Later this week here at THB I’ll be publishing two important pieces — one a guest post from a climate scientist on how his work was cited in the DOE CWG report and the other exposing a major scandal in climate research. Today, I share a big pile of recommended readings. We are all lucky to have so much good thinking/writing available as well as some top notch science (that you won’t read about in the media), and I share some things that I’ve recently found to be well worth reading.
Let’s get to it . . .
Commentary and Reports
Ted Nordhaus, of The Breakthrough Institute,1 has a fantastic essay that asks and answers the question: “Why do so many smart people, most trained as scientists, engineers, lawyers, or public policy experts, and all who will tell you, and I say this not ironically, that they “believe in science,” get the science of climate risk so badly wrong?”
Ted has some thoughtful words about me and my work in the essay, which I appreciate. I do have a different view of myself being “cancelled.” It is true that I do not get Christmas cards from the most extreme climate activists (who are found also in science and major media), but that is OK — they all read THB anyway!
The secretary’s plan was simple. We would reorient the debate about climate science and climate policy by confronting the gatekeepers head-on. The DOE was to publish a report that would reinforce areas of wide agreement among climate scientists, such as the observable fact that carbon dioxide is a GHG that is warming the planet. However, in the immortal words of Al Gore, the report would also shed light on some inconvenient truths that cut against the prevailing narrative that climate change is an existential threat.
Among those truths: US historical data do not support claims of increased frequency or intensity of hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and droughts.
My job was to coordinate the effort without injecting my own bias.
Many of the reactions to the DOE CWG have exposed pathologies of gatekeepers in the scientific community. For instance, climate scientist Kerry Emanuel2 (who helped to push me out from 538 back in the day) criticizes the CWG report for focusing on U.S. hurricane landfalls and not discussing the Caribbean, and in the process shares some blatant misinformation:
Given that the Caribbean region had a high population density (and associated newspaper accounts) going back to the early 19th century, they could have looked at ALL Atlantic landfalls, not just the U.S. Had they done so, they would have discovered a clear upward trend.
OK then, let’s look at that data. Chenoweth and Howard (2023) complied a time series of hurricane landfalls in the Caribbean from 1494. They found no upwards trend and a big surprise (emphasis added):
The central and eastern Caribbean Sea region has the longest continuous record of hurricane impacts anywhere in the world, extending back to 1494 CE Hurricane numbers and intensity in this region vary with the warm and cold phases of El Niño-Southern Oscillation. Hurricane frequency was lowest in the 20th century and stands out in the 529-year record for both length and duration.3
Too often, in their enthusiasm to debunk their perceived enemies, climate scientists make public claims that are simply contrary to evidence and research. If the CWG continues to expose such bad form, it will have been a very worthy effort. Have a look at Fisher’s peek behind the scenes.
The former NOAA employee responsible for compiling its now-retired “Billion Dollar Disasters” tabulation has joined the climate advocacy group Climate Central to continue the tabulation. This is good news — I long argued that the tabulation was more about marketing and advocacy than science. This move makes that explicit.
Last week, President Trump fired the head statistician at the Bureau of Labor Statistics after a jobs report that he did not like. Michael Strain, a colleague at AEI, writes: By incorrectly asserting that the jobs data are biased, Trump is undermining the credibility of the information on which policymakers, businesses, households, and investors depend. I agree. Here is an op-ed that I wrote in 2013 when the Greek government brought charges against its chief statistician. I never thought I’d see that here.
Peer-reviewed Research you Won’t See in the Media
Prescribed burns in the western United States significantly reduces both extreme wildfire risk and air pollution. While there are many good arguments for accelerating the decarbonization of the economy, modulating forest fire risk is not high among them. Two new papers quantify the effects of prescribed burns on fires and air pollution:We find that locations ”treated” with low severity fire see an immediate 92% reduction in the probability of very high severity wildfires in the same location, with detectable reductions in high-severity fire risk lasting up to a decade and detectable up to 5 km from the treated locations. We estimate that the future benefits of low-severity fuel “treatments”, in terms of reduced smoke from severe fires, substantially outweigh the costs of the smoke produced in the initial treatment fires . . .Sources:
Adaptation outpaces changes in extreme heat in Europe. Most studies projecting future impacts of increasing heat waves ignore or downplay the role of adaptation. In the real world, adaptation works, as quantified in a new paper that looks at heat in Europe 2000 to 2022:During the analyzed period, Europe outpaced climate change, with the capacity to tolerate an additional 1°C rise every 17.9 years [95% CI 15.3–22.7]. . . Additionally, increasing economic output, likely driven by infrastructural improvements, especially greater affordability of air conditioning, enabled tolerating each additional 1°C due to a per capita GDP increase of 19.7 thousand euros . . .
A counterfactual analysis of hurricanes Matthew (2016), Irma (2017), and Dorian (2019) finds that under a worst-case alternative track for each storm, insured damages would have been $1.2 trillion, $525 billion, and $250 billion respectively. These are massive numbers and suggest that the U.S. has not seen anything close to a worst case hurricane landfall.“The top five downward counterfactuals by gross industry loss for each historical hurricane (light blue) and the top overall loss event (dark blue). The location of the City of Miami is marked in red.” Source: Rye and Boyd 2022. In the worst-case counterfactuals, insured losses are nearly 300 times the reported loss for Hurricane Matthew, 25 times higher for Hurricane Irma, and over 250 times higher for Hurricane Dorian.
Europe has experienced several significant drought events in the 21st century. A long-term climate record shows that they are well within the bounds of natural variability.By using long-term hydrological and meteorological observations, as well as paleoclimate reconstructions, here we show that central Europe has experienced much longer and severe droughts during the Spörer Minimum (~AD 1400–1480) and Dalton Minimum (~AD 1770–1840), than the ones observed during the 21st century. These two megadroughts appear to be linked with a cold state of the North Atlantic Ocean and enhanced winter atmospheric blocking activity over the British Isles and western part of Europe, concurrent with reduced solar forcing and explosive volcanism. Moreover, we show that the recent drought events (e.g., 2003, 2015, and 2018), are within the range of natural variability and they are not unprecedented over the last millennium.
Finally for today, on September 17th, my AEI colleague Ben Zycher and I will be part of a panel discussion at AEI in Washington, DC on the question: “Should the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding Be Reversed?”. Ben and I have different answers to that question, as do the two lawyers who will be joining us on the panel. Healthy and respectful debate and disagreement — How it should be done! Please join us, in person or online. Reserve your spot here.
Buckle up, this week is going to be a big one here at THB!
2 Bizarrely, the ClimateFeedback “fact check” does not actually look at claims made in the DOE CWG report, but instead, “implied claims.” Incredibly dishonest.
3 Here is what the IPCC AR6 WG1 says about expectations: “By the late 21st century, tropical cyclones are projected to be less frequent in the basins of the western and eastern North Pacific, Bay of Bengal, Caribbean Sea and in the Southern Hemisphere . . .”. Landfalling hurricanes in the Caribbean are not expected to increase, so Emanuel is wrong on that as well.
