As I skipped across the radio channels, I found myself at the tail end of a Michael Smerconish interview with climatologist Michael Mann about climate change. Mann summed up his sentiment, “I hope that climate change doesn’t happen.”
That’s a close paraphrase. It is also what many ordinary folks, news media, pundits and even scientists say. Literally, that’s nonsense since climate change has been occurring on planet earth for a billion or so years and will continue well into the future.
But it’s a dangerous slogan that squeezes useful thinking about weather compared to climate, how we measure each, whether we project those with computer models or rely more on observational data, about pragmatic policy versus the larger command and control style of governance, and the variation across and within the several earth systems that frame our understanding of climate.
The slippery language of “I hope that climate change doesn’t happen” misses real world, pragmatic responses. Take, for example, the recent Canadian wildfires.
The air pollution transported to the northeastern United States from the fires has led to the usual chorus to take measures that focus on climate change. What we do not read is that forest management programs can accomplish far more than claimed offsets to the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
California researchers found that wildfire emissions outstripped, by double, the state’s own efforts to reduce greenhouse gasses over more than a dozen years. They also found that wildfires were second in CO2 emissions after transportation. Another study in the journal Science found that wildfire emissions in North American and Eurasia was about twice as much as for annual global aviation.
An aggressive effort to control wildfires with land management would likely exceed grandiose schemes to reduce CO2 through electric vehicle mandates and offshore wind farms.
Speaking of EV mandates, why ignore the very real advantages of hybrids? Toyota’s Chairman, Aldo Toyoda, has pointed out several important facts. “The amount of raw materials in one long-range battery electric vehicle could instead be used to make 6 plug-in hybrid electric vehicles or 90 hybrid electric vehicles … The overall carbon reduction of those 90 hybrids over their lifetimes is 37 times as much as a single battery electric vehicle.”
As government scales up EV mandates, sometimes to the exclusion of all gas-powered cars, significant lost opportunities are multiplied. Is this willful ignorance, corporate favoritism or the path to expansive government regulation?
Solar and wind farms often trade off the addictive need for more and more energy by chewing up the natural environment. Take the renewed interest in reviving the Soda Mountain Solar Project, a three-square-mile solar farm located in California’s Mojave Desert. We can imagine many more habitats that will be sacrificed to meet renewable energy needs — wildlife crossings, underground water aquifers, animal burrows and volcanic outcroppings — which to city dwellers may be a vast wasteland.
Ocean windmill farms contemplate the same destructive impact on the whale population and other sea life, not to mention the interference with national defense. Even if these impacts are mitigated in the near term, the materials used to build these windmills are difficult to recycle and will require large graveyards to bury them once their useful life (about 25 years) is over.
And, of course, the race to stave off climate change will affect the viability of energy grids, be subverted by opposite plans by countries like India and China, and end with the obsession to control household appliances and reducing the carbon footprint of all things we do to live our lives.
At the other end of the science policy spectrum where the Dr. Dooms reside are climate realists who seek more functional and adaptive outcomes. Judith Curry, in her new book, Climate Uncertainty and Risk-Rethinking Our Response, points out that catastrophe thinking neglects the findings of the latest official United Nations report that nearly all the feared tipping points — those that will cause us to miss saving the planet from being too warm relative to pre-industrial times (1720-1800) — are either very unlikely, exceptionally unlikely and/or having low confidence.
What this means is that our policy makers, our governments, our think tanks and climate organizations, and ourselves have time to better understand climate as well as time to make better informed decisions about adapting to a changing climate. We have time to avoid upscaling small-scale projects into large-scale environmental problems.
We have time to appreciate, according to Richard Tol, a long-time member of the United Nations process, that many of the “dramatic impacts of climate change are really symptoms of mismanagement and poverty and can be controlled if we had better governance and more development.”
Joe Nalven is a former associate director of the Institute for Regional Studies of the Californias at San Diego State University.
