The enforcement of climate orthodoxy and theresponse to the Asness-Brown paper on thetemperature record
Benjamin Zycher
March 25, 2015
Should you, dear readers, doubt that the climate empire strikes back at even the mildest qualifications of greenhouse gas (GHG) orthodoxy, merely consider a recent draft essay (http://www.stumblingontruth.com/articles/Its%20not%20the%20Heat%20its%20the%20Tepidity%2020150310.pdf) by Clifford Asness and Aaron Brown on the recent temperature record and attendant implications for policies to reduce GHG emissions. Titled “It’s Not the Heat, It’s the Tepidity,” the immediate — indeed, Pavlovian — and highly critical responses from various observers (http://fortune.com/2015/03/11/climate-change-cliff-asness/) were fascinating in their vociferousness and contempt. Truly outstanding in those dimensions was that offered by Mark Buchanan (http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-03-15/cliff-asness-should- manage-money-not-the-planet) on Bloomberg View, about whose critique I offer some observations below.
A full disclosure first: Asness is a member of the Board of Trustees of the American Enterprise Institute, where I work as the senior scholar in energy and environmental policy.
Asness and Brown at the very outset state clearly that they “are not climate scientists” and that they “are not challenging climate science.” They make two very simple points: Neither the land-ocean warming observed over a longer period since 1880 or a shorter one since 1990, nor the future temperature paths projected by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change support the common predictions of severe climate effects over the course of this century from increasing GHG concentrations. They note, but do not depend upon, the observation that the actual temperature record since 1990 has been lower than the lowest IPCC projections made in its first assessment report (https://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/publications_ipcc_first_assessment_1990_wg1.shtml), and they concede fully that future warming may prove substantially greater than the recent trend suggests.
Their second point is equally straightforward. “Dangerous” global warming often is defined as warming greater than either 2°C or 4°C by the end of the century. Asness and Brown show that an extrapolation of the actual temperature record suggests that future warming will become dangerous under that definition much later than that, and later even than in the lowest temperature paths projected by the IPCC. In their simple extrapolations, dangerous warming does not occur for 130-530 years. They do not state explicitly the obvious
Continue reading to see the charts and more.
Benjamin Zycher
March 25, 2015
Should you, dear readers, doubt that the climate empire strikes back at even the mildest qualifications of greenhouse gas (GHG) orthodoxy, merely consider a recent draft essay (http://www.stumblingontruth.com/articles/Its%20not%20the%20Heat%20its%20the%20Tepidity%2020150310.pdf) by Clifford Asness and Aaron Brown on the recent temperature record and attendant implications for policies to reduce GHG emissions. Titled “It’s Not the Heat, It’s the Tepidity,” the immediate — indeed, Pavlovian — and highly critical responses from various observers (http://fortune.com/2015/03/11/climate-change-cliff-asness/) were fascinating in their vociferousness and contempt. Truly outstanding in those dimensions was that offered by Mark Buchanan (http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-03-15/cliff-asness-should- manage-money-not-the-planet) on Bloomberg View, about whose critique I offer some observations below.
A full disclosure first: Asness is a member of the Board of Trustees of the American Enterprise Institute, where I work as the senior scholar in energy and environmental policy.
Asness and Brown at the very outset state clearly that they “are not climate scientists” and that they “are not challenging climate science.” They make two very simple points: Neither the land-ocean warming observed over a longer period since 1880 or a shorter one since 1990, nor the future temperature paths projected by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change support the common predictions of severe climate effects over the course of this century from increasing GHG concentrations. They note, but do not depend upon, the observation that the actual temperature record since 1990 has been lower than the lowest IPCC projections made in its first assessment report (https://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/publications_ipcc_first_assessment_1990_wg1.shtml), and they concede fully that future warming may prove substantially greater than the recent trend suggests.
Their second point is equally straightforward. “Dangerous” global warming often is defined as warming greater than either 2°C or 4°C by the end of the century. Asness and Brown show that an extrapolation of the actual temperature record suggests that future warming will become dangerous under that definition much later than that, and later even than in the lowest temperature paths projected by the IPCC. In their simple extrapolations, dangerous warming does not occur for 130-530 years. They do not state explicitly the obvious
Continue reading to see the charts and more.
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