In recent years, climate change has become a central political issue in the West. However, its ideologisation hinders both understanding of the complexity and ambiguity of this issue, and the very fact that there is no consensus in the scientific community on how humans influence climatic dynamics, writes independent economist Alexander Zotin.
As of mid-winter 2022, Europe has found itself in a full-blown energy crisis. Much has already been said about its immediate causes (last year’s cold winter, LNG demand from East Asian countries, early seasonal price increases, gas storage incapacity, post-economic recovery, etc.) But all these reasons pale in comparison with the main one, namely the restructuring of the energy balance of European economies, which has been going on over the last 10-20 years (and started a little later in other developed countries).
This transformation is a direct consequence of the “green” ideology prevailing in Europe now, which prioritises the crusade against changes in the Earth’s climate, primarily by reducing the emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The “green” ideology sees the solution to this problem in the rejection of traditional energy based on hydrocarbons, and a transition to renewable energy sources (RES), primarily based on wind and sunlight.
However, is the modern “green” ideology so justified? Is the modern scientific understanding of climatic processes so unambiguous and unshakable that it may completely dictate the political and economic agenda in the style of Soviet “five-year plans”, only by now insisting “Let’s reduce CO2 emissions by such and such a date!” To gain a deeper understanding of the scientific validity of the climate agenda, two questions need to be answered: how confident can we be that the current trend towards global climate warming will continue and how important is the anthropogenic factor in climate change?
Answers to these questions will show us that reality is somewhat different from the familiar media narrative.
In fact, we do not know what the Earth’s climate will look like in a few decades. The conclusions of the IPCC (The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is considered the most authoritative and frequently cited source on this issue) reports are based on probabilistic mathematical models. In essence, these models are by definition incomplete and can contain both true and false assumptions. As a result, this can lead to inaccurate predictions.
In recent years, the IPCC reports have become more and more politicised. The reports now contain a special summary for “decision-makers” in which information is presented in an adapted form for non-professionals, which means it is more or less distorted. The very same reports of four thousand pages politicians and journalists can hardly even read. At the same time, there are a lot of questions as to the methodology of the IPCC alarmistic models posed by independent scientists.
For example, the well-known American physicist Stephen Koonin, Deputy Director of the Science Department of the US Department of Energy under the Barack Obama administration, in his recent book Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters indicates that the IPCC climate models underestimate a large mass of the most important climatic parameters (or these are taken into account not on the basis of measured physical parameters, but on the basis of assumptions). For instance, this involves the circulation of clouds or the cooling effect of the anthropogenic release of aerosols into the atmosphere. At the same time, the scale of the influence of a whole system of positive and negative feedback in the climate system is also hypothetical (for example, the influence of an increase in the concentration of CO2 on the concentration of water vapour in the atmosphere, and the influence of the latter on the greenhouse effect). Accordingly, the models can (on the basis of false initial data) give false conclusions. In fact, the authors of the last IPCC Assessment Report 6 themselves admit the problem with clouds, but fail to write about it in the section for “decision makers”.
At the same time, it is important to understand that errors in modelling the most complex, and not fully understood, processes, such as the Earth’s climate, or other complex processes, for example, in the field of sociology or economics, is a natural thing for science. Unfortunately, neither modern politicians nor journalists fully understand the methodological limitations of the scientific method. While models produce probability distributions, they want to get clear and unambiguous answers. But these do not exist, and perhaps they cannot exist in principle. It is sad that the modern Western scientific establishment mostly plays along with this not-quite-correct approach. The same Koonin points to various ways of “tuning” the sets of climate models, and even more, the most impactful interpretation of their results for “decision-makers”. In general, there is a dominance of ideological persuasion over scientific information.
Apparently, in our situation it is worthwhile to reconsider objectively the likelihood that climate change forecasts are accurate, and perhaps to conduct an independent scientific analysis of the IPCC’s activity.
The answer to the second question — how important is the anthropogenic factor in climate change? — is logically closely related to the answer to the first one. There is indeed a consensus among scientists here, that over the last hundred years the concentration of CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has been growing, and that this increase is largely the result of the anthropogenic factor (as Koonin notes, it is counterproductive to argue with this, since this fact will be verified by five ways, independent from each other).
But there is no consensus when it comes to further conclusions from this fact. It is not a fact that the growth of CO2 will lead to any significant warming. Other non-human factors may be responsible for it. For example, from 1940 to 1970 global temperatures did not rise, although CO2 and other greenhouse gases continued to accumulate in the atmosphere.
The fact is that the overall influence of the anthropogenic factor is too small and its effect can be offset by the natural variability of the climate. Koonin writes that the impact of humanity is currently responsible for only 1% of the all energy flow that affects the climate system. In order to measure this impact and its effects with at least some benefit, we must observe and understand the more essential elements of the climate system (the remaining 99%) with an accuracy of more than 1%.
Alas, our understanding is apparently far from the required accuracy. Scientists more or less understand some relatively short-term cycles in the climate, like the fluctuations in the surface temperature of the Pacific Ocean — El Niño/La Niña (most likely the anomalous warming in 1998 and 2016 was caused by a strong El Niño). But longer-term oscillations, like the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and the Atlantic Decadal Oscillation (60-80-year cycles of ocean temperature change), are very poorly studied and are equally poorly reflected in mathematical models. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of such cyclical processes in the climate system. These are just the ones that we know about.
It is very important that one of the main parameters in the models is so-called equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS). Roughly speaking, ECS is how much warmer the climate would be if the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere doubled. The problem is that greenhouse gases themselves are responsible for only a smaller fraction of the overall warming effect. Most of it is caused by positive feedback processes, in which an increase in the concentration of greenhouse gases leads to an increase in the concentration of water vapour, and the latter, in turn, potentiates an even more significant greenhouse effect. Relatively speaking, CO2 itself and other greenhouse gases may be responsible for a third of all warming, and water vapor for the remaining two-thirds.
Here a very significant problem arises. The fact is that clouds formed from steam play an extremely complex role in the energy balance of the Earth. Depending on their height and configuration, they contribute to both climate warming (due to the greenhouse effect) and cooling (the reflection of solar radiation due to the albedo effect). At the same time, these effects are very poorly considered in models, since the formation of clouds is a local effect that does not correspond to the resolution of the models (the so-called subgrid parameter). As a result, the most important parameter of climate models, the very sensitivity of the climate to CO2 emissions, remains the result of assumptions, not calculations. The climate “mainstream” tends to place more importance on the greenhouse effect of clouds, which increases the positive feedback. But there are also sceptics who believe that the cooling effect of clouds is underestimated.
Some scientists, such as American physicists Nicholas Lewis and Judith Curry, argue that the IPCC models significantly overestimate the ECS. In IPCC Assessment Report 6, ECS is 2.5–4 ° C, with the most likely 3° C, while Lewis and Curry argue that an ECS of 1.7 ° C is more accurate. That is, the cooling and greenhouse effect of clouds is more balanced than indicated by the IPCC assumptions. This radically changes the whole picture — long-term warming turns out to be much less dramatic than in the IPCC scenarios (55-70% of the average scenario of the previous IPCC report).
Moreover, let us not forget that in addition to the cyclical processes of the Earth’s climate, there are also point events that can strongly influence it. For example, large volcanic eruptions also lead to a sharp cooling of the climate. And they may well happen in the coming decades (for example, the eruption of the Tambora volcano in 1815 led to the famous “summer without summer” in 1816).
Be that as it may, the answer to the second question is similar to the first answer: our knowledge of such a complex system as the Earth’s climate is too limited and incomplete to insist on anything with any degree of certainty. There is an anthropogenic impact, but its role in climate change should not be exaggerated. It is important to understand that science is not an ideology, its meaning is an unbiased search for truth in the face of constant doubt, trial and error. “Catastrophising” climate research and building on its basis an often absurd political and economic agenda can become a dead-end development. It is extremely important for Russia to maintain a restrained approach to the climate agenda and not fall to another Western venture with poorly predictable consequences.
