We will shortly dig into the details of a recently published paper that reveals something deeply dire about climate change that had not been previously known, nor had it been predicted by the climate models, and yet it is now beginning to manifest.
Dire as it is, there may actually be a bit of a surprising positive twist to it.
First however, let’s briefly mull over and laugh at a recent ever so human response to the topic of Climate Change. While the topic itself is deeply serious, some utterly daft responses by some merit a bit spotlighting to enable us all to mock such raw and vigorous stupidity.
Art Ally Has “The Answer”
Art Ally is a guy who founded the investment firm The Timothy Plan. He is however also a deeply religious individual, so everything in his life, including his investment platform, is viewed through a deeply politicised right-wing religious lens. He is not unique, many align with this same “philosophy” (and yes, it merits some air quotes). If indeed you use faith instead of reason to make financial choices then … well let me put it this way, he is not Warren Buffet, and so US News gives him an Overall Score 3.1/10 for a reason …
Hey ho, I guess you could do worse, but you could also do better by getting a monkey to throw darts and thus pick better stocks that way.
OK, so what is the Climate Change spin coming up from him?
Basically the following, and this is why he has earned a bit of attention …
Climate Change is just … (to quote him directly) … “a bunch nonsense.“.
Well of course, because all those highly trained scientists with decades of experience and mountains of evidence are fools, and Art has now burst their bubble.
You might of course wonder just how compelling his argument is.
Well here you go, he explains it like this …
“All you have to do to shoot this environmentalism—and it’s all an agenda, all driven to run people into fear and you can control them—if you want to shoot a hole in the environmental nonsense that is being promoted by the ultra-liberal folks, just take a cruise,” Ally declared. “Get out in the middle of the ocean and look around. To think that man has a capacity to affect that in any way is just total nonsense, We can’t; God is in control.”
“If we had global warming as being a real threat to us, explain to me why we aren’t setting new high records every year in our average temperature,” he continued. “‘Well, this is the hottest year since 1923.’ Well, why hasn’t it been every year since then working up to this? We need to just start thinking again instead of just listening to this agenda nonsense.”
Convinced?
Er … in a word – no.
Via NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) we have some actual data that is basically reality knocking on his door to tell him that he is oh so very very wrong…
Art is not alone, there are others who think the same way and would perhaps dismiss the above as a product of a bastion of “ultra-liberal folks“.
As I’m sure you are well aware, warnings have been coming from climate scientists all around the planet for multiple decades from within almost every nation state. Many collect data quite independently, and then use it to reach the same conclusion – human fossil fuel emissions of greenhouse gases are warming our world and disrupting our climate.
Climate Change is the greatest threat ever faced by our species and should be our primary focus. We need to strive as vigorously as we possibly can to mitigate it, but we don’t, and instead prefer to sail off into the sunset.
However, we are not done, and not yet in end-game.
OK, so what new scientific insight do I have for you?
The dire news is that the negative effects of climate change are happening far faster than the climate models predicted, and also in a rather surprising manner.
Study: “Global emergence of regional heatwave hotspots outpaces climate model simulations“
Published in PNAS on Nov 26, 2024 the above study is really bad news for us all.
Side Note – The full paper is available, you will not hit any paywalls accessing it.
The essence of it is this – there are hotspots all around the globe where heatwaves are happening. Using climate models to predict these is really hard. What climate models do extremely well, and they have an excellent track record for being right, is forecasting average global temperatures. However, when it comes to local variations, not so much.
What this new paper reveals is that while we know the overall average, the actual impact is not evenly distributed.
What is in play here is termed “tail-widening” – As the overall average temperatures increase we also get more hotspots with greater temperature extremes. We will see an increase in heat related deaths and also an increase of heat in places that have not experienced heatwaves previously.
The authors of the paper cite recent examples.
The first is Canada where they have had some ridiculously high heat waves, but there are also others …
It is also not just about heat. Warm air holds more moisture, and so what we will also get is a lot more regional rainfall and flooding, not just in places where we normally expect it, but also in places where we just don’t expect it and so the impact will be far greater because we are not prepared for it. Again with a local example: the impact of hurricane Helene in North Carolina.
Why is any of this “Good News”?
Views are changing.
Actual impact events make it far harder to deny that Climate Change is real, is here now, and will impact us. Individuals such as Art Ally are increasingly viewed, correctly, as delusional nuts who are totally wrong about it as they are about other well-established things such as evolutionary biology. There will always be people like Art, but because of real events that are way beyond the norm, the vast majority do now begin to recognise that Climate Change is real and that doing nothing is really not an option.
The Climate Change deniers will always be there babbling away in the background. When faced with real events, they are left with just one card to play – doomism.
One variation is this – Event X happened because (oh come now, you know the usual stuff) of LGBTQ+, or abortion, or … well take your pick, and hence a God is punishing us.
Another variation is – It’s too late, there is nothing we can do, eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.
Both are objectively false.
We are the cause, not a god, and we do still have choices. If we make such choices then the outcome really will be less bad.
With an increase in painful sharp impacts, we become more motivated to take action.
Yes, we are committed to specific things that are baked in, for example sea level rise. If however, we can slow things down a bit it gives us time to adapt.
Remember also that it is not just about the US. Yes the US political arena looks dire at the moment, but humanity is global and far far bigger than just the US. It is not a US decision, vast numbers of humans all around the globe are being increasingly motivated to reach for green energy, solar, wind, nuclear, geothermal.
Also inside the US the South West is being rapidly transformed. Federal grid approvals in Nevada are unlocking multiple gigawatts of new solar and storage capacity for in-state and California customers. The Trump administration will not be rolling that back, it will continue. The incoming administration might indeed have a drill-baby-drill mentality, but profitability dominates the thinking, and the economic reality now is that building solar is far cheaper and far more profitable than oil.
What about the conclusion within the hotspot paper?
We need to build better climate models to be able to predict such hotspot event. The super-high-resolution frameworks within the Earth Virtualization Engine (EVE) is one possibility, but another may consist of Machine Learning approaches that also show promising results.
However, the best path forward is not better models, but (to quote the paper) …
a rapid transition of relevant societal sectors away from fossil fuels to stabilize global temperature rise
… and that is still within our grasp.
An increasing frequency of deeply painful extreme hotspot events, will lead to a greater focus and motivation to get that transition done.