Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #638 – Watts Up With That?

The Week That Was: 2025 04-05 (April 5, 2025)
Brought to You by SEPP (www.SEPP.org)
The Science and Environmental Policy Project

Quote of the Week: “Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future!” —Niels Bohr, Nobel laureate in Physics and father of the atomic model. [H/t Richard Lindzen]

Number of the Week: About 12 percent carbon.

THIS WEEK:

By Ken Haapala, President, Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP)

Scope: TWTW begins with three separate views on the nature of climate science and whether it is a physical science. The first is the comments by Richard Lindzen in a tribute to Ray Bates. The second is an essay by David Whitehouse on the noble lie. And the third is an essay by Jennifer Marohasy on her reaction to comments by a newly appointed senior manager at the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority. Then discussed are the views of Andy May on plate tectonics changing Earth’s climate.

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A tribute to Ray Bates: On March 26, Richard Lindzen delivered to the Irish Climate Science Forum and CLINTEL a lecture titled: “Ray Bates, his Scientific Legacy and The New US Climate/Energy Politics.” The January 2024 obituary of Bates in the Irish Independent begins with:

“Professor Ray Bates, who has died aged 83 after a short illness, was a leading Irish and international meteorologist who pioneered new models for computer forecasting systems which won him an award from US space agency NASA.

The former assistant director at Met Éireann, who subsequently worked at NASA, Denmark’s Niels Bohr Institute and University College, Dublin, latterly encountered opposition from scientists and climate activists over his challenge to the consensus view on the level of threat posed by climate change.”

About fourteen months later, Richard Lindzen gives a different perspective with hope for a saner future. Below is a rough transcription of Lindzen’s presentation. The transcript is more a collection of thoughts than coherent essay. Lindzen’s views include:

Criticism of climate science skeptics is loaded with hate.

Climate as an issue is political, not scientific.

The accepted narrative has many errors. The problem with having many targets is the critics allow the narrative to remain in place!

Among all the various errors, Ray and I shared the recognition that current views on climate were almost entirely focused on radiative properties of the tropics and inadequately considered the hydrodynamics of the extratropics. Both hydrodynamics and radiation transport heat, but hydrodynamics dominate in the extratropics.

If you are currently employed in climate you have to publish, you have to get grants, and you cannot get them if you question the narrative.

We were both trained in dynamic meteorology which is central to the theoretical understanding of both weather and climate. Heisenberg’s PhD thesis was in hydrodynamic instability, which he maintained was harder to understand than Quantum Mechanics

Private groups such as ICSF, CLINTEL, etc. don’t have to deal with professional pressures so there is a degree of freedom there but also a lack of familiarity with the subject. [not stated, the need to publish for advancement.]

Moreover, people like Ray and me have wanted to better understand the climate itself. This is not identical to pointing out errors; and given climate alarm is fundamentally a political rather than a scientific construct, the former activities probably deserve priority – if one’s aim is to stop the extremely costly and dangerous hysteria.

However, it is no small thing for the scientific understanding of climate to have been set back a couple of generations. [The science is moving backwards] Remedying this will require that current active scientists be permitted to return to studying science rather than supporting a political narrative. Clearly, there is much to remedy.

For many years I have thought that it would help if the US government were to engage in a traditional A Team – B Team exercise wherein one side would identify the flaws in current policy and the other would defend current policy.

The problem here is that in a political issue, one has to convince the public, and it is clear that the observation by British writer, physicist and advisor to Churchill, C.P. Snow, [citing two worlds of knowledge] that the ignorance of science on the part of non-scientists (including those who are highly educated) precludes their knowing what to make of such an exercise.

In my experience, this extends to scientists and engineers whose expertise is outside of atmospheric physics. To be sure, there are important examples of individuals changing their position on climate alarm when exposed to such debates, but many individuals do not because the issues at debate are inaccessible to them.

[A good example of the former is Steve Koonin. Both sides in Koonin’s debate agreed that climate change was not an existential threat. Further, Koonin changed his views following the debate.] The reports of the IPCC Working Group I, the physical science, never speaks of an existential threat. All it says is that this will be costly and may reduce the GDP by 3% from models that say it may have increased by 200% from the present. So, the net increase would only be 197% — not horrifying.

Benny Peiser, who recently spoke to you [ICSF / CLINTEL], has long held that the pain imposed by policies will cause people to oppose the ridiculous climate policies. Sri Lanka offers an example where restrictions on fertilizer based on their contribution to greenhouse gases led to widespread starvation and an uprising. [Lindzen and Happer have a paper stating that the emissions of methane and nitrous oxide are so small compared to CO2, that the effect is tiny.] But this does not stop the control freaks.

However, President Trump has come up with a more benign approach. President Trump, his Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright, and his Administrator of the EPA, Lee Zeldin, all regard warming hysteria and its demonization of CO2 to be baseless, and are attempting to eliminate all regulations, funding and institutions based on this hypothesis.

So far so good.

A crucial start was getting rid of the “Endangerment Finding” whereby greenhouse gases could be considered dangerous “pollutants” by the EPA. This action alone eliminated numerous EPA pointless but expensive regulations.

The Supreme Court rejection of the Chevron deference has also been important: it withdraws much of the power of government agencies to demand deference to their supposed expertise.

I expect that there will be heated and hysterical opposition, but the assumption that climate alarm is canonical “truth” may well be over. The damage that climate policies have already produced is likely to diminish this opposition and open up a more honest and realist view of the subject.

As the great physicist, Niels Bohr, has noted, prediction is very hard especially when it deals with the future, but with the current Administration in the United States, there is ample reason to hope for a saner view of climate and a better outcome for the world’s people: those struggling with the increased cost of heating and driving, especially the billions who still lack adequate access to energy.

It is sad that Ray has joined many of his colleagues who have died without seeing this dénouement, but I suspect that Ray never gave up hope that this day would come.

See links under Challenging the Orthodoxy and Challenging the Orthodoxy RIP

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The [Ig]Noble Lie: Writing for Net Zero Watch, physicist David Whitehouse discusses how facts are twisted to fit what Lindzen called the Narrative. The essay states:

“At what point does science reporting stop being news and become propaganda peddled by uncritical journalists who read off press releases from approved providers with no critical assessment of what they are relaying to the public? If you pay attention to how climate science is reported in the media, you will have noticed how much of it is related to climate attribution studies. This is when a particular extreme weather event is studied and then said to have been made much worse by human climate change. Sometimes it is said to have been impossible without climate change.

Take the LA wildfires. They were made 35% more likely because of human climate change. It must be true: the BBC said so and so did almost everyone else.

The basis for this claim is an estimation of what the climate would have been without any human-induced changes. This is compared with the climate as it actually is. Then follows some statistical calculations and voilà, a result appears. The event was, say, twice as likely to have happened because of human-induced climate change.

However academically pure the initial intentions of this line of study were at its dawn about a decade ago, it has changed. Over the years, the field came to be driven by more politics, and with a desperation alien to science. It has come to symbolize media manipulation and, by some scientists, exhibits a lack of conscience. I say ‘lack of conscience’ because I know of scientists who see the results of climate attribution spread alarmingly across the media yet keep quiet about their distrust of the attribution procedure. Why do they do this?

The attribution studies quoted in the press come from the World Weather Attribution group (WWA), which provides quick responses to the question of whether any weather event has a human-altered climate contribution. Their contributions are not peer-reviewed – there isn’t time – so they use a procedure that was previously approved via peer review. It is therefore clear that this work is not for science, it for headlines in the next day’s media.

So, it was interesting to see that science YouTuber Sabine Hossenfelder has done what the BBC didn’t – check the results. She found that the LA wildfires were also statistically consistent with no human-climate interference and even got one of the authors of the report to admit it.

We all make mistakes. News journalists are under pressure to produce, and the WWA certainly takes advantage of this. But there is no excuse for such blatant lack of enquiry. Some journalists have, for decades, been wedded to a particular narrative, becoming in the process what every journalist should despise – a tribe pushing untruths and not even caring to question them. They have become accomplices rather than journalists.

But what about the scientists involved? Are they happy with this manipulation? Why did that author who admitted to Sabine that the press release wasn’t accurate speak up?

The noble lie

Part of the reason has recently been elucidated recently in the Conservative Woman. Professor Norman Fenton described his interaction with BBC documentary makers a decade ago after he asked some awkward questions while co-presenting a documentary on the statistics of climate change. None of his reasonable equivocations made it into the final cut, nor was he ever invited to present for the BBC again. The documentary he was involved in had a foregone conclusion, no matter what the facts. He was effectively cancelled.

It was an attitude that permeated the BBC at the time. It was something that happened to me when a BBC science editor told his colleagues not to interview me on space and astronomical matters because I was part of Nigel Lawson’s climate group.

It is the dishonesty of the noble lie. Tolerate untruths to serve a greater good. Let us not forget that extreme climate scientists and partisan journalists were there at the start of cancel culture. Almost 20 years ago, the TV documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle stirred up vitriol among some scientists, who then actively campaigned for a new law of scientific blasphemy, based of course on their own self-appointed judgement of what could be said. Free speech? Nah. [Boldface added]

For the public all this debate is behind the scenes. They deserve better. Now read the BBC LA fires report again in the light of what I have written.”

See link under Challenging the Orthodoxy

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The IgNoble Lie Downunder. Australian scientist and diver Jennifer Marohasy has written extensively on the health of the Great Barrier Reef, which has been pronounced dead many times yet lives on. The Australian government seems determined to insist that the claims of life of the reef in a world with increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide is impossible. In a post, “Every Day is Now Fool’s Day,” on her blog, Marohasy writes:

“I laughed then I cried, when I heard a newly appointed senior manager at the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority advocating for a low carbon economy.

Doesn’t she realize that what is visible from outer space of this massive reef ecosystem, that the Marine Park Authority is tasked with managing, is the sedimentary rock limestone. This is a vast deposit of carbon because the corals have been successfully hoarding it for some hundreds of thousands of years or at least during the interglacial warm periods. Yes. Hoarding it. The climate does change.  As global temperatures increase, the biosphere expands, and the Great Barrier Reef expands.[Boldface added]

The Great Barrier Reef is arguably the largest coral reef system to have ever existed on planet Earth. A coral reef is layer-upon-layer of calcium carbonate. It is not pure carbon — it is not graphite or diamond — but it is about 12 percent carbon. For sure, carbon dioxide is produced and destroyed naturally near the Earth’s surface and by the oceans. Fixing it is more difficult, and mostly by biotic means the corals have managed this, especially at the Great Barrier Reef.

The joke is on us: that every day in The West the managers, administrators, and the politicians — those in positions of power — send us on meaningless errands and tell us nonsense, including this seventh wonder of the world, and including about carbon dioxide that is absolutely critical to life on Earth. Although it is only a tiny fraction of the atmosphere the corals have managed to hoard it.

Ironically, the Great Barrier Reef is in the Coral Sea, the warmest part of the vast oceans. See link under Challenging the Orthodoxy.

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Changing Earth Causing Temperature Change: Writing in WUWT, Andy May presents another analysis demonstrating the importance of needing to understand plate tectonics to explain Earth’s changing climate for the past 66 million years. The work is based on the work by Westerhold, et al. using deep sea sediments published in AAAS Science, in 2020. The Westerhold work used isolated bits of data to claim that dramatic changes in temperatures were caused by changing carbon dioxide. However, the data was presented in clumps preventing detailed analysis.

Willis Eschenbach unraveled these clumps, showing extended periods when CO2 varied extensively, yet there was little change in temperature. Geophysicist Tom Gallagher used Eschenbach’s and Westerhold’s work and explained that the dramatic changes in temperature, which occurred very slowly, are better explained by plate tectonics changing ocean currents. Oceans hold far more heat than the atmosphere. Gallagher’s findings were discussed in the July 15, 2023, TWTW and in subsequent TWTWs.

Andy May supports the view of Gallaher, and presents his own findings based on the Westerhold paper but without using Eschenbach’s work. Also drawing on a number of other papers, May gives pictorial interpretations of the position of the continents showing that the changing continents changed the East-West flow of the Equatorial Current, resulting in the ice caps first at the South Pole and, after the closing of the Caribbean Seaway, at the North Pole. This is what Westerhold called Icehouse Earth. The conclusions of the May essay are [figures not shown here but are in the essay as well as the citations]:

“Long-term climate changes have many causes, but one of the major factors is plate tectonics and continental drift. When the continents and oceans are oriented north-south as they are today, which restricts west-east (zonal) air flow and encourages north-south (meridional) air flow, the world is colder. The opposite is the case when west-east flow is encouraged by open ocean connections in the mid- to low-latitudes as shown in figure 3.

Another major influence on long-term climate change is the Milankovitch cycles (also see here). The influence of plate tectonics on climate change is very long-term, on the order of tens of millions of years, whereas the Milankovitch cycles work on the order of hundreds of thousands of years. Shorter periods of change are normally related to changes in the Sun itself, these work on periods shorter than a few thousand years.

In the Westerhold study where the excellent data plotted in figure 1 came from, the authors noticed a strong correlation between the astronomical Milankovitch cycles of 21, 41, 100, and 405 thousand years (kyr) length and patterns in their global deep-sea d18O and d13C data [isotopes of oxygen and carbon]. Because the repeating Milankovitch astronomical cycles are computable and more reliable and accurate than any other dating technique, they used them to sequence and date the data plotted in figure 1. Their description of how this worked is in section 5 (“Astrochronology”) of their supplementary materials. For records older than 20 Ma only the longer eccentricity cycles could be used. The most prominent and stable cycle was the 405 kyr eccentricity cycle.

Westerhold, et al. conclude that their chronology is accurate to ±100 kyrs for the Pleistocene and Eocene, ±50 kyrs for the Oligocene, ±10 kyrs for the Miocene and Pleistocene. This sort of accuracy is remarkable if true, and it seems reasonable given their technique.

Comparing the known Cenozoic climate changes with Scotese’s plate tectonic reconstruction shows a coincidence of major climate changes with large geological events on a scale of many millions of years. Thus, it is easy, and logical, to conclude that the geological events caused the longer-term changes. I found it very encouraging that Westerhold, et al. could “see” the Milankovitch astronomical cycles in their deep-sea fossil records so clearly that they could be used for dating them. One of the biggest problems with comparing CO2 records to temperature records is that the CO2 records are made using different samples that must be dated separately from the temperature proxy samples. This gives me a lot more confidence in the d13C data in figures 1 and 2 than in the Rae, et al. data shown in figure 2. Further the prominent gaps in the Rae et al. CO2 data leaves too much to the imagination.

Westerhold’s deep-sea d13C proxy is not a direct CO2 proxy, but it can be paired directly with the d18O temperature proxy, and it is continuous. These characteristics make it superior to other CO2 proxies in my opinion. [Boldface added]

I should note that the exact timing of the major plate tectonic events discussed in this post is the subject of furious debate in the geological community (Hu, et al., 2016; Torfstein & Steinberg, 2020, Coates & Stallard, 2013). The precise dates when India collided with Asia, the Isthmus of Panama closed, or the North Atlantic opened to the Arctic are not known. They occurred over millions of years and different geological studies can reasonably provide different dates depending upon the data used. Thus, the dates given in this study are just based on my best judgement and are open for debate.”

See link under Challenging the Orthodoxy and the July 15, 2023, TWTW https://www.sepp.org/twtwfiles/2023/TWTW%207-15-23.pdf

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SEPP’S APRIL FOOLS AWARD – THE JACKSON

It is time for voting on the Annual SEPP’s April Fools Award – the Jackson. The grand prize is a large lump of coal. Last year, the deserving winner of the lump of coal was the US National Science Teaching Association. In 2023, the Association banned the CO2 Coalition from its meeting which the Coalition members paid for and were approved because the CO2 Coalition exhibit pointed out that CO2 is essential for photosynthesis which is the food source of all complex life on Earth.

Get your votes in by June 29, the award will be given at the 43^rd annual meeting of the Doctors for Defensive Preparedness on July 5-6. The decision of the judges is final.

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About 12 percent carbon: Jennifer Marohasy states above that coral reefs are about 12% carbon. The reefs are made up of calcium carbonate (limestone) which has a chemical formula of CaCO3. Calcium has an atomic weight of about 40, carbon about 12, and three oxygen atoms of about 48. The atomic weight of calcium carbonate is about 100 and carbon makes up about 12% of that. Apparently, such arithmetic is too complex for the new senior manager at the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority and the politicians who appointed her. Since carbon is used as a euphemism for carbon dioxide, eliminating CO2 from CaCO3 eliminates 44 percent of its molecular weight.

Challenging the Orthodoxy — NIPCC

Climate Change Reconsidered II: Physical Science

Idso, Carter, and Singer, Lead Authors/Editors, Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), 2013