This Frog is not Ready to Croak

Generally I admire Paul Krugman greatly as a very intelligent guy who is right on most things. But I part company with him over the climate. He has bought into the Cassandras who tell us that the end is nigh, all hope is lost, we are going to boil in a rapidly overheating Earth. Here's a bit from his latest NY Times op-ed:

Still, the boiled-frog problem on the economy is nothing compared with the problem of getting action on climate change.

Put it this way: if the consensus of the economic experts is grim, the consensus of the climate experts is utterly terrifying. At this point, the central forecast of leading climate models — not the worst-case scenario but the most likely outcome — is utter catastrophe, a rise in temperatures that will totally disrupt life as we know it, if we continue along our present path. How to head off that catastrophe should be the dominant policy issue of our time.

But it isn’t, because climate change is a creeping threat rather than an attention-grabbing crisis. The full dimensions of the catastrophe won’t be apparent for decades, perhaps generations. In fact, it will probably be many years before the upward trend in temperatures is so obvious to casual observers that it silences the skeptics. Unfortunately, if we wait to act until the climate crisis is that obvious, catastrophe will already have become inevitable.

The problem I have with this "slowly boiled" fear is that I've been hearing it for 30 years. Yes... the IPCC has been predicting runaway global warming since the late 1970s. It is now 30 years later. I don't see any runaway global warming. Here's the latest from the US's NOAA agency which monitors the weather. I've bolded the key bits:

NOAA: U.S. Temperature and Precipitation Near-Average for June

July 10, 2009

The June 2009 temperature and precipitation for the contiguous United States were near the long-term average, based on records going back to 1895, according to an analysis by NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C.

The average June 2009 temperature of 69.5 degrees F was 0.2 degree F above the 20th Century average. Precipitation across the contiguous United States in June 2009 averaged 2.90 inches, which is 0.01 inch above the long-term value.

I live in a river delta and am on land which is at or below sea level. I bought my house in the early 1980s and was aware of the IPCC predictions, so I mentally estimated that I had 25 years before I had to abandon my house to the sea level rise. They were predicting something between a one to two foot rise in sea levels by the year 2000. I would walk the dykes and mentally calculate how bad it could be with higher sea levels and a winter storm during high tide causint the sea to overtop the dykes.

Needless to say, my house is still safe and dry. Over the years I've gotten more and more cynical about the IPCC as they have kept the rhetoric up about catastrophe in the "near future" as that future fades further and further in time. It is 30 years since I started worrying. I don't see any sea rise. I don't see any real global warming (certainly nothing like they warned). I've seen them cut back their immediate scary numbers while keeping their rhetoric running hot with distant dire warnings. They never explain why the immediate threat they prophesized didn't appear. They simply move the doomsday date out further into the future. Nutty.

I wanted to stick graphs into this blog entry to show how IPCC keeps moving the goal posts, but they cleverly change the graphs so that no two use the same parameters, so you can't find two that show any clear change in the "predictions". Real scientists would be eager to track models versus data and show either correlation or drift. But IPCC futzes the data so when I go back to the 2001 documents and try to compare them to the 2007 documents I can't ever find an apples to apples comparison. It is frustrating.

Sadly Paul Krugman has been swept up in the hysteria. I find it funny because he lives in New Jersey which is suffering an unusually cold summer. So cold that a potato blight (and tomato blight) has seized the US Northeast. The same kind of cold wet weather that in the late 1840s caused the great Irish Potato Famine. Isn't it a great irony that "global warming" causes a widespread blight by a fungus that loves cold wet summers?

To understand the blighted world of the doomsayers, keep this in mind:

• In 1968 the Ehrlich's published a book, The Population Bomb, that predicted famine by the late 1970s because of overpopulation.
  

  "The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate..."
  

  They were doing simplistic linear extrapolitions of current birth/death trends and agricultural productivity. The reality was no famine. The gloom-and-doom was misplaced.


• The oil shortages of the mid-1970s caused by Arab embargos and the rising price of oil as Middle Eastern countries took control of oil away from American corporations fed into a general gloom of the Club of Rome which predicted widespread shortages and a catastrophe as Western civilization collapsed from material shortages in their publication The Limits to Growth.
  

  "The authors load their case by letting some things grow exponentially and others not. Population, capital and pollution grow exponentially in all models, but technologies for expanding resources and controlling pollution are permitted to grow, if at all, only in discrete increments."
  

  The joke was by that the late 1980s and early 1990s oil was cheap. The predicted resource shortages never came.


• Over the last 10 to 20 years another great doomsday prediction is "peak oil" or Hubbert Peak Theory. It predicts that we are on the threshold of a great falloff in oil production because we've exhausted the world's oil fields. I don't doubt there is a peak, but as usualy the thrill of doom seems to goad these Cassandras to gleefully see an end coming soon. The reality is that until every corner is prospected, nobody knows for sure. But I do know that I listened to T. Boone Pickens say that there was ample natural gas reserves.
  From 1985 through 2004, total natural gas reserves increased 22.3 trillion cubic feet. (see here)
  As usual, this theory is focused on extrapolations that ignore technical innovation. These doomsters totally ignore methane clathrates held in the world's oceans.

I think it is a weakness in human nature to be attracted to fuzzy thinking about (a) a "golden age" in the past and (b) a "doomsday scenario" for the future. In reality, humans have muddled along through a very long history. I suspect we will muddle through this as well. But not if we start listening too closely to the doom-and-gloom crowd. Sure, pay some attention because they generally have genuine concerns, but don't let them lead you to excesses because of their overly emotional reactions.