Dear Friends:
First, for those in Southern California, I’ll be speaking on global warming for the Orange County Astronomers at Chapman University on the evening of Friday, Sept. 12. The talk is open to the public — details here. Which brings me to the topic of today’s post…
You’ve probably heard that the Trump Administration seeks to rescind the EPA’s “Endangerment Finding” that global warming poses a threat to “the public health and welfare of current and future generations.” The stated rationale for this recision effort is a report from a newly formed “Climate Working Group.” I decided to have a look at this report, which you can download for yourself from this Department of Energy link.
I immediately noticed that their first major section (starting on p. 3) consists of nearly verbatim arguments (and the very same map) about a CO2-caused “greening of the Earth” that I previously addressed in a post I wrote in 2019 (Debating Climate Science – scroll down to the heading The Greening of the Earth). The claims I debunked come from even earlier, so at least this part of the supposedly new report is actually just recycling old misinformation.
That’s only the beginning of a long list of misrepresentations, misleading statements, and outright falsehoods. Indeed, even non-experts can probably identify obvious instances of cherry picking and other invalid forms of data analysis in the report. If you want help in understanding the claims and why they don’t hold water:
- For a detailed analysis, read this expert review of the “Climate Working Group” report compiled by 85 outstanding climate scientists. This review goes into page-by-page detail to correct the record on virtually every misleading or false claim in the “Climate Working Group” report.
- A similar debunking, but with a little less detail, can be found in this report from the outstanding Carbon Brief web site; this report identifies and discusses more than 100 false or misleading claims in the “Climate Working Group” report
- For a more general overview of of these kinds of “skeptic” claims, you’ll find nearly all of them discussed in chapters 1 and 2 of my book A Global Warming Primer — Pathway to a Post-Global Warming Future. Note 1: This book was recently named the 2024 Book of the Year for Ecology/Environment by the Foreward Indies award program. Note 2: The earlier (first) edition of this book is posted freely online at globalwarmingprimer.com/primer.
I’ll leave it to you to explore more, but before I close it’s worth a note about the authors of the new report, all five of whom seem to have done some good science in the past. Indeed, they are all surely smart enough to recognize the misleading nature of their claims, so it’s natural to wonder why they would write and stand behind such disingenuous arguments. Some of my colleagues suspect that they must be on the payroll of fossil fuel interests, but the history of astronomy offers an alternative possible explanation. From about the 1960s to the 1980s, a handful of well-known astronomers (who had made some great discoveries) took contrarian positions on either or both of the Big Bang and the nature of quasars. At first, their positions seemed to be at least plausible, and as a result hundreds of other astronomers spent many years investigating their claims and looking for evidence that could resolve the debates. Over time, the evidence became quite clear, leading virtually all other astronomers to conclude that these particular contrarian claims were wrong. Yet most of those who had first proposed the claims never wavered in their beliefs, and their attempts to explain away new evidence became increasingly desperate and disingenuous. Why did they hold on when the evidence so clearly ruled against them? They don’t appear to have had any financial or political motive. Rather, they were simply exhibiting a human frailty of being unwilling to admit error. It seems quite possible that the same may be the case for the authors of the new report. Incidentally, there have been many other famous examples of this same phenomenon, one of which is chronicled in a great new book that I’ll highly recommend: The Martians, by David Baron.
Finally, on the topic of Mars… The new “Perseverance Edition” of my book Max Goes to Mars published on Sept. 1. Please tell your friends with children, teachers, and others who may be interested.
Jeff