PETE: “So many questions. Some answered definitively. Some, imprecisely. Some, not even as yet asked. This climate stuff has us running in circles asking and answering. And no, there really isn’t a 97% consensus among “scientists.” * That number alone becomes a matter to question, but does it really matter? We’ve witnessed consensus after consensus fall to new information. It was, after all, the consensus that Earth stood in the “middle of IT ALL” as the center of the Cosmos. It was a consensus that mountains formed by isostacy. Both of those widely held opinions fell with Copernicus and Wegener.”
REPEAT: “Yes, but. Are you just one of those climate deniers? Why don’t you get a grip on reality? Humans are changing the climates worldwide. Scientists say so. And they have studied all the data. You deniers aren’t helping.”
PETE: “Actually, I’m not completely a climate change denier or a global warming denier. I know Earth both warms up and cools off. I know climates undergo changes. But consensus? I’m a little concerned about any popularized consensus. Popularized consensuses have gotten people killed. Think Giordano Bruno’s immolation under the consensus of the Church authorities, the folks who ran the Inquisition. This climate matter is fraught with intellectual misdoings, misunderstandings, and misguidances. Of course, I recognize that there are many honest, hardworking scientists who are committed to proving that Earth is undergoing anthropogenic climate change. But that famous 'hockey-stick graph,' for example, that was based on tree rings and that is always shown as 'proof,' isn’t what another and contemporary tree-ring analysis reveals, the second analysis showing a rise and then a decline in temperature. And this is where the misdoings enter the picture. The IPCC and the powers that be have truncated the downturn tree ring temperature line graphed in that other study, showing only that section that appears to match the hockey-stick pattern. The graph makers eliminated evidence counter to their favored “temperatures-gone-wild consensus. And since they have the power of the Press behind their pronouncements, they get to fashion a consensus among the laity and the societal movers and shakers, people like ex-Prince Harry.”
REPEAT: “Come on, why would anyone want to put out false information on climate? Those IPCC guys are trying to save the planet. They’re trying to educate the world before the runaway greenhouse effect passes the point of no return.”
PETE: “Just remember that consensus means ‘majority opinion’ and that opinions can be shaped by propaganda. So, any consensus is subject to shaping. Say something often enough, and it will be on the lips of the consenting. And in a cancel culture, those who dissent, even with evidence or logical counter arguments, suffer shunning from the True Believers. There are some pretty powerful voices that outshout the dissenters. And remember that we’re talking human beings here, creatures with motives like self-aggrandizement and wealth. Heck, even I made money off this climate stuff with my 1990s studies of greenhouse gas emissions funded by the US EPA and the PA DEP. Am I a hypocrite? I confess. I accepted grants associated with GHG emissions, hired some grad students and think tank people, ran some conferences, and traveled to visit those in charge of funding the grants. So, to my chagrin, I was back in the 1990s someone at the root of what has become a very large tree of funding and policy. I even wrote an emissions mitigation policy for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
“But climate funding since the 1990s has expanded into every scientific discipline. Climate is complex. It’s influenced by latitude, land-water distribution, ocean currents (both vertical and horizontal), elevation, the vicissitudes of a sometimes-fickle Sun, a precession of orbit and planetary tilt, photosynthesis within the surface ocean and on the land, sustained volcanism or volcanic quiescence, albedo, extent of absence of polar ice, freshwater influx into northern oceans, thermohaline ocean overturning, and a mix of greenhouse gases, chief of which is water vapor. Just about everyone can associate research in any field with climate in some form.”
REPEAT: “Sure, and those guys at the IPCC take all that into account. They are climate experts. They see the big picture. You don’t.”
PETE: “So, you believe there’s little question about climate or climate change? Aren’t both dependent on the definition of climate? There’s some arbitrariness in what we measure as climate and climatic change, isn’t there? Köppen, Thornwaite, and Strahler, all inventors of climatic categories, suggested a number of parameters, but, basically, relied on 30-year temperature and rainfall averages to delineate among climates, variously but basically defined on a region’s precipitation vs. evaporation potential: So much water into a region versus so much water out of a region, or, better, so much water available for life.
“You might have observed the phenomenon during seasonal changes. Under cooler temperatures of autumn in temperate zones, soils remain wet longer than they do under the hotter temperatures of summer. Rain can halt a baseball game on a hot summer day, but only temporarily interrupt a game. Storm passes, Sun comes out, game resumes on rapidly drying field. That doesn’t happen under cooler temperatures in those spring games or autumn games. In places where rainfall is rare and temperatures foster evaporation, the climate is arid or semiarid. Think Sahara, The Great Sandy, the Namib, the Mojave, and the Gobi. Where rainfall is virtually absent, aridity prevails, even when the temperatures are cool to cold: Think Atacama. Think Antarctica’s drier areas. Yet, one can see a problem: What of those climates designated as semiarid because the 30-year period might have fallen within a two-hundred-year drought that is followed by a century of wetter weather? What of those places that undergo desertification and then revert to more humid conditions. The Sahara wasn’t always a vast sandy land. The Mayans could tell you that Central America wasn’t always drought-free.
“Look, we all want a livable planet, but on a planet that has always changed, we need to adapt. Have we caused changes? Of course. It would be foolish to deny that humans have altered or are still altering the planet. I live in a house I built where trees once stood. I get city water in pipes running through former woodland soils. We appear to have gone off the rails on this climate business. How do we balance the needs of a great number of our species against the stability or instability of climate. So, Repeat, I’d have to ask you whether or not you are willing to give up all your civilized conveniences. Are you ready to give up toilet paper to save the forests? You ready to give up easy travel, take up life like that in a medieval village where no resident travels beyond the nearby hills? You ready to give up phones, TV, lighting, clean water, multi-floor hospitals with power-draining equipment and access to medical waste disposal?
“But back to that consensus thing we talked about. How far has the consensus taken us? Prince Harry—sorry, ex-Prince Harry—wants us all to be ‘like raindrops.’ Really. Here’s Breitbart’s account: ‘The Duke of Sussex, 36, who lives with his family on a $14.65-million estate in California, spoke of his passion for nature and Africa during a television exchange to feature in an upcoming documentary, continuing his love of offering advice on climate matters that peaked 12 months ago with his enthusiastic endorsement of Greta Thunberg….’**
“Harry and Meghan, so the report goes, will fly to South Africa to preach their climate change message. They intend to save the world, possibly telling the poor not to strive to own vehicles unless they buy $100,000 electric Teslas. Of course, in their minds their flight’s carbon footprint is probably irrelevant because it is made in the soil of climate-change education of the uninformed and poor African masses. GIVE ME A BREAK! And GIVE THOSE LESS FORTUNATE SOULS SOME CREDIT FOR UNDERSTANDING THEIR DAILY AND LONG-TERM NEEDS. Will throngs of adoring South Africans come out to see the couple? Will the Press cover the story of their visit and their message ad nauseum? And, while I’m on the subject of the Press, will a sycophantic Press press the presumed US President-elect on matters related to the economic tradeoffs associated with re-entering the Paris Climate Accord in the belief that quashing fossil fuel use in the United States will ‘save the planet.’ But save it from what? And what will his promised (or threatened?) ‘transition’ away from fossil fuels mean for the people who are currently alive and who want to maintain a certain level of affluence with all that it entails? Like freedom.”
REPEAT: “Typical denier stuff. Save the planet? Well, obviously, Harry, Meghan, Al Gore, and a host of likeminded people want to save it from the ‘existential threat’ of climate change. Aren’t you concerned? Do you want the seas to rise? You once lived in Miami. Do you want your old homestead underwater? Do you want Homestead, Florida, underwater?”
PETE: “Repeat, please don’t just repeat the consensus. Not much I can do about it, that is, about sea level rise. Homestead’s western side used to be much farther inland than it is today, in fact, many miles farther inland, with most of that sea level rise occurring long before people started to burn fossil fuels. North America was occupied when sea level was lower than most of the continental shelf. Don’t you think those early residents had to move as waters rose? So, is southern Florida under an ‘existential threat’? ‘Existential threat’ is the buzz-term that strikes fear into the masses who will not lift individual fingers to turn off light switches in unused rooms and who allow a number of appliances to use power on ‘standby,’ masses who will not change their consumption of energy for various reasons, some of them good, such as lighting a street or property to prevent crime. And how will society run in the ideal world with no existential threat? Will all businesses and homes lie along railroad tracks so we don’t have trucks running all over the place, burning fuel? The presumed President-elect would be happy since he has been a big supporter of Amtrak. Ignore that he likes to drive his gas-guzzling sports car.”
REPEAT: “No, No! These climate guys have all kinds of records that they’ve gleaned from proxy sources and actual measurements of temperatures. They even know the climate of a region going back millions of years. And there is evidence that carbon dioxide is a major player in global temperature. And what about the methane? The methane ices locked away in permafrost and in seafloor sediments? We’re about to make Earth Venus if they are released. People like Harry and Meghan are committed to prevent that. And as far as southern Florida is concerned, why the Army Corps of Engineers has even predicted a sea level rise of 1.5 to 4.5 feet in the twenty-first century.”
PETE: “Really? Now there’s an accurate forecast. And over millions of years and all those potential climate influences, has the climate anywhere been the same? Has sea level been constant? Has climate been a constant? Shifting tectonic plates, orogenies and their subsequent erosions, incursions of epicontinental seas and their regressions, evolutionary changes in photosynthesizers, massive flood basalts, even incoming bolides, aren’t all those climate changers? Pennsylvania was a tropical land millions of years ago. More recently, northern Pennsylvania was covered in part by ice. Even more recently, Pennsylvania emerged from the last big cooldown to grow a cover of temperate forests, thus, ‘Penn’s Woods,’ a land of 17.5 million acres of forests.
“Surrounded as I am by a sylvan setting, as I look out the window next to my computer, I think of a few years in the 1990s, when my region was under a very intense drought, so droughty one of those years that when I stood on a cliff overlooking the Monongahela River, I could see the river bottom almost to the river’s centerline; the river was so shallow that barge traffic ceased for a while, and that year was so droughty that I wondered whether or not a forest fire might consume the sylvan setting and my cedar house.”
REPEAT: “But, Pete, you’re missing the point. The climate is changing faster now than at any time in the past, and we’re causing the change.”
PETE: “Faster than at the beginning and end of the Younger Dryas? That cooling period seems to have occurred as temperatures plunged in a single century, and after a millennium or so, it ended in a matter of decades with rapidly rising temperatures—and sea level. Imagine the rapid warming of the time. Imagine sea levels rising so fast that Grandma really could tell tales of playing on dry land where all her grandchildren played in the surf. And what of the relatively rapid beginnings and endings of the Medieval Warm Period or the Little Ice Age? Hey, by the way, was that Medieval Warm Period caused by the burning of fossil fuels? Did the Vikings burn bunker fuel in their ships as they plied the waves across the Atlantic or into the Mediterranean?
“We humans are short-lived beings and our science of climate is a newcomer, as is, in fact, all 'science.' Not that humans haven’t been observing Earth and its climatic stabilities and instabilities accurately for millennia. Could agricultural societies have formed without knowledge of climate? Would the ancient Inuit ancestors have tried to grow grapes? Did the Vikings abandon Greenland because of climate change? Did the Little Ice Age not make beer popular when grape crops failed? Did sea level not rise and fall in ages past? When you have time, look up the geological and sea level history of Miletus, once a port.
“The effects of varying climate have also been noted through generations. And though they probably didn’t understand the reason for changes in sea levels or lake levels, surely some stories related through the generations the transgressions and regressions of waters. That ‘Hey, Grandma said that when she was a girl she used to play out there where we see only water’ would have been a worldwide expression among peoples living through a period of rapidly rising waters of the post-Last Glacial Maximum period. Stories of changing sea levels? Bet they told them in Ur. That city was once on the coast, but now lies ten miles inland. Where did all those ‘Flood’ stories originate? Wasn’t the Babylonian Sea Goddess Tiamat divided by Marduk to make the world? Wasn’t she associated with the Chaos of pre-Creation? Is climate stasis a myth? Face it. Climate-caused eustatic changes have occurred even in historical times and within human lifespans. Inhabitants of New England’s Cape Cod would have seen rapid changes in sea level during the period after the glaciers retreated. Go to Chatham, Massachusetts, and look at the soil layers between sand layers in Cape Cod’s cliffs, both kinds of layers an indication of sea level changes resulting from climate change. Those changes occurred rather rapidly at the end of the last glacial event and really rapidly about 14 millennia ago.
“And those droughts? I’m going out on a limb here to say that if they had a ‘rain dance,’ the Pueblo (Anasazi) would have danced it during the last 25 years of the thirteenth century. A quarter century of severely droughty years! Surely, they would have thought that the climate was changing irreversibly. The drought was enough to decimate their society and create a Pueblan diaspora. Imagine if there had been newspaper and TV reporters at the time. Imagine the reactions on social media. Imagine the flurry of climate studies and reports by political pundits showing an existential threat.
“The Web is a wonderful source of information. We can hop or crawl around the world of science, finding the results of research done in nearby or far-off places. As I hop or crawl over the Internet, I sometimes stumble upon answers that breed questions, the latter often unasked by researchers.
“For example, In a study by Zani et al. (2020), the researchers found that an increase in carbon dioxide and warming temperatures affected the time when the leaf-out occurs in spring, pushing the trees to start ‘eating’ earlier, that is photosynthesizing earlier.*** This regressing time of photosynthesis leads, the researchers say, to trees that reach a feeding limit, analogous, they argue, to sitting down to that turkey dinner and stuffing the stuffed turkey into the stomach until the brain says, ‘Whoa! Let’s watch football instead of eating any more food.’ The argument they make is that instead of leaves remaining at the ‘table’ of sunlight longer into the warmer autumn, the opposite occurs, making fall foliage dates in the Northern Hemisphere’s temperate forests recede closer to summer than to winter by a few days, maybe by as many as six days this century. According Zani and colleagues, people will be taking those foliage excursions in the Northeast earlier, rather than later, in the year.
“So, let’s say that the researchers are correct. They looked at various causes of earlier color changes in leaves, when chlorophyll gives way to xanthophyll, anthocyanin, and carotene that beautify the landscape with yellows, reds, and oranges. They considered temperature and carbon dioxide, for instance. And they ran lab experiments to corroborate their findings in the field. All good work, and all that work leading to a reasonable surmise: Their come-away conclusion is that global warming associated with carbon dioxide will not allow forests to sequester more carbon. Trees that ‘have eaten their fill’ won’t eat more. They suggest, therefore, that an increase in carbon dioxide won’t make a greener Earth on average and that nature on land won’t accommodate anthropogenic carbon emissions. That seems reasonable to me. So, according to Zani’s crew of scientists, forests can do only so much to absorb carbon. But…
“But what about any unanswered questions? What if there are more trees? If the current forest cover is insufficient to store the excess carbon, could a larger forest cover do the trick? Could a warmer world with more carbon dioxide drive more seeds to maturity? Could increased rainfall along the Sahara’s margins reverse desertification and allow more trees to grow where sands now cover the land? Will forests expand in South America and Australia? Abel and others (2020) have documented in another study an extension of rainfall zones on those two continents while noting a decline in rainfall in Asia and Africa.**** More forests in South America and Australia, fewer in Asia and Africa? Counterbalanced or not? A net gain of trees to sequester carbon, or a net loss? A photosynthetic feeding frenzy, tree sharks devouring sunlight by the megawatts!
“And what if the Brazilians stop burning down their tropical rainforests and Americans start planting some of those proposed trillion tree seedlings? Can lots of munchkin trees eat more sunlight than fewer bigger trees? Momma Oak says, ‘Acorn, finish your plate. You haven’t photosynthesized all your sunlight.’ What if the Nepalese stop cutting down woody plants for funeral pyres and start burying their dead instead? With more trees would the association between earlier leaf-drop and greater quantities of carbon in the atmosphere mean anything? Zani might have discovered a retrograde progression of fall foliage, but not necessarily a stasis or diminution in carbon sinks if Abel et al. are correct. And there are more questions.
“Will increased carbon dioxide increase marine algae that account for most of the carbon sink? Of course, all such questions have at least partial answers. Marine algae blooms are limited by the nutrients available in the water, including iron. Will changes in ocean currents take equatorial heat to areas lying beyond today’s tree line? Will changing currents carry more or fewer nutrients to once unproductive or productive ocean zones? Will temperate forests occupy areas now underlain by permafrost? Will mountain tree lines rise by hundreds of feet to replace landscapes once covered by snow and ice?
“So many questions. Will carbon find new sinks in the Southern Hemisphere? Remember your Earth history? The planet has not always looked the way it does today. The polar ice caps haven’t been around for long, geologically speaking, and even during their long reign on the poles during ‘human times,’ they have expanded and shrunk. The Vikings didn’t build their villages on a Greenland ice field. Dinosaur fossils lie in the rocks beneath the ice of Antarctica.
“Are potential changes in Earth’s sundry climates bad for all humans? If people in poor countries undergo desertification, won’t some people in rich countries benefit from increased arable land under changing climates? If sea level rises to cover southern Florida, will the rise mean more shallow warm water for coral reef development and species diversification? Isn’t there a fossil reef in Lockport, NY? Will Homestead, Florida, become a coral reef complex?”
REPEAT: “Hey, you’re all over the map on this stuff. I’ll grant you some of those changes you cite, but some of those sites you cite underwent changes that took thousands to millions of years. Things are happening faster now.”
PETE: “Yes, I admit I am ‘all over the map,’ but isn’t that what the so-called ninety-seven-percenters are doing? Aren’t they all over the map? They’ve said that global warming will cause worse winters, greater numbers of hurricanes—and if not, more powerful hurricanes—catastrophic sea level rise, droughts, floods, big snowfalls, hardly any snowfalls, warmer oceans, changes in warm ocean currents, changes in the Atlantic Meridional Current, more infrared absorption, more clouds, higher albedo that reflects sunlight, coral reef demise, coral reef movement and new growth, acidic seas, forest soils that release carbon and forest soils that sequester carbon, great migrations of humans, and on and on and on….
“I can’t stop going all over the map. Is it an existential threat if the wheat belt of the United States moves into Canada? Is an existential threat if coffee will be grown in Arkansas and tropical fruits in Kentucky? What is the ‘right climate’? Is the Dust Bowl period of American history the right climate? Or has the threat come because we humans have simply proliferated and arrogantly decided that we can live wherever we want without consequences? That we can live in hurricane-prone areas, in earthquake zones, on the sides of volcanoes, in a ‘tornado alley,’ in a desert, and at the base of snow-covered, avalanche-prone mountains? If Las Vegas lies in arid land, it’s there because we chose to put it there. If aridity increases, it might initiate a mass exodus from Vegas, but people have been abandoning locations for millennia because of climate changes, wars, natural disasters, and unknown causes. Think Göbleki Tepe; think the Pueblo sites. Or think climate-caused migrations. OR, think about the hypothesis that climate change was a major driver in human evolution, replacing African forests with grasslands and forcing us to come out of the trees and to walk bipedally, standing to see over the tall grasses, wary as we were of crouching predators.
“So, if you want to ‘become a raindrop’ as ex-Prince Harry suggests, it’s your prerogative. Just know that while you’re becoming a raindrop, Harry is up in the clouds spewing carbon and hygroscopic particles in the atmosphere as he travels to encourage people everywhere to become ‘raindrops.’ Makes me think of that once popular Hal David/Burt Bacharach song, ‘Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,’ retitled as ‘Princes, Hollywood Stars, and Politicians Keep Fallin’ on My Brain.’ Now there’s an inundation that is an existential threat.”
REPEAT: “You just don’t understand.”
PETE: “I guess not. And that’s why I keep asking questions.”
*That oft-repeated percentage is taken from a study by Naomi Oreskes, a study that fudges what was and was not incorporated into its conclusion. Oreskes, Naomi (December 2004). The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change. Science. 306 (5702): 1686. doi:10.1126/science.1103618
**Are we under the influence of simpletons? Harry, an ex-soldier, should be made of tougher stuff that his words indicate. https://www.breitbart.com/environment/2020/12/01/prince-harry-makes-climate-plea-what-if-every-one-of-us-was-a-raindrop/
***Deborah Zani et al. Increased growing-season productivity drives earlier autumn leave senescence in temperate trees, Science (2020). DOI: 10.1126/science.abd8911
Christine R. Rollinson, Surplus and stress control autumn timing. Science (2020). DOI: 10.1126/science.abf4481, science.sciencemag.org/content/370/6520/1030 .
****Christin Abel et al. The human-environment nexus and vegetation-rainfall sensitivity in tropical drylands, Nature Sustainability (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41893-020-00597-z
I suppose I should add this to your "if interested, read this, also" list: https://phys.org/news/2020-12-phytolith-reveals-seasonal-drought-conditions.html It is an article on millennium-scale droughts. And, while I'm at it, consider https://www.pnas.org/content/117/47/29478
REPEAT: “Yes, but. Are you just one of those climate deniers? Why don’t you get a grip on reality? Humans are changing the climates worldwide. Scientists say so. And they have studied all the data. You deniers aren’t helping.”
PETE: “Actually, I’m not completely a climate change denier or a global warming denier. I know Earth both warms up and cools off. I know climates undergo changes. But consensus? I’m a little concerned about any popularized consensus. Popularized consensuses have gotten people killed. Think Giordano Bruno’s immolation under the consensus of the Church authorities, the folks who ran the Inquisition. This climate matter is fraught with intellectual misdoings, misunderstandings, and misguidances. Of course, I recognize that there are many honest, hardworking scientists who are committed to proving that Earth is undergoing anthropogenic climate change. But that famous 'hockey-stick graph,' for example, that was based on tree rings and that is always shown as 'proof,' isn’t what another and contemporary tree-ring analysis reveals, the second analysis showing a rise and then a decline in temperature. And this is where the misdoings enter the picture. The IPCC and the powers that be have truncated the downturn tree ring temperature line graphed in that other study, showing only that section that appears to match the hockey-stick pattern. The graph makers eliminated evidence counter to their favored “temperatures-gone-wild consensus. And since they have the power of the Press behind their pronouncements, they get to fashion a consensus among the laity and the societal movers and shakers, people like ex-Prince Harry.”
REPEAT: “Come on, why would anyone want to put out false information on climate? Those IPCC guys are trying to save the planet. They’re trying to educate the world before the runaway greenhouse effect passes the point of no return.”
PETE: “Just remember that consensus means ‘majority opinion’ and that opinions can be shaped by propaganda. So, any consensus is subject to shaping. Say something often enough, and it will be on the lips of the consenting. And in a cancel culture, those who dissent, even with evidence or logical counter arguments, suffer shunning from the True Believers. There are some pretty powerful voices that outshout the dissenters. And remember that we’re talking human beings here, creatures with motives like self-aggrandizement and wealth. Heck, even I made money off this climate stuff with my 1990s studies of greenhouse gas emissions funded by the US EPA and the PA DEP. Am I a hypocrite? I confess. I accepted grants associated with GHG emissions, hired some grad students and think tank people, ran some conferences, and traveled to visit those in charge of funding the grants. So, to my chagrin, I was back in the 1990s someone at the root of what has become a very large tree of funding and policy. I even wrote an emissions mitigation policy for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
“But climate funding since the 1990s has expanded into every scientific discipline. Climate is complex. It’s influenced by latitude, land-water distribution, ocean currents (both vertical and horizontal), elevation, the vicissitudes of a sometimes-fickle Sun, a precession of orbit and planetary tilt, photosynthesis within the surface ocean and on the land, sustained volcanism or volcanic quiescence, albedo, extent of absence of polar ice, freshwater influx into northern oceans, thermohaline ocean overturning, and a mix of greenhouse gases, chief of which is water vapor. Just about everyone can associate research in any field with climate in some form.”
REPEAT: “Sure, and those guys at the IPCC take all that into account. They are climate experts. They see the big picture. You don’t.”
PETE: “So, you believe there’s little question about climate or climate change? Aren’t both dependent on the definition of climate? There’s some arbitrariness in what we measure as climate and climatic change, isn’t there? Köppen, Thornwaite, and Strahler, all inventors of climatic categories, suggested a number of parameters, but, basically, relied on 30-year temperature and rainfall averages to delineate among climates, variously but basically defined on a region’s precipitation vs. evaporation potential: So much water into a region versus so much water out of a region, or, better, so much water available for life.
“You might have observed the phenomenon during seasonal changes. Under cooler temperatures of autumn in temperate zones, soils remain wet longer than they do under the hotter temperatures of summer. Rain can halt a baseball game on a hot summer day, but only temporarily interrupt a game. Storm passes, Sun comes out, game resumes on rapidly drying field. That doesn’t happen under cooler temperatures in those spring games or autumn games. In places where rainfall is rare and temperatures foster evaporation, the climate is arid or semiarid. Think Sahara, The Great Sandy, the Namib, the Mojave, and the Gobi. Where rainfall is virtually absent, aridity prevails, even when the temperatures are cool to cold: Think Atacama. Think Antarctica’s drier areas. Yet, one can see a problem: What of those climates designated as semiarid because the 30-year period might have fallen within a two-hundred-year drought that is followed by a century of wetter weather? What of those places that undergo desertification and then revert to more humid conditions. The Sahara wasn’t always a vast sandy land. The Mayans could tell you that Central America wasn’t always drought-free.
“Look, we all want a livable planet, but on a planet that has always changed, we need to adapt. Have we caused changes? Of course. It would be foolish to deny that humans have altered or are still altering the planet. I live in a house I built where trees once stood. I get city water in pipes running through former woodland soils. We appear to have gone off the rails on this climate business. How do we balance the needs of a great number of our species against the stability or instability of climate. So, Repeat, I’d have to ask you whether or not you are willing to give up all your civilized conveniences. Are you ready to give up toilet paper to save the forests? You ready to give up easy travel, take up life like that in a medieval village where no resident travels beyond the nearby hills? You ready to give up phones, TV, lighting, clean water, multi-floor hospitals with power-draining equipment and access to medical waste disposal?
“But back to that consensus thing we talked about. How far has the consensus taken us? Prince Harry—sorry, ex-Prince Harry—wants us all to be ‘like raindrops.’ Really. Here’s Breitbart’s account: ‘The Duke of Sussex, 36, who lives with his family on a $14.65-million estate in California, spoke of his passion for nature and Africa during a television exchange to feature in an upcoming documentary, continuing his love of offering advice on climate matters that peaked 12 months ago with his enthusiastic endorsement of Greta Thunberg….’**
“Harry and Meghan, so the report goes, will fly to South Africa to preach their climate change message. They intend to save the world, possibly telling the poor not to strive to own vehicles unless they buy $100,000 electric Teslas. Of course, in their minds their flight’s carbon footprint is probably irrelevant because it is made in the soil of climate-change education of the uninformed and poor African masses. GIVE ME A BREAK! And GIVE THOSE LESS FORTUNATE SOULS SOME CREDIT FOR UNDERSTANDING THEIR DAILY AND LONG-TERM NEEDS. Will throngs of adoring South Africans come out to see the couple? Will the Press cover the story of their visit and their message ad nauseum? And, while I’m on the subject of the Press, will a sycophantic Press press the presumed US President-elect on matters related to the economic tradeoffs associated with re-entering the Paris Climate Accord in the belief that quashing fossil fuel use in the United States will ‘save the planet.’ But save it from what? And what will his promised (or threatened?) ‘transition’ away from fossil fuels mean for the people who are currently alive and who want to maintain a certain level of affluence with all that it entails? Like freedom.”
REPEAT: “Typical denier stuff. Save the planet? Well, obviously, Harry, Meghan, Al Gore, and a host of likeminded people want to save it from the ‘existential threat’ of climate change. Aren’t you concerned? Do you want the seas to rise? You once lived in Miami. Do you want your old homestead underwater? Do you want Homestead, Florida, underwater?”
PETE: “Repeat, please don’t just repeat the consensus. Not much I can do about it, that is, about sea level rise. Homestead’s western side used to be much farther inland than it is today, in fact, many miles farther inland, with most of that sea level rise occurring long before people started to burn fossil fuels. North America was occupied when sea level was lower than most of the continental shelf. Don’t you think those early residents had to move as waters rose? So, is southern Florida under an ‘existential threat’? ‘Existential threat’ is the buzz-term that strikes fear into the masses who will not lift individual fingers to turn off light switches in unused rooms and who allow a number of appliances to use power on ‘standby,’ masses who will not change their consumption of energy for various reasons, some of them good, such as lighting a street or property to prevent crime. And how will society run in the ideal world with no existential threat? Will all businesses and homes lie along railroad tracks so we don’t have trucks running all over the place, burning fuel? The presumed President-elect would be happy since he has been a big supporter of Amtrak. Ignore that he likes to drive his gas-guzzling sports car.”
REPEAT: “No, No! These climate guys have all kinds of records that they’ve gleaned from proxy sources and actual measurements of temperatures. They even know the climate of a region going back millions of years. And there is evidence that carbon dioxide is a major player in global temperature. And what about the methane? The methane ices locked away in permafrost and in seafloor sediments? We’re about to make Earth Venus if they are released. People like Harry and Meghan are committed to prevent that. And as far as southern Florida is concerned, why the Army Corps of Engineers has even predicted a sea level rise of 1.5 to 4.5 feet in the twenty-first century.”
PETE: “Really? Now there’s an accurate forecast. And over millions of years and all those potential climate influences, has the climate anywhere been the same? Has sea level been constant? Has climate been a constant? Shifting tectonic plates, orogenies and their subsequent erosions, incursions of epicontinental seas and their regressions, evolutionary changes in photosynthesizers, massive flood basalts, even incoming bolides, aren’t all those climate changers? Pennsylvania was a tropical land millions of years ago. More recently, northern Pennsylvania was covered in part by ice. Even more recently, Pennsylvania emerged from the last big cooldown to grow a cover of temperate forests, thus, ‘Penn’s Woods,’ a land of 17.5 million acres of forests.
“Surrounded as I am by a sylvan setting, as I look out the window next to my computer, I think of a few years in the 1990s, when my region was under a very intense drought, so droughty one of those years that when I stood on a cliff overlooking the Monongahela River, I could see the river bottom almost to the river’s centerline; the river was so shallow that barge traffic ceased for a while, and that year was so droughty that I wondered whether or not a forest fire might consume the sylvan setting and my cedar house.”
REPEAT: “But, Pete, you’re missing the point. The climate is changing faster now than at any time in the past, and we’re causing the change.”
PETE: “Faster than at the beginning and end of the Younger Dryas? That cooling period seems to have occurred as temperatures plunged in a single century, and after a millennium or so, it ended in a matter of decades with rapidly rising temperatures—and sea level. Imagine the rapid warming of the time. Imagine sea levels rising so fast that Grandma really could tell tales of playing on dry land where all her grandchildren played in the surf. And what of the relatively rapid beginnings and endings of the Medieval Warm Period or the Little Ice Age? Hey, by the way, was that Medieval Warm Period caused by the burning of fossil fuels? Did the Vikings burn bunker fuel in their ships as they plied the waves across the Atlantic or into the Mediterranean?
“We humans are short-lived beings and our science of climate is a newcomer, as is, in fact, all 'science.' Not that humans haven’t been observing Earth and its climatic stabilities and instabilities accurately for millennia. Could agricultural societies have formed without knowledge of climate? Would the ancient Inuit ancestors have tried to grow grapes? Did the Vikings abandon Greenland because of climate change? Did the Little Ice Age not make beer popular when grape crops failed? Did sea level not rise and fall in ages past? When you have time, look up the geological and sea level history of Miletus, once a port.
“The effects of varying climate have also been noted through generations. And though they probably didn’t understand the reason for changes in sea levels or lake levels, surely some stories related through the generations the transgressions and regressions of waters. That ‘Hey, Grandma said that when she was a girl she used to play out there where we see only water’ would have been a worldwide expression among peoples living through a period of rapidly rising waters of the post-Last Glacial Maximum period. Stories of changing sea levels? Bet they told them in Ur. That city was once on the coast, but now lies ten miles inland. Where did all those ‘Flood’ stories originate? Wasn’t the Babylonian Sea Goddess Tiamat divided by Marduk to make the world? Wasn’t she associated with the Chaos of pre-Creation? Is climate stasis a myth? Face it. Climate-caused eustatic changes have occurred even in historical times and within human lifespans. Inhabitants of New England’s Cape Cod would have seen rapid changes in sea level during the period after the glaciers retreated. Go to Chatham, Massachusetts, and look at the soil layers between sand layers in Cape Cod’s cliffs, both kinds of layers an indication of sea level changes resulting from climate change. Those changes occurred rather rapidly at the end of the last glacial event and really rapidly about 14 millennia ago.
“And those droughts? I’m going out on a limb here to say that if they had a ‘rain dance,’ the Pueblo (Anasazi) would have danced it during the last 25 years of the thirteenth century. A quarter century of severely droughty years! Surely, they would have thought that the climate was changing irreversibly. The drought was enough to decimate their society and create a Pueblan diaspora. Imagine if there had been newspaper and TV reporters at the time. Imagine the reactions on social media. Imagine the flurry of climate studies and reports by political pundits showing an existential threat.
“The Web is a wonderful source of information. We can hop or crawl around the world of science, finding the results of research done in nearby or far-off places. As I hop or crawl over the Internet, I sometimes stumble upon answers that breed questions, the latter often unasked by researchers.
“For example, In a study by Zani et al. (2020), the researchers found that an increase in carbon dioxide and warming temperatures affected the time when the leaf-out occurs in spring, pushing the trees to start ‘eating’ earlier, that is photosynthesizing earlier.*** This regressing time of photosynthesis leads, the researchers say, to trees that reach a feeding limit, analogous, they argue, to sitting down to that turkey dinner and stuffing the stuffed turkey into the stomach until the brain says, ‘Whoa! Let’s watch football instead of eating any more food.’ The argument they make is that instead of leaves remaining at the ‘table’ of sunlight longer into the warmer autumn, the opposite occurs, making fall foliage dates in the Northern Hemisphere’s temperate forests recede closer to summer than to winter by a few days, maybe by as many as six days this century. According Zani and colleagues, people will be taking those foliage excursions in the Northeast earlier, rather than later, in the year.
“So, let’s say that the researchers are correct. They looked at various causes of earlier color changes in leaves, when chlorophyll gives way to xanthophyll, anthocyanin, and carotene that beautify the landscape with yellows, reds, and oranges. They considered temperature and carbon dioxide, for instance. And they ran lab experiments to corroborate their findings in the field. All good work, and all that work leading to a reasonable surmise: Their come-away conclusion is that global warming associated with carbon dioxide will not allow forests to sequester more carbon. Trees that ‘have eaten their fill’ won’t eat more. They suggest, therefore, that an increase in carbon dioxide won’t make a greener Earth on average and that nature on land won’t accommodate anthropogenic carbon emissions. That seems reasonable to me. So, according to Zani’s crew of scientists, forests can do only so much to absorb carbon. But…
“But what about any unanswered questions? What if there are more trees? If the current forest cover is insufficient to store the excess carbon, could a larger forest cover do the trick? Could a warmer world with more carbon dioxide drive more seeds to maturity? Could increased rainfall along the Sahara’s margins reverse desertification and allow more trees to grow where sands now cover the land? Will forests expand in South America and Australia? Abel and others (2020) have documented in another study an extension of rainfall zones on those two continents while noting a decline in rainfall in Asia and Africa.**** More forests in South America and Australia, fewer in Asia and Africa? Counterbalanced or not? A net gain of trees to sequester carbon, or a net loss? A photosynthetic feeding frenzy, tree sharks devouring sunlight by the megawatts!
“And what if the Brazilians stop burning down their tropical rainforests and Americans start planting some of those proposed trillion tree seedlings? Can lots of munchkin trees eat more sunlight than fewer bigger trees? Momma Oak says, ‘Acorn, finish your plate. You haven’t photosynthesized all your sunlight.’ What if the Nepalese stop cutting down woody plants for funeral pyres and start burying their dead instead? With more trees would the association between earlier leaf-drop and greater quantities of carbon in the atmosphere mean anything? Zani might have discovered a retrograde progression of fall foliage, but not necessarily a stasis or diminution in carbon sinks if Abel et al. are correct. And there are more questions.
“Will increased carbon dioxide increase marine algae that account for most of the carbon sink? Of course, all such questions have at least partial answers. Marine algae blooms are limited by the nutrients available in the water, including iron. Will changes in ocean currents take equatorial heat to areas lying beyond today’s tree line? Will changing currents carry more or fewer nutrients to once unproductive or productive ocean zones? Will temperate forests occupy areas now underlain by permafrost? Will mountain tree lines rise by hundreds of feet to replace landscapes once covered by snow and ice?
“So many questions. Will carbon find new sinks in the Southern Hemisphere? Remember your Earth history? The planet has not always looked the way it does today. The polar ice caps haven’t been around for long, geologically speaking, and even during their long reign on the poles during ‘human times,’ they have expanded and shrunk. The Vikings didn’t build their villages on a Greenland ice field. Dinosaur fossils lie in the rocks beneath the ice of Antarctica.
“Are potential changes in Earth’s sundry climates bad for all humans? If people in poor countries undergo desertification, won’t some people in rich countries benefit from increased arable land under changing climates? If sea level rises to cover southern Florida, will the rise mean more shallow warm water for coral reef development and species diversification? Isn’t there a fossil reef in Lockport, NY? Will Homestead, Florida, become a coral reef complex?”
REPEAT: “Hey, you’re all over the map on this stuff. I’ll grant you some of those changes you cite, but some of those sites you cite underwent changes that took thousands to millions of years. Things are happening faster now.”
PETE: “Yes, I admit I am ‘all over the map,’ but isn’t that what the so-called ninety-seven-percenters are doing? Aren’t they all over the map? They’ve said that global warming will cause worse winters, greater numbers of hurricanes—and if not, more powerful hurricanes—catastrophic sea level rise, droughts, floods, big snowfalls, hardly any snowfalls, warmer oceans, changes in warm ocean currents, changes in the Atlantic Meridional Current, more infrared absorption, more clouds, higher albedo that reflects sunlight, coral reef demise, coral reef movement and new growth, acidic seas, forest soils that release carbon and forest soils that sequester carbon, great migrations of humans, and on and on and on….
“I can’t stop going all over the map. Is it an existential threat if the wheat belt of the United States moves into Canada? Is an existential threat if coffee will be grown in Arkansas and tropical fruits in Kentucky? What is the ‘right climate’? Is the Dust Bowl period of American history the right climate? Or has the threat come because we humans have simply proliferated and arrogantly decided that we can live wherever we want without consequences? That we can live in hurricane-prone areas, in earthquake zones, on the sides of volcanoes, in a ‘tornado alley,’ in a desert, and at the base of snow-covered, avalanche-prone mountains? If Las Vegas lies in arid land, it’s there because we chose to put it there. If aridity increases, it might initiate a mass exodus from Vegas, but people have been abandoning locations for millennia because of climate changes, wars, natural disasters, and unknown causes. Think Göbleki Tepe; think the Pueblo sites. Or think climate-caused migrations. OR, think about the hypothesis that climate change was a major driver in human evolution, replacing African forests with grasslands and forcing us to come out of the trees and to walk bipedally, standing to see over the tall grasses, wary as we were of crouching predators.
“So, if you want to ‘become a raindrop’ as ex-Prince Harry suggests, it’s your prerogative. Just know that while you’re becoming a raindrop, Harry is up in the clouds spewing carbon and hygroscopic particles in the atmosphere as he travels to encourage people everywhere to become ‘raindrops.’ Makes me think of that once popular Hal David/Burt Bacharach song, ‘Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,’ retitled as ‘Princes, Hollywood Stars, and Politicians Keep Fallin’ on My Brain.’ Now there’s an inundation that is an existential threat.”
REPEAT: “You just don’t understand.”
PETE: “I guess not. And that’s why I keep asking questions.”
*That oft-repeated percentage is taken from a study by Naomi Oreskes, a study that fudges what was and was not incorporated into its conclusion. Oreskes, Naomi (December 2004). The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change. Science. 306 (5702): 1686. doi:10.1126/science.1103618
**Are we under the influence of simpletons? Harry, an ex-soldier, should be made of tougher stuff that his words indicate. https://www.breitbart.com/environment/2020/12/01/prince-harry-makes-climate-plea-what-if-every-one-of-us-was-a-raindrop/
***Deborah Zani et al. Increased growing-season productivity drives earlier autumn leave senescence in temperate trees, Science (2020). DOI: 10.1126/science.abd8911
Christine R. Rollinson, Surplus and stress control autumn timing. Science (2020). DOI: 10.1126/science.abf4481, science.sciencemag.org/content/370/6520/1030 .
****Christin Abel et al. The human-environment nexus and vegetation-rainfall sensitivity in tropical drylands, Nature Sustainability (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41893-020-00597-z
I suppose I should add this to your "if interested, read this, also" list: https://phys.org/news/2020-12-phytolith-reveals-seasonal-drought-conditions.html It is an article on millennium-scale droughts. And, while I'm at it, consider https://www.pnas.org/content/117/47/29478
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