What If...

My 20 year predictions from 5 years ago

In 2010, apparently at Keith Kloor's instigation, I made some predictions about 2030.

See how you think they are panning out a quarter of the way through. Some interesting comments, too.

Related, just two years after entering the climate business, in 1992, I made these rather wild prognostications that mostly ran through 2019, and a few words about the further future.

A hat tip to Robert Nagle for reminding me of these.

This week I am thinking we will drop the ball just on sheer nationalist belligerence, replaying the calamities of the early 20th century, long before the climate thing kicks in.

Remember, the thing about existential threats is you have to get ALL of them right.

Exxon as Egg, Defeating Organized Denial as Omelette?

We have to forgive Big Oil and offer it paths to move on without undue disruption, just as we have to forgive ourselves and design our own transition.

William Connolley has challenged me to take up Exxon's side of the battle in the question of whether their behavior should be investigated on the same principles that convicted the major tobacco companies a few years back.

I have thought about it and I am not going to do that. I think the investigation of Exxon should proceed. On the other hand, I think the demonization of Exxon must stop.
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Mike Mann is definitely on board with the investigation of Exxon, according to a thought-provoking interview with Inside Climate News.

Mann: I think it’s a legitimate question to ask, "Was there some collusion here?" Were they intentionally misleading the public and policymakers and their own stockholders about what they knew about climate change...when they knew better—when their own scientists had told them that the science is real and the outcomes would potentially be catastrophic?
I've seen compelling arguments from one of the lawyers who was involved in the RICO [Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act] case against the tobacco industry. She was quoted as saying that based on what she has seen, there is a prima facie case for suspecting the possibility that they [Exxon] were engaging in what is effectively racketeering.
I think we all deserve to learn more about what they knew and when they knew it...and I assume that will come out in the course of [the] investigation.

ICN: Do you think we'll find evidence that other oil companies behaved similarly?

Mann: Oh yeah. I think this is the veritable tip of the iceberg. If this investigation from [Schneiderman's office] leads to legal action, then there will be a process of discovery, and my guess would be that then we start to see stuff from the Global Climate Coalition [an industry group, disbanded in 2002, that opposed carbon emissions cuts], of which ExxonMobil was a member, but there were many other members. I suspect that we’ll learn a lot about the other actors that were involved, and ExxonMobil might not even be the worst of the actors.

I have little doubt that this is true. As Mike said, this is stuff we have "long suspected".
On the other hand, Exxon/Mobil is a vast enterprise, and the question of collective culpability is complicated, even though it's no surprise that there's reason to believe that some people pulling levers at Exxon were behaving maliciously.
Here, Mike spins it rather negatively:

ICN: One big difference between the tobacco and Exxon cases is that Exxon didn't hide its climate change research. Exxon scientists have published peer-reviewed papers and participated in government panels. How do you think that changes the situation?

Mann: Frankly, there was sort of a good cop/bad cop thing going on there...The cynic in me thinks that they were playing both sides. In fact, we know that they continued to have some scientists who participated in the IPCC process into the 2000s, while they were obviously engaged in massive funding of climate change disinformation, basically financing propaganda that was fundamentally inconsistent with the sort of work that their own scientists were doing.
So this internal dissonance feeds the notion that it wasn't really a good faith effort on their part to try to find a way forward to solving this problem. It was to buy them some plausible deniability and apparent credibility by appearing to engage with the scientific community, while at the same time, behind the scenes, massively funding efforts to attack the science and to attack the scientists. That's my view.

That's hardly the most charitable view one could take.

Presumably in an institution as vast as Exxon/Mobil, some people were acting in good faith and others were not.

The comparison to tobacco is weak on at least three grounds:

• Firstly, the tobacco companies were more tightly knit and smaller than big oil, so their intentionality was more cohesive. 
• Second, the oil companies are producing a product with enormous short term benefits, and what were originally long-range and speculative drawbacks. As Mike said, the knowledge that intolerable global risks were built into the fossil fuel business model must have been obvious to some people within the organization, but it's hard to identify what the organization as a whole knew or should have known. That one's own business, and a mightily impressive one, is ultimately also destructive is surely something people will be slow to understand.
• Third, while the tobacco companies were exclusively promulgating pseudoscience to support their model, Exxon was not. Big oil is a legitimate presence at the same annual AGU meeting where American climate science comes together.

To be sure, on the other hand, pseudoscience on climate has certainly been produced in copious proportion, largely by by dubious non-profits, some of which were modestly but directly supported by Exxon. I think, presuming that any shred of civilization survives the coming bottleneck, that it will be historically important to determine to what extent this is true, and to find legally and ethically sound ways of discouraging the organized promulgation of agenda-driven pseudoscience.

I am not insensitive to the echoes of this position in what Lamar Smith is doing to NOAA which the Texas Observer summarizes as "to ferret out out how — not whether — politically motivated government scientists are using what Smith believes are “skewed” numbers."

The issue really lies in the disconnect between what science actually says and what the body politic understands. From the outside, there is an easily perceived symmetry between what Lamar Smith says about Thomas Karl and what Mike Mann says about Exxon. The adjudication of this question, which is harassment and which legitimate investigation, depends crucially on what the science actually says. And yet, we don't want the courts deciding that - lawyers deciding what science is legitimate obviously fraught with risk. If the courts err in such a judgment, it could lead directly to Lysenkoism, wherein totally bogus theories are enshrined in law.

I have, until recently, been an enthusiastic supporter of Bill McKibben, whom I always thought of as (like Hansen) balancing a serious and measured disposition with a horrified comprehension of the long-term ethical travesty that our current civilization is based upon. But his targeting of Exxon as scapegoat goes too far. With this he's stopped seeming to me the reluctant activist and more the political gamesman.

The problem is that blaming Big Oil is not the way out of our quandary. We cannot shut these industries down. Not only do they represent significant investment that we cannot afford to throw into chaos, they are also legitimate and crucial stakeholders in the energy problem. We have to work with the incumbents in the energy industry, not against them. We have to understand the constraints under which they operate, some of which they can;t afford to be frank about. While those of us in the most developed countries need to consider the possibility of moving to less energy-intensive approaches to life, we also need to understand that the world will need more, not less energy to proceed to a state of civilization and sane governance, where daily life is not fraught with risk of deprivation and violence.

This is achievable at the same time as decarbonization. There are no serious technical obstacles. But making enemies of the incumbent powers in the energy industry is not the way to do it.

In the end, an oil major can more easily sustain an investigation than a science team; they are plenty lawyered up already. What to NOAA is an upheaval must at the present time seem to Exxon as an irritant. But on the other hand, this analogization of the oil industry and the tobacco industry can be taken too far. The fossil fuel business model must be replaced by an energy business model, but the road for the big producers must be made easy, not hard, or they will fight tooth and nail, and bring us down along with them.

That corporations are entities with free will is an absurd legal fiction that does enormous damage.

They are animated by people, but the people are fungible and replaceable. A corporation is a machine which responds to the marketplace and the legal and social environment. Our objective cannot be to destroy the crucial components of industry. Rather we should be looking for ways to motivate them to act collaboratively.

It would be great to get to the bottom of the climate BS industry. I think we will find that corporations like Exxon played a minor role, and that it's more rich and socially malign oil billionnaires as individuals who are behind the production of manipulative pseudoscience. But if prying at Exxon offers a way to investigate, I think I have to support it. I am not convinced that a huge amount of culpability is going to end up on their shoulders, though, and frankly, I hope that it won't.

On the other hand, McKibben's developing posture that the oil industry must be destroyed is a turn very much for the worse. The history of scapegoating is not a pretty one. In the end, the oil industry is us. We have to forgive Big Oil and offer it paths to move on without undue disruption, just as we have to forgive ourselves and design our own transition.

Big Oil itself increasingly understands this. The rest of us should do so as well.

Our task is to energize the world in the near future while minimizing the (already inevitably large) losses to our descendants over times to come. Defeating organized denial is a part of that task, but breaking the energy industry in pursuit of that goal is a catastrophically disproportionate strategy.

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Tightened up version of this rant at Medium entitled "Investigate Exxon, but Blame Yourself"

The law of BS and the 8 Error Tweet

As proof of the proposition that

the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is AT LEAST an order of magnitude greater than the effort required to produce it

which is the fundamental flaw with the "my opinion is every bit as good as yours" school of democracy, I offer this article on Medium, wherein I take 2500 words to refute a single tweet, a tweet which manages to hide at least eight identifiable implicit but substantive errors.

Indeed, although @AZComendador is somewhat obscure and probably not very influential, the misinformation density in that single tweet was so high that I decided to award him the Golden Horseshoe for (correction) 2015.

The author replies on Twitter that he "mostly agrees with me". Weird. Anyway he wants to discuss but doesn't want to take it up on Medium. (I agree that Medium is better for publishing than for discussing.)

But I don't want to take it up on Twitter. Arguing on Twitter is such a useless time sink. It's very hard to craft 140 characters that are immune to willful misinterpretation. Twitter is useful for sharing news and exchanging ideas with people with whom one has a shared understanding. As a medium for debate, it is a horrible time sink.

So if AZComendador wants to discuss matters, he is welcome here.

(Moderation is turned off again, until such time as he-who-shall-not-be-named decides to monopolize the conversation again.)

This is all I have to say about the CRU emails

Proven by stolen emails: under pressure from people behaving maliciously, communities used to comity flail. That's all.

— mtobis (@mtobis) November 10, 2015

This morning's tweets

I think I was on. Nothing you haven't heard before, but in pithy quotable 140-character chunks. Kicked off by my pointing Fab at my article CO2 On Trial

David Roberts on Keystone

When he starts off on the right foot, nobody is more cogent on climate issues than David Roberts:

Fossil fuel extraction and transport projects have a presumptive social warrant. Local opposition or environmental standards may sometimes trump that warrant, but the heuristic applied defaults to positive, to yes.

That attitude simply isn't commensurate with the urgency that climate change imposes. Limiting global temperature rise to 2 degrees means not burning 80 percent of the fossil fuel reserves already available to us. At the rate we're going, we're going to burn through that 20 percent in just a few decades. There's got to be some decisions made somewhere not to dig it up, not to build distribution infrastructure for it — to leave it in the ground.

Getting there means removing that presumptive social warrant, the default yes. It means creating a new heuristic: fossil fuels must be reduced as fast as practically possible. It means creating a new default answer to fossil fuel infrastructure: no, unless a case can be made that the climate damage is worth it. This wouldn't mean cutting off all fossil fuels tomorrow, despite the crude caricatures painted of activists. But it would mean steadily raising the bar, changing a defeasible presumption of innocence to a defeasible presumption of guilt.

Well, um, yeah. What he said.

Go read the whole thing. It will probably be the most important thing you read about climate this month:

 What critics of the Keystone campaign misunderstand about climate activism

In re Smith v Karl

The House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, under the leadership of my own representative Lamar Smith, has been harassing Thomas Karl, recent past president of the American Meteorological Society and longtime head of the National Climate Data Center, a federal agency under NOAA, because he expressed himself unimpressed by the "hiatus" in global temperature increase, and because he published data that supported his conclusion.

Smith has been demanding defenses of the rather mundane and straightforward measurements and calculations going into NCDC's global temperature estimate.

As I understand it Karl and NCDC have been bending over backwards to be cooperative, and have presented their raw data and algorithms in great detail to the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee. They stand ready to answer any substantive questions and defend any particular calculation in detail.

The scandal is this: the committee has showed no signs of interest in their honest answer to what might be an honest question, but has pursued the matter to the point of harassment and vile innuendo.

This cannot stand, and by "cannot stand", I mean they probably will get away unscathed, but they really ought not to.

Alas, as the Benghazi metascandal and the Planned Parenthood metascandal prove, the congressional majority have no scruples and the American press has no spine. Fortunately the executive branch has developed a bit of one. NOAA should not be quick to comply and I am pleased that they did not. I think that is the next best thing.

It's not because Smith's committee doesn't have the authority to investigate NCDC, it's that he ought to refrain from abusing it.

A court case would be a very good thing if the press played against type and showed up awake for a change. I don't have a strong answer to a lukewarmer blogger nymmed Fabius Maximus' point that the committee will win on the legal niceties. Perhaps there isn't one. But confusing legal power with responsible government woefully misses the point of democracy.

Still, every time another sliver of the public sees the ethical shabbiness of the majority's actions that would be a good thing. The scientific community is not positively impressed by Smith's ridiculous antics. They should be made plain to see. The press will cower indecently rather than tell the truth here, but Smith is being flatly and transparently abusive, and it would be good if the rest of society did not turn away. But my hopes aren't set high at this point.

Tom Fuller Gets One Right

I'd like to commend Tom Fuller for most of this:

Representative Lamar Smith has issued a subpoena for emails and records from NOAA scientists participating in Thomas Karl’s rather desperate attempt to prove the ‘pause’ in global warming never existed. 

The pause did exist, and Karl’s paper is being contested where it should be–in the scientific literature. 

What Representative Smith is doing is both wrong and stupid. Wrong, because we don’t need to create a climate of fear in science. Scientists should be able to communicate via email without re-reading every word they write with an eye on future investigations. Stupid, because witch hunts don’t increase your stature, reputation, amount of information or even the size of your… big toe. 

When Cuccinelli did this with Michael Mann I opposed it, writing an open letter to Cuccinelli equating what he was doing with Salem’s search for witches. What Smith is doing is no different and I oppose it just as strongly. 

To be clear, I have no objection for asking for data, models, calculations. But emails between scientists? No. That way lies poorer science. 

Representative Lamar Smith, call off your dogs.

Other than the 'desperate' (*), this is very sound. Fuller and I disagree so often that I should come out and say that I greatly appreciate his writing this, and I greatly appreciated his position on Cuccinelli vs Mann as well.

(* - Karl's data speaks for itself. Whether he should have come out "against" the hiatus insofar as whether it exists is another story. There are arguments to be made either way but I think it was not a practically wise thing to say, since his latest round of revisions were so minor. This grand claim didn't make sense. There was enough of a hiatus that people are still trying to explain it. However, it was never that MUCH of a hiatus as people liked to claim. It's really small potatoes. So I can't buy into Karl being 'desperate'; 'hubristic' is closer if that's a word.)

Some thoughts

I should be at the coffee shop writing my book, a far less ambitious book than these grandiose tweets imply.

But whatever - this needs to be said. Somebody more famous than me ought to say it, but the only way I can figure for that to happen is for me to get more famous.

They seem to make sense in whatever order, but they were written bottom to top.