Inconvenient Truth / Inconvenient Facts

Many people, including my usually well-informed daughter, have not updated their picture of climate change from the apocalyptic tale told in "Truth." On the other hand, "Truth" has so much blatant bullshit that it is a low-hanging fruit for climate skeptics. Sadly, skeptics are more or less forced into refuting Gore's arguments which turn out to have almost nothing to do with the real question.

These two beautifully produced publications represent the poles of the polarized issue. Anyone who is interested in the topic has probably read at least one of them. For skeptics who have only laughed at isolated claims in "Truth," I recommend purchasing the book and holding it in your hands to absorb the whole impact and thrust of the presentation.

On the other hand, those who still regard the climate crisis as a real emergency should invest in a hard copy of "Facts." For better or worse, this book (specifically produced to defend the coal industry) has many skeptical issues that need to be considered. Is it right for the wrong reasons?

I leave out consideration of the IPCC, its methods, publications, and models. Closely related is what is now "settled policy" - that we can and should seek "net zero" by [fill in date]. All of that will be addressed in a different post.

Before getting down to the details, I'd like to mention some basic facts that both "sides" have come to agree on (more or less) since Inconvenient Facts was published.

• Sea level has been rising since the end of the last Ice Age and is now rising at about 3 mm per year.  This is related to the fact that polar ice and glaciers have also been melting for thousands of years and still are. I deal with this issue in detail here.
• Any prospect of humanity achieving "net neutral" carbon emissions is Science Fiction. The devil is in the details. Bill Gates (the ultimate detail guy) to me in "How to Avoid Climate Disaster" Ironically, at the time he wrote that, Bill seemed convinced there was a disaster around the corner. But by showing what it would take to avoid the disaster, Bill painted a Science Fiction world. There is a whole genre of books that say the same thing. Bill's is just the first one I read.
• There is no sign that the world will develop and follow a plan to make a significant impact on climate change, whether or not such a thing is possible. There is no plan. There is no plan to make a plan. It is worth noting that, even if the IPCC's models were believed and urgent recommendations were followed, "Net Zero" would still be centuries away. As long as the current laws of physics remain what they are, there is no possibility that any future technology will replace fossil fuels and/or nuclear energy. Sorry, the math doesn't work out for the wind farms and solar panels.
• Mining is at the heart of technology. Ugly though it is, we will need to mine the materials we need to use for any future energy source. That includes lithium for batteries.
• "Nature" is in a constant state of flux. All statements in the physics of climate are dynamic in the sense that they describe change - the way any given state of nature leads to another. Chaos, not "balance," is the way to think of nature.

So, what are the "takeaway" messages from our two books? Let Mr. Gore go first.

The subtitle on the cover reads "the crisis of global warming." Now we call it "climate change" since it turns out the actual climate is not warming in a sufficiently scary manner. But we have a "crisis" right off the bat.

What is the crisis? You would think this would be easy to find out by reading the book, but the book is a laundry list of horrors along with compelling graphics to illustrate each one:

• Mining.
• Population growth
• Something about polar bears
• Something about penguins
• Something about "disrupting the balance of nature as we know it."
• Pollution
• (over) population
• Ocean currents ...

and so on. But where is the crisis? Floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes are depicted - supposedly all part of the "big picture" of the crisis.

When you get right down to it, the book assumes without a shred of proof that C02 emissions are an emergency. The rise in C02 concentration gets a two-page spread. The greenhouse effect is presented in a manner suitable for little children (and still is presented for children). The fact that C02 is a minor greenhouse gas (the major one is water) is not mentioned, nor is the fact that greenhouse "forcing" is one of the thousands of barely-understood influences on climate. But C02 has one big advantage. It's our fault. 

Between the lines is a claim that the climate is well enough understood that we know there is an emergency and must act now. Gore is optimistic that we can turn things around. Windmills. Solar Cells. Nuclear only appears in the form of bombs. The book is for dummies, so we don't get into the math of just how this will work.

We are stuck with getting 80% of our energy from fossil fuels for the foreseeable future. The only question is, will this destroy the planet? This is the theme of the book. But there is nothing worth the name of evidence offered.

Gore attempts (quite successfully) to create panic over a wildly exaggerated issue. We still have the panic. But he has a way of fixing things. Where have we heard that from a politician before?

Let's hear from the other side:

Gregory Wrightstone is the executive director of the C02 Coalition, whose goal is stated on their web page:

The CO2 Coalition was established in 2015 as a non-partisan educational foundation ... for the purpose of educating thought leaders, policymakers, and the public about the important contribution made by carbon dioxide to our lives and the economy. The Coalition seeks to engage in an informed and dispassionate discussion of climate change, humans’ role in the climate system, the limitations of climate models, and the consequences of mandated reductions in CO2 emissions.

Major donors to this "coalition" include the "usual suspects," such as the Koch Brothers and the Mercers, who have funded such "non-partisan" projects as Fox News.  It is no coincidence that Wrightstone is a frequent "talking head" on Fox. The common thread of these projects is to present "alternative facts" in a format that superficially resembles the way that actual facts are presented.

The "inconvenient fact" about who pays Wrightsone's rent is omitted from the book. I have never seen it mentioned in Wrightstone's "qualifications" when he appears online. This book is part of the "educational" goal of the C02 Coalition. To claim it is "non-partisan" and "dispassionate" is simply laughable.

The book is wonderfully produced, full of nice color graphs and Wrightsone's well-honed rhetoric, which you can sample in numerous videos (mostly on Fox News) without buying the book. He weaves fascinating information about the Earth's past (what is true ain't new) along with "facts" coming only from hard-core Climate Skeptics such as Craig Idso, who served as Peabody's climate denier in chief (Peabody is "big coal").  "What is new ain't true."

This book collects all the "talking points" of climate skeptics between two covers. For those who are routinely confronted by climate skeptics, it's useful to know their playbook. The key well-known "fact" it presents is that climate has been changing for the whole history of the. Earth, and THEREFORE, we are OK. Nothing to see here. It's like saying volcanos have always been happening, so don't worry about living on a volcano.

But those who think we have a climate emergency are concerned about a particularly fast, nasty, and totally unprecedented change in climate, entirely created by Wrightestones's financial supporters.  Wrightstone never directly addresses this issue. The reader is left to come to his own conclusions, which assumes that the typical reader actually knows the claims of Al Gore and company in detail.

Another assumption that both "sides" make is that the average reader understands graphs. As a former math teacher, I assure you that such skills are rare in the general population, and it's easy to fool those who do. Even me.

So the average reader may wade through all the pretty graphs and miss the treatment of ocean levels rising (Page 114 and following). This destroys the #1 image people have of global warming: cities swallowed by the ocean. This is fatal to Al Gore's picture of catastrophe. The actual amount of sea level rise will be dwarfed by the rise in "normal" hurricanes for thousands of years.

It's a classic case of "too much information." Similar arguments about temperature changes happening over centuries are buried in accounts that reveal the author's wide knowledge of history. But, again, we are talking about .5 degrees C, a difference few of us would notice. Again, such differences are buried in the extremes of heat and cold. 

Gore's followers, faced with a paucity of evidence for increased hurricane activity, alarmists have claimed that climate change is producing more extremes. Here again, the Wrightstone drowns the baby in the bathwater. We are not seeing trends in the frequency or seriousness of hurricanes, for example. It's not easy to dig out that fact in this book, and the author actually claims hurricanes are decreasing. What he needs to calm the panic is just that the increase is unproven. It's not in the data. His hand-drawn "trend lines" on pages 96-97 do nothing but raise suspicions of cherry-picking. Those of us who love graphs hate hand-drawn trend lines.

Wrightsone seems to be unaware of how central climate emergencies are in the "Inconvenient Facts" mindset. True believers walk away thinking that this and virtually all bad weather is the result of climate change. This idea is constantly in the headlines. It needs to be addressed head-on, but the author buries it in graphs of crop yields.

Wrightstone has earned his keep by digging deep to find everything he knows to prove that coal is good for you. In his enthusiasm, he misses the point. Are we faced with a climate emergency or not? If so, is an excess of C02 responsible?

To be honest, the only way I found answers to these questions in Wrightstone's book was to know them in advance. The answer is "no" and "probably not." Wrightsone is right for all the wrong reasons.