Every time I opened LinkedIn, I find myself surprised (pleasantly) by the significant increase in call outs of “climate catastrophists,” whose calls over the last 50 years simply haven’t come true. No major hurricanes in the Gulf in August? Climate change done it. The most rain West Texas has had in decades receiving their annual average in 12 days? You guessed it. But at $4-$9 trillion a year to get to net zero while the world builds 350 new coal plants and China expands production capacity by 600 mm tons a year (that would be more than a 20% increase in their countries emissions..), people are rightly asking questions of the same people that pushed the “COVID is the end of the world” narrative.
As a result, we see figures like Steve Koonin, Bjorn Lomborg and Michael Shellenberger prominently pushing back. It’s important work, as the World Economic Forum (defund the WEF…) descends on New York and has pivoted from controlling society using COVID to using climate change to the same end. Here’s a guest post from Doug on the topic with a fellow substack writer’s comments on the WEF in New York at the end.
Steven Koonin writes in the WSJ, each year, some 2,200 gigatons (or 0.01%) of Antarctica's ice is discharged in the form of melt and icebergs, while snowfall adds almost the same amount. The difference between the discharge and addition each year is the ice sheet’s annual loss.
That figure's been increasing in recent decades, from 40 GT a year in the 1980s to 250 GT a year in the 2010s. But the increase is a small change in a complex and highly variable process. The recent annual losses amount to 0.001% of the total ice. If continued at this rate, they'd raise sea level by only 3 inches over 100 years.
Two recent studies reported in the media focus on the terminus of glaciers—ie, where the ice, the ocean and the ground come together. One used an underwater drone to map the seabed at a depth of 2,000 ft, about 35 miles from the terminus of the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica. It sought to detail the extent of a large ice retreat at the glacier.
The cause of the specific event at the Thwaites Glacier remains unknown, in part because the time of the rapid retreat hasn’t been determined. It likely happened more than 70 years ago, if not several centuries ago. But the media claim a doomsday glacier the size of Florida is disintegrating faster than thought. In reality, the Thwaites Glacier is retreating less than half as rapidly today as it did in the past.
A second study tested the idea that freshwater from the melting of one glacier could be carried by currents along the shore to accelerate the discharge of nearby glaciers. Because global climate models are insufficiently detailed to describe the ocean near the coast, researchers constructed a special model to prove out their idea.
Under scenarios deemed likely by the IPCC, a connection between ocean currents and discharge would increase the overall discharge rate in one region of the continent by some 10% by the end of the century. But to emphasize the idea being tested, modelers used influences almost 3x larger.
Yet, even though that fact is stated in the paper, reporters rarely catch such nuance, and warned Antarctic melting could be 40% faster than thought with the absurd claim that a massive tsunami would swamp New York City and beyond, killing millions. A more accurate report would be that ocean currents connecting antarctic glaciers might accelerate melting.
To Sum It Up: These papers describe the science with appropriate precision and caveats, but the media misrepresent the research to raise alarm. That denies the public the right to make informed decisions about climate action.
Our Take: There are many reasons to doubt much of today's reporting by even long-established news outlets, but none are greater than the regular misrepresentation and distortion of facts related to climate studies. It's rampant, deliberate, and highly problematic.
Serious question - the world's managed to avoid blowing itself up for the past 80 years or so but the amount of money spent on weapons and mini-wars has been pretty mind boggling as well. If suggesting that it won't be possible for all 7-8 billion of us to ever have a "first world" lifestyle is off limits is the alternative letting them find out the hard way? An example of an industry that's facing the logical outcome of its own rhetoric is so called "fast fashion". Globalized supply chains have created a business that manufactures millions more pieces of clothing than it used to and encourages people to wear something once. The results are piled up literally all over the place. This same industry says it wants to be "green". Reducing energy use in both manufacturing, shipping, and delivery of this stuff, not to mention disposing of it in a way that doesn't create even more mountains of synthetic trash means it has to shrink. Odds are the shareholders aren't going to do that voluntarily. And the companies may be subsidized by countries who want the jobs. So essentially the taxpayers either support this activity via higher taxes now or inflation behind the scenes that raises prices for everyone will keep the party going. How is this reallocation of money different from the "UBI" idea? It's just which special interest group gets to handle the money.
My question is won't the plates act like ice cubes in a glass if the water level rises, and just float at a higher level? The whole flooding concept makes no sense to me, absent changes in weather patterns (maybe hurricanes happen more/less or elsewhere).