Yes, you read the title right. It’s not a misprint. I know that the actual bumper sticker, which I used to see around California regularly, is “Think Globally, Act Locally.”
That made some sense. But when I watched CBS Sunday Morning’s August 7, 2022 segment on climate change, one of the people interviewed seemed to have the opposite view. His name is Peter Kalmus and he’s a climate scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In the interview with Tracy Smith, he pointed to the hot summer in big parts of the United States and said:
Twenty years from now, we will look back on the summer of 2022 and we will wish that he had it this good. We will wish that it was this cool. And that’s not an exaggeration whatsoever.
But wait. He’s looking at temperatures in the United States. I just got back from my cottage in Canada, where the spring and early summer were unusually cool. And my cottage is only about 60 miles north of the U.S. border. So he seems to be “thinking locally,” that is, generalizing from weather in the United States, and acting globally, that is, advocating solutions for the world.
Moreover, he seems to be confusing climate and weather. Accept as given that the U.S. summer has been unusually warm. According to this source, the average temperature in the contiguous United States in July was 2.8 degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th century average. That’s 1.56 degrees Celsius. Some of the standard models say the earth’s temperature about 20 years from now will be about 1.5 degrees Celsius above where it has been recently. So we might look back on an unusually warm 2022 summer and say it was slightly cooler. But are we really going to notice that small difference? If some of the standard models are right (and there’s a lot of difference between models, as Steven Koonin has pointed out), the best guess about the U.S. temperature in the summer of 2042, even if we do nothing to offset global warming, is that it will be only slightly above the temperature this unusually warm summer.
So actually, Peter Kalmus is exaggerating.
By the way, if you watch the whole 8-minute CBS segment, you’ll see Sarah Birch talking about adjustments we can make to reduce global warming. Notice what form of energy she says nothing about. Hint: the word starts with “n.” (Of course, I don’t know if she didn’t mention it. She might have and CBS put that part on the cutting room floor.)
READER COMMENTS
Cobey Williamson
Aug 15 2022 at 8:45am
The quality of this blog has declined significantly in the short time I’ve been following it. What was a reasoned, if often cherry-picked and incorrect, set of arguments has devolved into idealogical trite.
A lot of experts get touted here. But apparently their expertise only applies if they say what you want to hear.
David Henderson
Aug 15 2022 at 10:43am
Cobey, How long is the “short time” over which you’ve been following the blog?
Jon Murphy
Aug 15 2022 at 8:57am
My understanding is that just parts of the US have been unusually hot and dry (I know MA has been). Other parts have been unusually cool and wet. If my understanding is correct, then your reasoning is even stronger.
Dylan
Aug 15 2022 at 10:26am
Is he? I just watched the segment and didn’t catch that his quote was specific to the U.S. In fact, the piece starts out talking about the hot summer the world over and looks at various places across the globe. Is there something I missed saying that they were just looking at the U.S.? Global surface temperatures in June were the 6th hottest on record, same for July.
And then you talk about a 1.5 C degree difference being only slightly different, completely missing the point that when the world was, on average, just 8 degrees cooler, much of this country was covered in ice.
David Henderson
Aug 15 2022 at 10:42am
You write:
I didn’t miss the point; it wasn’t relevant. There’s a large difference between 8 degrees and 1.5 degrees.
robc
Aug 15 2022 at 11:56am
I think you had an error in your piece.
If 20 years from now will be 1.5C hotter and this summer was 1.56C hotter, then the typical summer in 20 years will be slightly cooler than 2022.
David Henderson
Aug 15 2022 at 1:24pm
Thanks, robc. I did think about that and realized that the 1.56 degrees Celsius is hotter than the 20th century. But because there was heating between the 20th century and this century, I roughly took account of that. So, for example, the temperature in 2022 was probably not as much as 1.56 degrees warmer than in, say, 2009.
Dylan
Aug 15 2022 at 2:09pm
David – I might have misread your meaning. I had taken your numbers to be the 1.5C warmer now than the average of the 20th century, + an additional 1.5C in the next 20 years, for a total of 3C rise over the average of the 20th century, and calling that only “slightly warmer.” Or even calling just 1.5C average rise over today, slightly warmer, when almost all of human civilization has existed within a 1C difference band.
*BTW, I think NDT is using Fahrenheit to refer to the last ice age, in Celsius it was “only” 4C colder when Boston was buried in mile thick ice.
https://xkcd.com/1732/
vince
Aug 16 2022 at 1:43pm
Steven Koonin has a short video on YouTube called: Is there really a climate emergency? The answer is that we don’t know but we shouldn’t panic. Ironically, he says it takes an extraordinary long time to remove carbon dioxide. Might we become enlightened after it’s too late?
I recently read about a different problem with burning fossil fuels, which concerns me more than a modeled temperature increase. The oceans absorb about half of the fossil carbon. It’s turning the ocean more acidic and destroying it as a food source.
It seems prudent that we shift away from fossil fuels–globally, not locally. Why not?
Richard W Fulmer
Aug 17 2022 at 7:54am
Because we don’t yet have practical replacements for fossil fuels, which provide some 80% of the world’s power. For electrical power generation, the most practical alternative is nuclear, but it’s currently politically unacceptable. And even if we chose to go nuclear today, it would take decades to build enough nukes to make a difference.
Wind turbines require backup – megawatt-for-megawatt. We don’t have battery storage capable of backing up wind turbines at scale for more than a few minutes, though several battery storage units capable of backing up a city for as much as four hours are being constructed. The only other backup options are pumped storage hydropower (which face siting limits) and natural gas turbines. Other conventional power sources can’t be fired up quickly enough to keep the grid stable when the wind dies down.
Solar panels also need backup, and we haven’t yet figured out what to do with old panels when they’ve reached the end of their useful lives. They contain some very nasty chemicals, and shouldn’t be dumped in landfills (though many, no doubt, will be).
Hydropower is limited by the number of suitable sites. Moreover, building new dams is no longer politically possible and existing dams are being dismantled.
The biomass plants in the UK and the EU were supposed to be fueled by wood scraps but, in practice, we’ve been clearcutting forests to feed them.
We have similar problems with transportation. There are an estimated 1.4 billion cars on the road today. Replacing them with EVs will require a massive increase in mining operations to provide all the needed copper, cobalt, lithium, nickel, aluminum, manganese, graphite, and rare earth metals. Moreover, to recharge the cars’ batteries, we’ll require many more power plants than we currently have.
Biofuels may be an alternative, however, it’s not clear whether more energy is needed to produce them than they provide. Government studies on corn-based ethanol range from a net 30% gain to a 30% loss. Even if they are a net plus, we would have to turn forests into farmland, eliminating carbon sinks and releasing tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere when we plow up the soil.
vince
Aug 17 2022 at 2:52pm
“Because we don’t yet have practical replacements for fossil fuels, which provide some 80% of the world’s power.”
How much of that world’s power is waste or excess? One reason is fossil fuel power is being subsidized. What’s the true economic price, with all costs built in? Just to toss out a number, assume a 50% chance carbon emissions will destroy the earth by 2100. What would that make the true economic price of fossil fuels today?
Richard W Fulmer
Aug 17 2022 at 6:42pm
It depends upon how we define waste and excess. At the low end, it could mean any power usage over and above that required for bare survival. Beyond that, the bar could be set at any quality-of-life level. Who decides?
By not including the total costs of climate damage in the price of the fuels? How do we determine the proper price? Who decides? How do we impose that decision on other countries? China, for example, is ramping up its coal-fired powerplant construction.
In that case, the game is already over. The carbon dioxide that we put into the atmosphere today will remain in the atmosphere for centuries, and carbon dioxide emissions are on course to increase for decades. Fortunately, the IPCC’s likely scenarios are not that extreme.
The fact remains that fossil fuels currently provide the bulk of the world’s power. With what do you propose to replace them? How quickly could your proposed substitutes come online?
vince
Aug 18 2022 at 11:47am
Who decides? No one but dictators want tyranny. The only answer I can give is that we will get what we deserve. If climate change is both serious and man made, and the international community as a whole disregards it, we are playing the ultimate game of chicken.
Richard W Fulmer
Aug 18 2022 at 12:39pm
What do you want the “international community” to do?
vince
Aug 18 2022 at 4:05pm
Agree on and implement a reduction that makes the risk manageable. What other alternative is there? Roll the dice?
Richard W Fulmer
Aug 18 2022 at 4:55pm
There have already been international agreements, which are mostly ignored by the signatory countries. The U.S. reduced emissions largely by replacing coal-fired powerplants with natural gas facilities – a move driven by the free market.
Government-sponsored initiatives, such as the following, have made the problem worse:
Corn-based ethanol mandates
UK and EU biomass power plants
Onerous regulations that have driven energy-intensive industries to emerging nations that largely ignore the environment
Restrictions on domestic mining which push mining operations to emerging nations
Restrictions on pipelines that force oil and natural gas to be transported by rail and truck, both of which are less efficient than pipelines
Cabotage laws (e.g., the “Jones Act”) that reduce the transportation of goods by ships, which are very efficient carriers
Tariffs on green equipment such as solar panels
Requirements that EVs contain American-made components
Agricultural subsidies, which result in over-fertilization and overproduction
German solar farms built near the Baltic Sea (an area that has very short days in the winter)
vince
Aug 19 2022 at 2:01pm
“There have already been international agreements, which are mostly ignored by the signatory countries.”
Then we get what we deserve.
T Boyle
Aug 17 2022 at 4:50pm
Oh, dear.
I’m not going to get into the science, here, only the logic of the claim and the statistics.
If, in 2042, the average summer will be fractionally cooler than this summer was, then almost half the time we can expect summers to be hotter than this summer was. This summer, remember, was an outlier – an especially hot summer. Therefore, in 2042 half of all summers will be hotter than what we now consider “especially hot”. The other half, of course, will be cooler than “especially hot”, but of course most of them will fall quite close to what we now consider “especially hot”.
And what about the tails? As you will recognize, when you move the mean of a normal-type distribution, the number of tail events (above some threshold) tends to rise really quickly. So, while we currently experience virtually no summers that are 2 degrees hotter than average now, in the future they would be dramatically more common, not just a little more common.
Finally, I don’t know about you, but I remember 2002 as “relatively recent”. 20 years is not a long time.
This is really not very reassuring at all.
Comments are closed.