Steven Koonin on The Limitations of Climate Change Models

Okay, since this is a policy-oriented meeting, I thought the best thing I could do as a scientist was to lay out some of the factual context of

climate

and the closely related topic of energy, so if you listen to most of the dialogue political and certainly What you hear in the media is that

climate

science requires us to make large and rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, take climate action immediately and on a large scale, and that is driven by the fact that global greenhouse gas emissions have increased at approximately 1 and 1. 12% a year the UN says we need to reach net zero emissions within 30 years to avoid the worst effects of climate

change

and have several trajectories of emissions in the future.

I have a suggestion by the way? I guess not, as you can see, emissions would have to reach 0 by 2050 or so, if we want to keep global temperature rise between 1 and 12° above the pre-industrial stage, do you think about the policy needed to implement something like that? and they have to strike a balance, on the one hand we have the certainties and uncertainties of climate science and I was amused to hear during yesterday's banking talk the reverence with which physics and chemistry are treated in terms of precision and certainty. According to your understanding, this is largely not the case and the dangers and risks of a changing climate and, on the other hand, we will see the growing global demand for reliable, affordable and clean energy.

Achieving that balance is a policy issue that must be incorporated. values ​​and priorities environment versus development risk tolerance Equity throughout the north, south and between generations and really any of the policy responses that can be given make a difference and how much they will cost and, of course, it is in the central picture where I most expect You are all interested and focused, so I want to explain some of the considerations involved in Striking that balance in the form of three high-level statements. The first is that the notion of a climate crisis that is heard so often has little scientific support.

The current climate is not broken and fears of future catastrophes depend on extreme emissions scenarios being fed into

models

that are wholly inadequate to the task and therefore if we act too quickly and poorly thought out we will incur a threat greater for human well-being. -Being more than climate

change

itself and, of course, I will show you data and trends that support these statements. A second is that if you advocate rapid or too rapid global decarbonization, you have a moral problem that I will try to elucidate. and the third is that if you try to decarbonize too quickly at the national level, it will be disruptive and costly and will ultimately degrade national security.

Let me start with a definition. First, the weather is not the weather. Climate is the long-term, typically 30-year average of climate properties and that is very well illustrated in this graph showing an approximately 9,100-year-long record of the annual height of the Nile River measured during the summer minimum in Cairo. The Egyptians, of course, cared a lot about the height of the Nile, as did the people who ruled Egypt at one point, and what you see when you look at this graph (the blue values ​​are the annual values) is that there are many ups and downs of year to year, one year it might go up to almost 6M and the next year or so it will go down to 2m or 1 meter, so that happens year after year.

The second is that if you look at the 30-year average, which is the red line, you can see that it also goes up and down. a lot and if you were alive for the first 150 years of this record you would see the annual minimum going down and down and no doubt some medieval Egyptian climate panel would be shouting New Normal New Normal and recommending prayers and sacrifices, in fact the climate varies a On its own human influence, was completely absent during this time and if you just waited a couple of hundred years after 700, you will see it reappear quite frequently, so you can be very fooled by the variability from year to year or by the variability over decades and disentangling the response to human influences from this natural variability of the climate system is something that is a major challenge for science these days.

We do it a lot in the media. The media completely misrepresents science. Here's a little vignette from NASA. press release March 2020 The Guardian uh newspaper published in the United Kingdom in December 2019 headline The Greenland ice sheet is melting seven times faster than in the 1990s and if you look at the text of the article, The rate of ice loss has increased from 33 billion tons per year in the 1990s to 254 billion tons per year in the last decade. That's a true statement, but if you look at it in context, it sends a very different message. . Here is the actual data compiled by the Danish Meteorological Institute.

This is how much Greenland ice loss year by year averaged over 10 years and you can see from 1990 to 2012 it went up a lot, it's a big part of this graph, but if you look at the last 100 years it went up and down a lot. and if we go back to 1930, when human influences were much less than they are today, about 1/5, you can see that ice was being lost almost as much and even as the world warmed from 1930 to 2022, the Ice loss has increased and is going down and, in fact, is currently decreasing rather than increasing, so this is not global warming.

Well, this is what the weather happens to be in the North Atlantic, so it's impossible to talk about the weather without talking about the unusual heat we've seen this summer. here's the context, okay this is US EPA data, official government data, it's the heat wave index, we can talk about how heat waves are defined, but not right now and you can see that in the last 40 years or so since 1980 there has not been much change, this does not include last summer of course we do not have that data yet but still one year will not make much difference in the climatic sense and it was much more active in terms of heat waves in the 1930s than it is. now it runs again the human influence is much smaller this is the satellite derived record of global temperature lower atmosphere temperature month by month and the last point on that graph is July 2023 last month and you can see a big increase , but when you look at other big spikes you see mainly due to noos and you can see that there is a gradual long term trend, so as much as the media and other people make of the unusually hot July that we have had, it is not about of human influences, but of long-term climate.

The trend in this data may well be human influences, but they can't resist capitalizing on dramatic climate events to make clear what the causes are, perhaps greenhouse gases, but that seems unlikely again because greenhouse gases act for long periods of time without problems. Niño, we are at the beginning of another El Niño cycle. There are other oscillations in the climate system that are conspiring to work together. Stratospheric water vapor is another explanation. You may not know that in January of last year there was a huge underwater volcanic eruption that increased water vapor in the upper atmosphere by between 10 and 133%.

You can see it here in this graph. That big dark spot at the bottom of the graph in more recent years is water vapor from this underground eruption under the marine eruption and that increases the heat trapping of the atmosphere and we have finally been cleaning up the lower atmosphere of carbon emissions and from ship emissions, allowing the Earth to absorb a little more sunlight and that is also playing a role in the recent warming. Finally, the urban heat island is heard. There is a lot of talk about records broken in Phoenix, Houston and so on, the temperature in the cities is higher than in the surrounding areas by up to 5 or 6° and if you have a climate that is in the middle of a city that is growing and growing and El The city's increasing warming begins to affect whether you'll break or record or not, temperature isn't the only thing that is a manifestation of the weather, what's much more worrying are extreme weather events and rising sea levels.

However, the graph from the most recent UN report published about a year ago and the colors indicate whether or not a trend has been observed in various phenomena associated with heat and cold. Well, yes, we have more heat, more heat waves globally, although not in the US, less, less cold waves, but then there is a whole category of wet and dry for which there is no trend , there is a whole category of wind that includes tropical cyclones, hurricanes, typhoons again for which there is no trend, etc., in fact, for most extremes. climate events we have not seen Trends over the last century here is some of the accompanying text low confidence in most reported long-term trends in hurricanes low confidence in mid-latitude storms tornadoes hail lightning no Trends, etc., in What we are confident is that we have seen an increase in intense rainfall on a global scale on the earth, and it continues on and on, there is not much that gives us support that there is a climate crisis underway here are some of hurricane data this is the record for the number of hurricanes worldwide at the top Trace are all tropical storms at the bottom Trace are hurricanes and this is a record that spans approximately 50 years OD is difficult to see any change at all this is a measure of hurricane activity expect the strongest storms more than The weakest storms again globally at the top of the northern hemisphere, at the bottom, many ups and downs over 50 years, but it is difficult to find any effect and, in fact, the official reports say that we cannot find any trend that I will not follow. the language, but that's what it says, by the way, I don't know if you'll have access to the charts, but you have links to all the supporting reports, whether they're UN reports or quality peer-reviewed literature, in each of statements, so that's today's climate in the past, you might wonder what about the future, that's why we trust

models

and one of the main measures of me of a model is how sensitive it is to rising carbon dioxide of carbon if carbon dioxide is doubled in the model.

How much would the temperature rise and is that shown on this graph? There are about 40 different models listed there, they are produced by institutes and universities around the world and what is divided is how sensitive the model is and the ones in yellow around 40%. The UN considered many of them to be too sensitive and therefore not used at all. That's a little scary. The best modelers in the world make their best attempts and are wrong 40% of the time. It's even worse when you ask how well the models produce. temperature history that we have seen and that is shown in these graphs the black is the actual temperature increase observed on the globe and the different traces are the different models and you can see that many of the models differ from the data or differ from them themselves for more than just the temperature rise they are trying to describe, and in fact even climate modelers don't believe in their own models, at least at a regional level, Tim Palmer at Oxford and beö Stevens, who is the director of the Institute Max Plank. for meteorology says that for many key applications the current generation of models is not fit for purpose, there is more, he gave a lecture at UCLA about a year ago and says that in many places it is difficult, impossible, to scientifically advise social efforts to adapt to inevitable situations. warming we cannot assess the extent to which a given degree of warming represents an existential threat and there is Tim Palmer in an email not publicly published but widely published in the National Academy uh membership says that our understanding of climate change, especially on a regional scale is quite poor thing, how can a country adapt if it doesn't even know the sign of the change in rainfall, as the IPCC figures show? and says policy and decision makers are starting to feel uncomfortable when we say they would prefer us not to say such things in public, they claim, they undermine the public's faith in the need to take action and I think they know this is a disease, a dysfunction of science in this particular field as a scientist.

I think it is our duty to expose scientific knowledge and unknowns transparently, completely and without prejudice eh, that is not happening. I can tell you that I will show you specific examples. Okay, let's look at just one or two more model projections. Sea level. I live most of the time in Manhattan, in New York City, there has been a tide gauge. at the foot of Manhattan, the southern tip for 150 years. Maybe a little more, this isthe rate of rise of the sea at the tip of Manhattan since 1920, it has averaged five, no, 3 millimeters a year, you can see, but it rises and By the way, a fall of 3 millimeters per year is one foot per century.

Noé, the part of the US government that deals with oceans and atmospheres says that for the next 30 years this chart will do the right thing. Noah, who am I to challenge Noah? We'll soon know whether that's going to happen or not, and in fact, you know other researchers say you shouldn't use these models because they're not very accurate, they're not very precise, etc., giving an impression of false confidence. Well, for users, if you can't believe the models about what will happen in the future, how could we understand how things are going to change as the planet warms?

We can look at the p P, so here is the global average temperature since 1850 and you can see that since 1900 or so it has increased about 1.3 degrees to the present, which is almost the same amount of warming that the UN predicts on average By the end of the 2100 century, what will be the impacts? I don't know, but we can look at how the Globe has fared over the last 120 years and the answer is that humanity has prospered like never before, the global temperature increased by 1.3, the population increased by a factor of five, the Life expectancy went from 32 years to In almost 73 years, the literacy fraction increased by a factor of four, GDP per capita increased by a factor of seven, etc., etc., and the death rate from extreme weather conditions increased. decreased by a factor of 50, even as the planet warmed by 1.3.

That doesn't mean things are going to be perfect in the next 80 years, but it sure gives some sense that humanity is perfectly capable of adapting and thriving as conditions change. Here is an example of that agriculture. This is 60 years of global agricultural data. The area of ​​land used for cereal production has not increased. all as the Bottom Trace shows, but the population, of course, has increased grain yield, which is how many bushels per acre you get or tons per acre or whatever, has increased dramatically as agronomy has improved and grain production production, how much grain? Global production has actually also increased by 250% even as the planet warmed.

If we look at climate losses, how much GDP was spent due to extreme weather events? This is global data. First, you can see that it's around a quarter of a percent of GDP. Second, you can see that it's actually down a little bit, again. Worried people will say that this is going to go up and up, but in fact, as the world develops, we become more and more resilient and able to cope. With extreme weather events and in any case at the moment it is only a quarter of GDP globally, what about the economic impacts? Last March, about 4 months ago, the White House released a white paper summarizing the outcome of 12 independent, peer-reviewed studies on How Much Would Warming Affect US GDP?

This graph comes from that report and what you can see is that the change in global surface temperature is in degrees Fahrenheit because this is a US graph, but hey, we're currently on that vertical line. and you can see that warming is expected to have affected the US GDP. Those different lines indicate different models. The black line is the average. You can see that it has gone down to less than a tenth of a percent and that if we go to the extreme of In this graph, which is where we would be under Paris' 2 degree warming, you can see that it is still at 2%;

In other words, the economy would be 2% smaller in 2100, say, than it would have been otherwise. It is in Lor noise in another article compiled a similar set of estimates for the world as a whole and again the conclusion is a few by a few degrees, well, you might say, what about tipping points? And of course people have studied it too. There is an article, it's another 1 or 2% for tipping points and so economically this is in the noise, okay, now you could argue that GDP is not the only thing that matters, there will be differential impacts between poor and rich, etc., it is all true, but it is hardly a catastrophe or an existential threat.

I moved on to the second statement that I wanted to make and that promoting rapid decarbonization globally is immoral and it starts with demographics, this is the world's population historically and, um, projected to the year 2100 and you can see we just surpassed 8 billion people right now. and according to this projection we will reach 10 billion by the end of the century, most of the growth between now and the end of the century will occur in Asia and Africa. Well, that means that the developed world, where there are one and a half billion of us, is getting older, the developing world is younger, and urbanization is advancing at a spectacular rate.

They are creating 50 million people a year, the equivalent of six New York cities a year. Half the world is now urbanized. Seven, 70% will be At the end of the century, Steve Haber spoke yesterday about the developed world bubble in which we live. I would say almost an echo chamber. This graph makes it quite evident that what is being divided up here is for several representative countries indicated on the right, annual per capita energy consumption, how much energy each person used, divided by GDP per capita in constant US dollars. 2017, and you can see there are a lot of interesting things we need to understand about this graph, some of us in the US Canada, some other very developed countries use a lot of energy, we are in the upper right corner and we have a relatively high GDP.

As a result, in the middle of the graph are the European countries and several other middle countries that use about half the energy per capita of the US and have somewhat lower GDP, and below, in the lower left corner, you see a set of countries whose energy use increases universally and monotonically as they get richer, the richer countries use more energy and when you are a developing country below, in the lower left, your energy use will increase a lot to as their economic situation improves. The sobering thing about this graph is that there are only one and a half billion people at the top of this graph, if you scroll down.

At the bottom left there are about 6 billion people, so it's pretty clear that as they improve their standard of living by using more energy, energy demand will increase. The people there maybe some of you come from those countries or have been there. In them, life without energy is not fun, it means cooking and heating with what is politely called traditional biomass or wood and manure, indoor air pollution is terrible, it kills 2 million people a year, without 24-hour lighting, you have to do it. studying in extreme conditions it is okay to eat romantically by candlelight but studying by candlelight is not fun the inequalities are staggering Nigeria consumes 130th of the energy per capita that we consume in the US and there are 3 billion people in the world 38 of the population use less electricity per year than the average US refrigerator and I will say with a bit of shame that I have three refrigerators in my house in New York, so if you combine the demographics of population growth with the need for energy as you develop, get strong growth in energy consumption, this is shown projected until 2050 again, you can see most of the growth, around 50% in total , it's in Asia and the developed world is quite flat and where are we going to get that if we don't change our policies most of it will continue to come from fossil fuels even though renewable energy can grow strongly fossil fuels continue to dominate this sample of where the world obtained its energy from different sources from 1965 to the present and we can see that most of the world's energy comes from the lower segments: oil, coal and gas; the others grow a little, but not at a tremendously fast rate;

The world has spent around $4 trillion over the last decade trying to change the energy mix, but fossil fuels still account for around 80% of the world's energy and that means there will be higher emissions from the developing world, let's do whatever we do in the OECD, as you can see now, emissions are about half and half of the vertical line in 2020, but As we move towards mid-century, the developing world dominates, that's because the Fossil fuels are, in fact, the most reliable and convenient way for those countries to get the energy they need. There is an economist, a political scientist called Anthony DS, who died about two years ago.

He ended up working at Brookings, but during the early part of his career in the 60s he was working at UCL watching the smog get worse as more and more people could afford cars and wrote a wonderful paper called Up and Down with ecology 1972 Would highly recommend what he said there: that the environmental deterioration of the elites is often the common man's best standard of living and therefore we in the developed world might clutch our pearls and recoil in horror at the threat of change human-induced climate. In the developing world we have much bigger problems, more immediate and more easily solvable problems, so when we say that science requires us to reduce emissions, they say: what do you mean we?

So we have Prime Minister Modi in India saying that the colonial mentality has not gone away. The developing nations are closing us the path that made them develop and the former president of ner, who just opposed a coup d'état, said about a year ago that Africa is being punished for the decisions of Western countries to end to public financing of foreign fossil fuel projects. by the end of 2022 you will see this when the IMF or the World Bank refused to finance fossil fuel projects. Well, let's keep fighting. We have fossil fuels that should be exploited, so there is a moral issue for those of us who are.

Sitting fat and happy in the developed world, what are we going to say to these people? No one has a good answer as I've been going around asking that question. Finally, let me touch on rapid national decarbonization a little bit. You say, well, okay, the US EU should lead the way and reduce our emissions well, it's not that simple because, to borrow a phrase from a movie, recently energy touches everything everywhere, all the time , is one of the fundamental systems of society. Energy systems evolve very slowly because they need to be reliable and assets last a long time, power plants, refineries, cars, etc.

ET, so you game the energy system at your own risk if you try to make the energy system change too quickly it will be extraordinarily disruptive to the cost and reliability of energy services Here California has very close electricity rates to the highest in the country due to the heavy dependence on solar and wind energy. We are going to change the way people are employed. You put electric cars. The mechanics will disappear. The flow of funds. You lose the fuel tax. What are you going to do to replace the fact that financing an electric car, for example, costs much more upfront but has lower operating costs, at least until the government starts taxing it to recoup lost costs, fuel revenue, the costs? domestic manufacturing increases if energy becomes more expensive?

Manufacturing becomes expensive Germany, which has the highest energy costs in the world, is seeing an exit from manufacturing as manufacturers abandon cheaper energy costs elsewhere and deploy immature technologies that will have to be replaced. The wind is not yet up to the task of tobacco. That's why we're seeing many wind turbines having to be replaced before the end of their projected useful life. 30 years, it's turning out to be more like 15 because we haven't taken the time to mature the technologies we need. New supply chains are important. part of the energy transition will be technologies that use exotic materials relatively exotic lithium plus copper Cobalt manganese Rare earths because renewable energies have to collect energy in very large areas and must be very efficient in collecting it, so sophisticated magnets and conductors are needed and etc., so we have to readjust the supply chains and right now China has a market for the processing of these exotic materials and that is causing pain, if you will, in the energy transition, how much is it going to cost?

Well, it's hard to estimate. but people try various estimates show that getting to Net Zero by 2050 in the US will cost between 5 and 7%of GDP each year, that is, 1.5 trillion dollars a year. We could do a lot with $1.5 trillion besides trying to cut back. our emissions when the United States accounts for only 13% of global emissions anyway and the rest of the developing world is increasing rather than decreasing globally, the numbers are more or less the same, so we should think carefully before to commit to investing 1 and a half billion. We are one year away from reaching the Net Zero level and we are already beginning to see a retreat in these excessively strict regulations that aim to decarbonize the economy in Europe.

We're probably looking at what people call Green Peak. There has been pushback in Germany, in France in the UK and the Netherlands on how to heat their homes, whether an internal combustion engine can be banned by 2035, etc., and political changes are occurring as a result of consumers not are happy with these mandates in the US are just beginning to hit. Everyday consumers in the Northeast, and I think we'll see a similar pullback, people will start asking, tell me again why are we doing all this, as electricity costs go up, electric vehicles cost more than internal combustion engines, etc. ., okay, so I have Given that there are many things that are in the cup with the half empty side, what do I think we should do?

I think the first thing we have to do is cancel the climate crisis, you know, when the UN Secretary General stands up and says we are on the road to climate hell with his foot on the accelerator, that is totally wrong. and at the same time it is counterproductive. I think we need to recognize the task and the challenges of trying to reduce the human influences on the climate that we need. To have better and more transparent representations of scientific and unknown knowledge and technological potentials for non-experts and, more generally, I believe that the public and decision makers, including policy makers, have to Be more literate about energy and climate.

We need to work harder on scientific observations understanding that we should not limit the energy supply of the developing world if we in the west of the EU try to do so China will intervene and make sure they get the energy and that is not a good thing geopolitically , we need a greater focus on adaptation and resilience if we can't reduce emissions fast enough and I think there are many reasons why we can't. We need to understand how to better adapt to a changing climate. One of the things we don't do is prepare for In the past, the terrible tragedy we've seen in the last week on Maui was anticipated by many over a decade ago and there are reports that say you should do X Y and Z and of course , nobody made most of them and of course for developing countries we need to make sure that they improve their situation so that they can be more resilient technology is really important we have to create technologies that have low or zero emissions almost as cheap as fossil fuels.

I have my own favorites list there. I won't go into details and ultimately I think at the moment a graceful decarbonisation governments are just throwing things at the wall and trying to see what sticks, so we have, for example, in the usir. I think totally unjustified subsidies for wind and solar energy when they cannot be the main source of electricity in the country, so we have to discover these paths in involves regulation of technology businesses Behavior that no one has done that is fine, we are just all running around saying the sky is falling in the last graph.

I thought it would be good to offer a couple of thoughts on the contribution of science and technology to policy in general, not only on climate and energy, but also on pandemics. for example, other ESS matters, artificial intelligence for those of you who are not experts, since most of you are not, as I read your bios in science and technology matters, don't be afraid to ask stupid questions, sometimes they can elucidate or reveal gaps in our understanding or things that advisors are not telling you ask about data coverage bias uncertainties we saw in Co ask about model protections how do you know the models are correct what is the range of models you get, for example, for the differential? from uh coid 19 or for the climate don't trust the media to get input from science and technology on these policy issues, they are completely wrong.

It's like shooting a fish in a barrel to write opinion pieces that take a story from another medium and confront it with real data on climate and energy. Salt from the echo chamber seeks diverse perspectives among scientists and engineers and welcomes the bad news if everyone tells you the same thing you want to hear that is not good at all Paul Simon wrote 60 years ago almost man listens to what he wants to hear and discards the rest so look for that diversity of perspectives of opinion and finally do not distort science to justify a decision make that balance that I talked about at the beginning explicit yes on the one hand on the other hand, etc., I have been a scientist most of my life and only you know that I have been involved in policy issues, I would say that in the last 20 years.

At one point I heard the phrase politics informed by science and I thought when I heard it right. Of course, what other kind of policy is there and then I discovered that you often see in science on climate issues policy-informed science, that is, that the description of science is meant to conform to what those responsible for the policies policies would you like to see happen? Okay, so I'll leave you with those general thoughts and we welcome any comments or questions you may have.