In The Economist “Climate Issue” newsletter, “planetary affairs editor” Oliver Morton starts strong, describing how Earth’s “albedo” (its tendency to reflect incoming sunlight) is decreasing and hence the planet is warming. But instead of concluding that less of the warming than previously thought is therefore due to CO2, or pondering why the albedo might be decreasing and whether it’s possibly in part natural, he suddenly hollers “It can seem strange that such mighty things as hurricanes, droughts and ocean currents respond to the number of cars or coal mines. But they do, because the amount of useful energy gained by burning fossil fuels is utterly dwarfed by the warming caused by the carbon dioxide released in the process.” So why aren’t hurricanes increasing, or droughts? And what have ocean currents to do with it? It’s not just the Earth that suddenly went dim, sir. But speaking of oceans, it’s nothing to Popular Mechanics claiming global warming started 80 years earlier than anyone thought and that it means we’re having even more impact instead of that it must therefore be most natural.
We do want to give the Popular Mechanics piece credit for one important point about scientific journalism. The study they’re hyping is based on sea sponges in the Caribbean as a proxy for global ocean temperature going back over 300 years. Six of them. (Sponges not years or Caribbeans.) And it does concede, and quote someone, that it’s kind of a slender basis for drawing such cast conclusions. But now we want to rubbish them and here’s why
First, they bait the click:
“Oops, Scientists May Have Miscalculated Our Global Warming Timeline/ Clues have emerged that reveal a much hotter history than we thought.”
And use a stock image of half the Earth burning and the other half not which seems scary but utterly irrelevant. Then they toss science in the bin and get cutesy:
“The Paris Climate Accords in 2015 set an ambitious (and necessary) goal of keeping global temperatures at 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temps. But a study says we might’ve blown past that threshold several years ago.”
No. The Paris goal of 1.5C was just made up and has no scientific basis. And you don’t need to virtue-signal; your audience knows you’re that kind of person. Plus “blown past” is overblown and if you really think the Earth got to a dangerously hot point years back and nobody noticed, not even the alarmists, you don’t know what “dangerous” means. Or arguably “hot”.
It gets worse. After another cutesy-poo “Whatever your stance is on climate change (it’s real!)” and the repetition not just of several points but of “blown past”, the nugget of their discovery, the justification (it’s false!) for all their hype, is that:
“The study concludes that the world started warming roughly 80 years before the IPCC’s estimates, and that we already surpassed 1.7 degrees Celsius in 2020.”
And having rubbished the latter, let us underline what the former really means and then rubbish them for missing it completely.
According to the story, the IPCC uses 1850 to 1900 as “its preindustrial baseline” because “direct human measurement of sea temperature only dates back to roughly 1850, when sailors dipped buckets into the ocean.” Which anyone with half a brain can see at once is a highly unreliable measurement of temperature especially given the thermometers they used. Oh, and the irregularity and infrequency and highly unrepresentative distribution of the sampling. And the lack of protocols for handling the water. But never mind.
The crucial point is that if the warming actually started in the 18th century, if the sponges say sooth from their underwater caves, then it cannot possibly be blamed on humans and their “carbon pollution”. Instead you’ve just shown conclusively that the Earth is rebounding naturally from the Little Ice Age and that the same trends the IPCC detected from 1850 or 1900 or some combination of the two had already been going on for a century and would continue to go on, and you’d be a pretty manky scientist if your idea of a likely hypothesis is that if a trend continues steadily it shows that the cause changed dramatically.
Now as noted the piece did then give space to some skeptical voices. But only in the narrowest possible sense, because after quoting people saying we need more data (send more sponges!) it concludes with this scintillating burst of utter illogic:
“Unfortunately, even if the sponges are wrong, there’s mounting evidence that we are in the process of crossing that 1.5 degree threshold as we speak, according to New Scientist. In order to save the planet for future habitability, humans need to curtail emissions immediately – after all, the sea sponges are telling us so.”
How many fatuities can one cram into a two sentences? Beginning and ending with even if the sponges are wrong they’re telling us whatever we already thought is right even if it isn’t.
You really can’t tell these people anything.
P.S. Inside Climate News manages to blame “climate change” for northern pike moving south in Alaska into places where it was illegally introduced 70 years ago. (“Climate Change Is Helping an Invasive Predator Wreak Havoc on Iconic Alaskan Fish”.) Guys, warming moves habitats north not south in the northern hemisphere. Duh.
