Admittedly I am hijacking my own language column a bit to insert my interest in climate change this week, but bear with me. We’ll get to the hot models.
I understand why many conservatives ignore this issue, not so much denying climate science as taking a pragmatic view that the climate space mostly exists as a fig leaf for political power to be exercised against them. But two recent disputes within the climate field highlight why you can sometimes learn more from actually paying attention to this stuff than you can by tuning it out.
One is over a January 2022 open letter calling for an “International Non-Use Agreement on Solar Geoengineering.” Climate warming occurs when solar radiation hits the Earth and gets trapped by greenhouse gases and dark-colored water and solids. Solar geoengineering proposes to use cloud seeding, mirrors, and such to reflect more sun rays back out to space — the global equivalent of those reflectors you stick in your parked car’s windshield so it’s less sweltering when you get in.
The letter argues very poorly. “First, the risks of solar geoengineering are poorly understood and can never be fully known.” OK, but so are the risks of not solar geoengineering. “Second, speculative hopes about the future availability of solar geoengineering technologies threaten commitments to mitigation and can disincentivize governments, businesses, and societies to do their utmost to achieve decarbonization or carbon neutrality as soon as possible.” OK, but speculative hopes about enforceable commitments to decarbonization threaten the development of solar geoengineering technologies — via this exact letter’s effort. “Third, the current global governance system is unfit to develop and implement the far-reaching agreements needed to maintain fair, inclusive, and effective political control over solar geoengineering deployment.” Wait, what? The global governance system is fit to regulate all use of consumer energy technology markets, but it can’t handle this?
“Social cancellation is not a good response to governance challenges,” as University of Buffalo Environment and Sustainability professor Holly Jean Buck wrote in a response to the open letter. “What junior scholar is going to want to ask questions about solar geoengineering and its governance, when sixty ‘senior scholars’ have said not to explore it?” Good question.
Zeke Hausfather is one of the contributors to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report. He also asks good questions. Hausfather is one of the reasons you should trust this sort of report rather than ignore it. He writes in Nature about one of the big problems climate scientists face: too many hot models. “[M]uch of the scientific literature is at risk of reporting projections that are inconsistent with the approach taken by the IPCC, and that are overly influenced by the hot models.” Unfortunately, Hausfather is not lamenting Kate Upton’s influence over the IPCC. What’s going on here is extremely boring, and should be, but instead, we have activist lunatics shutting down airports and gluing themselves to art because of shoddy speculation. The scientists build the main prediction about the future global temperature based on an average of all computer models, and a lot of scientists are studying worst-case scenarios, which are, definitionally, unlikely scenarios. These are the “hot models.”
Hausfather’s latest work has involved looking at the most sophisticated climate models and seeing which ones best predict observed reality when run in reverse. Do they show accurate temperatures from years we know about? Do they reflect the ice age? If not, they may have some uses, but they shouldn’t be assumed to predict the future accurately, either. That’s how we got a more accurate range of possibilities for the Sixth Assessment Report that nearly rules out the two scenarios partisans and activists spend all their time talking about, the ones in which climate change does nothing at all or causes some kind of apocalypse. You’d think we’d have heard that news, but we got distracted by hot models.
