And why the narrative that “carbon dioxide determines our climate”‘ is not only wrong, but also dangerous.
Over the last weeks, and also in future weeks, I have argued and will argue against the simplified climate change narrative that builds around statements that “carbon dioxide emissions are the main determinants of our climate”, “landscapes contribute to climate mainly by storing and sequestering carbon”, and “the most important strategy to avert the climate crisis by focusing on the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions”. Such simplification traps us in false solutions that are detrimental to our society’s stability.
**Disclaimer – This blog reflects the current state of my knowledge. It does not reflect the opinion of any institution, and my understanding will change as I learn more. The purpose of this blog is to summarize information, stimulate thought, raise conversation, and serve as a basis for further studies.
Let’s use a metaphor from schooling and child development: imagine a scientific consensus that “The quality of school education in Grades 1-6 is fundamentally important for a child’s development“. I believe such a consensus is possible. Then media translates this an overly simplistic headline: “Success of our child determined during Grades 1-6“. And even further: “You want to know a child’s lifelong income, look at their Grades 1-6“. Both of the latter simplifications are catchy media slogans, but false and blinding us for many potential actions that could help youth at risk. The same is happening in the climate debate – media has simplified the message to the level that it is wrong.
The outcomes of over-simplification was demonstrated by how the public responded to messaging during the COVID pandemic. Two contrasting narratives prevailed the media:
- On one hand, a generalized endorsement of vaccines: “Vaccines work. That’s why everyone must take the COVID vaccine now”. In reality, some vaccines were certainly successful in protecting us in history, while many other vaccines never made it on the market because they were either too dangerous or had low efficacy. Other vaccines remain on the market, but little effective. A more true statement would have been: “Vaccines are our most powerful tool against viruses, and we have used the vaccine technology successfully in the past to overcome several deadly diseases. We are conducting the best safety testing that is feasible within the short time frame of the COVID pandemic, but it cannot be perfect and low-level risks remain. We have put contingencies into place to minimize the damages from the remaining risks”.
- On the other hand, some “anti-vaxxers” argued that “Vaccines are dangerous and will kill us all”, some even claiming that evil overlords have constructed the pandemic for the sole purpose of killing much of our world’s population with Troyan Horse vaccines. There’s some truth to these concerns: In history, some vaccines were indeed dangerous and killed people in the interest of corporate profit making. Our recent Canadian history offers such examples: indigenous children were deported into residential school and used for medical experiments; many died when vaccines were tested on them (or, using the words that Canadian media prefers, the kids went missing… Did they run away into hiding? Did the tooth fairy take them? ). Yet many other vaccines are perfectly safe and greatly contribute to our population’s longevity.
By over-simplifying, governments and media left citizens with two choices that were, in their simplicity, both obviously wrong. So many citizen felt deeply confused. Those on the “Vaccines work!” side quickly dismissed concerns from the “gray middle” as anti-vaxxer positions, valid questions were framed as irrational doubt seeding. Basic strategies of health and general boosting of the immune system (eat well, stay fit, go outside) was not communicated by governments. I felt put off by this over-simplification and lost touch with the simplifying mainstream narratives – both the pro-vaxx and anti-vaxx messaging. Over-simplification pushed me into solitude, into forming my own narrative, and away from society. Today, new findings certainly confirm my “gray” position during the pandemic: many of the concerns that were raised during the COVID pandemic, and blankly dismissed by government agencies, were now independently verified (e.g. China’s role in the origin, corporate entanglement by Anthony Fauci and other government staffers, systemic profiteering by the White House, partisan misinformation, etc). Again, sensational media and political opposition blew these concerns out of proportion… In the end, our societal wounds from COVID have not yet healed; some of our “thinking majority” remains estranged from our political mainstream.
The Climate conversation is no different. There is a strong scientific consensus that “the emission of carbon dioxide and other anthropogenic greenhouse gasses are warming Earth”. There is no question around the validity of this statement. But when media and self-proclaimed climate experts proclaim that “Carbon Dioxide made this storm”, it is as wrong as “Grade 1-6 determines a child’s income” or “All vaccines work for everyone“. Things are a bit more complex, and we need to understand any living being at an appropriate level of complexity. Whether it is a child, the system involving people and government and the pharmaceutical industry, or our Earth’s biosphere and climate.
When scientists agreed that global warming is now ‘officially observable’ during the early 2000s, researchers were well aware that landscapes regulate our climate locally, sometimes regionally and at times even globally. When academics narrowed down communication on greenhouse gases, the intention was mostly to create a clear message to the public and to decision makers: “Greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide warm our climate! Reducing carbon dioxide emissions reduces this driver of global warming”. Because scientists needed humanity to hear this loud and clear. This early greenhouse gas narrative co-existed with the commitment to preserving biodiversity and combating desertification – together enshrined in three UN conventions signed at the Rio summit in 1992, and embedded within the academic framework of global change research. Today, the public and decision makers have largely abandoned two of the three Rio conventions, research into global change (under the IGBP) has been de-funded, and greenhouse gases remain as the sole platform for discussing global change. Instead of understanding Earth as a complex entity, the world has embraced a new narrative that “climate is made by carbon dioxide”, that “computer simulations are our best tools to understand the climate”, and that “the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions will address global warming”. Yet, this is a perversion of the original scientific consensus that “greenhouse gases (including carbon dioxide) warm the global climate” – a consensus that still recognized the many other pathways how this Earth’s climate is regulated, especially on land.
For example, as our continents are desertifying, they create heat domes. These heat domes pull in large amounts of water from the ocean, due to a temperature gradient. This takes the form of massive storm systems with sudden rainfall… a natural way how Earth re-establishes balance, moves moist air masses from the oceans to the land, and cools the land. Heavy rainfalls become flash floods, whenever our soils are degraded or sealed and can no longer retain water on the land, and when our drainage design moves water downstream rather than retaining it locally. Greenhouse gases contribute to the storm systems, and additional heat adds water and energy into the system. But many storms are now driven by our landuse … and curbing greenhouse gas emissions will have HARDLY ANY BENEFIT with respect to heat domes, or flash flooding. Over-simplification twists causality – it leads to a false understanding of Earth and its climate, and inspires ineffective policy responses.
To remind ourselves of the limits of our main tools of analysis, our global circulation models, it is useful to remember systematic errors in these model that scientists are well aware of. For example, one of the most important determinants of predicted rainfall and clouds on Earth is …. the modeller’s choice of grid resolution. This is the spatial size of one “modelling units”. The European PRIMAVERA study reviewed the impact of grid resolution on rainfall. With massive super computing power, they could demonstrate that a model resolution of 3km x 3km dramatically shifts rainfall patterns, if compared to the standard resolution of 50-100km grids ([1]). Other variables – the latent energy transport by vapour, or ground temperature –equally differ! And grid resolution is only one of many reasons why climate models cannot predict the Earth’s weather, or simulate the water cycle in relevant accuracy. Indeed, satellite observations teach us that the Earth’s climate system behaves differently than our climate models predict, as soon as we dig into more complex dynamics like the water cycle. And scientists are actively searching for the causes of these model discrepancies. It is just quite difficult to know what we don’t know!
Differences between model estimates of precipitation during summer months. The graph shows how, on average, six leading global circulation models change precipitation if grid resolution is changed from the standard resolution used in IPCC experiments to higher resolution of 3x3km2. Especially in the tropics, but also elsewhere, models have recurring differences that hint at a system bias. Source: Vanniere et al., 2018
I have warned, and will continue to do so, against several implications that are derived from a simplified climate narrative – in particular the use of global circulation models for predicting the impacts of human interventions into the Earth’s climate system. However, this does not mean that I advocate against the warming effects of greenhouse gases, or that GHG are irrelevant for our climate action strategy. It just means: Things are more complex and we must urgently find the humility to accept Earth’s complexity. We must recognize Earth as a living system that humans depend on, if we want to sustain our human civilization.
Maybe an apocalyptic metaphor is helpful: Imagine we are sitting in a large pot, our Earth, that is slowly warming up because there’s a fire underneath it. Once we realized this predicament of ours, in our panic, we set the inside of the pot on fire – lots of flammable greases start burning inside the pot, as collateral in our fight against the fire below the pot. And the fires in the pot are soon more dangerous than the fire below the pot – but they escape our attention, as we are focused on the outside of the pot! As a species, humans are drying out our land so that it can catch fire, because we are scared of the greenhouse effect.
And climate activists seem scared about speaking out against these false climate solutions – it seems impossible to contain a Genie once it’s out of the bottle. Examples are abound how we attempt “greenhouse gas mitigation at the expense of our living biosphere”: palm oil plantations for biodiesel that drive the last Orangutan apes into extinction, corn ethanol uses 40% of all corn produced and intensifies soil erosion and the Mississippi oceanic dead-zone (the world’s largest man-made GHG emitter to date), deforestation for solar parks, phony carbon credits that the UK government pays out to UK consumers who heat with Canadian wood pallets (from clear-cut logging Canada’s last old-growth forests). In despair, activists and scientists now align with large investors to call for geoengineering, which would direct enormous public funding toward our largest shareholder corporations (see Geoengineering Watch). Why isn’t there more push-back against these counter-productive pseudo-climate-policies?
So simplification can be counterproductive and even deadly because it leads to misguided policies, and it splits and polarizes our society. By only offering people either a white or black narrative, many people in the grey will be estranged and pushed toward conspiracies and misinformation. We need to come back to nuance, careful listening, and respecting complexity. Sometimes, the best we can say is: “I cannot form any conclusive opinion, because I don’t have enough information. But what I perceive of reality is scaring me, I am deeply worried“. If a politician says that, it would scare the pants out of his/her subjects… and sometimes, this is OK. We urgently need climate literacy beyond carbon dioxide.
I recommend following the climate educator Alpha Lo. His writing is directed to curious nerds, who want to dig deeper and past the high-level summary. Yet, his education uses relatively simple terms and concepts to describe a world that is not only more complicated than we think, but more complex than we can think. Yet, there’s also a humbling beauty in accepting this complexity as it is, and resisting my urge to “simplify away” the dominant role of life in regulating our living Earth.
References
[1] Vannière B, Demory ME, Vidale PL, Schiemann R, Roberts MJ, Roberts CD, Matsueda M, Terray L, Koenigk T, Senan R. Multi-model evaluation of the sensitivity of the global energy budget and hydrological cycle to resolution. Climate dynamics. 2019 Jun 14;52:6817-46.
much agreed Thor,
the biggest simplification was in Jimmy Carter’s time when the scientists said CO2 is measured GHG and said water vapour is biggest by far but too variable and hard to measure, default: CO2. (all per Walter Jehne).
And really all this is missing the point: they are symptoms and we really need to refocus on cause: Overshoot of population, consumption, pollution. ‘