legitimacy of his views.

The Journal‘s readers may also wish to know that Schmitt has appeared on Alex Jones’ radio show, where he suggested that environmentalism and concern for climate change was a front for Soviet Communism. (If Green is the new Red, I want my EDF donations back.) This isn’t the first time Schmitt’s made these facile arguments for online rags, either. His latest is basically a verbatim copy of those he’s written previously, such as this one from three years ago.

In short, the notion that more CO2 is an unqualified panacea for plant life is scientifically baseless and has been debunked countless times over. The only ones still peddling this sophomoric tripe are known cranks with either an ideological commitment to small government or a vested interest in the continued burning of fossil fuels. Readers of the Journal interested in preserving the health of our planet should push back on this critical issue in any way they can, even if it means canceling their subscription.

Further reading:

• Analysis of “The Phony War Against CO2”
• New study undercuts favorite climate myth ‘more CO2 is good for plants’
• Vegetation May Speed Warming of Arctic
• Yet another study suggests that climate change will hurt crops more than it helps them
• ‘Global Greening’ Sounds Good. In the Long Run, It’s Terrible.
• High CO2 levels cause plants to thicken their leaves, which could worsen climate change effects, researchers say