In May, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced that it was going to start protecting us from carbon dioxide.
Having worked as an editor, I have a reflex reaction when I run across phrases that don’t make sense to me.
My hand reaches for a sticky note: “Pls explain.” Or just “Huh?” My eye looks for a place to put it on the screen.
The EPA’s press release had the title: “EPA Proposes New Carbon Pollution Standards for Fossil Fuel-Fired Power Plants.”
‘Carbon pollution’?
If I remember junior high science correctly, carbon is the fourth most abundant element in the universe.
Carbon dioxide, which the EPA also calls a ‘pollutant’, is in the air we breath.
CO₂ makes those bubbles in sparkling water. Bread and beer, too. You can make CO₂ at home, if your mother will let you. You mix baking soda and vinegar.
Although that, I think, was elementary school.
Plants love CO₂. Owners of greenhouses pump in extra to make them happy. Plants breath carbon dioxide in and oxygen out. That, as I recall, made the animal kingdom possible.
In college I learned that carbon is the structural backbone of molecules large enough to carry biological information. Essential to life again. The fusion reaction in the sun is catalyzed by the CNO cycle.
‘C’ as in carbon. An inconvenient factoid for anyone who wants decarbonize everything.
I may be hyperventilating about the EPA going after carbon dioxide.
You see, I’m a CO₂ emitter myself.
Regrettable, I know. But true as I live and breath. The air I exhale is 4.4% carbon dioxide. It was only 0.04% on the way in.
That makes me guilty of what, a thousand pounds a year?
I’m prepared to say, “Lock me up.” But I suppose that wouldn’t do any good, either.
I fantasize about my court appearance. Would contrition be the best strategy?
“I know, Your Honor,” I would mumble, eyes down. “I’ve tried. I just can’t help myself…”
It’s been a while since junior high. I check to see if something has changed.
“Google, is carbon dioxide a pollutant…”
I don’t even get to the question mark.
Carbon dioxide is a ’pollutant’ because, well, the government says it is.
‘Government says it is…’
I consult a reference book. I reach for my well-thumbed copy of 1984.
I find Orwell comforting in these situations.
There’s a line in the appendix to the original edition: “Newspeak would be barely intelligible to an English-speaker of our own day.”
I flip around and read a page or two of the novel.
I feel inspired. From the Latin spirare, ‘to breathe.’
I will be Winston Smith, Orwell’s plain-speaking rebel who works at the Ministry of Truth. I will make sense of ‘carbon pollution’ myself.
I start with ‘carbon’.
Carbon isn’t hard to find. The Earth’s crust contains 1.9 billion gigatons of it. The oceans 40,000 gigatons; our friends the plants, 2,100 gigatons; and the atmosphere 870 gigatons.
Add the weight of two oxygen atoms and there are 3,200 gigatons of CO₂ in the atmosphere.
All those ‘gigatons.’
Google to the rescue, again. Sort of.
One gigaton is the weight of:
5,500,000 blue whales
200,000,000 elephants
all land mammals other than humans
10,000 fully-loaded US Navy aircraft carriers
20,000 Titanics
3,000,000 Boeing 747s
As a math exercise, I try converting everything to ‘blue whale equivalents’.
My calculator overflows.
I try ‘pollution.’
I get lawyers.
Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency, 549 U.S. 497 (2007).
I read the case.
It makes no sense.
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts sued the Environmental Protection Agency.
Yes, the same EPA.
But in this case, Massachusetts sued the EPA for failing to regulate carbon dioxide as an air pollutant.
Now, that’s a twist. When Texas sues the EPA, it’s not because it failed to regulate something.
The central issue is, even for me, is a no-brainer. The Supreme Court had to decide whether, under the language of the Clean Air Act (CAA), the EPA was allowed to regulate carbon dioxide.
Given that the Clean Air Act says the EPA can regulate “any chemical emitted into or otherwise enters the ambient air,” the answer is pretty obviously “Yes.”
“Any chemical” covers a lot of ground. It’s what the lawyers call a ‘capacious’ definition.
The interesting part of the case is over what Massachusetts is doing in the court with the EPA in the first place. The issue of ‘standing.’
I look up ‘standing’. The legal kind.
I get it now. As in, “You don’t have a leg to stand on.”
It seems you need more than one leg. You need three: injury, causation, and ‘redressability’.
Massachusetts has prove it has suffered an injury. But, I learn after some more reading, a ‘threatened’ injury may be good enough.
The EPA must have caused Massachusetts’s injury.
The EPA must have it within its power to redress the injury. Make Massachusetts whole again.
Well, we all want that.
With my new-found knowledge, I write a summary of the case.
Massachusetts is the injured party because by 2100 there is going to be sea level rise.
The sea, according to Massachusetts’s lawyers, is going “to swallow Massachusetts’ coastal land.”
Therefore, the EPA is falling down on its job by not regulating carbon dioxide coming out of new automobile tailpipes.
Say what?
The year 2100 sounds like a long way off.
You’d think there’d be some kind of inverse statute of limitations or something. But what do I know?
Down the rabbit hole again. ‘Sea level’ and… ‘automobile tailpipes’?
I start with ‘sea level.’ Here, at least, I’m back on the familiar ground. More junior high science.
Measuring the tide has been important to mariners for millennia. And “taken on the flood” is in Shakespeare.
A civil engineer named Loammi Baldwin Jr. started measuring the tide at Charlestown Navy Yard in 1825.
Old-school tidal gauges were low tech, but ingenious in their way. Baldwin built a hut way out on the end of a pier. That was called the ‘tide house.’
Those little lapping waves were nuisance. The tide house had to have something called a ‘stilling box.’
Once the water calmed down, all it took was a float on a wire, a pencil and paper, and Baldwin was done.
I read on. There are two high and low tides per day. These we usually blame on the moon. Actually, it’s Earth’s fault. Earth is the one doing the rotating, inside an ocean bulge caused by the moon’s gravity. Various astronomical cycles modulate tides even more.
Science nerd gets distracted. An 18.6-year ‘nodal cycle’. Who knew?
Tides make ‘sea level’ is slippery thing to measure. NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, offers 19 ‘tidal datums’ to choose from: mean high tide, highest high tide, and so on.
Fortunately there’s a default tidal datum. I look at NOAA’s Boston Harbor tidal gauge. Here it is since 1900:
Massachusetts’s lawyers were right!
Over the entire globe, sea level is rising an average of 1 or 2 millimeters per year.
I put Boston Harbor slightly higher, maybe 2.6 millimeters a year.
It’s the beauty of the law. The lawyers only needed a number > 0.
They were under ‘no obligation,’ to use a legal phrase I like, to bring up that Boston has experienced land subsidence for many decades. Or that the city added 21 square kilometers (about 8.1 square miles) of land by reclamation between 1800 and 1975.
Or to mention that sea level has been rising along the entire US East Coast at 1.1 mm/year for the last 10,000 years.
That would really complicate the case, because it’s Canada’s fault.
A sad story, but one having a happy ending. Canada got depressed during the last Ice Age. That massive ice sheet. Who wouldn’t?
Today, good news. Canada is bouncing back!
Unfortunately, Canada’s rise is taking the US East Coast down with it, on a sort of geologic teeter-totter.
Hmm. This case against carbon dioxide is starting to feel like a bit of a stitch-up.
The legal concepts of ‘causation’ and ‘redressability’ I learned in Playground 101: “It’s your fault!” And, “What are you going to do about it!?”
Massachusetts’s lawyers want the EPA to solve global warming.
Sounds like a pretty big ask.
But in law, as in sports, all that matters is the final score. Massachusetts won, 5-4. The Supreme Court ordered the EPA to go off and have a rethink about carbon dioxide.
And now the EPA is coming after CO₂.
I search, but I can’t find any reference to carbon dioxide’s Sixth Amendment rights.
I feel stirred to rise for the defense. They are, after all, talking about sequestering it for life.
I invest in a copy of Legal Defenses for Dummies. It comes with a money-back guarantee.
I already know something about my client. But the book recommends I do some research on the prosecutors. Try to figure out where they are coming from.
On to Wikipedia. The Environmental Protection Agency was created by an executive order of Richard Nixon in 1970.
It was a bureaucratic reshuffle. Previously, pollution and pesticides had been regulated by different departments, Interior and Agriculture. The idea was put it all under one roof.
I have an image of dedicated, if underpaid, EPA career scientists studying issues, making considered assessments, and passing well thought-out recommendations up the chain to policy-makers, who use them to make informed decisions.
Got that wrong.
If I’m going to be the Atticus Finch of CO₂, I need to find an earlier case of a near-lynching.
I find one: EPA v. DDT (1973).
DDT? That’s a bit harsh.
But my client isn’t going to win any popularity contests, either.
I need to figure out the prosecutor’s m.o.
(That’s short for modus operandi. I’ve learned a lot from my For Dummies book.)
Back to DDT. The public and the media were whipped up. They wanted action. They had read Rachael Carson’s Silent Spring.
The EPA held seven months of hearings. Scientists gave evidence. Cross-examination was used to weed out dubious claims. The transcript ran 10,000 pages.
I don’t have time for 10,000 pages. I skip to the conclusion.
The examiner found that, unless grotesquely misused, DDT did not injure humans or birds.
His recommendation was: Regulate use of DDT? Sure. Ban it entirely? No.
Which was the same recommendation made by the National Academy of Sciences.
The NAS also pointed out that “in little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million deaths due to malaria that would otherwise have been inevitable.”
A defense attorney could work with that ‘no more malaria’ thing.
Wouldn’t have helped. William Ruckelshaus, administrator of the EPA, banned DDT outright.
It seems that Ruckelshaus’ boss, Richard Nixon, was in trouble at the polls. He needed an environmental ‘win’.
Ruckelshaus later explained that in EPA decisions, “scientists have a role to play” but the decisions are “ultimately political.”
I stand disabused of my naïveté. The policy desired by the politicians trumped the science.
It’s conceivable that the EPA is going after my client because the EPA is in the pay of Big Wind or the Renewables Lobby.
But that sort of thing would require an army of investigators to document.
Even if it’s true, which I doubt.
And I don’t have an army.
It’s more likely a case of old-fashioned regulatory capture.
The kind activists used to complain about, until they figured out how to do it themselves.
One improper motive the EPA might have is embarrassment.
The politicians have made an endless series of emissions-reduction pledges they haven’t been able to keep.
Their prattle about targets and goals for 2035 or 2050 or whenever has started to sound like crazy talk to at least some of the voters.
Neither will the regulators admit that the biggest reduction in CO₂ emissions they ever got, they lucked into. Fracking came along.
Which they’re also against. Just not as much as coal. They need natural gas to make the windmills work.
I look up the Clean Air Act.
It was originally passed in 1963. The EPA took over enforcing it 1970.
In 1960s clear air laws were, in a word, about smog.
Today you have to fly to Beijing or Delhi to get the full-on smog experience.
In 1963, you only had to get to Los Angeles.
Photochemical smog has very complicated chemistry.
But by the late 1950s, pretty much everyone knew it came from automobile tailpipes.
The science hero of the story was a former food flavor chemist, Arie Jan Haagen-Smit, a professor at Caltech in Pasadena.
Haagen-Smit put a sample of LA smog into his food-flavor gas chromatograph.
I assume he washed it out afterward.
Haagen-Smit worked out a complex chain of reactions in which carbon monoxide (CO) and the nitrogen oxides, NO and NO₂, when exposed to sunlight, turn into ozone and the other nasty lung-irritating brown stuff.
So that’s where ‘tailpipe’ comes in.
For smog, the clean air laws worked. They gave us catalytic converters and all that. Air quality visibly and measurably improved.
The EPA doesn’t get all the credit. California had its own famously more stringent regulations on vehicle emissions.
The Clean Air Act was, in fact, intentionally written to allow regional and local options. Sulfur dioxide coming out of a factory smokestack in Michigan doesn’t have much to do with smog in the LA Basin.
Hmm.
CO₂ is what they call a ‘well mixed’ gas. Pretty much the same everywhere.
Can’t fault the EPA for lack of ambition.
It’s preparing to take on the world.
I look for cases about carbon dioxide.
I enjoy this one: Wisconsin State Supreme Court, Donaldson v. Urban Land Interests, Inc., 564 N.W.2d 728 (Wis. 1997).
The tenants sued the landlord because his building had lousy ventilation.
The tenants complained that an excessive accumulation of carbon dioxide, which they themselves had exhaled, caused their bad health. The tenants’ lawyers coined a great term: ‘sick building syndrome.’
I pause to wonder. In the Clinton era, was ‘I didn’t exhale’ a viable defense?
Back to the case.
The Wisconsin judge was sympathetic to the tenants’s health woes.
But he told the tenants that by hauling CO₂ into his courtroom, they had fingered the wrong guy. Their health woes were probably from something else.
A pollutant, he said, needs to be an ‘irritant’ or ‘contaminant.’ An ‘irritant’ is something that provokes a physiological response. A ‘contaminant’ is a foreign substance that renders something unfit for use.
Carbon dioxide, the judge pointed out, is neither of those. It didn’t render the atmosphere ‘unfit for use.’
This is hopeful.
But it leaves me worrying that I’m missing something in the prosecution’s case.
If lower court judges are going to let carbon dioxide walk, how are the feds supposed to nail it?
Actually, I know that one. I watch TV.
When the prosecutors want to nail a bad guy but can’t get the evidence, one of them looks around and says in a low voice, “I know a way. Let me handle it.”
The EPA’s case is: CO₂ is a gang member.
Sure, CO₂ can protest its innocence. But it’s mixed up in some very bad company. It’s guilt by association, or RICO, or something. The whole gang needs to be put away.
EPA calls them the GHG. I call them the ‘greenhouse gas gang.’
The EPA’s indictment isn’t very specific about which gang member did what.
A legal move I need to make is getting my client’s case ‘separated’. I don’t want to be put in the position of defending the whole gang. Too much work.
And, it looks better for my client. Asthma attacks? Not CO₂, that’s NOx. Premature deaths? That’s particulate matter, PM2.5.
But I’ll have to be wary. I know the prosecutors will keep slipping in that CO₂ is a ‘known associate’ of those other bad boys.
Methane has a rap sheet as long as your arm. The case against it must feel like a slam dunk.
Not even oil and gas industry lawyers want to defend methane leaks. No ‘friends of the court’ are likely to show up for methane.
Except, perhaps, the cows.
‘Enteric fermentation’ produces almost as much methane as oil and gas leaks.
Some courageous regulators are prepared to dive in on bovine flatulence. New Zealand proposed a tax on cow emissions last year.
I hear through the courthouse grapevine that the jury consultants have warned the prosecutors that methane may be a ‘problem’ with some jurors.
Confined to its pipes and rebranded ‘natural gas’, methane could be heating their homes, hot water, and dinner.
Even jurors who have ‘electrified everything’ are, likely as not, running on electricity generated at a natural gas plant.
I’m a little puzzled over the charges filed against nitrous oxide, N₂O.
This is recreationally known as laughing gas. It’s a bit player in the greenhouse gas world.
I suspect N₂O is in the dock because it’s easily confused with its cousins, NO and NO₂, nitric oxide and nitrogen dioxide. Those really are irritants.
The EPA’s new mission of protecting the planet from global warming may mess up its old mission of protecting us from air pollutants.
Sulfur dioxide (SO₂) causes acid rain. The EPA currently requires coal-burning power plants to install SO₂ scrubbers.
But SO₂ in the atmosphere has a significant cooling effect on the planet. The 1991 eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines put 17 megatons of SO₂ into the air. It brought temperatures down -0.4° C over large parts of the Earth in 1992-93.
A few advocates of geoengineering propose that we intentionally add SO₂ to the atmosphere to cool down the planet. Those are the ones who are too lazy to come up with a better aerosol, of which there are many.
The nitrogen oxides (NOx) are irritants associated with asthma. But they also have a cooling effect.
I can’t blame the EPA for not reading the IPCC reports. They’re pretty thick. But they could at least at the pictures:
One greenhouse gas seems curiously immune from prosecution.
Water vapor.
Why aren’t they going after water vapor?
I have an uneasy feeling about this. Have the prosecutors made a deal or something?
I research ‘selective prosecution’ as a legal defense.
You have to argue that your client has been unfairly singled out. Others engaged in the same conduct have somehow escaped the government’s wrath.
A 1886 San Francisco ‘Chinese laundry’ case was one of the few times the defense worked.
Mr. Yick Wo’s attorneys successfully argued that the building department was out to get him.
Not because his laundry was a bigger firetrap than any other, but because of Mr. Wo’s national origin.
My client, CO₂, is at the moment 27% Chinese. Maybe something to work with there.
And I would be in fashion. Selective prosecution has been making a comeback.
Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, and Michael Avenatti have all argued the government is out to get them.
More distinguished company for my client.
But For Dummies warns me that the selective prosecution defense “is almost always doomed to defeat in court.”
I put my notes away. Maybe I’ll need them later.
I have my first interview with my client.
The prison guards look like hard guys. They obviously deal with a lot of hard cases.
The prison guards are harder. But they seem very wary around CO₂.
They keep making these little sotto voce comments among themselves about somebody ‘getting snuffed’.
They’ve got CO₂ wearing the customary orange jumpsuit, chains and ankle shackles.
But they’ve fitted him out with something like a World War I gas mask. It has a hose coming out the nose leading to a tank strapped on his back.
He looks like the Elephant Man. Or E.T. in orange.
Instead of making him pee in a cup, they pass some of him through lime water. It it turns milky-white, he’s still in there.
I protest this treatment. “He’s tasteless, odorless and invisible,” I object.
“We know,” the guard says. “Invisible. How do we know what he’s up to?”
This is a problem I will run into again defending CO₂.
I wish people could see my client.
People can go really crazy worrying about things they can’t see. Like things that might be living in the carpet.
Since they can’t see CO₂, their imaginations run wild. He’s the star of their mental horror show.
At least I get the guards to take the chains off.
It’s our get-acquainted visit. I ask CO₂ how he’s holding up.
Prison is pretty boring, he says. And the food.
But, he’s been lifting weights.
He pats his belly. His goal is to drop a few of those gigatons. Or at least convert them to muscle mass.
I tell him to keep it up. Being in a voluntary reduction program might look good to the parole board.
I let him talk.
It’s important to give my client a sympathetic backstory: difficult childhood, overcame hardship, all that.
CO₂ started out innocent enough. When Flemish chemist Jan Baptist van Helmont discovered it in 1640, he called it ‘spiritus sylvestris’. That’s ‘sylvan,’ as in forest glade. So ‘forest gas’ or ‘wild spirit’.
My client likes ‘Wild Spirit’. He peels down the jumpsuit and shows me a tattoo on the back of his neck.
I tell him to keep it covered in court.
Irish physicist John Tyndall discovered in 1861 that both water vapor and CO₂ block thermal radiation. That’s incorrectly known as the greenhouse effect, the details of which are complicated.
I make a note to subpoena water vapor.
At the end of the 19th century, a lot of scientists thought CO₂ emitted by industry had a beneficial warming influence on the planet.
Sadly, they’re not available to be character witnesses for my client. They’re dead.
I ask CO₂ if he needs anything from the outside. He says no.
Then he changes is mind. He says it might be nice to have a plant in his cell.
I say I’ll ask about it on my way out.
Any particular kind of plant?
He thinks for a second.
He’d like a cactus.
Our first day in court doesn’t go well.
The detectives claim CO₂ confessed when they brought him into the station.
But they neglected give him a quarter to call me.
In an unbelievably bad legal call, the judge is going to allow the prosecutors to re-enact the interrogation, this time for the record and with me in attendance.
Prosecutor: “Have global surface temperatures increased since 1880?”
CO₂: “Why ask me?”
Prosecutor: “Just answer the question ‘Yes’ or ‘No’?”
CO₂: “I dunno. I guess so.”
Prosecutor: “You guess so. And are humans adding you, carbon dioxide, to the atmosphere?”
CO₂: “For sure.”
Prosecutor: “Your answer is ‘Yes’?”
CO₂: “Yeah.”
Prosecutor [indicating the other defendants in the dock behind the Plexiglas]: “And do you and your other greenhouse pals have a warming effect on the planet?”
CO₂ [looking, then indignant]: “Where’s water vapor?”
Prosecutor: “Who?”
CO₂: “Water vapor. She should be up there. She’s been like, all over me…”
The prosecutors appear slightly alarmed. They spend a minute whispering to each other.
The female prosecutor then straightens up and says flatly, “Water vapor is not on trial here.”
She continues badgering my client where she left of. “Just answer ‘Yes’ or ‘No’.”
“Do you,” she repeats, “Have a warming influence?”
CO₂ [mumbling]: “I guess…”
Everyone is having trouble understanding what CO₂ is saying through the gas mask.
Prosecutor: “Was that a ‘Yes’?”
I’ve coached my client: Keep your answers short; don’t let the prosecutor rattle you; and never, ever, embellish an answer.
But CO₂ gets hot under the collar. “Sure, we warm things up. What’s the big deal?”
At this, the prosecutor, incredulous at her luck, looks toward the judge.
I sense she is ready to demand a directed verdict.
I jump up to object. “These Yes/No questions are meaningless, Your Honor.”
That stops things. “Why are they meaningless?” the judge asks.
“My client, CO₂, is non-binary.”
“Non-binary?”
I look at CO₂. “We need to talk about he/she/it in percentages. Numbers.”
Later that day, I catch a break from the judge. My motion to drop the other defendants has been granted.
CO₂ will stand trial on his own.
The International Geophysical Year started in 1957. Research money was available. Roger Revelle, of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, got a grant to set up a station to monitor the ‘background’ concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Revelle hired Charles Keeling, a postdoc in geochemistry at Caltech. Keeling set the station up on the side of Mauna Loa, Hawaii.
The theory was that the monitoring station should be remote from any industrial source of CO₂.
That Mauna Loa is an active volcano was, apparently, a problem Keeling could handle. He paid attention to the direction of the wind.
Keeling’s initial reading showed that the air at Mauna Loa had a concentration of CO₂ of 310 parts per million, ppm.
It’s 422 ppm today. That’s the 0.04% CO₂ air I was hyperventilating earlier.
Those decimal points are tricky. I double-check my math with Dr. Google.
The jury will most likely have no clue what ‘ppms’ are.
I prepare an Exhibit board with big type they’ll be able to read:
150 - below this, plants start to die from ‘CO₂ starvation’
180 - Earth’s all-time low, at the most recent glacial maximum
280 - taken to be the 1850 ‘preindustrial level’
422 - the level now in 2023
475 - Dengler and Reid’s estimated plateau. More on them later.
560 - twice the pre-industrial level. Important in climate science arguments over the Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS). That fight is about what the average global surface temperature will be if CO₂ doubles from the pre-industrial level.
800-1000 - the level of CO₂ commonly commonly maintained in commercial greenhouses to stimulate plant growth.
1,000 - causes drowsiness when reached in classrooms and auditoriums.
I can see the the jury nodding off already.
But, they’ll probably know they can walk into a greenhouse and not die. So at least they won’t be scared to death.
Keeling, a bona fide science hero, plugged away year on year making sure his CO₂ measurements were as accurate as possible.
Not that it was easy. The US Weather Bureau, which carried the Mauna Loa station on its books after the International Geophysical Year ended, stopped funding it in 1963. Keeling had to scramble for money. The original ‘Keeling Curve’, like the ozone layer, has a hole in it.
Little did the Weather Bureau know the Keeling Curve would become Exhibit A of climate forecasters.
And it is now for the prosecutors in my case.
I’m going to need to focus the jury’s attention on a detail in the Keeling Curve. I prepare a blow up:
Keeling’s first discovery was that CO₂ in the atmosphere was seasonal.
He wrote in 1960, “the seasonal trend in concentration observed in the northern hemisphere is the result of the activity of land plants.”
‘Land plants’ and ‘Spring’ sound good.
Atmospheric CO₂ decreases as plants take it up in the spring and summer. Over the winter, the concentration increases as plants die and decay.
The increase peaks around April. That’s why those ‘highest CO2 ever’ stories appear in the media in May, like crocuses.
The carbon cycle is a Cycle of Life.
It suffers from some unpoetic word choice.
All those gigatons of carbon are ‘reservoirs.’ Plants, the ocean, and soil are ‘sinks.’
Carbon flows from ‘sources’, like humans burning stuff, to ‘sinks’.
The indictment says humans have ‘disrupted’ the natural carbon cycle.
I circle the word ‘disrupted’.
I have an obligation to my client to object to prejudicial terminology wherever it appears.
There hasn’t been a ‘natural’ carbon cycle without man-made CO₂ since Ogg the Caveman discovered could light a fire with his Bic.
Worship Nature if you must, but keep humanity out of it, I will say.
The complexity of the carbon cycle makes a ‘capacious’ playground for lawyers and accountants to play semantic games.
The Drax Power Plant in the UK burns wood pellets imported by ship from the US and Canada. The pellets burned in 2019 put between 13 or 16 million tons of CO₂ into the atmosphere.
That’s about the emissions of 7 million passenger cars.
Drax earns tax credits for producing green energy.
It’s renewable, Drax’s lawyers assure us, because trees grow back.
‘Land-use change’ is another capacious phrase.
Burn down a forest or clear land for agriculture and you’re a carbon criminal.
Agree not to burn down a forest and, in some parts of the world, with the right lawyer and account, you can have a lucrative business farming carbon credits.
Without lifting a finger. Other than to endorse the checks.
Prosecution Exhibit A is the full Keeling Curve.
It goes up and up. It looks plenty scary:
It might as well come with an arrow that says, ‘END OF THE WORLD, THIS WAY ☞’.
At least the plants are happy.
‘Global greening’ in the past few decades has been well-documented by satellite imagery. A 2016 paper, having no fewer than 32 authors from 24 institutions in 8 countries, analyzed satellite data and found there had been roughly a 14% increase in green vegetation over 30 years.
Most of that greening was due what’s called ‘CO₂ fertilization.’
The prosecution puts on an expert witness who testifies that CO₂ “will remain in the atmosphere for thousands of years.”
It’s is an old trope. Even the EPA marks it with an asterisk. The footnote says, “It’s complicated.”
In my cross-examination, I walk the witness through some math.
He agrees that a molecule of CO₂ put into the atmosphere today has a 25% chance of being incorporated by a plant or dissolved in the ocean by next year.
“If 75% is left after 1 year, and 75% of that is left after the next year…” I prompt.
He’s writing column of numbers on a pad.
“Tell me when you get to 50%,” I say.
“Uh… 5 years?”
“That’s the ‘half-life’ of an average CO₂ molecule put in the atmosphere,” I say to the jury. “About five years.”
Even though I know it’s entirely the wrong way of looking at it.
But, hey, I’m CO₂’s defense attorney.
That business with a single molecule is actually the ‘residence time’.
It was accurately established by tracking carbon-14 put into the atmosphere by atomic bomb testing in the 1950s. Five years later, half of the carbon-14 was gone.
Fortunately, I didn’t have to bring up atomic testing in front of the jury.
The ‘half-life’ is different. The half-life of CO₂ in the real world is on the order of 35 or 50 years.
A half-life curve approaches, but never quite gets to, zero.
A skillful lawyer, like our prosecutor, can grab the end of that long tail, hold it up, and announce triumphantly, “See! Some still left!”
Or a regulator like the EPA, used to working with one-off pollution events like oil spills, can ask how long it will take nature to work down a ‘pulse’ addition to some extremely low level. Where we can pretend it never happened.
The carbon cycle doesn’t work like that.
It’s an accountant’s nightmare to try and track where all the carbon is flowing.
Some try. They make models with zillions of little boxes and arrows.
I ask the witness to consider an explanation that Joachim Dengler and John Reid came up with.
Which I hope will be comprehensible to the jury.
You’re in a situation where you have no idea where your money has been going.
We’ve all been there, right?
But at the end of some month, you realize you it’s time to face the cold hard truth.
You have to figure out how much you actually spent that month. And you haven’t been carrying around a little notebook and writing everything down.
Fortunately, there’s a way.
You take the change in your bank balance at the end of month and subtract the deposits you made. Those, presumably, you know.
For CO₂, the amount in the atmosphere is the bank balance.
Deposits are CO₂ emissions. Which the International Energy Agency, the IEA, estimates.
Joachim Dengler and John Reid asked the backward-sounding question, “How much CO₂ does not remain in the atmosphere?”
The cleverness of the approach is that, as with your spending, we don’t have to know for sure where the CO₂ is going.
It could be going into plants, carbonate rocks, kelp, the ocean, terrestrial microorganisms. Wherever.
They studied the numbers. One interesting thing Dengler and Reid, and others, found is that the rate of CO₂ absorption increases as CO₂ concentration increases.
That’s like saying you’re likely to spend more when you have more money in your bank account.
The timing of individual deposits, and what happens to every little molecule, doesn’t matter. It’s all netted out at the end of the month.
One interesting implication that follows by math that if emissions flatline — not go to zero, just stop growing — the concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere will plateau. Eventually.
Dengler and Reid calculate the Keeling Curve could plateau at around 475 ppm some decades out.
Global CO₂ emissions have not flatlined, but aren’t doing all that bad. They bounced up and down because of COVID, so it’s a bit hard to tell.
They grew 0.9% in 2022, according to the IEA.
Would 475 ppm be horrible?
That’s 53 ppm higher than today.
But we’ve lived with a 165 increase since Keeling’s first measurement in 1958.
The prosecution puts up its Exhibit B.
It’s pretty simple. They’ve added a wiggly line for temperature on top of the Keeling Curve. Both are going up.
Now, this is a little like using PhotoShop to put a sniper rifle in my client’s hands.
But whining won’t get me anywhere. We’ve already admitted that CO₂ is going up. And that the world is getting warmer.
The prosecution wants the jury to look at the two lines next to each other and conclude: “Look! CO₂ is making the temperature go up!”
The warming trend line alone probably looks bad to the jury.
Although maybe worse that it should. The human brain imposes order on disorder.
These 3 time series look like they have clear trends:
All were generated by computer in a random walk.
Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says:
The climate system is a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore the long- term prediction of future climate states is not possible.
But talking about ‘chaos’ won’t help me defend CO₂ in front of a jury.
They’ll think he’s The Joker in The Dark Knight.
Chaos theory is a sort of none-of-the-above, nothing-burger explanation.
It’s not very satisfying to those demanding red meat.
Solid answers. Like, “Who do we lynch?”
And the rules of legal evidence weren’t written by Kahneman & Tversky.
So the prosecution only has to get the jury to ‘see’ something in their chart:
Which is introduced by their expert witness, a Dr. Osborn.
Dr. Osborn, patiently prompted by the prosecutor, explains that the temperature line comes from the ‘HadCRUT5’ data set.
That unpleasant acronym stands for Hadley Centre/Climatic Research Unit Temperature.
The Climatic Research Unit (CRU) is at the University of East Anglia in the UK.
The Hadley Centre was created in 1990 by Margaret Thatcher to study climate change. It’s part of the Met Office.
The Meteorological Office, which everyone calls the Met Office, is the British national weather service.
Dr. Osborn works for the Hadley Centre.
The prosecutor asks Dr. Osborn to explain to the jury how the HadCURT5 data is collected.
Osborn starts explaining.
The prosecutor interrupts him and asks him to explain the acronyms he’s using.
With pleasure, Osborn says.
SAT stands for ‘surface air temperature’. It’s basically taken on land, 1.5 meters above the ground.
SST stands for ‘sea surface temperature’. It’s the temperature of the ocean at 1 meter deep. It’s taken in a variety of ways.
The CRU and the Hadley Centre don’t measure temperatures themselves. They just collect data from national meteorological organizations around the world.
The on-land stations are collectively known as MSATS, meteorological surface air temperature stations.
While pretending to pay attention to this, the jury is staring at the chart.
It does look like there are entire decades where CO₂ and temperature are heading in opposite directions.
I overhear a hopeful thing. One juror whispers to his neighbor: “1940?”
The prosecutor hears it, too. And clearly decides to fast-forward Dr. Osborn’s testimony ahead a bit. Like to its conclusion.
“Dr. Osborn,” the prosecutor says, “Looking at that chart, wouldn’t you say that the correlation between temperature and CO₂ is obvious? In fact…”
The prosecutor glances down at his note pad. “The R² is 0.87?”
“In your expert opinion?” the prosecutor adds quickly.
This was an attempt to step back in bounds. I could object, but I don’t see the point.
I’m not sure the jury knows what R² is.
It’s the visual I’m worried about. They make an big impression on jurors.
Think of them as highway signs for an offramp called Quick Conviction.
I have some work ahead in my cross-examination of Dr. Osborn.
I’m not, by nature, a negative person.
But in defense of my client, I have to prick some holes in HadCRUT5.
I start with some easy slow pitches.
“Dr. Osborn,” I say cheerily. “You sound like be the right person to ask about a personal problem I have.”
The male prosecutor gives off a low moan.
“I have a thermometer outside my kitchen window,” I continue.
“I see,” says Osborn.
“Oh, it’s easy to see. Big numbers.”
“The problem,” I continue, “is that the temperature on it is always different from what Alexa says the temperature is. By like, 3 or 4 degrees.”
“There could be a lot of reasons for that,” says Osborn.
“I know. I looked up how the Weather Bureau says you’re supposed to measure the temperature. It’s not simple, is it?
“No, it’s not.”
“You’re supposed to locate the thermometer 1.5 meters from the ground, put it out of the sun in an enclosure, keep it away from any heat source, and a lot more things. Is that right?”
“Yes.”
I shake my head. “And those rules for taking sea surface temperatures…” I start.
I decide to answer my own question before the prosecutor has time to object.
“You throw a bucket over the side the ship. But opinions differ on what kind of bucket is best. Canvas or wood? Then, how many times do you bob the bucket up and down in the water? And after you haul in the bucket and put the thermometer in the water, you have to be careful how you hold the thermometer up to read it, so it’s not in the wind…”
Osborn, at least, seems to have enjoyed my speech. “That was the old-fashioned way.”
“The World Meteorological Organization publishes a number of documents about best practices,” Osborn adds helpfully. “But yes, they are involved.”
“So, most countries have had Weather Bureaus for a long time, right?”
“Correct.”
“And that’s because they thought it would be a good thing if they collected weather data and provided weather forecasts for their citizens?”
“Yes.”
“So they built those little stations to measure temperature, rain, atmospheric pressure, humidity, wind speed, and those other meteorological things. Which is a pretty long list…”
The prosecutor growls. “Your Honor? Is there a question here?”
I ignore him.
The judge makes a little whirring motion with his index finger.
I don’t ignore him.
“These countries didn’t put up weather stations so they could report climate data to the Hadley Center, did they?”
“No.”
“They were taking temperature readings anyway. And then the Hadley Centre came along and said, ‘Hey? Can we get a copy of that?’“
“Something like that.”
“And when was that?”
“Climatic Research Unit (CRU) started compiling data in the 1980s.”
“So these weather stations do what, exactly? Send a fax saying the thermometer outside said it was 68° at 9 this morning?”
Osborn gives me an indulgent smile. “No, we ask stations to report anomalies. Not absolute temperatures.”
“And we don’t use fax anymore,” he adds. “But I suspect you knew that.”
“‘Anomaly’,” I say slowly, turning over the word.
I pick something off my table and pretend to read from it.
“My dictionary…,” I commence.
I stop.
I’m looking at the take-out menu from the Szechwan place around the corner from the courthouse.
Not bad, if you’re in the area.
“My dictionary,” I repeat, after recovering, “defines ‘anomaly’ as ‘something that deviates from what is standard, normal, or expected’.”
“On your chart, the anomaly was zero in 1878. Was there something so great about the weather back then?”
Osborn smiles again. “It’s just a convenience term. The anomaly is the difference between today’s temperature and the average temperature over a base period, usually 30 years.”
“Can you understand how the public might assume a temperature ‘anomaly’ is a bad thing?”
“Like I said. It’s a convenience. Not a value judgement.”
“I see. Why use these anomalies and not the actual thermometer reading?”
“There are a number of reasons. Two stations might have very different absolute temperatures, but the same anomaly. So the temperature trend at both stations would be the same.”
“I see.”
“So the Climatic Research Unit isn’t researching the climate from thermometer readings?”
“No. Only the reported anomalies.”
“The actual temperature information is gone by the time the CRU gets the data?”
“Correct.”
Osborn continues. “Also, using anomalies makes it easier to interpolate between geographically remote stations.”
“That’s so you can fill in all those little grid squares on your globe?”
“Yes.”
“Sounds a lot of processing is going on.”
“It is. But we’re careful,” Osborn says.
“I hope so.”
“Dr. Osborn, from the point of view of physics, if you’re interested in tracking the Earth’s heat, isn’t air surface temperature about the worst possible thing you could choose to measure?”
The prosecutor objects. And rightly so.
I withdraw. We’ll do it one at a time. Rapid-fire, I hope.
“Can surface air temperature readings be affected by the wind?”
“Yes. That’s why WHO recommends instrument be in enclosures.”
“Soil moisture? Like, if it rained last night?”
“Yes…”
“Time of day?”
“Of course. But usually the daily temperature is the high and the low divided by two.”
“That’s in a ‘meteorological day’, isn’t it? Which starts when?”
"Usually 7 at 8 am local time.”
“Not solar time?”
“No. Ordinary clock time, whatever it is at the station. Which, before you ask, can be daylight savings time.”
“I wasn’t going to ask that.”
“You weren’t?”
“No, I was going to ask about batteries. I know when mine run down I have to get out the ladder…”
“Yes,” Osborn says, cutting me off. “Power supplies to instruments need to be reliable.”
“Was it true that a change in the Australian power grid in 2012 made a third of their Bureau of Meteorology thermometers read 0.4° C higher?
“No, I don’t know if that was true.”
“And if it was,” Osborn continues, “I’m sure the Australian BOM has fixed the problem. Or adjusted the readings for it.”
“The local environment around the station can affect thermometer readings?”
“You’re talking about so-called urban heat islands. Those get adjusted…”
“Not just urban. Is it true that when they paved the gravel road in front of the post office in Barrow, Alaska, the average winter temperature went up 6° C?”
“I don’t know about Barrow, Alaska. But if that was true, that sort of change in the station’s environment gets fixed by homogenization.”
Osborn now asks me a question. “I assume you’re going to ask me about that?”
“I am, but not yet.”
“Let’s get back to your chart.”
Time to throw Dr. Osborn a slider.
“Dr. Osborn?” I ask. “Do you have a thermostat at home? In your house, I mean?”
Dr. Osborn looks wary. “Of course.”
“Have you ever turned it up or down 2° Fahrenheit?”
He looks at me more wary.
Maybe he doesn’t want to appear uneven to the jury. I decide to help him out.
“Perhaps you have elderly parents living at home? Or persnickety children? Or a wife who sometimes complains that the AC is too cold? Or not cold enough?”
“I’ve adjusted a thermostat before. I’m sure on some occasion by two degrees.”
“That number on the top of the chart. That’s says ‘1° C’. I am right?”
“Correct.”
“Which is how much in Fahrenheit?”
“1.8 degrees Fahrenheit.”
“So, that temperature line that’s so wiggly? It’s wiggling within a range of 2.8° Fahrenheit? Over 170 years?”
“Yes.’
Some lawyers think jurors are stupid. They would pound on a point like this to make sure it gets hammered home.
But I’m nice. I think the jury will get it.
“Would you agree,” I continue, “That many people experience a range in temperature of say, -5° C to +20° C between winter and summer?”
“If they live in a temperate zone, yes. That’s the approximate annual variation.”
“So that’s a range of 25° C in one year?”
“Yes.’
“Compared to 1.6° C in 170 years on the chart.”
“Yes.”
“And over their entire lifetime, if they’ve been unlucky, a person might at some point have experienced temperatures as low as -20° F and as high as 120°F?”
“That’s hypothetical, but I suppose so.”
“I’ve put your same temperature data on a chart using that scale. May I show it to you?”
The prosecutor objects, of course. But since it’s the same data, I get my chart in:
Like I said. These visuals make an impression on jurors. I hope.
“Dr. Osborn,” I say. “For the prosecutor earlier, you superimposed a lot of straight lines on that wiggling temperature line.”
“Trend lines, yes.”
“And you made a point of saying the trend depends on where you start and end the line?”
“I did.”
“And you said people spend a lot of time arguing about what the trend is now? Or what it was in some past decade?
“They certainly do.”
“The jury’s head is probably spinning with all those different numbers,” I say. “So for my next question, I would like help them to focus.”
“Okay.”
“By giving them just one number to keep in their head. So I’m going to pick a number.”
“All right.”
“But not one of yours.”
“Not one of ours?”
“Since we’re discussing yours, I thought a number from from a third party would be best.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I see prosecutor starting to rise in his chair.
I hasten to add: “If, in your expert opinion, Dr. Osborn, if you are willing to accept it.”
The prosecutor settles back down.
“Try it and I’ll let you know,” says Osborn.
I continue. “The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, has had TIROS satellites carrying instruments since 1978 that measure the temperature anomalies of various layers of the atmosphere.”
“I’m familiar with the UAH data.”
“UAH. That’s the University of Alabama at Huntsville, right?”
“Right.”
“Not The Crimson Tide.”
“I fear what I know about football, you call soccer.”
“So I checked this morning, The NOAA satellites give a global warming trend of +0.13° C per decade since they started recording data on December 1 1978.”
“Which,” I hasten to add. “Is not that far off from some of the trend lines you drew. Maybe a bit on the low side.”
“It’s in the ballpark.”
“But not coming out of left field?
“No.”
“Good. And, just so the jury understands. That’s per decade? Not per year.”
“Correct.”
“0.13° C per decade,” I repeat. “So this trend is a pretty small number. I take it your thermostat at home can’t be adjusted a quarter of a degree Fahrenheit?”
“No.”
“Could 0.13° C be within some margin of error?”
“It could. Although it’s close to the trend as reported by the other networks.”
“Who also process the data more-or-less the data the same way as you do?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Now tell me about ‘homogenization’.”
“Homogenization is analyzing and adjusting station temperatures to remove artificial influences. So, a station might upgrade its equipment. Maybe it’s been relocated. The environment around it may have changed.”
Osborn continues. “As you suggested it did in Barrow, Alaska.”
“Dr. Osborn, does the name John McClean mean anything to you? Not,” I hasten to clarify, “the Bruce Willis character in Die Hard. An Australian fellow.”
Osborn rolls his eyes. “Oh yes.”
“He does stick up for the Southern Hemisphere, doesn’t he?”
I glance up at the Exhibit B. “Your chart shows the temperature anomaly from 1850, does it not?”
“That’s when the data series starts, yes.”
“Is McClean right that in 1850 there was only a single reporting station in the entire Southern Hemisphere? Indonesia, if I recall?”
“That was true. But our geographical coverage has improved considerably since those days.”
“I’m sure. Back to McClean. He wrote an entire doctoral dissertation picking apart the way data makes its way into the HadCRUT database. McClean calls it a ‘data audit’?”
“We’re familiar with his work. And we and our partner organizations corrected some of the data entry errors he found.”
“Like the ship at sea reporting ocean temperature, from 50 kilometers inland?”
“Yes. We fixed that one.”
“McClean’s ‘audit’ set off quite a punch-up down in Australia, didn’t it? Front-page story in The Australian? ‘#DataGate’?”
“We followed the controversy. From afar, I’m pleased to say.”
Osborn continues. “We take the data the Australian Bureau of Meteorology gives us. If they can improve it, we’re all for it.”
“Those Australians got pretty rough on their BOM, didn’t they?”
“There was criticism, yes. And some changes, as I recall.”
“Homogenization is mainly important to people looking for trends?”
“To people trying to establish accurate trends over long periods of time, yes.”
“A few of the Aussies starting looking at the raw data from BOM stations and comparing it to the homogenized data. Can I show you Amberely, Queensland?”
I get the display up before the prosecutor can object:
“Dr. Osborne, one Australian called what was going on ‘an industrial scale remodeling of historical temperature series and the recombination of thousands of these homogenized records.’ Is that true?”
“People say a lot of things on the internet.”
“She has a Ph.D.”
“What in?”
“Biology, I think. Expert on coral reefs.”
“Our belief is that homogenizations cancel out.”
“But you haven’t studied it station-by-station?”
“That would be up to the various national agencies. If they think it’s worth their time.”
“On this ‘urban heat island’ thing. The US started setting up stations in rural locations to avoid it, or least be able to measure its effect.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“Can the CRU segregate out rural and urban stations and look for a difference?”
“They don’t keep metadata about the details of a station’s location. So, no.”
“Can I bring up the Australians again?”
“I doubt if I can stop you.”
“They did on their Acorn network, and found the warming trend for rural stations was was 45% lower. Does that sound possible?”
“Possible, but we don’t do that kind of analysis.”
“Do you not have enough staff? What’s the budget of the CRU and Hadley Centre?”
The prosecutor objects, of course. I move on.
“The chart shows temperature anomalies from HadCRUT5, correct?”
“Correct.”
“Whatever happened to HadCRUT1?”
“That was the first version of the database. It stopped being updated in 2002.”
“And there was a HadCRUT2, which ended in 2005, and a HadCRUT3, which ended in 2012, and a HadCRUT4 and now HadCRUT5…”
“I see you’ve done your homework.”
“There are some years where some of these HadCRUTs overlap…?”
“I suppose.”
“For which they presumably have the same raw data…”
Osborn is very wary now. “Perhaps…”
“Would I surprise you if I said each iteration of HadCRUT has produced a higher warming trend? From, presumably, the same raw data? Almost 0.2°C of additional warming in 17 years?”
“I don’t know if that’s true. HadCRUT5 replaces the earlier datasets. It’s the most accurate one we have.”
“I see.”
Let’s see if the umpire has is eye on the ball. “If that is true, would you call that 0.2°C increase ‘anthropogenic warming’?”
The prosecutor objects to my question as argumentative. Which it was. I withdraw it.
I have an unfortunate habit of telegraphing my change-up.
I don’t know exactly what it is. Maybe some kind of facial tick. Anyway, the batters see it coming.
I need to make a point that’s going to cause jury brain pain.
But it has to be done.
They’re being paid $15 a day. Time for them to earn it.
“Dr. Osborn? Do you know the Zip Code of Maton, Michigan?”
Osborn gives me a look. “No, I don’t.”
“I understand. It’s a small town.”
The prosecutor emits a low moan. I catch the word ‘relevance’.
“The Zip Code of Maton, Michigan, is 49663.”
“Which you get,” I explain, “When you add up all the other Zip Codes and divide by the total number of Zip Codes. It’s the average Zip Code.”
The prosecutor moans louder. But he hasn’t bothered to make an objection.
“So, a Zip Code means something to people in a particular place, right?”
“I suppose.”
“And the temperature means something to people in the place where they live.”
“Of course…”
“But can you just add up temperatures and divide?”
“I don’t see your meaning.”
The prosecutor again. “Your Honor? What is the point of…”
I decide to get closer to the point.
“Dr. Osborn, do you know the difference between an ‘extensive’ and an ‘intensive’ variable?”
He does know that. An ‘extensive’ variable is proportional to the size of a thing. An ‘intensive’ variable is a quality that describes the thing.
“So if we have two bricks,” I ask, “We can add their weights and divide by two to get their average weight?”
“Correct.”
“Because mass is an ‘extensive’ variable, is it not?”
“Correct.”
“The combined weight of the two bricks means something in the physical world?”
“Correct.”
“Isn’t it true that if each brick has a temperature, and we add the two temperatures, that particular sum that means nothing? If the temperature of each brick is 30° C, the temperature of both isn’t 60° C, is it? Temperature is an ‘intensive’ variable?”
“Correct,” Osborn says precisely. “Which is why, in our communications, we are careful to refer to our number an ‘average of global anomalies’. Not ‘global average anomaly’, or ‘global average temperature’, as the press sometimes reports it.”
“Dr. Osborn,” I ask. “Were you working for the Hadley Center when the ISO, the International Standards Organization, was asked to come up with an official scientific unit for ‘average temperature’? An SI unit like, the kilogram or meter?”
“I was. And vaguely remember that, yes.”
“The ISO wouldn’t do it, would they?”
“It was a while back. I don’t remember how it played out.”
“They said the ‘average temperature’ of two independent things makes no sense in physics. Unless you mix them. But then you no longer have two things.”
Here, the prosecutor objects. I’m testifying. It’s true. I back off.
“Dr. Osborn. You’re here from the UK. Am I right?”
“So before your trip you might have checked the exchange rate between the pound and the dollar?”
“I did.”
“There are lots of exchange rates between different currencies, correct?”
“Yes.”
“But it makes no sense to add them up and average them, does it? There’s no ‘global exchange rate’?
“I’m not an economist. But no, I’ve never heard of that.”
“So when the media talks about the ‘Global Mean Surface Temperature’, it’s a very weird abstraction? A kind of a phantom that can’t even existence in the physical world?”
“As I said. What the media says, the Hadley Centre can’t control.”
“Dr. Osborn,” I continue. “Hypothetically. Let’s say we add the absolute thermometer readings from all those stations around the world, from the tropics to the North Pole, and divide by the number of stations.”
“Okay. Hypothetically.”
“Would you expect the correlation between any one station and that global average to be ‘good’, ‘bad’, or ‘indifferent’?
“Those are my choices?”
“Feel free to invent your own word.”
Osborn feels put on the spot. “‘Indifferent’ or ‘bad’, I suppose. But that’s not the point of the HadCRUT data series. We’re studying the trend, not absolute temperatures.”
I look at the prosecutor. “All that matters is a trend. Any number > 0 means the world is getting warmer?”
“Yes.”
I’ve been thinking ahead to what I’m going to say when I get present CO₂’s defense.
I decide to test the water now.
Besides, I have two pitches I haven’t thrown yet, my curve ball and my screwball.
“Dr. Osborn, the trend you testified about earlier?”
“Yes?”
“That’s computed by doing a linear regression on the wiggly line? Letting a computer find a straight line that fits the data?”
“Yes.”
“And it finds that upward sloping line, with a positive slope of say 0.13° C per decade?”
“If we remove that trend from your data, what’s left over? The residual, I believe it’s called.”
“On detrended data, temperature spikes emerge from the background noise. But I don’t have a slide showing that.”
“Fortunately I do. May I?”
“Does that look about right? In your expert opinion?”
“That’s about right. I’ll accept that.”
“So what are those upward spikes in 1944, 1998, 2016?”
“Well, the data collected during the Second World War was a bit dodgy, so I’ll be hesitant to conclude anything about 1944. But 1998 and 2016 were big El Niño years.”
I look at my own chart. “I cut off the scale on the chart. Sorry. But the horizontal line they are just crossing is a 2° C above the baseline. So those spikes were about a +2.3° C?”
“Yes.”
“In a single year or two?”
“Yes.”
“And the downward spikes are La Niña?”
“Yes.”
“Dr. Osborn,” I say, switching gears. “In addition to looking for a simple linear trend, has anyone ever looked for oscillations in your data ? Some kind of wave pattern, perhaps superimposed on the secular trend?”
Osborn thinks for a second. “Has anyone? Yes. Schlesinger and Ramankutty come to mind. They did a spectral analysis of temperature history using four different data sets, including ours.”
“And did Schlesinger and Ramankutty find anything? In addition the long-term trend?”
“They said they found an oscillation with a period of 65–70 years. Which they attributed to long-term variability in the North Atlantic.”
“The jury has probably head of El Niño. That would be something like El Niño, only in the Atlantic, and much longer?”
“That’s grossly over-simplifying it.”
“But something like that?”
“Yes, something like that.”
“Dr. Osborn, I’m going to ask you to speculate. Which I’m sure you won’t want to do.”
Osborn tilts his head, prepared to listen to whatever nonsense I’m about to spout next.
“If there are ocean oscillations modulating a long-term trend,” I begin.
“Yes…?”
“Is it possible that in some decades we just caught the wave?”
“I don’t understand what you mean, caught the wave.”
“I’ll rephrase the question.”
I can’t remember if I learned that from my For Dummies book or Perry Mason.
“People got all hot and bothered about the temperature going up in the 1980s and 1990s, right?”
“I don’t know about ‘hot and bothered’. ‘Concerned’, certainly…”
“Could that have just been bad luck?”
“What do you mean, ‘bad luck’?”
“In those decades, we were on the roller-coaster while it was going up?”
“Roller coaster is not very scientific.”
“I know.”
“Internal variability caused by ocean-atmosphere interaction is currently a hot topic of study. If you will excuse my pun. In the IPCC’s most recent…”
“Ah,” I interrupt. “Speaking of the IPCC and ‘internal’…”
“Yes?”
“In IPCC-speak, is my client ‘internal’ or ‘external’?”
“CO₂ is an external forcing.”
“So CO₂ is not to blame for these long-term ocean currents?
Osborn looks exasperated. “No. CO₂ is not to ‘blame’, as you say, for ocean oscillations.”
I get to call some rebuttal witnesses.
I’m getting what is called ‘wide latitude’.
If they’re willing to talk about CO₂ and temperature, they’re in.
I have a set-to with the prosecution because I make the mistake of writing down that one of my witnesses will talk about the MWP and LIA. That’s the ‘Medieval Warm Period’ and the ‘Little Ice Age’.
The Medieval Warm Period was — maybe — warmer than in its today.
The Vikings moved to Greenland.
They apparently didn’t know the way to Florida.
But ‘Medieval’ means before industrial CO₂. So I want the jury to hear about the MWP.
During the Little Ice Age it got very, very cold.
Then about 1750, a warming trend began.
Again without benefit of CO₂.
I want to jury to consider maybe we’re just still in that trend.
But I forgot that at the Ministry of Truth, where Winston Smith worked, they spent a lot of its time rewriting the history books.
“The IPCC,” the prosecutor objects, “No longer recognizes the ‘Little Ice Age’ or ‘Medieval Warm Period’.”
In 2003, the IPCC, according to a leaked email, decided to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.
The MWP is an embarrassment if your press release says the 20th century warming is ‘unprecedented’ and ‘anomalous’.
To the prosecutor, I counter that unless we’ve been teleported to the Hague, the IPCC has no jurisdiction.
The prosecutor counters that the terms are Eurocentric. Practically racist.
I counter that it’s not my fault the Europeans started writing down temperatures before other people did.
The judge appoints a Special Master to resolve our squabble.
Speaking of the Hague, that’s where Daniel Fahrenheit lived when he invented the mercury thermometer in 1724.
The Central England Temperature Record (CET) was completed after decades of painstaking work sorting through records kept by village parsons and the like.
The CET’s daily temperature readings start on 31 January 1659. That’s four months after the death of Oliver Cromwell.
Who died of complications from malaria, by the way. No DDT in his day.
The Master reports back fast. She must know how to use Google, too.
‘Little Ice Age’ is in. The ‘Medieval Climate Anomaly’, as she calls it, is out.
All that ice gives me an idea.
The jury likes my next witness.
He’s wearing Extreme Cold Weather gear: insulated overalls, parka, fleece, mukluks, woolen cap and gloves.
At least he’s pushed the goggles up so we can see his eyes.
He puts up a reconstruction of the air temperature at the summit of the Greenland Ice Sheet:
Oops. ‘Medieval Warm Period’ is in small type in one of the green bands. My bad.
That’s us on the far right. The red band is the short stretch with modern records.
Our temperature is ticking up, to be sure. But I want the jury to see where it’s been before.
Sadly, the GISP2 record ends around 1854. There has since been an temperature increase to about the same level as during the Medieval Warm Period — sorry, ‘Medieval Climate Anomaly’ — and to 422 ppm for CO2.
You’d think that with the money they’re spending on climate research, they could spend a little bit more to bring the proxy records up-to-date.
My witness has covered some ground, or ice, in those mukluks.
His next slide is from the Antarctica. The Vostok ice core. Temperature and CO₂ for 420,000 years:
It shows 4 glacial periods and 5 interglacials, including the present one. The horizontal line indicates the modern temperature.
All four previous interglacials got warmer by 1° to 3o C than our present one. Ours is about 2oC colder than the last one.
Even though atmospheric CO2 concentration is 200 ppm higher.
My witness adds that the ice cores show that temperature increases came before CO₂ increases.
Unfortunately, he has a thick Russian accent.
I’m not sure the jury understood a word he said.
And I still need to counter that “R²=0.87” thing.
Now, I know, being a smarty-pants, that it takes a correlation of maybe 0.95 to be smoking gun.
But to the jury, 87 probably sounds like a B+.
So my next witness is a statistics guy.
He says that both the Keeling Cure and the temperature time series are ‘autocorrelated.’
I ask him to translate that into English.
He does okay. If a time series is ‘autocorrelated’, it means the best predictor of the next number in the series is the previous one.
“And why,” I ask, leading him like a puppy, “would that matter?”
“If, say, 76% of each year’s average temperature is determined by the previous year’s temperature, that doesn’t leave much scope for it be influenced by CO₂.”
I would like him to stop talking now.
But he throws a disdainful glance at the prosecutor. “R² assumes each observation is independent. So R² is an inappropriate statistic to use on two autocorrelated time series.”
I guess it was important to him to get that out.
I take a look at the jury.
Several are doodling.
Somehow, I don’t think they’re taking notes about R².
It’s time for a bold move.
I ask the judge for a sidebar.
I offer to stipulate that there is a 50% correlation between temperature and CO₂ concentration.
On one condition.
The prosecutor, of course, wants to know the condition.
I want the judge to admonish — another word I learned from my book — the jury that a correlation does not imply anything about the direction of cause-and-effect.
I can see the prosecutor’s first instinct is to haggle over the 50% thing.
But after a minute he chuckles and takes the deal.
I can see his thinking. If the jury barely understands ‘correlation,’ it hasn’t got a prayer of understanding ‘correlation’ and the rest of whatever in the heck it was I just said.
I’m hoping the jury can relate to chickens.
Causality is important in personal injury law.
Little Sally, who’s not a very good rider, gets her bike back from the repair shop.
But there was a screw-up at the shop. Nobody fixed the brakes.
Sally runs a red light and gets hit by a car. Whose driver probably could have stopped if he hadn’t been beating time to that song on the radio.
In court these situations gets sorted by something called the ‘but-for’ test: But for the defendant’s act, would the harm have occurred?
‘But for’ the bike shop failing to fix Sally’s brakes, the accident wouldn’t have happened.
So Sally’s parents should sue the bike shop. Not the driver.
A consequential paper published in Science in 2010 applied the ‘but-for’ test to blame it all on carbon dioxide.
Andrew Lacis and his collaborators made a model of the earth’s climate.
They took out all the greenhouse gases except water vapor.
Their little model earth turned into a snowball after 50 simulated years.
‘But-for’ CO₂, earth would be a snowball.
The earth is not a snowball. Ergo, CO₂ is to blame for global warming.
I can accept that as a thought experiment. Without water vapor and CO₂, the earth might become a snowball.
There’s plenty of naturally produced CO₂. So we don’t have to worry about the earth becoming a snowball anytime soon.
Lacis and his colleagues were not terribly interested in what goes out outside their model world.
They were thinking like personal injury lawyers.
Finding someone to blame is, as I’ve said, a familiar legal concept from Playground 101.
Or rather Playground 101 as further explicated by St. Thomas Aquinas. Doubt is radically simplified if there is a Prime Mover.
Lacis’s paper attributes 75% of the greenhouse effect to water vapor.
But water vapor gets off the hook.
Water vapor gets a defense we also know from Playground 101: “CO₂ made me do it”.
It’s rare for a journal like Science to coin a meme. It’s not TikTok.
But the title of Lacis’s became one: “Atmospheric CO2: Principal Control Knob Governing Earth’s Temperature.”
My client hates being called a ‘knob’, by the way.
But policy-makers love being handed a control knob. It’s something they can twist.
The prosecutors want a simple narrative for the jury. Cause, CO₂. Effect: global warming.
I’m hoping chickens can mess that up.
In science, it is very difficult to demonstrate strict causality, especially from historical records.
But a smart man named Granger realized that we can demonstrate a weaker form of causality that’s now called ‘Granger causality’.
If you have historical information about phenomenon A and phenomenon B, and A allows you, within reason, to predict B, you can call A the ‘Granger-cause’ of B.
The thing about Granger causation is that, logically, there are four states:
Neither variable A nor variable B Granger-causes the other, or
Variable A Granger-causes variable B, or
Variable B Granger-causes variable A, or finally
Variable A Granger-causes variable B AND variable B Granger-causes variable A.
My next witness is a Greek, Demetris Koutsoyiannis.
Fortunately Demetris speaks comprehensible English.
Koutsoyiannis starts out quoting Plato: “Which of the two came first, the hen or the egg?”
He points out that Plato’s ‘ἡ ὄρνις’ is feminine. So it means ‘hen’, not ‘chicken’.
Koutsoyiannis was inspired by the COVID-19 lockdown.
There was an unprecedented 5% decrease in carbon emissions for well over a year.
But the normal seasonal pattern and relentless tiny increase in CO₂ concentration did not change one bit.
If emissions didn’t change CO₂, maybe we should try pointing the finger at something else.
Like temperature.
The causality could be T→CO₂, not CO₂→T.
Or both. That’s where the chicken comes in.
The math is way too complicated to present to the jury.
I ask Koutsoyiannis to summarize.
While both causality directions exist, the results of our study support the hypothesis that the dominant direction is T → CO₂. Changes in CO₂ follow changes in T by about six months on a monthly scale, or about one year on an annual scale.
I have no idea if the jury will be able to get its head around the idea of both CO₂ and temperature just both going up in lockstep together. They will want to know the Prime Mover.
But maybe a chicken can plant a seed of reasonable doubt.
Late in the afternoon, the judge informs us the schedule for tomorrow has changed.
It’s in order to accommodate a special witness being called by the prosecution.
Water vapor.
I’m annoyed at myself. I should have seen this coming.
Water vapor is the queen of the Greenhouses Gasses.
And what does she have on my client, CO₂?
The judge goes on to explain that owing to water vapor’s special needs, the courtroom thermostat will be set to 32° F. tomorrow. He advises us dress warmly.
Talk about doing somebody a solid.
The rest of the afternoon, the prosecution tries to lay a foundation for water vapor’s testimony.
The prosecutor calls an expert witness, a Dr. E. Foote, to explain the ‘greenhouse effect’ to the jury.
I object to the term. “What’s going on in Earth’s atmosphere is not like what is going on in a greenhouse,” I complain.
To my shock, I win one right out of the box. Even Dr. Foote agrees.
After some negotiation, which involves the usual whining from the prosecutor, it shall henceforth be referred to as the ‘Tyndall gas effect’.
So now Dr. Foote is supposed to explain the ‘Tyndall gas effect’ to the jury.
I don’t envy his job.
But Foote does okay.
He starts by putting up a graphic:
Then he takes the jury through it. Real baby steps.
Sunlight comes in through the atmosphere.
Visible light makes up about 40% of the energy Earth receives from the sun.
The rest is electromagnetic radiation that is not visible. About 50% is infrared, 9% ultraviolet (UV), and 1% X-rays or microwaves.
“Ultraviolet,” Dr. Foote explains to the jury, “is what gives you sunburn.”
Like I said. Real baby steps.
“Some of the incoming energy gets reflected right back into space. That’s by clouds, the ice caps, or other white surfaces. We don’t have to worry about that.”
“The solar radiation that hits the ground or the lower atmosphere also bounces, but in a different way.”
“When it bounces, it comes off as infrared rays. Heat. Like what you can measure with a no-contact oven thermometer.”
He quickly qualifies that. “Actually, the proper term is ‘longwave radiation’.”
He goes on. “‘Infrared’, strictly speaking, has a wavelength > 0.7μm. Anything > 4μm we call ‘longwave’.”
I can see the jury’s eyes dimming.
Foote soldiers on.
“We all know the air is transparent. That means visible light rays pass right through it.”
“Nitrogen and oxygen, the main gases in the atmosphere, are also pretty much transparent when it comes longwave heat rays.”
“But some gases in the atmosphere, especially water vapor, are not as transparent. They trap some of the heat…”
I object. I don’t want the jury thinking my client is ‘trapping’ anything. Like small animals.
More haggling with the prosecutor.
Foote finally agrees that ‘intercept’ or ‘impede’ may be more appropriate words.
“It’s the heat intercepted,” Foote says, giving me a look, “by the greenhouse gases that makes Earth livable.”
“Otherwise,” he says, “It would have an average temperature around -20° C.”
“That’s -4° Fahrenheit,” he translates. Then adds for the jury’s benefit, “Cold!”
I’m not going to give Foote a hard time about the Tyndall gas effect.
My client has already confessed to being a greenhouse gas.
I’m more worried about what water vapor is going to say tomorrow.
Still, it won’t look good for the defense if I don’t give Dr. Foote a hard time about something.
“Dr. Foote,” I say. “You said….”
I make a show of looking at my legal pad, which is blank.
“‘Light from the sun warms the ground’.”
“That is correct.”
“Does sunlight strike the ocean?”
Foote gives me that look that expert witnesses give dumb lawyers.
“Of course it does.”
“And how much of the earth’s surface is ocean? Approximately?”
“71%, I believe.”
“What happens to it there?”
“When downward solar radiation strikes the ocean surface?”
“Yes. No, wait…”
“First tell me what happens when the that longwave radiation re-emitted by water vapor and the other greenhouse gases hits the ocean. It does, doesn’t it?”
“It does.”
“Is it warming the ocean up?”
“No, it only penetrates a few millimeters.”
“I see. Now tell me about ordinary sunlight hitting the ocean.”
I let him ramble on.
“The sunlight heats the water at the surface of the ocean. Some of the water evaporates…”
“Becomes water vapor?” I interrupt. The more times her name comes up, the better.
“Yes.”
“Go on.”
“The water that doesn’t evaporate is saltier, and so it’s heavier. It starts to sink. That creates an vertical current in the ocean…”
He’s just used the phrase ‘thermohaline circulation’ when I interrupt him again.
“Back to those currents you’re talking about,” I ask. “They affect the weather? The climate?”
“Of course. They’re very important.”
I pause for effect.
I want the jury to think there’s something deep here.
“You didn’t mention CO₂ in all that.”
He sees the trap. “No…”
I decide give him an out. “Tell us where CO₂ comes in.”
“Into the ocean?”
“Yes. Just the ocean.”
“Well, at the surface, some CO₂ in the air dissolves into seawater…”
“The same seawater that ends up sinking to the bottom?”
“Yes.”
“So the ocean is salting that CO₂ away. To make a bad pun.”
“That is bad. But yes. Some CO₂ gets circulated into deep water.”
“And the rest of it?”
“Some is taken up by phytoplankton in photosynthesis…”
“Our ‘friends the plants’?” I ask brightly.
“I’m not sure who calls phytoplankton that…”
“Aren’t phytoplankton responsible for something like 50% of the oxygen in the earth’s atmosphere?”
I feign shuffling around for a paper in front of me. That blasted Szechwan menu again. “I think I can quote NASA…”
“I’ve seen the figure. It’s a reasonable approximation.”
“Anywhere else CO₂ goes?”
“Some CO₂ gets incorporated by marine organism shells, as calcium carbonate…”
Dr. Foote, apparently, did not receive the expert witness coaching I give my clients.
He embellishes his answer. “That brings up ocean acidification…”
I stop him there.
“Ocean acidification…” I repeat slowly, as if needing time to take it in.
“What is the pH of seawater?” I ask.
“Right now? Or our projection for the future?”
“Right now will do.”
“About 8.1.”
“And a pH of 7 is neutral?”
“Correct.”
“So, if its pH is 8.1, is seawater acid or base?”
“Seawater is alkaline. A base.”
“Not acidic. But its pH is getting lower, you say?”
“Correct.”
“In the direction of 7, right?”
“Correct.”
“So would ‘ocean neutralization’ be an appropriate term?”
“The term used in the literature is ‘acidification’. Everyone discusses CO₂ as a cause of ‘ocean acidification’…”
I look at CO₂ in his orange jumpsuit.
“People say a lot of things about my client, Dr. Foote.”
I have one more question for the good doctor.
“Dr. Foote, do you recognize this equation?”
dT = 5.35/3.2 ln(C/C_0)
He puts on his glasses and studies it. “I believe that’s from an IPCC report. TAR3. Chapter 6, if I recall.”
“Very good,” I say. “That ln? That’s short for ‘natural logarithm’, is it not?”
“Yes.”
“And dT doesn’t stand for delirium tremens, right? It’s some kind of change in temperature, no?”
“It is.”
“So the equation in English is: a linear increase in CO₂ does not result in a linear increase in warming? It results in less warming.”
“Yes. That’s well known.”
“If I did the math right, a CO₂ molecule added to the atmosphere today, at 400 ppm, is only 0.01% as effective as the first molecule ever added.”
“I’d have to check that calculation, but something like that.”
“Dr. Foote, in your expert opinion, is it possible we’ve already experienced the worse that my client, CO₂, can do? That from here on out, he loses his potency?”
At the word ‘potency’, CO₂, in his orange jumpsuit, swings his head and mask and looks at me.
“It’s possible. But I couldn’t speculate on that.”
I have no more questions before a break.
After the break, Foote puts up a new chart.
It has colorful vertical lines and looks like comb or bamboo forest:
Each line is a wavelength at which different gases absorb and re-emit longwave radiation.
Water vapor and CO₂ share a lot of lines.
I know from working on CO₂’s backstory that this is why scientists let CO₂ off the hook for a long time.
In the parts of the spectrum where infrared absorption could take place, the CO₂ and water vapor already in the atmosphere sufficed to block all the radiation that could ever be blocked. An increase in CO₂ would not have mattered.
In the 1950s, a fellow named Gilbert Pass figured out that CO₂ and water vapor weren’t sharing quite so beautifully with each other.
Pass presumably knew his stuff. He worked for Lockheed designing heat-seeking infrared missiles.
I decide to stick my toe in. Test the water for tomorrow’s testimony.
“Dr Foote,” I ask, “In my client’s interrogation, CO₂ said, ‘water vapor was…’”
I look down at the transcript. “Here’s the phrase he used: ‘she was all over me’. ”
“Do you have any idea what CO₂ could have meant by that?”
“I have no idea.”
“Could you possibly take a look at this chart?”
“It’s similar to yours,” I explain, “but total Tyndall effect of both gases is on the outside in pink. CO₂’s contribution is the inside band in gray.”
“Looking at that chart, can you see how might client my say, ‘She was all over me’?”
Foote studies the chart for just a minute. “It’s well-known that water vapor is the largest contribution to the greenhouse — sorry, Tyndall gas — effect.”
“It might not be well-known to the jury, Dr. Foote. How big?”
“Well, it depends on how you treat clouds.”
“Clouds are water vapor, right?”
“Of course.”
“So let’s include them.”
“Well, we don’t understand clouds very well. I’ve seen estimates attributing as much as 95% of the greenhouse effect to water vapor. But on the conservative side, I’d say 75% might be a good number.”
“What’s the low number for CO₂?” I ask.
“Why do you want the low number?”
“Because I’m his defense attorney.”
“The low number for CO₂ is 9%.”
“9%. And the rest of the greenhouse gang?”
Foote rattles off the numbers. “Methane 4% to 9%; ozone (O₃) 3% to 7%.
“O₃ is on your chart there,” he points.
I look. He’s right.
“Dr. Foote,” I ask. “Where exactly is this Tyndall gas thing happening?”
“Where in the atmosphere?”
“Yes.”
Foote looks toward the jury. “The best analogy I’ve heard is to think of it as a fog.”
“A fog?”
“Yes. An infrared fog. So it’s not visible, of course.”
“So how do we know it’s there?”
“With instruments we can measure infrared optical depth.”
“And where do they say this fog is?”
“The emission layer is high above the surface.”
“How high? I’m just trying to picture where all this is going on.”
“The maximum optical depth of the ‘fog’ is somewhat below the tropopause, which is the interface between the lowest layer of the atmosphere, and the stratosphere.”
“And the fog starts to thin out above that?”
“Yes. Thermal emissions above that start to head off into space.”
“And how high in kilometers, or feet? On an airplane, do we fly through this fog?”
“That depends. The height of the tropopause varies with latitude. In the tropics, it’s about 16 or 17 km, so that’s 52,000 feet, a bit high for most aircraft. Near 30° latitude it’s 12 km, which is about 39,000 feet, still a bit high. Near the poles the tropopause is around 8 km above the surface, which is 26,000 feet.”
“The air must be pretty choppy up there. You’ve got winds, clouds, water vapor…”
“It is. It’s hard to place the Tyndall gas effect at some particular altitude. It’s like looking at a color gradient where maybe one part is darker part than the rest. No bright line.”
“I see.”
I don’t. But I have no more questions.
This evening I have to prepare for water vapor’s testimony.
I dig out the notes I made about ‘selective prosecution’.
The government is under no obligation to prosecute all possible defendants in a case.
Like water vapor.
So the odds are stacked against that particular defense.
And making it is a lot of work. For me.
The defense attorney has to turn the tables and investigate the prosecutors.
Including their state of mind. The discrimination against your client has to be intentional.
That, and then you have to show the prosecution is based on something like race, religion, or national origin.
CO₂ doesn’t tick those boxes. Except what I said about him being 27% Chinese.
Religion might be a possibility.
Senator Mazie Hirono of Hawaii said in 2019 that people should “believe in climate change as though it’s a religion.”
Climate changes, like the weather changes. That’s a perfectly reasonable thing for anyone to believe.
But that’s not what the Senator was saying.
She’s saying people should embrace, like a religion, climate change.
The contemporary orthodoxy.
Meaning no disrespect to the orthodox. An orthodoxy is just an ‘authorized or generally accepted theory, doctrine, or practice’.
‘Climate change’ was once called ‘global warming’.
But when the catastrophic warming predicted by the IPCC’s computer models didn’t show up on schedule, the name got changed.
Even to ‘climate emergency’, if you read The Guardian.
The change from ‘global warming’ was a happy one for the media.
They could now write stories about the weather. The weather is always interesting to people.
The reporters’ style guide made clear that the phrase ‘made worse by climate change’ had to appear in any story about bad weather.
That was the writers’ little genuflection. Letting climate orthodox readers know they were on side.
There’s hardly any need to repeat the the foundational beliefs of climate orthodoxy.
But I will.
The recent warming is unprecedented.
Somehow that’s automatically a bad thing.
The iPhone was unprecedented. Unless you count those brick-like car phones from the 1980s.
The Warming is caused by human activity.
‘Human activity’ is certainly a capacious definition. It encompasses a broad swath of dumb stuff, like burning down the Amazon.
Anyway, The Warming will be very dangerous.
Or maybe is already. That seems to depend on how you feel about the today’s weather.
But it’s an article of faith that it will be very dangerous someday.
We humans can save ourselves only by ending the use of hydrocarbons as soon as possible.
Preferably by switching to renewables. At whatever cost.
The future of the planet depends on it. You’re going to count pennies?
Sounds like religion to me.
And there’s nothing wrong with that.
It’s possible for a good, moral and mostly secular person to respect some of the traditional religious precepts without buying into the whole ball of wax.
In history, defenders of one ball of wax fought wars with defenders of a slightly different ball of wax.
In Europe, Catholics burned Protestants and the stake and vice-versa.
Sunni Muslims believe that the Prophet did not explicitly declare a successor. Shia Muslims believe that the Prophet publicly designated his cousin and son-in-law, Hazrat Ali (peace be upon him), as the first in a line of hereditary Imams from the Prophet's family to lead the community after him.
They’re still going at it.
Evolutionary biology suggests that humans, who spent most of their time on earth running around in small bands, crave being mind-melding into a group.
Proselytizers understand this. They’re skillful at putting on the full-court-press.
Extinction Rebellion certainly sounds like some kind of Jim Jones–style Doomsday cult.
Michael Crichton’s theory was that climate catastrophism is the replacement religion for sophisticated urbanites who have given up on Judaism and Christianity.
The Original Sin is now the Industrial Revolution.
Otherwise, the precepts are about the same. If we don’t mend our ways, the End Of Days will be upon us. It’s ‘code red’ for humanity.
The traditional religions also spent a lot of time talking about ‘pollution’ and ‘purity’.
We know, or can easily find out, which foods are kosher or halal.
Hinduism has elaborate beliefs about pollution. Some occupations are only fit to be performed by the untouchable caste.
The guardian of climate change orthodoxy is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC.
Which would make it sort of like the Vatican. Every so many years it puts out a new Bull telling us we’re going to Hell.
It’s very skillful at politics, so maybe more like the Jesuits.
If the climate orthodoxy needs a ‘pollutant’, CO₂ is their guy.
I’m not sure the religion thing helps.
I’m not defending CO₂ before the Spanish Inquisition.
Although it sometimes feels that way.
I have to focus on my question: why is the prosecution is calling water vapor as a witness?
Did she watch CO₂ do his greenhouse thing?
How’s her night vision? Did she have a clear line of sight?
Or was she in on it herself?
Which would make her, what? An ‘unindicted co-conspirator’? Like Nixon in Watergate?
I read up on conspiracy defenses in my For Dummies book. I collect some pointers:
→ Was your client the ringleader? Did your client organize, plot, or direct/lead the criminal group or other jointly accused persons?
→ Try to figure out who the cooperating witnesses are. Are there any informants?
→ Note that cooperating witnesses have a built-in incentive to lie.
Hmm. If water vapor is lying, I’m going to have to handle her with kid gloves.
These “He said / She said” things can be a minefield.
Water vapor is crying when the bailiff escorts her to the witness box.
She’s wearing this diaphanous dress with little puffy sleeves.
As 80% of greenhouse gas by mass, water vapor is a bit on the zaftig side.
There’s an interruption while the clerk runs out to get a box of tissues.
The bailiff advises water vapor she can make an ‘affirmation’ if it’s against her principles to swear an oath.
Water vapor says she has no problem with swearing on the Bible. But last time she did, she left a wet handprint that ruined one. Mildew or something.
They let her affirm.
The woman prosecutor is going to question water vapor.
I wonder if that means anything.
She, the prosecutor, starts off with the usual questions. Water vapor states her name and so on.
No fixed address. That’s interesting.
It’s freezing in the courtroom.
Even with the thermostat set to 32° F., water vapor seems to be having trouble pulling herself together.
She’s coming across as slightly unfocused. At bit vacuous.
Asked by the prosecutor where she lives, water vapor replies airily. “Anywhere. Everywhere. I’ve never liked the desert much. Or tops of mountains. Where I really want to go is…”
The prosecutor mercifully cuts this off.
The prosecutor asks if water vapor knows my client, carbon dioxide.
Now, strict etiquette here is for the prosecutor to ask the witness if she see him here in the courtroom, and, if so, point him out, and so on.
But since the guy in the orange jumpsuit and gas mask could be anybody, the prosecutor helps her out.
I don’t object.
Water vapor flutters her fingers. “Hi, CO₂…”
CO₂ bucks his head up at the sound of his name.
He doesn’t say anything back. I’ve trained him to keep his mouth shut in court.
“So you know the defendant?”
Water vapor casts her eyes down. More tears. She wrings another tissue. “Yes. I know him…”
“Ms. Vapor,” the prosecutor continues, oozing sympathy, “You told our investigator that, on and off for years, you and the defendant have been in a…
“Let me read what you said.”
The prosecutor looks at a legal pad. “You said that, for on and off for years, you and the defendant have been in a ‘closely coupled feedback loop’. Is that correct?”
Water vapor looks a bit miffed. “That lady was your investigator?”
“She was.”
“I thought that was just a girl talk. About relationships and all…”
Water vapor dabs her eyes with the tissue again. “It’s not very often anyone pays attention to me. Asks about my feelings. Most people never notice me. Except to complain about humidity…”
“Ms. Vapor,” the prosecutor says. “Can you focus on the question?”
Water vapor emits a bubbly giggle. “I suppose I do go on a lot. Sometimes it just comes pouring out.”
“Ms. Vapor, please…?”
“Maybe I said that.”
“So your answer is ‘Yes’?”
“I suppose.”
Water vapor does have a nice breathy voice. I can see why CO₂ might be attracted.
“Just to be clear. You told our investigator you’ve been in this ‘closely coupled feedback loop’ with CO₂ on and off for years?”
“I talk a lot. So I probably said that, yes.”
“Can you explain it to us?”
“No.”
“Can’t? Or won’t, Ms. Vapor?”
“I can’t explain it. There’s just some chemistry. CO₂ excites me.”
“CO₂ ‘excites’ you?”
“Gives me a buzz. The other gases leave me flat. You must know how that is…”
“Ms. Vapor,” the prosecutor says, “I need to ask you a delicate question.”
Water vapor looks wary.
“After CO₂ excites you, what happens?”
Water vapor stops to consider her answer.
“I’m not usually not paying much attention…”
“Not paying attention?”
“I’m kind of in a daze, you know?”
“In a daze? When?”
“After I emit.”
“You emit?”
“Longwave radiation, I think.”
“And where to you emit it?”
Water vapor looks embarrassed. “Like where does it come out?”
“No. Where does it go?”
“Oh. All over. Up, down, out into space, back down to the ground. All over.”
It goes on like this for a while. Then it’s my turn.
My cross-examination should to be sensitive and tactful.
But I decide to skip the niceties and dive right in.
“Ms. Vapor,” I ask. “This ‘excitement’ you get with CO₂?”
“Yes?”
“Is it mutual?”
“Yes… I mean I think so. That’s what he tells me, anyway.”
“So CO₂ ‘emits’, too?”
“He sure does.”
“And how long, exactly, does this ‘excitement’ last?”
She dabs her eyes with a tissue. “Not long enough.”
“You and CO₂ fall back into an equilibrium state?”
“I guess you could call it that.”
“This ‘excitement’, Ms. Vapor. Can you bring it on by yourself?”
She glares at me.
I rephrase the question. “Do you need CO₂ to get excited?”
She straightens up. Haughty, now. “I don’t need him for anything.”
“You don’t?”
“But if you really must know, Mr. Nosy, sure. I do it to myself all the time. Alone.”
“I see. So when you get excited with CO₂…”
I think about how to phrase the question. “Is it because you want to? Or because he just happens to be around?”
She’s indigent. “I’m not a slut, if that’s what you’re implying…”
“No one is implying anything, Ms. Vapor. Just trying to establish the facts.”
Time to switch gears. Some empathy needed here.
“You seem to like CO₂…”
“I do like him,” water vapor says, glancing at him, then back to me.
“Have the two of you ever discussed forming a long-term relationship?”
Water vapor starts crying again.
“I’d really like that…”
“But?” I prompt gently.
“I don’t seem to be any good at hanging around. I can’t help it. I just take off after a couple of days.”
“Ms. Vapor, the IPCC calls my client a ‘forcing’.”
“I don’t know anything about that.”
“Is CO₂ ‘forcing’ you do anything? Anything you wouldn’t do otherwise?”
“No…”
“So this mutual excitement. It’s consensual?
“I guess you could call it that.”
“Ms. Vapor. Are you a ‘submissive’?”
“A what?”
“Someone who needs to be dominated, to achieve…” I look for the right word. “Excitement.”
“You mean does CO₂ tie me to the bedpost or something?”
“Or something.”
“No, I don’t play those games. Not very often, anyway.”
I have to get tough on her now. “Ms. Vapor, isn’t it a fact that you and my client are never alone when you ‘get excited’?”
She looks uneasy. “Nitrogen is always hanging around watching us,” she admits warily.
She continues. “I don’t know what kick Nitrogen gets out of it. I don’t think Nitrogen can get it up itself. It must be some kind of contact high or something…”
I wait for her to finish.
“I think Nitrogen should get a life. Nitrogen is so boring…”
“So this group situation in the troposphere. It just heats up? Until it reaches Thermodynamic Equilibrium?”
“I guess. Everyone is pretty wasted when its over.”
“And my client,” I look at CO₂ in his jumpsuit. “Is just one of several participants in this atmospheric orgy?”
“I suppose…”
“Just to be clear. CO₂ doesn’t start things off. He’s not like, the one sending out the invitations or anything?”
“No, it just sort of happens. When they’re enough of us around.”
“Just sort of happens,” I repeat.
I have no further questions for water vapor.
The prosecution rests its case.
The jury is shivering.
They’re looking at the door that leads to the deliberation room. It’s got to be warmer in there.
The judge asks the jury to leave the courtroom. They can’t wait.
This step in the ballet is to allow me, the defense lawyer, an opportunity to ask for a ‘directed verdict’ of acquittal.
The judge can order a directed verdict if he thinks the prosecution has woefully failed to prove its case. Otherwise, I present my defense. Then it’s up to the jury.
I don’t think the prosecution has made a great case.
But I can’t read the judge.
And a failed motion for a directed verdict can ruin your momentum.
It’s like throwing a pass to the end zone from midfield, only to have your wide receiver drop it. You’re right back where you started, only worse.
So I’ll do it the old-fashioned way. Let the jury decide.
In the second half, I get to present a more coherent defense.
The points I got in before were in cross-examinations of prosecution witnesses.
Which makes me look kind of negative. Always objecting, always quibbling with what people said.
So now I get to tell CO₂’s side of the story. More or less without interruption.
Although I’m sure the prosecution will do unto me what I did unto them. It’s how the game is played.
So now I really need to make up my mind about my defense. What do I really want to get across to the jury?
I could argue that CO₂ and water vapor were just a couple of crazy kids who didn’t know what they are doing.
They didn’t mean for things to heat up between them. It just happened.
That might tug the heartstrings of the jury.
But it’s an argument for getting my client a reduced sentence.
I want to get him off.
I stop and ponder. Will water vapor wait for CO₂ until he gets out of prison?
A tearful reunion, no doubt.
I could talk about how much it will cost the state to keep CO₂ locked up when he could be doing some useful rehabilitative work. Like growing vegetables.
CO₂ tells me his cactus is doing great.
But I can’t see him spending the rest of his life working on the prison farm.
The ‘but for’ business might be turned around to CO₂’s credit.
“But for” CO₂, the earth would be a snowball.
In some distant Milankovitch cycle past, CO₂, like a pilot light, kept water vapor out of the deep freeze and got the greenhouse thing going again.
We should thank him for his past service.
And give him a break.
In our system, the accused is presumed to be innocent until proven guilty.
That doesn’t seem to be working here.
It feels like the burden of proof is on me to prove that CO₂ is innocent.
There are a couple of “It’s not CO₂” arguments.
Jo Nova and John Abbot did an interesting study in 2018.
Abbot, a math guy, trained a neural network to follow closely the temperature records available from 50 AD to 1830.
Once trained, the network ‘understood’ natural climate variations. Pre-Industrial Revolution.
Then they turned the network loose and let it run forward to 2000.
The 20th century would have warmed naturally anyway.
There’s a hard science argument that looks at Earth’s outgoing longwave radiation (OLR). This has been measured by by satellites since 1985.
If CO₂ were ‘trapping’ heat somewhere, Earth’s surface temperature would being going up, but OLR would be staying the same.
Surface temperatures have been going up. But so has OLR.
So the energy ‘budget’ is more balanced than it looks.
Which is a good thing, otherwise Earth would continue warming indefinitely.
Javier Vinós says this “exonerates” CO₂.
But I don’t understand the argument well enough to explain it. And I’m certain the jury wouldn’t get it.
I keep circling back to the selective prosecution defense.
I have to show that CO₂’s prosecution is to be based on some ‘invidious classification’.
I look up ‘invidious’. Adjective: (a) ‘likely to arouse or incur resentment or anger in others’; (b) ‘unfairly discriminating; unjust’.
Race, religion and national origin are ‘invidious’ in US law.
I see one argument.
Forget that CO₂ is 27% Chinese.
It’s not his national origin that’s aroused the prosecutorial wrath.
It’s his natural origin. Or lack thereof.
They’re after CO₂ because of his human origin. Or part of him is.
How much?
Even Wikipedia, no friend of my client, says “Most sources of CO₂ emissions are natural.”
Natural emissions of CO₂ come from rotting plants, forest fires, undersea volcanoes and hydrothermal vents.
Termites are big emitters of CO₂.
I’m don’t need them showing up in the courtroom. CO₂ has enough unpopular friends already.
I try to put some numbers on it.
The breakdown appears to be: 120 gigatons of CO₂ per year from natural sources; 7 Gt per year anthropogenic.
Which by my calculator is 5.5%
I do search to see if anyone has used this argument before. That’s always a good idea.
I don’t see where any fact-checker has nit-picked those numbers.
The principle counter-argument to the argument seems to be that the argument was made by ExxonMobil in 1997:
While most of the CO₂ emitted by far is the result of natural phenomena, namely respiration and decomposition, most attention has centered on the 3 to 4 percent related to human activities – burning of fossil fuels, deforestation.
And ExxonMobil is in league with the Devil. Or the Devil itself. We should put our fingers in our ears when the Devil whispers.
The atmosphere doesn’t keep track of where CO₂ comes from.
Plants don’t prefer one brand of CO₂ to another. For them, ‘human’ vs ‘natural’ is Coke and Pepsi.
I have to argue prosecutors unfairly singled out CO₂. Water vapor should be in the dock with him. Not on the witness stand.
First, I have to show the discrimination was intentional.
That’s not hard to do.
The prosecutors have had it in for CO₂ for years.
CO₂ had a pretty good rep until the 1970s.
Then OPEC took Middle Eastern oil off the table.
The US had two choices: nuclear or coal.
It picked coal. Fracking and renewables were not things then.
Coal took some reputational damage in the debate.
Coal’s detractors harped on the bad things coal emits when you burn it : particulates, mercury, sulfur dioxide (SO₂), and so on. Carbon dioxide was a late addition to the list.
CO₂ came out publicly as a climate villain in 1977.
There was this story in the New York Times:
Not that the problem was seen as all that urgent. A story by the same writer from the following January:
We all make mistakes.
The Department of Energy started doing research: the ‘Carbon Dioxide Program’.
The 1970s scientists, to their credit, gave my client the benefit of the doubt.
Or, at least, they were clear they didn’t have proof he was guilty.
This display of good conscience came about because: climate is chaotic; we didn’t know much about natural climate variation; and the record of observation, of the right things with decent instruments, was too short, in climate time.
All of which are still true. Although the instrument record is a little longer.
As late as 1995, IPCC scientists were haggling over sentences like:
None of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed [climate] changes to the specific cause of increases in greenhouse gases.
Then the policy-makers took over the investigation.
Their mind was already made up. They were chomping at the bit to go after CO₂.
The policy-makers, who were lawyers, had a different idea about the scientists should be doing.
They didn’t want endless research with no definitive result.
They expected the scientists to help them build their case against CO₂.
The semantic games were on.
There was a Jesuitical definition of ‘climate change’ in the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
‘Climate change’, by definition, could only come from humans. The scientists were instructed to look for
a change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and which is in addition to natural climate variability observed over comparable time periods.
It’s worth pointing out that the IPCC doesn’t do, or commission, original climate research.
The working group reports contain ‘gists’ of research done by others. They read a bit like super-condensed Cliffs Notes. Or Wikipedia, for that matter.
The value-added comes from the selection process.
So many research papers, so little time. Thank goodness someone is reading them for us and flagging the important ones.
Of course, the selection process is where prejudice can seep in. It’s inescapable.
The technical working group (WG1) reports are, on the whole, not bad. The authors make an effort to be inclusive. And measured in how they say things.
Yet they are working under the directive.
They’re not writing a textbook. The lawyers expect to use what they write in their case.
Which explains the maddening “(medium confidence)” parentheticals that are the hallmark of IPPC style.
Those parentheticals expand into advice to the lawyers: you can use this, but be aware it’s low confidence. Or, don’t worry about using this, it’s high confidence.
The concept of ‘progress’ in IPCC-land is a weird one. It’s epistemological.
What’s reported as ‘progress’ aren’t new developments in science. It’s levels of certainty, which started out at “maybe we think” and progressed to “we’re 100% sure.”
Which ties to the strange and probably (medium confidence) pernicious goal that the science be ‘settled’.
You settle an argument. Like you do a law case.
Science evolves and is supposed to maintain an open mind. It shouldn’t be settled for all time.
True, as Thomas Kuhn pointed out, a paradigm can persist for a long stretch of time.
Although that’s all the more reason to pay attention to the little things the paradigm doesn’t explain very well. They’re little shavings of kindling that may eventually ignite into the next bright idea.
Anyway, the IPCC working group reports are too thick for the media or public to read.
They media reads the Summaries for Policy Makers.
Which the lawyers write. And which are, to be polite, salesmanship.
Or, to be impolite, propaganda.
I review what I know about the Wrongly Accused from watching TV.
The good guy, usually accompanied by his girlfriend, has to get away from the cops.
He’s innocent. That’s good. The cops are after him. That’s bad.
The predicament is double bad because, while busy running from the cops, the good guy and his girlfriend have to do the work the cops failed to do. Run an investigation and find the Real Killer.
To make things triply worse, sometimes the Real Killer and his henchmen are chasing them, too.
Fortunately, I don’t have to go off all vigilante-style. I don’t have to deliver the cause of global warming to the courtroom in cuffs.
I need only convince the jury that the detectives brought the first suspect they could fit to the crime. Then they stopped looking. They were in a rush.
If they left other suspects up on the whiteboard, that can create reasonable doubt.
And if the detectives stopped their inquiry after some big-shot politician had a word with the boss, that’s even better.
If you’re looking for something that causes warming, the Sun is a good place to start.
Some 99.9% of the energy in Earth’s climate system comes from the Sun. That’s 173,000 terawatts (TW). Earth’s geothermal energy only totals 47 TW.
Humans been worrying about the Sun for most of recorded history. It is pretty obviously the giver of life.
Any variation in the Sun, such as an eclipse, brought on fear and trepidation.
Although actually the Sun is pretty steady. The ‘solar constant’, the amount of energy striking the earth expressed in watts per square meter, doesn’t change much.
Once upon a time, children, there was a Weak Sun. But that was a long time ago.
It’s just possible to see sunspots with your bare eyes.
But don’t try this at home. It can be done at dusk or dawn, especially if there is dust or smoke in the air, and if the sunspots are large.
Some ancient astronomers saw them.
But it really helps to have a telescope.
Thomas Harriot in 1610 was the first to see sunspots with that invention.
Happily, Harriot did not burn out his retinas.
German-born British astronomer Frederick Herschel observed sunspots for years. Herschel discovered the planet Uranus in 1781.
Herschel asked a perfectly reasonable question: could the sun have an effect on agriculture?
Sadly, Herschel took things a little too far.
In 1801, he presented a paper to the Royal Society about predicting the price of wheat by counting sunspots.
The history of solar-climate conjecture shows it follows a fashion cycle.
Theorizing would peak at some embarrassing overreach, like Herschel’s.
Interest would then subside.
But inevitably the Sun would pop back up, like a whack-a-mole.
Someone would find a solar cycle in an unexpected place, like tree rings.
German astronomer Heinrich Schwabe documented the 11-year sunspot cycle named after him.
That was in 1843. Schwabe spent 17 years searching for the planet Vulcan against the disk of the sun. He made his sunspot notes on the side.
Norman Lockyer, who founded the journal Nature in 1869, was very big on sunspots. He discovered helium on the Sun before it was found on Earth.
There may be a solar constant, but the Sun is a roiling fusion fire.
What goes on in the Sun is very complicated. It’s not a lightbulb.
Schwabe’s 11-year sunspot cycle is the best known. But there are more.
There seems to be a ‘Pentadecadal’ 55 year cycle.
The Feynman cycle (as it should be called) is around 100 or 105 years.
Suess-DeVries cycle is approximately 210 years. The Eddy cycle, 1,000 years.
And, very important in explaining our paleoclimate, the Bray cycle of approximately 2,300 years.
All those cycles have been a blessing and a curse.
The blessing is pretty simple. They explain a lot.
In paleoclimatology, the solar–climate relationship is utterly non-controversial.
The curse is a little more interesting.
Just as humans want to ‘see’ trends, they want to see cycles.
If anything, humans are even more hard-wired for it.
Humans have been dancing to the beat since the beginning. Even chimps like to drum.
Our brains are very good at sorting out complex and even changing rhythms.
The predisposition to see cycles doesn’t mean they aren’t real. The natural world is full of them, starting with the astronomical ones.
It’s just a caution to be very careful.
You can explain anything with enough cycles. And it’s fun.
Blame Fourier. He proved an arbitrary wave form can be broken down into a superposition of underlying sine waves.
Looking for cycles can start out as sane, sober scientific research. But in some cases it develops into a pathology, Cyclomania.
Your observational data indicate a cyclical phenomenon. That’s fine.
Then things get tricky.
You can improve the fit of the data if you add another cycle.
Which might be real. Or not.
The reference case for Cyclomania is the Ptolemaic solar system. The retrograde motion of the planets was fixed by adding an epicycle:
Back around 1300, ingenious mechanical contraptions with wheels inside wheels were not all that bad at predicting where the planets would appear in the sky.
In fact, some are still in use at planetariums today. The same kind of gears are in the electro-optical projectors that show patrons the sky as viewed from Earth.
Two frequencies can reinforce or beat against each other.
Adding a secondary cycle can explain why your primary cycle stopped working.
As I said, it all needs to be done very carefully.
Solar cycles have some unique problems that have something to do with the Sun.
Since the 19th century, people interested in the Sun’s effect on the weather have been able to find good correlations for stretches of time.
Then they go poof. Call it the Cheshire Cat effect. Just when you think you’ve got it figured out, it disappears.
Or, even more interesting, just as the Sun flips its magnetic field, the correlation stays strong, but becomes negative.
In the early 20th century, honest researchers established some pretty good correlations between certain weather events and solar activity.
Then, in 1924, all that work went to hell.
If you look at climate data for enough years, like over century, certain ‘breakpoint’ years pop out. The climate goes into a new regime.
These regimes last, to give a number, something like 25 years. But they're not predictable like clockwork. And they may only last 15 years or so.
The Sun and/or the major ocean oscillations have something to do with them.
In 1924, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation changed abruptly from cool to a warm, following upon a 1923 solar minimum.
1976 was another big breakpoint year, also caused by a big shift in the El Niño-Southern Oscillation.
The regime that followed, 1976–1998, we now call the ‘late 20th century warming’.
Which, not coincidentally, coincides with the public panic over my client, CO₂.
There was another big El Niño in 1998.
The 15-year regime that followed is now variously called the Global Warming Hiatus (Wikipedia), the ‘standstill’ (UK Met Office), or the ‘pause’.
Oddly, despite the zillions that were then being spent on climate research, the IPCC missed it.
It took a retired paleontologist to notice that something was going on in the HadCRUT data.
Bob Carter drew that a trend line from 1998 to 2006. He wrote about it article in the Daily Telegraph.
It had another one of those headlines that became a meme: “There IS a problem with global warming… it stopped in 1998.”
To the climate orthodox, this was reprehensible apostasy. Carter was viciously slammed.
What they should have been thinking about was the danger of extrapolating straight lines into the future based on short data sets.
By the end of the hiatus, or whatever you want to call it, it was clear to all but the zealous faithful that the IPCC models had broken down. They were running too hot.
Circa 2014, the IPCC had a choice.
It could have done the right thing, which would have be to say we got it wrong, we’re going to take some more time to look at it.
Or, it could have did what it did, which was double down on the propaganda.
They were in a hurry to get to Paris 2015.
Who wouldn’t be?
The computation-intensive global models lost their credibility then, and haven’t yet earned it back.
History helps here, too.
The global climate models initially basked in the reflected glory of numerical weather prediction.
Weather prediction made real strides in the supercomputer era.
Now instead of the weather forecast being wrong three days out, it’s wrong ten days out.
The thing about weather prediction is that you find out the next day if you were right or wrong.
If you were wrong, you change your model and try again.
So my New Rule for anyone making a climate prediction is: write it down on a piece of paper and put it in a time capsule along with a $100 bill.
Side bets are allowed on what the value of the $100 bill will be in 30 years.
A few of the early intoxicating warming predictions have aged in the barrel over 30 years.
James Hansen would have lost his C-note on the predictions he made in 1988.
Hansen’s lowest temperature-increase scenario barely happened.
Despite CO₂ going up higher than even he dreamed.
But I digress from the Sun.
The intellectual fashion cycle was: pro-Sun 1860–1920; against it 1920–1960; positive again in the 1960s and 1970s.
Then the Sun went negative in the 1980s. That time, satellites were to blame.
In February 1980, the ACRIM Solar Maximum Mission measured the solar constant to a new level of precision.
The solar constant was found to be even more constant than previously thought. In Solar Cycle 21, which ended September 1986, it fluctuated only ± 0.07%.
General opinion held that level of variation in Total Solar Irradiance, or TSI, was too small to make a difference to the energy balance of the planet.
Which dovetailed nicely with the real reason why the IPCC in the 1990s was not interested in the Sun.
Although that had to do with politics.
In British political parlance, the Sun wasn’t part of the brief.
Recall the quasi-Jesuitical 1992 UN definition of ‘climate change’.
‘Climate change’ the result of human activity. Nothing else.
The Sun is not anthropogenic.
Ergo, the Sun is not a source of ‘climate change’. As defined.
The policy-makers didn’t want the scientists spending their time studying the Sun any more than it wanted them studying volcanoes.
They also limited the time scale of interest.
Which worked against the Sun. And the ocean oscillations, too.
The UN was not interested in turning up a serial killer.
It wanted one culprit it could throw the book at for the late 20th century warming.
My client.
Paleoclimatology was out. There was no point having the detectives pour over cold cases dating back to the ice age.
The bosses had an implicit 30-year dictum. They reckoned that was plenty long to distinguish ‘climate’ from ‘weather’.
Nature was not consulted about this 30-year thing.
It was probably a bit of preemptive public relations on the part of the bosses. In statistics, n < 30 is commonly called a ‘small sample’.
The year 2000 was a solar maximum.
But by then, CO₂ was already the guy.
I need an expert witness on the Sun.
I look for one with good visuals.
No, not what you’re thinking. I’m not on Tender. I don’t care what the witness looks like.
I want the jury to see charts with something besides scary lines going up and up.
I ask my miracle-working assistant to put together a list of researchers who have the usual expert witness credentials.
But, most importantly, who have good slides of oscillations.
“Oscillations of what?” she asks.
“Anything,” I say. “I’m not fussy.”
She gives me that look.
I move my hand up and down. “You know. Waves.”
Miranda sets me up with a scientist she thinks will be perfect.
Miranda is always right.
It’s very annoying sometimes.
I meet Joanna at a Starbucks.
At least I’m not working out of the trunk of my car anymore.
Joanna is, presumably, the one sitting there with a portfolio leaning against her chair.
She starts showing me nice large prints.
It’s good practice for an expert witness to expound things to a dimwit such as myself.
If I can sort of understand what in the heck they’re talking about, maybe the jury will, too.
Joanna has scruples.
I find that charming. Refreshing, given my line of work.
She has a question about using this chart:
My eyes follow the wave pattern. “What’s not to like?”
Joanna points to the scale on the left.
I study it. I wouldn’t know a watt per meter squared if I ran over one.
She says the variation is small. The scale of the chart makes it look bigger.
Like I said, refreshing.
I explain that the prosecution is out to convict my client based on a trend of 0.13° C per decade.
Which, by skillfully fiddling of the scale of their chart, they have made look ginormous to the jury.
Therefore, I conclude, we can defend CO₂ with whatever that thing you just showed me is.
Speaking of trends, she says. She shuffles through her deck and shows me this one:
“That’s us coming out of the Little Ice Age?” I ask.
It is, she replies.
I tell her I like it. I ask if she has any more like that.
Her basic sunspot chart is interesting, but a bit bland. And the jury may not see the point.
I ask her who ‘Dalton’ is. Was.
John Dalton was an English naturalist who kept a meteorological diary for 57 years starting in 1787. It ended up with over 200,000 observations.
He was also color-blind, but figured that out. Color blindness is still sometimes known as Daltonism.
I point at 1816. “Wasn’t there a volcano then?”
Joanna nods. She knows her Tambora.
I wait to see if she tells me the volcano erupted because of sunspots.
If she does, I’m going to have to call an Uber for her.
She doesn’t.
I ask if she’s got something on the same time scale, only prettier.
And maybe accompanied by a hammer, to get the point home to the jury.
She rummages around and pulls out this one:
I like that one. It’s pretty.
I stare at it a moment.
I suppose I could tell the jury the correlation is ‘obvious’. R² is whatever.
But I guess I’ll let them draw their own conclusions.
Joanna’s testimony goes well. She’s good at the expert-witness thing.
She explains her slides to the jury better than she did to me at Starbucks.
Which maybe it was she had practice.
Or maybe I’m slow and needed to go over the material twice.
Per my request, she stays away from the far-out cycle stuff.
It’s possible there’s a connection between the 11.86-year solar cycle and gravitational pull of Jupiter.
But I told her even if that’s true, it’s going to sound like astrology to the jury.
Joanna holds up will under-cross examination by the male prosecutor.
She doesn’t exaggerate about the variation in TSI being a ‘small’ number.
But she gamely holds out. Being small in some physicist’s energy balance model doesn’t mean it can be dismissed.
I think of ways to putting that to the jury.
Napoleon was small, but he was important.
She goes on. We shouldn’t decide a priori what a ‘small’ number is. The effect of a small variation may be non-linear. The proverbial flap of the butterfly’s wing.
Science should work from observations to theory, not the other way round.
A lot of research suggests the Sun’s effect is cumulative. We may not understand the exact mechanism right now.
The physics model treats the Sun like Vegas. What happens in one solar cycle stays in a one solar cycle.
Actually she didn’t say that. I did.
Joanna puts in some cat scratches on the woman who created the PMOD data series.
Although that’s probably a sexist thing for me to say.
ACRIM is the original source of raw data for satellite-measured TSI.
Unfortunately, the satellites wear out. The instruments go dodgy. They need to be recalibrated.
PMOD is a ‘reprocessed’ TSI data series that tries to stitch it all together in one convenient place.
But somehow PMOD manages to massage the raw data in a pro-warming direction.
Where have we seen this before? HadCRUT, perhaps?
The woman behind PMOD said in an early interview that her motive in creating the data set was to help fight global warming.
Which is fine, if that’s her personal belief.
But it doesn’t exactly build confidence that her data set is unbiased.
The keyboard warriors who take data off the internet never ask how the sausage is made.
They build models that all reach the same conclusion. I suppose they’re happy to be part of the consensus.
Joanna even manages to get in some bonus material.
Solar activity affects the Earth’s speed of rotation.
A little. It’s been well documented since the invention of atomic clocks.
I don’t know what it means. But more power to the Sun. I’d like a few extra microseconds of sleep in the morning.
Ultraviolet radiation, UV, ramps up to a solar maximum.
UV makes ozone, which warms the high stratosphere.
That can affect the high winds that circle the globe. The ones that hold in the dreaded Polar Vortex.
The Big Possibility is that this indirectly influences the strength and direction of the great poleward air flows, which are the principle cooling mechanism of our planet.
Solar variation also affects Earth’s magnetic field.
That normally shields us from gamma rays coming from deep space.
Cosmic ray collisions make condensation nuclei that attract water vapor and forms clouds.
Water vapor again. And she said she wasn’t easy.
I conclude it’s time for the IPCC to take some advice from Joni Mitchell. We really don’t know clouds at all.
Joanna is not bad looking, by the way.
I tell her I need her cell number, just in case there’s a retrial.
I think the case is going pretty well.
She’s given the jury a lot to think about.
But I’m a worrier.
We’ve acknowledged that CO₂ is going up.
And we’ve more-or-less acknowledged that the planet has been warming. At least a little.
Whether enough to worry about, who knows?
With luck, the jury not get all hot and bothered about it.
But just saying saying CO₂ is going up, and temperature is going up, kind of leaves them hanging.
A hung jury, by the way, would be a good outcome for for my client.
Unless the prosecutors decide to go to the expense of a retrial.
I check to make sure Joanna’s cell number got into my Contacts.
Telling the jury it’s a hen-and-egg thing doesn’t feel like enough.
CO₂ and temperature spiraling up together leaves the theological question unanswered. What’s causing that?
“We don’t know” doesn’t play well with humans.
I need to find the Prime Mover.
In insurance law, an extreme weather event is called an act of God.
The ancients blamed some deity or another. It’s getting warmer. Zeus did it.
I don’t think that will play.
But I like the idea of a personified fall guy.
And I know who it is.
I’m going to do a bad thing.
I’m going to throw El Niño under the bus.
Yes, I know. El Niño is only the warm phase of the Southern Oscillation in the equatorial Pacific.
El Niño only lasts a few years. So you can call it weather, not climate.
But if the prosecution can blame CO₂ for the weather, turnabout is fair play.
El Niño is perfect for my little frame-up.
He sounds like a Mexican drug lord.
In the Wrongly Accused narrative, the Real Killer, overlooked by the detectives, is still out there, lurking.
There’s dramatic tension because we know the Real Killer will Strike Again.
And we all know El Niño will be back.
My defense is not quite as unscrupulous as it sounds.
El Niño releases heat that built up in the ocean over previous years. It can produce dramatic warming.
With CO₂ nowhere in sight. Or at least offstage.
Unless he’s been hiding out in Peru.
I make a note: Next time we talk, ask CO₂ something in Spanish.
Our jury, like most, skews elderly.
I do some counting on my fingers. They were alive in 1997.
So probably old enough to remember the 1997–98 El Niño event.
Which, I discover, has its own Wikipedia page.
This time, I decide to find the scary visuals first. I’ll find the expert witness later.
I like this red finger of doom coming out from Peru:
I want the jury to think the evidence against El Niño is deep. So, this diagram:
I need to convince the jury that there was a rush to judgement against CO₂.
Back in the day. The 1980s maybe. Their minds were made up by then.
They should have listened to the 1970s scientists and been patient enough to do some more research.
If there are ‘multidecadal’ phenomena going on, you need — duh — multiple decades of good data.
Long-term ocean oscillations were first documented in 1984 by Folland in a paper in Nature, “Worldwide marine temperature fluctuations 1856-1981.”
By 1984, CO₂ was already on the run.
The term Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) wasn’t coined until the year 2000.
Peruvian fishermen knew about El Niño a long time ago.
Warm water appearing around Christmastime.
That was good for sardines, bad for anchovies.
In Spanish, El Niño is ‘the Christ child’.
But there’s no reason to bring religion into the courtroom.
I won’t mention that to the jury if I don’t have to. I’m happy if they think El Niño is El Chapo.
The discovery of what’s now called the El Niño–Southern Oscillation or ENSO dates back to the British Raj in India.
The Indian Meteorological Department’s prediction of the monsoon failed badly in 1899 and 1901. An unanticipated drought lead to a famine. The British colonial officials were caught unprepared.
Gilbert Walker was a Cambridge math whiz who was hired to help out.
He’s the ‘Walker’ of the Yule–Walker equations still used today.
Walker went out the India and took charge of collecting and analyzing the weather data.
With the aid of low-cost human computers, Indian nationals mostly, Walker studied decades of data from India but also from around Australia. Which was also a British colony back then.
Walker discovered a great seesaw oscillation of atmospheric pressure between the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It was well-correlated to temperature and rainfall patterns.
But unless you lived where the monsoon is, it was a kind of a regional thing.
In the 1960s, Jacob Bjerknes joined up South America’s El Niño with Walker’s Southern Oscillation. El Niño was rebaptised the El Niño–Southern Oscillation, ENSO.
We have no problem describing what’s going on during El Niño.
During a warm El Niño, there is high air pressure in the western Pacific and high sea surface temperatures in the eastern Pacific.
During the not-truely opposite La Niña, there is low air pressure in the western Pacific and low sea surface temperatures in the eastern Pacific.
And we can detect El Niño when it comes on. There’s a Multivariate ENSO Index (MEI).
But there’s a lot of hand-waving about what causes it.
NOAA says an “interaction between the surface layers of the ocean and the overlying atmosphere in the tropical Pacific.” Which is pretty much a repeat of the definition.
El Niño is one of those quasi-chaotic climate things that happens at irregular intervals. It can appear two years in a row, then not again for years.
The average of these irregular intervals might be 3.8 years. But that’s exactly the sort of average that is not very useful.
A lots of people have have bent their statistical brains trying to tease something out of the El Niño cycle.
The ocean oscillations peak their little heads up over the straight lines drawn on long-term temperature charts.
When Berkeley Earth subjected its historic temperature data to detailed analysis, they noted the unexplained residual had a “remarkable correspondence” to “the longer term multi-decadal oscillations that give the AMO its name.”
One interesting advanced-math result is that the North Atlantic and South Pacific oscillations are very similar despite being half a planet away from each other:
For cycle hunters, the moon is not a bad bet for something that influences the ocean. The 3.8 year thing shows up in super-high spring tides, when the gravitational forces of both the Moon and Sun are aligned in what called ‘syzygy’.
The IPCC orthodoxy deals very poorly with climate phenomena like ocean oscillations.
Oscillations distract people from the long-term secular warming trend.
Which, of course, the IPCC blames on CO₂.
The IPCC can dismiss oscillations by invoking the ‘balance of nature’ corollary that falls out of the premises of the orthodoxy.
If climate change by definition comes from human activity, every non-anthropogenic ‘natural’ change therefore must net to zero. Sooner or later.
Although they can provide a handy fudge factor when a prediction doesn’t come true.
The IPCC reports appear to give due consideration to the Sun, volcanoes, the oceans and other natural ‘forcings’.
But you know in advance they will all net to a Big Zero.
The 30-year dictum helps dismiss oscillations, sun or ocean . El Niño, even if it comes all the time, is a 2- to 15-year variation. Therefore it belongs under ‘weather’, not ‘climate’.
The concept of multi-decade climate regimes should be even more discomforting to the IPCC.
Those imply its work could become irrelevant. Like what happened to the solar-cycle researchers in 1924.
I find an expert witness to parrot my El Niño theory to the jury.
This guy, unlike Joanna, does not have scruples.
And he’s not as nice-looking.
But he gets the job done.
The defense rests.
The prosecutor’s closing statement is an impassioned plea.
Of the usual.
To quote Greta, blah, blah, blah.
I see where she’s finally graduated from high school in Sweden.
She says she’ll miss not being in school any more because she won’t be able to not go to school any more. On strike, that is.
I’d say something about not understanding teen-agers, but she’s turned 20.
The prosecutor says CO₂ is obviously guilty. Just look at the graph.
The US needs to spend money incarcerating its CO₂ because China and India won’t do anything about theirs.
Okay. I’m putting words in his mouth there.
When my turn comes, I make an impassioned plea for ignorance.
Or at least having the sense to say, “We don’t know.”
Miranda has given me a long list of quotations about ignorance.
“I don’t know anything ignorance,” I said, explaining why I needed her to perform this research task. “Could you just please go on the internet and look it up for me?”
One quote seems oddly on topic. William James said “Our science is a drop, our ignorance a sea.”
Only one speaks out to me.
Good olde William Hazlitt was debunking Edmond Burke’s interest in phrenology in 1829.
The origin of all science is the desire to know causes, and the origin of all false science and imposture is the desire to accept false causes rather than none; or, which is the same thing, in the unwillingness to acknowledge our own ignorance.
It’s been a long trial.
It’s up the the jury now.
After they start their deliberation, I engage in a self-justification session.
I always feel better after one of these.
Yes, I say to myself. Putting the blame on El Niño was a bit disingenuous.
But, I ask myself, what is the jury really worried about?
Some 0.13° C trend that won’t show up until after they’re dead?
Or some really weird weather next month?
Why shouldn’t El Niño take the rap for that?
I wonder how long the jury is going to take to reach a verdict.
To pass the time, I look up other cases.
The O.J. Simpson jury only deliberated four hours before they acquitted him.
But my client never played for USC.
I arrange for a room where I can sit with CO₂ while we’re waiting.
He’s got his cactus with him on his lap.
I’ve slowly been able to get CO₂ to open up.
Waiting for the verdict, he seems light-headed. Almost giddy.
He’s just starting telling me about some high old times back in the Cretaceous when the bailiff opens the door. Something is going on the the courtroom.
I enter.
The judge looks displeased about something.
The two prosecutors, male and female, are hunched over their table rapidly flipping through law books.
I overhear one of them use the phrase ‘jury nullification’.
I ask the Clerk what’s going on.
The jury wants to return a Scottish verdict: ‘Not proven’.
Over there, it means the jury is unconvinced that the suspect is innocent. But his guilt has not been proven beyond reasonable doubt.
We don’t have that verdict here. The prosecutors are wondering if they should object.
I think they’ll think twice about that. They’d likely as not push the jury into returning ‘not guilty’. They really don’t want that.
I’ll take ‘not proven’.
It means CO₂ walks.
Today, anyway.
I give CO₂ my arm and walk him out of the courthouse.
He’s been in the ankle shackles so long he still shuffles.
We emerge at the top of the steps.
It’s a beautiful spring day.
Since the verdict, my cell phone has been dinging messages non-stop.
But I don’t see any press gathering at the base of the steps. Good thing.
As best as I tell behind the gas mask, CO₂ is blinking. He hasn’t been out in the sun in a long time.
We shake hands.
CO₂ hands me his cactus.
I promise to take good care of it.
I don’t know much about cacti. But this one seems especially green to me.
I pat CO₂’s belly. I can feel abs under the jumpsuit.
“Keep that up, okay?” I tell him.
He nods.
I give him a moment to take it all in.
Although I suspect he’s in a hurry. Water vapor is probably out there somewhere, waiting for him.
I put my arm around his shoulder and pat him on the back. “You ready for this?”
He nods again.
I open the valve behind his neck.
There’s a slow hissing sound.
I step back and watch. Small wrinkles start to appear in the orange jumpsuit.
This is going to take some time.
I decide to make a quick scroll through my messages.
The vast majority, as I suspected, are hate mail.
How could I defend an obviously guilty criminal like CO₂?
I’m a psychopath. Or a shill of the oil and gas industry.
I wish. I hear those guys pay pretty well.
There are a few congratulatory texts. I appreciate those. I’ll acknowledge them later.
CO₂’s jump suit creases in half and folds over.
I stop looking at my phone. This is the moment.
I’m not very good at this. “Goodbye, old friend,” is all I manage to say.
He doesn’t acknowledge. He may already be gone.
The jumpsuit and the mask collapse in a heap at the top of the steps.
I look at it for a moment.
I start to think about what to do with it. I guess the penal system will want it back.
I pick up the jumpsuit and fold neatly, like I was packing a suitcase.
But I give it a good squeeze out as I do. I want my client 100% exonerated.
In the last City Beautiful campaign, somebody put those ‘flower towers’ in the courthouse plaza.
It may be my imagination.
But I think the geraniums just perked up.