The Lancet response to Bjørn Lomborg

A Bjørn Lomborg Wall Street Journal article (Climate Change and the Lancet’s ‘Heat Death’ Deception With COP27 approaching, {Lancet} claims rising temperatures have killed people but ignores that they appear to have saved far more.) criticized a Lancet study that found a increasing heat deaths among old people without adjusting for the fact that there are a lot more old people now, thanks to medical and environmental progress as a result of fossil fuel use.

Lancet then responded by going wildly off topic: "Behind this discussion lies an ethical conflict. Older generations have enjoyed enormous benefits from industrialization, mostly based on fossil fuels. But global heating from fossil-fuel greenhouse gases leads to extreme weather events such as floods and droughts, wildfires, reduced crop yields, increased risk of infectious disease, biodiversity loss and sea-level rise, all with effects on health and survival. We are putting our children’s future in the balance. The generational injustice can’t be ignored."

Now it's not the old people, who are actually doing better because of fossil fueled progress, but the young in a distant future who are threatened by climate change events that, with all the scrutiny today, still haven't materialized. In fact, this chart shows that our children's risks caused by climate change have declined dramatically over the past 100 years of rapidly expanding fossil fuel use.

Heat and cold deaths?

The Lancet is hoist on its own petard.

Droughts?

Floods and droughts?

Extreme weather events?

Wildfires?

Reduced crop yields?

 

Increased risk of infectious disease?

Apparently the Lancet physicians never heard of the pandemics that killed hundreds of millions in colder periods of past centuries: the Black Death (Bubonic Plague) that killed 200 million over six hundred years ago; Smallpox killed 56 million about 500 years ago; Spanish Flu killed almost 50 million only one hundred years ago; the Plague of Justinian killed perhaps 50 million 1,500 years ago; and AIDS/HIV so far has killed around 30 million. 

Of the roughly 259 pandemics spanning the past several thousand years, the probable link to climate change is rapid increase in population and cities after the end of the last glacial period (Ice Age) about 11,700 years ago.

Sea level rise?

Historic sea level higher for most of the past 3,000 years.

Honolulu sea level?

Honolulu rate of sea level rise is six inches per century and steady.

The key points of the Lancet response are all unsupported.

So I wrote a letter to the Editor of the Wall Street Journal:

Editor

The Lancet response to Bjorn Lomborg’s article (Climate Change and the Lancet’s ‘Heat Death Deception’” was breathtaking in its deceptions. Its portent of fossil fuel doom didn’t acknowledge the 99% decrease in climate related deaths during the past 100 years due to wealth creation and development as a result of fossil fuel use. Placing the present in the context of the last 1,000 years, we find in the past greater weather events such as droughts and floods and over ten times the acreage burnt by wildfires annually. Rather than “reduced crop yields”, the world now produces record harvests without increased acres planted on an almost annual basis. Sea levels, now lower than during half of the past 10,000 years, are increasing at a rate of six inches per century with no signs of acceleration, per the world’s tide gauge records. 

 

The Lancet letter then goes off tangent about deaths caused by small particulate matter air pollution. Unmentioned by Lancet, these deaths are primarily due to burning wood and dung to cook and heat in enclosed spaces and have been since humans mastered fire. The growing use of natural gas and electricity generated from burning fossil fuels reduces these deaths dramatically.

 

“ Physician (Lancet), heal thyself!”

Frequently Asked Questions by Ignorant Climate Change Alarmists

Ignorance is a strong foundation to build a belief system on, and human-caused climate change is the best example extant. I’m frequently confronted with statements that anthropogenic global warming, climate change, or now its latest incarnation, weather “weirding”, are responsible for such things as droughts, sea levels rising, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, vanishing snow, retreating glaciers, civil war in Syria, deforestation in Indonesia, and loss of the Kilimanjaro ice cap.

My answer is always that climate change is natural, and that our current modest warming is a natural recovery from the Little Ice Age (1400-1850AD), the coldest period during the past 10,000 years. I explain that there have been five warming periods in the past 10,000 years since the end of the Ice Age. I name the periods chronologically, beginning with the Holocene Optimum 8,000 to 5,000 years ago, the Minoan, Roman, Medieval (900 to 1400AD), and finally our current warm period. I point out that each warm period does not get as warm as its predecessor, and that the warm period we are experiencing now is the least warm by far.

Then I throw in the Eemian warm period 125,000 years ago, and note that it was much warmer than any of the Holocene, our current warm period. By then I can see total incomprehension, so I don’t explain that the past million years have a pattern of 100,000-year cold (glacial) periods alternating with 20,000-year warm (interglacial) periods. The bottom line is that I have just given a brief lesson in natural climate change, and that the concept that climate is always changing, and often is much warmer than now, is met by dumb disbelief by my audience. “That’s not what Al Gore said!”

So then I make it simple. I show a chart of temperature in a local city, Santa Rosa, California (below). Temperature in Santa Rosa peaked in the 1930’s, and there has been a cooling trend since.

Since these temperature records are from the U. S. government National Climatic Data Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, I can’t be accused of oil company propaganda.

This is the Santa Rosa chart after it was recently "homogenized". The strong cooling trend of the originally recorded data has now become warming - the early 1900's are over one degree Celsius lower, and recent temperature are about half a degree higher.

Here is Ukiah, before and after homogenization. Again, a century-long cooling trend becomes warming.

Ukiah before homogenization:

 Ukiah after homogenization:

They might say, so what, that’s only one city, and the Earth is overheating. Obviously they haven’t comprehended what I illustrated concerning natural climate change in the past 10,000 years, and the past million years. So then I show them a chart showing there has been no significant global warming for almost 18 years, a period where the rate of increase of atmospheric CO2 has doubled. 

None of the climate models show that a huge increase in atmospheric CO2 does not increase warming for almost 18 years. Just the opposite. The climate models show warming accelerating, yet at this point measured temperature is below the lowest climate model projections. In science studies, when models don’t agree with reality, the models get thrown out. Since the UN still goes with the models instead of reality, that shows that science is not what the UN is trying to accomplish.

How about sea levels rising. Tide gauge records for the four largest cities on the U. S. West Coast – San Diego, Las Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle – show that current sea level for each of them is about the same as in 1941, and that all have experienced falling sea level since 1983.

.

Do you see any sign of sea level acceleration in this San Francisco tide gauge record? Sea level was two inches higher at San Francisco in 1983 than in 2016, and the rate of rise is less than five inches per century. The "experts" predict sea level will rise five feet by 2100, but at the current rate sea level will not reach a five-foot increase until 3300 AD. Just in time for the next glacial period (Ice Age).

Droughts? Fewer and less severe than before 1950.

Hurricanes? Glad you asked. Fewer powerful ones, and the longest period since the Civil War that no strong hurricane has hit the U. S.

Tornadoes. Also fewer strong ones.

Floods? Besides the fact that floods should not have anything with global warming, there has been no trend in increasing weather-related losses.

Snow? No trend of less snow.

Glacier retreat? Glaciers have been retreating since the end of the Little Ice Age, and for many glaciers, they retreated far more before 1900 than after. Seen Chasing Ice, by James Balog? James does not inform his viewers that the glacier he videoed in Greenland retreated 18 miles from 1851 to 1964, stopped retreating until 2001 while atmospheric CO2 increased steadily and dramatically, and has retreated an additional six miles since (during a period of no significant global warming).

Wildfires? The trend is going down.

It is amazing how small an effect facts have on beliefs, such as the anthropogenic global warming/climate change religion. It should be so simple to end it. CO2 is going way up, but temperature isn't, and the climate now is nowhere as warm as previously naturally. 

But it isn't. Belief dies hard, if ever.

Polar Bear Prosperity

It’s fund-raising time for natural climate change deniers and a photo-shopped image of a polar bear on a tiny ice floe in a vast ice-free ocean was used as their “poster boy” 

Brad Keyes at The Conversation defended its use: “The problem is, only sensational exaggeration makes the kind of story that will get politicians’—and readers’—attention. So, yes, climate scientists might exaggerate, but in today’s world, this is the only way to assure any political action and thus more federal financing to reduce the scientific uncertainty.”

Pity the polar bear. Global temperature was up 1°C, Arctic summers were 5°-8°C warmer, and Arctic summer ice was virtually gone. This occurred annually for thousands of years 130,000-115,000 years ago during the Eemian interglacial, and hit its peak 125,000 years ago. And the polar bear survived.

The polar bear also survived during the recent Holocene Climatic Optimum, 9,000-5,000 years ago, when Arctic temperatures were similar to the Eemian period, with substantially less sea ice than the present. And the polar bear survived.

None of these facts of polar bear survival during previous warmer, lower sea ice periods, seems to have sunk in with the natural climate change deniers. Recent periods of greater warmth, higher sea levels, and lower Arctic sea ice should register something in their feverish minds: our current warming following the Little Ice Age, the coldest period since the end of the Ice Age, is modest and unremarkable compared to previous warm periods. Within the past 10,000 years, the Holocene Climatic Optimum, and the following cooler Minoan, Roman, and Medieval warm periods were all warmer than the present. And the polar bears survived them all.

In fact, the polar bear population quadrupled 1960-2000, and is up 10%-20% from 2000 to the present. 

Surviving? They’re thriving.

Chicken Little is a Dumb Cluck

The upcoming release of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fifth Assessment Report (IPCC AR5) has unleashed Chicken Littles that would have overfilled Petaluma when it was the “Chicken Capital of the World”. Editorial cartoons in both the San Francisco Chronicle and the Santa Rosa Press Democrat featured a “climate change denier” being engulfed by waves of global warming catastrophes. However, much of IPCC AR5 has already been leaked, and it is stealthily scaling back its prognostications from six years ago of the sensitivity of temperature increases to the doubling of atmospheric CO2. It now contains hints that previous certainties are now not quite so certain, inspired no doubt by the lack of significant warming for the past 17 years.

I had already analyzed in my last letter the evidence of slowing sea level rise that can be determined by looking at the 159-year San Francisco tide gauge record. At its current rate of 3.22 inches of sea level rise per century, it will take almost 11,000 years to hit the 36-inch increase that “experts” expect by 2100 (and that some expect by 2050). That would require an immediate increase from just over three inches per century to over three inches per decade. Temperature would have to increase immediately to above the highest IPCC AR5 projections not expected until after 2100.

Rolly Coombs, electrical power generation expert, noted a recent Thomas Elias ICO article where Elias mistakenly wrote that two Southern California solar installations would generate one-third of the power of a nuclear plant. Rolly observed that they would only produce 9% of Diablo Canyon’s 18,566 GwH/year, and I verified that by comparing their 642MW maximum capacity and 28% capacity factor to Diablo Canyon’s 2150MW capacity, which came out only 8%.

Is Elias stupid, or are his readers?

Both?

We Don't Have A Planetary Emergency - Yet

Global Warming never was a planetary emergency, and then it became natural climate change (“natural” was omitted – it’s an inconvenient truth). Then it became severe weather, except that a modicum of weather history research shows current weather not nearly as severe as previous. Through it all the word “unprecedented” has been liberally sprinkled, without adding the caveats that the warming was only unprecedented if you only look back a century, or almost a millennium at most. How moderate warming can be considered an emergency, given the greater good it provides, and the economic and societal progress burning fossil fuels provides can be considered dangerous, is ludicrous. The alternative, global cooling leading into another glacial period, can be easily demonstrated to be a magnitude greater in terms of human catastrophes than warming could ever. For the past million years, 100,000-year glacial periods have alternated with 10,000-year interglacials. It’s no accident that humanity made more progress in the 10,000 years since the end of the last Ice Age than in the 100,000 years that preceded it. It won’t be long (in geological terms) before Chicago is back under a mile-thick ice sheet, and San Franciscans have to travel west 26 miles to get to the cruise ship berths. Dante was wise when he made ice the inner circle of Hell. A “Slushball” Earth is a planetary emergency to truly fear.