Climate Change: A Concise Assessment of What we are Risking.

The text below is a translation of a post that I published in the Italian newspaper "Il Fatto Quotidiano" about two months ago. The idea was to provide a concise statement on the climate situation (no more than 650 words allowed).  I tried to emphasize the risks involved with the "climate tipping points" and criticize the common idea that, since "the Earth's climate has always been changing,"  there follows that "human activities can't affect climate". I can't really say what impact this article may have had -- normally my posts on "Il Fatto" score a few thousand clicks. But, if you have the time to read the comments (78 in total), you may notice that many commenters were not even vaguely touched by my arguments and continued repeating their typical statements, "where is the proof?" "These are just models," "Nobody knows exactly what's the climate sensitivity factor," "The Club of Rome made wrong predictions," etc.  And so it goes....

The failure of the Madrid climate negotiations, the Cop25, was not really unexpected. Even today, very few people, be they politicians or citizens, understand the risks of what's happening, and those who do are accused of "alarmism". But how long can we carry on as if nothing is happening? What do we risk if we do nothing?

The answer is that we risk much more than we can afford. Many studies tell us this, among others also a recent article published in Nature titled "Climate tipping points — too risky to bet against." Even without going into the details, the title is clear enough to understand that the matter is becoming dramatic. But why so much concern among scientists?

We can summarize the problem in one short sentence: the Earth's climate is unstable. It is something that is emerging with ever greater force from all studies in climate science. Of course, the fact that the climate always changes is a favorite argument of those who deny climate science. Their reasoning is: "the climate has always changed, therefore man has nothing to do with it." Wrong, very wrong: what we learn from past climate changes is instead that the Earth's climate changes easily and, therefore, is not so difficult to change it. And that's where the risk is.

Today the climate seems stable to us because human civilization has developed over a period of about 10,000 years of modest changes in temperature. Some people enjoy speculating about these small variations, for instance discussing how Hannibal's elephants could cross the Alps. Maybe, at the time, it was a bit warmer than today, but they must have had quite some problems with freezing trunks.

But, if we go further back in time, we see that the Earth's climate has seen real, strong, and dramatic changes. In the past, over a span of about a million years, our planet has seen episodes of intense glaciation interspersed with relatively warm periods, such as the one we live in today. In the more distant past, the Earth saw much more radical and catastrophic changes.

To push the Earth from a glacial period to an interglacial one does not take much: small perturbations are enough, the so-called "Milankovitch cycles", related to asymmetries of the movement of the earth around the sun. But what humans are causing with their greenhouse gas emissions and other factors is a much stronger perturbation that drives us to a warmer, much warmer, planet.

What could happen then? There is talk of temperatures high enough to destabilize the ice caps at the poles and make them disappear. It would not be the first time that the Earth has no ice at the poles, on the contrary, it is a condition that has occurred commonly in the distant past. But, if the biosphere can live even without ice, our civilization has developed with icecaps at the poles, in climatic conditions that have made possible agriculture, trade, maritime transport, and more.

To create enormous damage to us, we don't even need that the icecaps disappear completely. It is enough to lose an important fraction of the ice to change everything: the sea level would rise to submerge existing ports, then we would see acidification and oceanic anoxia, desertification, mass extinctions and a few more effects that would imperil the survival of human civilization difficult, if not actually of our species.

This is the reason for the great concern: it is not so much the fact that the temperature increases, it is that we face the risk of jumping sharply from one climatic state to another without knowing where we will end up. However, we continue to discuss without taking action: few realize that we risk much more than we can afford.

Denigrating "The Limits to Growth" is Still a Popular Pastime. But can we Learn Something From it?

Many people seem to be surprised when I tell them that I follow the abominable science denial blog "Watts Up With That" kept by Alan Watts. Yes, it is abominable, sometimes, but it has one feature that makes it stand a couple of notches above the other science denial blogs: it is almost never boring, It has the same fascination that you can find in a well-done evil character of a literature piece, think of Shakespeare's Iago in Othello. And sometimes you can learn something even from WUWT: if nothing else about how your enemies think and behave.

The first report to the Club of Rome, the 1972 study titled "The Limits to Growth," is one of the typical bugaboos of those people we call "denialists," people who deny the main findings of climate science. The study didn't consider global warming explicitly, but its results relative to pollution could be seen as hinting at the problem. So, it is not surprising that the same attitude of denial embraces both studies on resource depletion and climate change. No surprise that, in the 1980s, "The Limits to Growth" started to be the target of a denigration campaign that's continuing nowadays in parallel with the one ongoing against climate science. I told the "Limits-Bashing" story in my 2011 book "The Limits to Growth Revisited."

The story is not over. Today, I found Limits-bashing alive and well in a post by Eric Worrall on "Watt's Up With That" (WUWT). The post starts with a citation from an article by Annabel Crabb on ABC news describing the split on climate change that took place 10 years ago in the Australian parliament. The story is not so easy to decipher for someone who is not Australian, but Ms. Crabb attributes the collapse of bipartisan policies on climate change on the actions of MP Andrew Robb who, apparently, had been an early supporter of the ideas of the Club of Rome but who later reversed his position.

Crabb reports:

He (Robb) mentions that when he was a much younger man, he was "a great student" of the Club of Rome, an association of scientists, bureaucrats, politicians and public thinkers who in 1972 published the book Limits To Growth, warning that the world's resources could not withstand the depredations of ceaseless economic growth indefinitely.

Limits To Growth is still the highest-selling environmental book in the history of the world, having sold 30 million copies in more than 30 languages.

But Robb's early fascination with the work gave way to distrust of its conclusions and primitive computer modelling; he says its warnings of resource exhaustion and economic collapse towards the end of the 20th century were overstated.

"The thing they didn't talk about was technology. That you could find gas 300 kilometres offshore, for example, and find a way to bring it onshore. Because of this, the Club of Rome — which was quite a reputable group of people — looked more and more ridiculous as the years rolled on."

The Club of Rome has its critics and its defenders; Limits To Growth was commonly derided by the 1990s as a misguided Doomsday scenario, but has enjoyed something of a renaissance lately. The CSIRO published a paper in 2008 finding that the book's 30-year modelling of consequences from a "business as usual" approach to economic growth was essentially sound.

But what's not deniable is that this work influenced one young man who grew up to be one member of a parliamentary party with a singular role to play in one vote on a policy that would either change or not change the course of a country.

In the end, Ms. Crabb arrives at the surprising conclusion that if the Australian parliament failed to adopt environmental policies it was a fault of a Club of Rome. A bit of a flight of fancy to say the least. It seems more likely that Mr. Robb just thought that a little "Limits-Bashing" was appropriate to justify his actions of 10 years ago. So, he engaged in a few remarkably statements for someone who claims to have been a "Great Student" of the Club of Rome. For instance, the Limits study never said that the collapse of the world's economy was expected "toward the end of the 20th century." (and, about one of Ms. Crabb's statements, 30 million copies sold for The Limits to Growth is a wildly exaggerated number).

More interesting than the somewhat convoluted Australian story is the reaction of Eric Worrall on WUWT. Apparently, he had never heard of the work of Graham Turner, so he engages in a somewhat rambling criticism of The Limits to Growth where he cites Turner more than once. The surprising thing is that Worrall doesn't engage in the usual sneers against the Club of Rome. No, Worrall makes several mistakes, evidently he doesn't know much about dynamic modeling nor about the specific study he is criticizing, but, considering the standards of the WUWT site, it is a reasonably balanced text.

But I said that you can often learn something from WUWT. What is that you can learn in this case? A typical trick they play: they publish a post that looks superficially balanced, but they know that it is a bait for their commenters who will then proceed to state what climate science deniers really think. With this post, as for many others on WUWT, the real learning experience is to read the rabid comments. Just as an example, about Turner's work, we read that "CSIRO is a cesspool of socialist academics including some IP theft specialist employees working for China; yes really!"

And we keep going and we keep learning 

Climate Science Deniers Start Feeling the Heat. Now it is Foot-Dragging Time!

Greta Thunberg is both a cause and an effect in the great shift that's ongoing in the public opinion about climate change. Climate science deniers are feeling the pressure and they are preparing to change their strategy. No more denying that AGW exists and that it is a danger for all of us. It is time to move to foot-dragging for profit. 

A post by Tim Ball on the despicable WUWT blog is well worth reading because it summarizes the plight of climate science deniers in the current debate. Ball says that he calls it quits because:

"you are asking people to believe that a small group of people managed to deceive the world into believing that a trace gas (0.04% of the total atmosphere) was changing the entire climate because of humans. In addition, that group convinced many others to participate in the deception. The public view is that deceiving so many is just not possible. "

Stark clear: Ball perfectly summarizes the problem for him and his band of science-deniers: how could anyone believe what they are saying? With Greta Thunberg bursting into the debate, their position is rapidly becoming untenable. So, they are shifting away from discussing whether AGW exists or not. Ball says,

"I decided to stop trying to educate people about the global deception that is AGW. ... The challenge now is to help people understand the differences between deceptively derived policies, and what is the best, most adaptive, most profitable, and most rewarding strategy for survival of the individual, business, or industry. "

And I couldn't have said it more clearly. Ball and his ilk are preparing for a war of attrition against the attempt to do something to save humankind before it is too late, all in the name of the "most profitable" strategy. 

(I know, I know, I shouldn't link to anti-science blogs, but this one is a must read -- anyway I put a no-follow clause on it. Note also a recent post by Michael Barnard on Medium that notes the same thing as I did)

Stunning News from the Memesphere: Forest Fires had no Effect on the Public's Perception of Climate Change

In 2018, the fires in California and in other parts of the world have been especially devastating. But they had little or no effect on people's perception of global warming and climate change. It seems that we are operating on the basis of a wrong model of governance: the bottom-up mechanism is simply not working.

This year, we had the largest forest fires ever seen in history in California. And we had terrible forest fires in Greece, Portugal, and Scandinavia. Climate scientists were quick in stating that these fires were made more likely and more severe by global warming, but you don't need to be a climate scientist to understand that higher temperatures mean drier conditions and more fires.

Then, if you live, as I do, in a bubble in the memesphere where climate change is regarded as a serious and imminent problem, you surely had the impression that the fires of this summer was an important factor in affecting the perception of the general public. All that sound and fury couldn't signify nothing, right? I saw several self-congratulatory messages in the meme bubble stating something like, "now they will start understanding the problem of climate change!"

Alas, that's not true. The results are stark clear: there is NO evidence of an increased public interest in global warming as a result of the fires. Below, you can see the results of a search on Google Trends for the United States. These data record the number of times that a certain term was searched on the Google Search Engine.

Note how the interest in the term "wildfires" spikes up in correspondence with major wildfire events. You can see in the graph the three California fires of 2017, August, October, and November. You can also see the rising interest in the 2018 fires. But climate change? No detectable effect. At best, a very minor increase, not even compensating the decline generated by the Trump administration starting to use deception by omission. (note how the spike in interest in climate change in 2017 is the result of Trump's announcement that the US would withdraw from the Paris treaty). Other countries showed the same pattern: I could detect some rising interest in climate during the 2018 fire season only in France, in Germany, and in some other countries of central Europe. A minor effect, anyway.

All that is nothing less than stunning. We had this big disaster, fires everywhere, giant columns of smoke, incinerated buildings, all pointing directly to global warming. Of course, it is possible to argue that there are other factors that caused the fires, but at least you would think that people would have been stimulated to look over the Web on the subject. Instead, nothing, zero, null, zilch, nada. No detectable rise in interest in climate change despite the fires. People just didn't make the connection.

So, what's happening? One of the problems is that the media didn't emphasize the climate factor in causing the fires. The many articles published on the subject normally contained a few sentences about the effects of climate change buried somewhere in the text, but the subject never appeared in the title and was never emphasized in the summaries. But it was not a conspiracy of the media: simply, they found that mentioning climate change in the news about the fires was a "palpable ratings killer." So, the media had no interest in diffusing a subject that the public found uninteresting and the public found the subject uninteresting because it was not diffused by the media. It is a damping feedback which is gradually marginalizing climate change to the status of a non-problem. (see this post on Cassandra's Legacy and this article).

In the end, the problem is that we have a wrong model for how to generate action against climate change. We tend to think that, as the change becomes more evident in the form of major disasters, people will take notice and that will force politicians and opinion leaders to do something. That's not happening. We are having giant fires, scorching heatwaves, and droughts, besides, of course, rising temperatures. But people don't care if they are not directly affected and, if they are, they have other priorities than worrying about climate change. The bottom-up model of diffusion of the climate change meme is simply not working.

So, what do we need? One thing that can be said is that no major environmental problem was ever solved by means of a bottom-up meme diffusion mechanism: refrigerator owners never pushed for their CFC refrigerating fluid to be replaced with non-ozone depleting fluids. Instead, manufacturers were forced by law to stop their production of CFCs. We need to find a way to go in that direction in order to stop greenhouse emissions, hoping that it is not too late.


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As a further note, during this year's fire season, I published a comment on an Italian newspaper on the fires in Greece, trying to highlight the connection with climate change. The result was discouraging: most commenters angrily disagreed with me and much preferred a conspiracy theory that attributed the fires to "arsonists." It seems that not only people can't see the connection between forest fires and climate change, they become positively angry when it is pointed out to them.

The Conspiracy of the Stonecutters: is Climate Science Denial going through a Seneca Cliff?

In a recent article on WUWT, Tim Ball describes climate science as the result of a "cabal" devised by the Club of Rome as a way to promote world socialism. He is confusing the Club of Rome with the sect of the "Stonecutters" of "The Simpsons". They really seem to be running out of serious arguments. 

Sometimes I think about how difficult it must be to be a climate science denier. I have been studying climate science for years and I can tell you that it is tough stuff and that climate scientists are smart people who have been building their competency over decades of work. Climate science deniers can have a good time telling each other their beliefs in their sites frequented only by like-minded people. But only those of them suffering from a near terminal Dunning-Kruger syndrome can think they can debate a true climate scientist on climate science. No way.

So, I can almost sympathize with climate science deniers: they face a nearly impossible task. And one good example of their plight is a recent article by Tim Ball on WUWT. Worth reading because it is, in a way, honest. Ball writes (emphasis mine):

I know from experience that after you explain to an audience what and how the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) deception was achieved the next question is inevitable. What was the motive? Unless you answer that question, people become a little more skeptical but remain, at best, undecided. They can’t and don’t want to believe that scientists would be involved in anything nefarious or even misleading. They can’t believe that so many of them were misled, which is why the 97% consensus claim was so effective.

Truly pathetic, isn't it? Put yourself in the shoes of poor Tim Ball. Imagine that you are trying to explain to a group of adult people that, say, the Tooth Fairy really exists and that she has been kidnapped by Santa Claus who keeps her hidden in a secret igloo near the North Pole. Something like that. Wouldn't that be difficult?

Ball doesn't seem to be touched by the idea that he is dealing with normal people who may well be right in their skepticism. So, he proceeds with a desperate attempt to demonstrate the undemonstrable. He says that, clearly, people are skeptical about the idea that tens of thousands of scientists are all conspiring against the American people but, hey, this is not a "conspiracy", it is a "cabal", defined as "A small group of intriguers, especially one formed for political purposes."

What is the difference between a conspiracy and a cabal? Basically, none, except in the mind of Ball who seems to think that by using the term "cabal" he has dodged the objection that a conspiracy on climate would have to be too large to be kept hidden. He doesn't seem to realize that the problem remains unchanged: how is it possible that so many scientists in the world are involved in the conspiracy...er, cabal, and nobody ever talked about it?

Never mind that, Ball tries to substantiate his idea by digging into the corpus of legends that arose in the 1970s after the publication of "The Limits to Growth", the much maligned 1972 report to the Club of Rome. At that time, the Club was accused of the worst possible things, including to be initiating a conspiracy to take over the world. None of these accusations could ever be substantiated and, clearly, if the Club had really been planning to take over the world, they haven't been very successful in almost 50 years of attempts.

But Ball is undeterred; according to him, the Club of Rome is the culprit of everything. He is confusing the Club with the "Stonecutters" of "The Simpsons". But why would the Club be pushing their cabal? Obvious: they wanted (and they still want) to promote world socialism. Again, if that was the plan, they don't seem to have been very successful. Don't you think it would be easier to convince people that the Tooth Fairy really exists?

If you followed me up to here, I guess that, like me, you don't know whether you should laugh or get angry. Surely, it is such a pathetic story that one is tempted to laugh. But, then, if you think of the kind of disaster we are facing (and the Hurricane Harvey is only one of them), you see that people are suffering and dying because of climate change. And you may well get angry at people like Tim Ball are arguing that nothing should be done because they attribute everything to an obscure cabal devised by a group of white-haired people who collected in a smoke-filled room nearly 50 years ago in order to promote socialism.

Hopefully, a Seneca Cliff in the public opinion on climate will take care of this group of conspiracy theorists.

The most recent (March 2017) Gallup poll results on climate change. This can be seen as a "Seneca Cliff" in reverse. A hard core of unbelievers maintain their position, but the overall opinion is clearly tilting in the direction of thinking that climate change is real and it is a serious problem. 


For a detailed rebuttal of Tim Ball's post, see "The Hot Whopper"

Climate Change: How Desperate Can You Be?

The legend of the city of Ys has that it was swallowed by the sea. Many modern islands risk to suffer the same fate as the result of Global Warming (Image source). But their inhabitants tend to deny that, and for good reasons: they are desperate. 

Sometimes, what you read in the news really looks like the stuff legends are made of. So is the phone call that President Trump gave to the mayor of the island of Tangier, who had appeared in TV, worried that his island on the Chesapeake bay risked to disappear into the Ocean. Here is an excerpt from the "Washington Post".

Trump thanked the mayor and the entire island of Tangier, where he received 87 percent of the votes, for their support. Then the conversation turned to the island’s plight.

“He said we shouldn’t worry about rising sea levels,” Eskridge said. “He said that ‘your island has been there for hundreds of years, and I believe your island will be there for hundreds more.’”

 Eskridge wasn’t offended. In fact, he agreed that rising sea levels aren’t a problem for Tangier.

“Like the president, I’m not concerned about sea level rise,” he said. “I’m on the water daily, and I just don’t see it.”

Do you realize the eerie lunacy of this exchange? Trump who tells the mayor, "don't worry, your island will be there for hundreds of years" Does he think he is Moses who can command the waters? And the good mayor of Tangier who says, "I'm not concerned about sea level rise, I'm on the water daily and I just don't see it." Ahem... Mr. Mayor, do you really expect to see a sea level rise when you are "on the water"? And then the mayor goes on, saying that despite the fact that the sea is not rising, the islands are sinking. Absolutely fantastic. Is this madness or what? Maybe not or, at least, there is method in it.

In a previous post of mine, I described how the government of the Maldives Islands also denied that sea level rise was a threat I wondered "Is this an epidemics of brain disease? Or do the Gods really drive crazy those whom they want to destroy?" A question that applies also to the inhabitants of Tangier, in the Chesapeake bay.

But no, this is not an epidemics of madness. There is a perfectly rational explanation for what's happening. I wrote in my post,

Imagine that you are part of the elite of the Maldives. And imagine that you are smart enough to understand what's going on with the Earth's climate. As things stand today, it is clear that it is too late to stop a burst of global warming that will push temperatures so high that nothing will save the Maldives islands. Maybe not next year but in a few decades, it is nearly certain. 

So, given the situation, what is the rational thing for you to do? Of course, it is to sell what you can sell as long as you can find a sucker who will buy. Then you can say good riddance to those who remain. 

What we are seeing, therefore, is a game in which someone will be left holding the short end of the dynamite stick. When the elites of the Maldives will have left for higher grounds, the poor will be stuck there. For them, the Seneca Cliff ends underwater.

The same considerations apply to the islands of the Chesapeake bay. Imagine you are mayor Eskridge. Imagine yourself telling Trump over the phone, "Mister President, I believe that you made a big mistake when you decided to leave the Paris Agreement. Insteas, you should promote emission cutting and renewable energy development." Yeah, can you imagine that?

The problem is not so much that Trump wouldn't listen, but that it is just too late for that kind of actions being able to save the Chesapeake islands, just as the Maldives islands. The only hope for the inhabitants of Tangier is that Trump will tell the US army to build a wall around the island. He may; he seems to like walls. But if you want him to do that, you should be nice, very nice, to him. 

The human mind is a curious contraption that has been perfected to what it is today by hundreds of thousands of years of natural selection. The minds that made the wrong choices were ruthlessly eliminated when the bodies they inhabited were eaten by sabertooth tigers or suffered equally bad fates. So, it may well be that in the current climate change drama, people are making the best possible choices in order to save (or try to save) their ass. The rich deny climate change because they plan to save themselves and dump the poors. The poor deny climate change because they hope to court the favor of the elites and be among those who will be saved by them. And so it goes.

So, when you read some absurd form of denial of climate change on the Web, don't think that the people who write are stupid, or evil, or paid by the PTB (Powerst That Be). They may, but they may simply be more desperate than you. 

You can find the same concepts expressed in narrative form in "The True Story of the Fall of Troy"

See also this post by Gaius Publius "Finding the Greater Fool"

The climate emergency: time to switch to panic mode?

The latest temperature data have broken all records (image from "think progress"). At best, this is an especially large oscillation and the climate system will be soon back on track; following the predictions of the models - maybe to be retouched to take into account a higher climate sensitivity to CO2 concentrationsing temperatures. At worst, it is an indication that the system is going out of control and moving to a new climate state faster than anyone could have imagined.

James Schlesinger once uttered one of those profound truths that explain a lot of what we see around us: it was: "people have only two modes of operation: complacency and panic."

So far, we have been in the "complacency" mode of operation in regard to climate change: it doesn't exist, if exist it is not a problem, if it is a problem, it is not our fault, and anyway doing something about it would be too expensive to be worth doing. But the latest temperature data are nothing but spine-chilling. What are we seeing? Is this just a sort of a rebound from the so-called "pause"? Or something much more worrisome? We may be seeing something that portends a major switch in the climate system; an unexpected acceleration of the rate of change. There are reasons to be worried, very worried: the CO2 emissions seem to have peaked, but that didn't generate a slowdown of the rate of increase of the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. If nothing else, it is growing faster than ever. And then there is the ongoing methane spike and, as you know, methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.

What's happening? Nobody can say for sure, but these are not good symptoms; not at all. And that may be a good reason to switch to panic mode.

The problem is that societies; specifically in the form called "states" do not normally show much intelligence in their behavior, especially when they are in a state of panic. One of the reasons is that states are normally ruled by psychopaths whose attitude is based on a set of simple rules, mainly involving intimidation or violence, or both. But it is not just a question of psychopaths in power; the whole society reacts to threats like a psychopath: with the emphasis on doing "something", without much concern about whether it is the right thing to do and what would the consequences could be. So, if climate starts to be perceived as a real and immediate threat, we may expect a reaction endowed with all the strategic finesse of a street brawl: "you hit me - I hit you."

A possible, counterintuitive, panic reaction might be of "doubling down" in the denial of the threat. That could lead to actions such as actively suppressing the diffusion of data and studies about climate; de-funding climate research, closing down climate research centers, marginalizing those who believe that climate is a problem; for instance classifying them among "terrorists." All that is already happening in some degree and it may well become the next craze, in particular if the coming US elections will handle the presidency to an active climate denier. That would mean hard times for at least a few years for everyone who is trying to do something against climate change. And, perhaps, it would mean the total ruin of the Earth's ecosystem.

The other possibility is to switch all the way to the other extreme and fight climate change with the same methods used to fight terrorism; that is, bombing it into submission. Of course, you cannot bomb the earth's climate into submission, but the idea of forcing the ecosystem to behave the way we want is the basic concept of "geoengineering".

In the world of environmentalism, geoengineering enjoys more or less the same reputation that Saddam Hussein enjoyed in the Western press in the 1990s. That's for good reasons: geoengineering is often a set of ideas that go from the dangerous to the impossible, all ringing of desperation. For a good idea of how exactly desperate these ideas can be, just take a look at the results of a recent study on the idea of pumping huge amounts of seawater on top of the Antarctic ice sheet in order to prevent sea level rise. If it were a science fiction novel, you'd say it is too silly to be worth reading.

However, it may be appropriate to start familiarizing with the idea that geoengineering might be the next world craze. And, perhaps, it is better to take the risk of doing something that could go wrong than to do nothing, considering that we have been doing nothing so far. Don't forget that there are also good forms of geoengineering, for instance the form called "biosphere regeneration." It is based on reforestation, fighting desertification, regenerative agriculture and the like. Removing some CO2 from the atmosphere by transforming it into plants can't do too much damage, although it cannot be enough to solve the problem. But it may stimulate also other fields of action against climate change; from adaptation to switching to renewable energy. Maybe there is still hope..... maybe.

How to build a safe plane according to the COP21 in Paris

In the 1950s, a series of crashes affected the "Comet,"  a plane that was supposed to be a major innovation in aviation. The main reasons of the disasters can be attributed to the general atmosphere of technological optimism that pervaded the 1950s and that led engineers to overestimate their capabilities. The Comet was a hard lesson to learn, but it was learned. Today, the industry is extremely conservative and modern planes are way safer than they used to be.

Several years of work with materials for turbine engines have taught me  how careful is the aerospace industry about the safety of their products. Of course, nobody wants to think about planes crashing, not even aerospace engineers, but they must. There is no such thing as an "alarmist" in the aerospace industry. So, the industry is extremely conservative and careful; nothing goes inside a plane unless it has passed rigorous tests and having been conclusively demonstrated to be safe and conforming to the specifics. That is what makes planes one of the safest existing transportation systems.  

Now, imagine now to handle the management of the earth's climate to aerospace engineers. They would quickly understand that the earth's ecosystem can crash; meaning that it can warm up out of control as the result of the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. And that can kill almost everything on the planet: it has happened in the past and there is no reason to believe it is impossible now. That would be the equivalent of a major plane crash; as they say in the industry a "hull loss." So, if the planet were a plane, it would have to be immediately grounded. Safety dictates that we should stop burning fossil fuels from now.

Unfortunately, it seems that the rules that hold for the aerospace industry are not valid when it is question of managing the earth's atmosphere. Let's suppose that a plane were to be built by the methods used in Paris.

How to build a safe plane according to the methods used in the COP21 in Paris.

1. A large group of politicians and bureaucrats convenes in a city in order to decide the specifics of the plane. Aerospace engineers provide advice, but they are not the ones responsible for the decisions made.

2. Those engineers who worry that the plane could crash are branded as "alarmists" and removed from the design process. Politicians not attending the conference declare that it is impossible that any plane can ever crash and that all the worries about planes crashing are only the result of aerospace engineers lobbying for fat research grants. 

3. The specifics of the plane, speed, range, size, etc, are decided by a debate among politicians, while grassroots activists march in the streets asking for better planes.

4. No one designs the plane, Contractors provide their own specifics for each subsystem (wings, engine, control system,etc) in total autonomy. Nobody can say whether these subsystems will work together and whether the result will be a plane that can fly.

5. The management of the conference has no power to modify the proposals of the contractors, nor to make sure that the specifics that have been listed will actually be met once the subsystems are delivered for assemblage. 

6. The conference is concluded with the politicians declaring that the plane will fly.  

7. The first test flight will be performed with the plane fully loaded with passengers.

h/t Richard Heinberg

Methane hydrates: the next communication bomb in the climate change debate

Methane released from ice is a spectacular and dangerous phenomenon. It is not so just because methane can catch fire, but because, on a large scale, the release it could generate a rapid and devastating global warming. We cannot say much about the time scale of such an event and not even if it could take place at all, but the perception of the possible danger ahead could be a true communication bomb in the climate debate. (the video shows Katey Walter from University of Alaska at Fairbanks experimenting with this methane trapped in ice)

As greenhouse gas, methane is more powerful than carbon dioxide, but there is a much more important difference between these two gases. Carbon dioxide emissions are something that we create and that we can control, at least in principle. If we stop burning fossil fuels, then we stop generating CO2. But, with methane, it is another matter. We have no direct control on the huge amounts of methane buried in ice in the permafrost and at the bottom of oceans in the form of "hydrates" or "clathrates."

Methane hydrates are a true climate bomb that could go off by itself as the result of a relatively small trigger in the form of a global warming. Sufficient warming would cause the decomposition of some hydrates to release methane to the atmosphere. This methane would create more warming and that would generate more decomposition of the hydrates. The process would go on by itself at increasing rates until the reservoirs run out of methane. That means pumping in the atmosphere truly a lot of methane. There are different estimates of the amount stored in hydrates, but it is surely large - most likely larger than the total amount of carbon present today in the atmosphere as CO2. The effects of the rapid release of so much methane would be devastating: an abrupt climate change that could bring a true planetary catastrophe. It is a scenario aptly called the "clathrate gun" and the target is us.

Now, there are plenty of uncertainties about this scenario, and we cannot say much about its timescale or even whether it would happen at all. But uncertainty is something that may make the scenario even more worrisome. People are scared of things they don't completely understand and that they know they can't control. That's surely the case of methane hydrates. We don't know how likely the worst scenarios are, we only know that methane is being released from hydrates right now and that the concentration of methane in the atmosphere is going up. We can't say if that's the start of the clathrate gun going off, but it is enough to be scared. I don't know about you, but I can tell you that I am scared.

The timescale of the clathrate gun may be long enough that we don't have to be worried in the short term. But another explosion seems to be going off much faster, this one in the media. The trend has started with scientific papers. Before 1999, there was not a single paper on the subject in the "sciencedirect" database. In 2011, 49 papers were published and the trend may be exponential. On the Web, Google Trends still doesn't generate a significant increase in the number of searches for terms such as "hydrate" or "clathrate". But we find about 40,000 pages dealing with the combination "climate change", "methane release" and hydrates. Even the mainstream press is starting to report about the subject. So far, the problem of methane hydrates has been largely absent from the debate on climate change. But that may be rapidly changing.

The methane release scenario has all the characteristics needed to catch the public's attention. It is spectacular, gigantic, biblical, and also rapid. It even has an evil sounding name: the "clathrate gun." It is nothing like the tame scenarios of the IPCC that plod on, slowly, up to the end of the 21st century. The IPCC scenario are not meant to be scary: nobody cares about slowly boiling frogs. But do you remember the 2004 movie "The day after tomorrow"? What scares us, mostly, are sudden catastrophic events. Now, think of a blockbuster movie from Hollywood about the clathrate gun. We would see giant hurricanes, biblical droughts, deadly heat waves, devastating floods..... No matter how the story is told, it is a true communication bomb.

Before continuing, let me hasten with a disclaimer. Let me state that I am NOT saying that we (scientists, activists, journalists or whoever) should exaggerate the dangers ahead in order to scare people with the methane story. Absolutely NOT - on the contrary, my point is that a scared public is NOT a good thing for reasons that I will explain in a moment. Let me also state that this post is NOT meant to claim that the clathrate gun is going off, it is meant to discuss how the public would react to the perception that it may be going off. This said, let me go on.


So, let's assume that the clathrate story becomes widely known, how's the public going to react? According to James Schlesinger, "People have only two modes of operation: complacency and panic". The clathrate communication bomb may well lead to a paradigm shift about climate and push the public opinion all of a sudden to the other side of the Goldilock dilemma: from complacency to panic.

Some people could see that as a welcome event: we would finally see an effort to do something to avoid climate change. But it is not obvious at all that this outcome would be positive. Things done in haste are not necessarily done well. Likely, we would see a frantic effort to "do something," no matter what, no matter how. If the past experience with the energy crisis is a guide, the chances to pick up the best solutions are small (see, for instance, the hype on biofuels). It is probable that we would seek for miracle solutions in large scale geoengineering. Carbon sequestration, sulphate particles in the upper atmosphere, mirrors in space, painting roofs white, what you have.


Would those actions work? Perhaps yes, but we would be moving into a totally uncharted territory. We don't know which could be the best solutions and we can't be sure of the side effects of most of them. Then, wouldn't the energy needed for geoengineering lead to more fossil fuels being consumed and, consequently, more greenhouse gases produced? And, then, suppose that geoengineering works in cooling the planet, wouldn't people revert to complacency and declare that the clathrate gun was a hoax from the beginning? As we move into the future, the problems we have created seem to become bigger just as it becomes evident that we, as a species, are just not equipped with the tools needed to solve them.

Things would have been much simpler if we had been able to find an agreement to tackle the climate problem at its roots, reducing greenhouse emissions. That would have provided a clear target to achieve and little room for wild swings in public perception. But it may well be too late for a strategy based on gradual changes. Things keep changing, and the only sure thing is that we can't stay idle in front of changes. So, get ready for the next big change: the clathrate communication bomb going off!

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Some recent articles and posts about methane release from hydrates. This list is not meant to be complete or representative, it is here just to give some idea of how the debate is heating up (a very appropriate metaphor, in this case)

Much ado about methane - David Archer on RealClimate 

An online model of methane in the atmosphere, by David Archer, RealClimate

Dave Archer wrong to dismiss concern about potential methane runaway in Arctic, by Gary Houser on "Climate change, the next generation"

How much time is there left to act? By Sam Carana on Geoengineering

Methane: a worse worst-case scenario, by "The Tracker", theidiottracker 

Wetting the stratosphere, boiling the oceans, Eli Rabett, RabettRun

The BEST results: the scientific method works.

Recently released results by an independent research team ("BEST") confirm something that had been obvious for a long time: the Earth is warming.

The recent results by the Berkeley team (BEST) confirm that the Earth is warming. That's no surprise; we had known that for decades. So, what's so special in these results?

One point is, of course, the evident disarray of the skeptical tribe, as they had clearly put great hopes in this study. But that is a short term phenomenon as they are rapidly closing ranks and restarting the doubt-creating machine. Rather, what is interesting in the BEST study, I think, is a further demonstration of how well the scientific method works (*).

Think about that: the BEST study had started with great fanfare as a new study performed by people who defined themselves as "skeptics". It was supposed to be the final world on whether the earth is warming or not and clear hints were sent by the performers that they had strong suspicions that decades of work by climate scientists had been badly affected by an overlooked phenomenon known as "Urban Heat Island" (UHI). Considering some previous statements by the BEST team leader, Richard Muller, and some of the financing sources of the study, it was not an auspicious start.

But, instead, the team was staffed by professionals and worked professionally; applying the scientific method. At least three different teams had worked before BEST in examining the data provided by the temperature measuring stations. They all had used the scientific method; just as the BEST team did. In the end, all four teams arrived to the same results. The "UHI" bias does not exist (or, better said, it is correctly accounted for in the treatment of the data). See? The method works.

But then, why so much discussion? What made the BEST team think that previous studies were wrong? And what made critics of the BEST effort think that it would be biased in favour of anti-science theses? Well, it is a fact that scientists are human beings and they have their personal biases.

There are two kinds of typical scientific biases: one is when an aged scientist mistrusts everything new; it is the "not measured here" syndrome. Within some limits, that is a syndrome shown by Richard Muller in several of his public statements - but, in the end, it didn't affect the work of the team.

The other kind of bias occurs when scientists turn out to be easily gullible on matters they are not experts on. This is shown, among many examples, by the recent case of the "E-Cat," the device that was claimed to be able to produce energy by nuclear fusion reactions. This kind of bias is specular to the one described before; here, a scientist may take position on the basis of incomplete data, but "measured here." Eventually, however, also this bias can be corrected by the scientific method.

So, we have a good method that we can use to understand what's happening around us and what problems we will be facing in the future. We can use the scientific method to take action in order to avoid the negative effects of climate change and resource depletion. The problem? We are not using it.






(*) But what is exactly the scientific method? It is not so easy to say as it could seem, since different fields of science require different approaches and the complete description of the method needs a rather long article in Wikipedia - to say nothing of the many books and studies that have been dedicated to the subject. But I think there is a single fundamental point in the method: experimental results always take precedence over theory. In other words, reality always trumps hopes. It is this approach that defends us from the ideological bias that is part of our way of thinking.