Climate change has become “that” topic – like evolution of species, plate tectonics, or AI where the public has heard so much about it that many think they know everything they need to know. Such confidence can be both a good and bad thing.
The upside is that the biggest global societal problem of our time, climate change, has become a part of the broader culture. The vast majority of the world agrees that something must be done to mitigate global warming – 69% of the world population is willing to contribute 1% of their income to climate mitigation, and 89% demand climate action from their governments and politicians. 62% of Americans feel a personal duty to reduce the effects of climate change. However, the downside is that most lack a sufficient foundation in the science of climate change which creates misconceptions, a lack of ability to discern pseudoscience, and an ill-founded surety about the realities of global warming. Misconceptions get in the way of understanding the science behind the predictions of climate change to the point where mitigation efforts are derailed or stalled. The consequence is that anthropogenic climate change, a phrase used to describe the change in climate attributable to human activity, becomes a political “belief” rather than accepted as scientific discourse.
The U.S. is among the most politically divided countries about anthropogenic climate change. Despite 61% of Americans regarding the scientific evidence supporting a warming Earth as solid, the current administration has successfully and systematically defunded most of its institutions providing the most scientifically sound information and educational materials about climate change. The damage to NASA, NOAA, NIH, and EPA is profound and is threatening the exalted status of the U.S. as a global leader in scientific research. Such misguidedness stems in part from “The vast majority of the world” (the tendency of individuals to underestimate the willingness of others to want to mitigate climate change), and in greater part from “climate modeling ignorance.”
One of the most pernicious misconceptions about climate change is the idea that climate models make projections for the next 100 years by simply extrapolating the globally averaged changes in weather patterns over the last 40 – 50 years into the future. This is an important misconception to correct because it goes to the core of the credibility of climate models in the mind of lay people who make political decisions about mitigating hazards of anthropogenic climate change. This misconception is an outgrowth from another one – that weather and climate are the same thing. Many lay people do not realize that both regional and global climate is determined by many factors beyond atmospheric chemistry and dynamics, including (but not limited to) ocean circulation, the thermal properties of both seawater and ice, the extent and volume of ice cover as well as Earth’s orbital parameters – are all part and parcel of climate models:
For example, “will it snow tomorrow?” is a ‘weather’ question, while “how do El Niño events in the tropical Pacific Ocean affect winters in West Michigan?” is a climate question. This distinction matters for making decisions about mitigating climate change because it fosters the understanding that teleconnections affect both global and regional climate, and that a persistent change related to global warming in the natural cyclicity of a distant interaction between ocean and atmosphere (El Niño in the tropical Pacific) can change what to expect in West Michigan in the next 50 or 100 years.
Another pervasive misconception is the confusion of Environmental Science with Climate Science. Two big questions arise: “what can a climatologist do that an environmental scientist cannot?” and “why does developing Climate Science programs in colleges distinct from environmental science matter for the lay person, the broader public?”
Nationally, while both Environmental Science and Climate Science programs are broadly
multidisciplinary and interrelated, they have important differences. Climate Science is a physical science focusing on the causes, direct effects, and changes in climate through all of Earth’s history including the Anthropocene (the “Human Era”) through computational models involving the chemistry and physics of climate change; while Environmental Science is a natural science broadly involving ecology, microbiology, soil science, conservation, restoration, natural resource management, entomology, pollution, water quality, and similar.
For example, pollution of a river system is a massive environmental problem. So is recycling waste. But neither are problems directly related to climate change. Similarly, availability of food or clean water is a sustainability question related more to human population growth, economics, politics, and environmental change than climate change; though of course the greater the human population, the greater the amount of greenhouse gasses emitted to the atmosphere which leads to climate warming. So, climate change affects and informs environmental change and sustainability but is only one aspect of those fields. The change in duration of the annual growth season or warmer temperatures shifting to higher latitudes will affect availability of food and water – these are sustainability issues.
Unfortunately, only a handful of colleges and universities across the United States have developed college majors specifically in Climate Science, most recently Grand Valley State University. However, academic programs specifically dedicated to Climate System Science are a new national trend – so new in fact that it is difficult to find information about the number of students enrolled or graduates produced annually nationwide.
What has this got to do with “climate modeling ignorance”?
Creating academic programs specifically focused on Climate System Science with a bend toward climate modeling is crucial at these times of swift and dangerous climate change. Lay people (the voting public) need to better understand the scientific basis for the causes and predictions related to anthropogenic climate change so humanity can make better informed decisions about mitigation efforts.
Not everyone can dedicate resources and time to majoring in Climate Science but growing a population of well-educated climate scientists will help create a more climate literate public. Individuals specialized in climate system science who understand the strengths and uncertainties associated with climate modeling can inform the broader public about anthropogenic climate change and more effective ways of countering and preventing its hazardous effects.
A Communications major minoring in Climate Science may pursue a career as a climate journalist or spokesperson. In essence, a student minoring or majoring in Climate Science becomes a person who fosters climate literacy in their communities. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average salary for climatologists is $94,570 annually, there were 10,500 people employed as climatologists in 2020, and the projected growth rate for climatologist jobs between 2020 and 2030 is 8%. According to ZipRecruiter, the average earnings for a climate scientist or climate change specialist is $111,343.
In summary, degrees in Climate Science and Environmental Science are distinct from one another by content and by job prospects they offer. The job prospects for climate scientists are numerous and varied because climatologists are urgently needed in a world where climate is changing fast and often times unpredictably.
References
- M.S. McCaffrey, and S.M. Buhr, "Clarifying Climate Confusion: Addressing Systemic Holes, Cognitive Gaps, and Misconceptions Through Climate Literacy", Physical Geography, vol. 29, pp. 512-528, 2008. http://dx.doi.org/10.2747/0272-3646.29.6.512
- P. Andre, T. Boneva, F. Chopra, and A. Falk, "Globally representative evidence on the actual and perceived support for climate action", Nature Climate Change, vol. 14, pp. 253-259, 2024. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41558-024-01925-3
- A. Ziegler, "Political orientation, environmental values, and climate change beliefs and attitudes: An empirical cross country analysis", Energy Economics, vol. 63, pp. 144-153, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.eneco.2017.01.022
- F. Lehner, and T.F. Stocker, "From local perception to global perspective", Nature Climate Change, vol. 5, pp. 731-734, 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2660
- M. Maslin, and P. Austin, "Climate models at their limit?", Nature, vol. 486, pp. 183-184, 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/486183a
- D. Lombardi, and G.M. Sinatra, "College Students’ Perceptions About the Plausibility of Human-Induced Climate Change", Research in Science Education, vol. 42, pp. 201-217, 2010. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11165-010-9196-z
- W. Fleming, A.L. Hayes, K.M. Crosman, and A. Bostrom, "Indiscriminate, Irrelevant, and Sometimes Wrong: Causal Misconceptions about Climate Change", Risk Analysis, vol. 41, pp. 157-178, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/risa.13587
>> most lack a sufficient foundation in the science of climate change which creates misconceptions, a lack of ability to discern pseudoscience,
That’s why this forum is a great place to help to clear up misconceptions, but of course only if the experts actually engage in a meaningful way.
For myself I having a few topics here and found the answers here often lacking and sometimes completly off topic or even contradictionary (there was a lively discussion about the maximum possible impact of the Tonga-Hunga-event with very different answers if the temperature raise in 2023https://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah6/from:2022 , could be a result of it and no apparentfinal resolution)
For example to S. Rahmstorfs recent article I wrote:
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2025/10/high-resolution-fingerprint-images-reveal-a-weakening-atlantic-ocean-circulation-amoc/#comments
Rahmstorf’s statement above
“””A recent paper by van Westen et al. (2025) has shown that the much-feared tipping point where the AMOC breaks down (first demonstrated in a simple box model in 1961) is also found in a high-resolution (eddy resolving) ocean model – destroying any hope that it might be an artifact of too coarse and simple models”””
Can be contrasted to his post here on Jan 26 2025
“””Of the 24 CMIP6 models, a full 23 underestimate the sea surface cooling in the ‘cold blob’. And most of the CMIP6 models even show a strengthening of the AMOC in the historic period, which past studies have shown to be linked to strong aerosol forcing in many of these models”””
Which seems to indicate that for CMIP6 models a very careful tuning is required to show his pattern.
Without that modern models seem not able to proof this cold blob. Perhaps we only see masterful tuning rather than underlying physics at work here, the assumption that these are not artefacts of the modeling seems contradicted by the apparent ease they can be switched on and off in modern models
Cycles in Atlantic are well studied and Artic patterns forming and weakening as a result have happened in the recent centuries without tripping any tipping points.
=> so far no answer at all, maybe hs research is really weak here, in January he advocated not useing CMIP6, but CMIP5 models for this.
G. Schmidt’s post
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2025/05/predicted-arctic-sea-ice-trends-over-time/
has the following image with Schmidt’s comment
https://www.realclimate.org/images/cmip6_seaice.png
“””Actually, this isn’t bad. The CMIP6 ensemble mean for September area trends is now -11 %/decade (observed 13 %/decade) and the March trends are spot on. Note that the observed loss in ‘area’ is slightly larger than the trend in ‘extent’ (13 %/decade vs. 11 %/decade)”””
which does not seem to describe what is shown on the graph omitting very significant uncertanties for the CMIP6 ensemble mean rendering the models seemingly useless.
And I made basically the same point to E. Kelly’s recent post
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2025/09/critique-of-chapter-6-extreme-weather-in-the-doe-review/
where I wrote:
>> models made accurate forecasts
Which ones? CMIP6 or the older ones? G. Schmidt showed they have different outputs and as a consequence of that Wiliam’s questions are quite justified and still lacking good answers.
A bunch of 4 year olds can scribble lines on a diagram making “forcasts” too, they are about as meaningless as bad models.
=> it seems that the commenters there did not realize what the areas around the essemble means represent (to be fair G. Schmidt did not discuss those)
There are significant differences between CMIP6 and older models, they simply cannot all be accurate!
(I am guessing all older models are not very good as they lack resolution and physics)
If models are not precise for arctic sea ice trends, they might not be good enough for the tropics/hurricane formation either.
And there is a longstanding critique to M. Mann-type proxy reconstructions, that the potential proxy selection bias needs to be expressed in a mathematical uncertainty for the results.
Right now it seems to me that each of those analyses does not included this and therefore implicitly assume that their proxies perfectly represent the climate and temperatre of the past without any uncertainty, which could at best only be true for one of those thousands recosntrucitosn usign differrent series.
And just to add one more topic, I am holding the firm belive that artic polar vortex anomalies (which are shown to correlate with solar and vulcanic, but so far NOT anthropogenic signals) contribute significantly to local extreme weather events, but I doubt it is modelled adequately in attribution studies as performed by F. Otto and others.
>> most lack a sufficient foundation in the science of climate change which creates misconceptions, a lack of ability to discern pseudoscience,
Some believe they do and a lack of dispersing their concerns is very telling!
Yebo Kandu: a concatenation of cluelessness.
Science does exist. Some people practice it, and observe it. YK is only interested in promoting his own point of view, without reference to reality.
Pointing to his own writings is not evidence 0f anything but a lack of objectivity and a surfeit of prejudice.
Why should ‘experts’ (whose blog this is, in an effort to promote knowledge rather than ignorance) ‘engage’ with arguments from people who are not themselves open to criticism?
Yup. But as noted the last time Yebo Kandu used this script, replies are not for the benefit of those like Yebo Kandu. They are beyond help. Replies are instead for the benefit of people those denialists try to disinform.
Hi Susan,
You’re answer to Yebo Kandu perfectly illustrates WHY the support of climate science is collapsing–Collapsing across the US and across the world. Because you provide no actual scientific rebuttal using scientific methods. But your response IS ripe with ad hominem. Look at your reply again:
“Yebo Kandu: A concatenation of cluelessness”.
How simple. How easy. How unscientific. How utterly predictable from the climate establishment. My guess is that there are a whole lot more people now unwilling to go with the “trust us, we’re scientists” meme anymore, especially in light of the devastatingly normal outcomes (as compared to historical trends) we’re having despite record warmth. It is painfully clear that as temperatures rise, so does human flourishing, and that’s a bitter pill to swallow for the climate science community.
So while the climate community will continue to weep, wail and gnash teeth about how “unscientific” America is heading, maybe, just maybe, America doesn’t really care because there is no actual science that is being performed in America by so called scientists. Americans may be smarter than you think. Just something to think about.
S: You’re answer to Yebo Kandu perfectly illustrates WHY the support of climate science is collapsing–Collapsing across the US and across the world. Because you provide no actual scientific rebuttal using scientific methods. But your response IS ripe with ad hominem. Look at your reply again:
BPL: Unlike you (unless you’re one of his sock-puppets), we’ve been here a long time and know YK has nothing to offer. So take your concern trolling and stuff it.
Nice try, Scott. What actually happened is Susan heard Yebo Kandu’s debunked script numerous times and the many scientific rebuttals of it. So she treats it no more seriously than seeing a flat Earther repeat the same script they’ve been debunked on several times. The fact that you can’t tell (or act like you can’t tell) Yebo Kandu is wrong reflects poorly on your level of understanding, just as it would on someone who can’t tell a flat Earther is wrong. Nor does your tone trolling work.
Based on your comment, I don’t think you’re interested in an “actual scientific rebuttal”; it’s just a pretense to suit your preferred ideologically-motivated narrative. But on the small chance that you are interested, then go read Susan’s linked comment below and the long thread of rebuttals above her comment. And try saying something cogent about those rebuttals. When you fail to, that’ll illustrate what I said about your position:
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2025/09/critique-of-chapter-6-extreme-weather-in-the-doe-review/#comment-839323
Also, your reasoning is poor. ‘X occurred while humans flourished’ does not prevent X from being extremely harmful and something worth preventing. Vaccine denialists commit a similar distortion when they compare the number of vaccine-preventable deaths to the larger number of deaths from other causes. That’s the wrong comparison. One instead checks the benefit of an intervention like vaccines by comparing risk without the intervention vs. risk with the intervention. Similarly, one assesses harm from a phenomenon like anthropogenic climate change by assessing risk with the phenomenon vs. risk without the phenomenon. One does not do it by saying benefits from other factors (ex: improvements in sanitation, medicine, crop genetics, and technology) offset that risk and allowed humans to continue flourishing.
And one doesn’t do the ‘risk with vs. risk without’ comparison by comparing “to historical trends,” since there are obvious confounders such as changes in public health, sanitation, etc. with time. Yet that’s the incorrect comparison you did. Again your comparison is as bad as anti-vaxxers claiming vaccines didn’t work by comparing pre-vaccination vs. post-vaccination time-periods, without accounting for obvious confounders like more lax social distancing requirements, variants like Alpha and Delta with greater transmissibility and higher fatality rates, etc. If you want to see how to properly do the comparison, then read attribution studies. Though that would require you to be genuinely interested in the science, instead of just in your preferred ideological narrative.
Anyway, by your absurd reasoning, smoking-induced cancer is not important, nor increases in type 2 diabetes, nor… because those happened during improved human flourishing and have been offset by benefits elsewhere. Reason better, not in such an ideologically biased manner. Here’s how empty your reasoning sounds:
‘How utterly predictable from the public health establishment. My guess is that there are a whole lot more people now unwilling to go with the “trust us, we’re scientists” meme anymore, especially in light of the devastatingly normal outcomes (as compared to historical trends) we’re having despite record type 2 diabetes and heart disease. It is painfully clear that as type 2 diabetes, excess processed sugar intake, heart disease, and excess saturated fat intake rise, so does human flourishing, and that’s a bitter pill to swallow for the public health community.’
And in case you’re one of those saturated fat denialists (since that often overlaps with AGW denialism):
https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD011737.pub3/full
Atomsk’s Sanakan, well said. Scott has argued previously that climate change is a non issue because deaths related heatwaves and flooding have decreased. I’ve suggested this decreasing trend is because of medical advances etc,etc and we cant guarantee any of this will always be the case in the future especially as warming rates increase. And that countries like the USA are devoting more and more resources to health care which means less resources available for other things. So the smart solution is to fix problems that CAUSE a potential increase mortality rate. Scott talks about life flourishing on planet earth. I’ve pointed out life on planet earth has often got better because of PREVENTIVE measures.
He never acknowledges this and just repeats his views. Probably some ideological motive perhaps a dislike of governments getting involved in preventative programmes. I would bet money on that one.
Hi Atomsk,
I only have one question for you:
How do you define detection and emergence in regards to human health outcomes resulting from a changing climate?
Andrew Dessler has his version:
https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/is-this-the-most-embarrassing-error
Even he admits that decades long trends over a historical baseline are what IPCC uses to determine the magnitude of effect of climate on outcomes.
PS. As a medical doctor studying climate change for nearly 20 years now, I got a kick out of your tobacco reference. Strange–Andrew used the same analogy. Wrong, but humorous.
Re: “I only have one question for you”
Nice try. You dodged the actual points, which were:
1) There’s evidence on Yebo Kandu’s long history of debunked claims. Susan is aware of that history. This justifies her comments on Yebo Kandu and undermines your objection to her comments. You should have been able to tell Yebo Kandu was wrong.
2) Your reasoning on causal attribution is faulty due to, for example, not accounting for time-varying confounders.
None of those points requires answering your question. Let me know when you actually have something cogent to say on those points. I’ve dealt with ideologically-motivated denialists long enough to not fall for their attempts to move the goalposts.
Re: “PS. As a medical doctor studying climate change for nearly 20 years now, I got a kick out of your tobacco reference. Strange–Andrew used the same analogy. Wrong, but humorous”
I can see through what you’re doing, as an immunologist whose dealt with various forms of ideologically-motivated science denialism for the better part of 2 decades, Your paranoid thought process is similar to what I’ve seen from AGW denialists, vaccine denialists, HIV/AIDS denialists, etc. Y’all just change the target of your denialist narrative, whether it’s the virology community, immunology community, climatology community, etc. In that respect you’re like the climate scientist Dr. Judith Curry, whose baseless paranoia about the climatology community parallels HIV/AIDS denialists’ baseless paranoia about the virology community. Hence why she adapts ludicrous talking points the HIV/AIDS denialist Dr. Henry Bauer applied to virologists, immunologists, infectious disease physicians, epidemiologists, etc.:
Re: “Even he admits that decades long trends over a historical baseline are what IPCC uses to determine the magnitude of effect of climate on outcomes.”
You’re disinforming again. I read Dr. Dessler’s *Climate Brink* post a while ago, including comments below it. If you’re the Scott commenting there, then you’re what Mal Adapted aptly called: “a relentless motivated obstructionist on TheClimateBrink.”
Anyway, Dr. Dessler there distinguished detection vs. attribution vs. emergence. Emergence is about magnitude of an effect relative to a historical baseline. But my critique of your claim was not about emergence. It was about attribution. My point was you don’t competently attribute anthropogenic impact because you, for instance, disregard time-varying confounders.
It’s as ridiculous as saying COVID-19 vaccines didn’t mitigate COVID-19 mortality because of the magnitude of the mortality change relative to an earlier baseline. For instance, by saying there were more reported COVID-19 deaths for the post-vaccination time-period vs. the pre-vaccination time-period. And by saying that without accounting for time-varying confounders such as less social distancing with time, later variants with higher intrinsic transmissibility and fatality rates (R0 and IFR, respectively), less mortality underreporting with time due to greater availability of tests, etc. Vaccine denialists reason that way, but sensible and informed people don’t reason that way for causal attribution. They instead check analyses that control for those confounders using unvaccinated control groups that come from similar conditions + time-periods as the vaccinated groups they compared to (ex: randomized controlled trials, cohort studies). Otherwise, one conflates attribution that reveals the causal impact of vaccines on COVID-19 mortality vs. emergence in post-vaccination total COVID-19 mortality relative to a pre-vaccination baseline.
Similarly, doing anthropogenic attribution for climate change impacts is not about checking for emergence. It’s about matters like controlling for time-varying confounders, such as changes in solar output, changes in public health infrastructure (if you’re looking at attributions for things like heat-related mortality), etc.
Re: “I only have one question for you:
How do you define detection and emergence in regards to human health outcomes resulting from a changing climate?”
Again, the point was on *attribution*, not on emergence nor on detection. You mess on anthropogenic *attribution* since you do things like not controlling for confounders. So your question was an irrelevant goalpost move.
Scott, if you’re really a medical doctor like you claim, then you need to improve your causal reasoning. Because I know the principles I just went over are explained to physicians in their training on causal reasoning, especially with respect to clinical trials, cohort studies, ecological analyses, etc. Yet you conveniently don’t apply those principles in your causal reasoning on climate science. As Dr. Gavin Schmidt aptly told about your reasoning:
Atomsk,
Do you mean like controlling for variables? I think that’s what you’re getting at. In retrospective observational trials we do a lot of that. But as they say, correlation may or may not equal causation. See my response to David to gain further understanding. Thanks and have a good day.
Re: “Do you mean like controlling for variables? I think that’s what you’re getting at. In retrospective observational trials we do a lot of that. But as they say, correlation may or may not equal causation. See my response to David to gain further understanding.“
Neither this reply nor your response to David address the points made. There’s no further understanding to be gained from you since you willfully distort distinctions between attribution vs. detection vs. emergence, misrepresent what people say, etc. The tactics you run on topics like time-varying confounding are not going to fool anyone sensible, no matter how many times you try them.
And your “correlation may or may not equal causation” point is vacuous. For instance, if you really are a physician, then you should know ‘Bradford Hill considerations‘ for inferring causation. Those don’t just rely on correlation, and they work well for anthropogenic climate change. There is, for example, plausibility in the form of an evidence-based mechanism by which greenhouse gas increases cause warming. Then there’s evidence-based mechanisms for how that warming causes other effects, such as increasing hurricane intensity. There’s also specificity since the vertical profile of temperature changes from the troposphere through the thermosphere and the horizontal temperature change across regions differs between greenhouse gas increases, increases in solar output, aerosol increases, etc. Hence anthropogenic fingerprints (Hegerl). And so on. You and your fellow denialists sidestep points like that to suit your preferred ideological narrative, similar to how you take advantage of time-varying confounding so as not to do attribution correctly. Anyway, it’s clear you’re not here in good faith, consistent with what Susan Anderson, Dr. Gavin Schmidt, Mal Adapted, etc. noted.
I just remembered you object to terms like ‘science denier’:
It makes no sense for you to make that statement while claiming to be a physician. A physician should know of HIV/AIDS denialism, vaccine denialism, COVID-19 denialism, germ theory denialism, evolution denialism, etc. (ex: Smith, WHO, Rosenau, da Fonseca). And a physician should understand using terms like ‘denialism’ does not imply that virology, immunology, microbiology, evolutionary biology, etc. have no position worth supporting. Parallel point applies to climatology: pointing out denialism there does not imply having no position worth supporting.
This is another illustration of the ideologically-motivated double standard you apply to climate science. If you don’t want denialism pointed out, then don’t engage in it. Pointing out denialism is a criticism, not an ad hominem fallacy.
Also, this:
1) It has not been warming gradually over the past few thousand years [Osman, IPCC].
2) The current rate of warming is around 25 times larger than the rate coming out of the Last Glacial Maximum, and larger than other rates over the past 2000 years. The impact of the larger trend is not necessarily the same as the impact of the smaller trends [Copernicus, PAGES 2k Consortium, Osman].
3) You still were not accounting for time-varying confounders. Hence why your reasoning is as bad as saying that human ingestion of fast food increased with time as human flourishing increased. That does not mean the fast food ingestion caused the flourishing since you have not accounted for time-varying confounding from other factors. Parallel point for what you’re trying to do with warming and human flourishing.
4) Your emotional response of ‘terror vs. no terror’ is irrelevant to what the scientific evidence on attribution and trends.
Not to mention the utter silence of the experts on here!
It speaks very loudly!
BTW I do claim one scientific achievement on here..
I believe I was the first mentioning that S. Rahmstorf’s posts this year on Arctic cold water simulation might be an artifact in older models (he seems now to think about that nowadays, but I find his discussion incomplete)
However, I can’t be the first here to recognize this problem, there are some real experts on here.
Is it really that simple that they hold back their knowledge in order “not to hurt the cause”, that would indicate a serious problem with scientific ethics.
While I certainly understand time is limited, I feel Figen should argue with me BECAUSE I have an agenda which is apparently different from his, it’s one of the best ways of scientific progress, which I think he also sees as the big reason we doing all this, not research grands.
YK: Is it really that simple that they hold back their knowledge in order “not to hurt the cause”, that would indicate a serious problem with scientific ethics.
BPL: And if your mother had wheels, she’d be a trolley.
Re: “Is it really that simple that they hold back their knowledge in order “not to hurt the cause”, that would indicate a serious problem with scientific ethics.“
Why should they engage and share their knowledge with you when you baselessly accuse them of fraud and of pseudoscience? You fail to provide evidence supporting your accusations and willfully evade evidence showing you’re wrong, no matter how many times it’s explained out to you. All so you can avoid honestly admitting to the accuracy and skill of model-based warming projections. Climate scientists are not obligated to engage with that sort of behavior.
And:
Thank you for reading my article, though your post does not really address anything I have said. Instead you seem to want to point out isues you’ve had with previous posts and responses. I understand you are unhappy with the engagement of our hosts on this blog and that they give contradictory answers. I don’t know about that. But as a fellow scientist what I can tell you is that science is NOT about absolute answers, or evenconsistency. Scientists can entertain contradictory ideas and do so all the time. Science is not about finding truth but rather about quantifying uncertainty which is how I read the responses you seem to find objectionable.
Every answer, finding, conclusion will have uncertainties attached. The power of science is its ability to tell us how much uncertainty or insonsistency surrounds a finding so that we know any answer beyond those “error bars” are wrong. There is really no other way to understand nature.
Your answer was polite for which is a good start.
However, writing that science is about quantifying uncertainty after I cited specific examples which seem to be lacking in that regard leaves me flabbergasted.
A good start might be my citation of G. Schmidt, where he seems to completely ignore the uncertainty clearly visible in the graph he describes.
Also, I fail to how this is not relevant to your post about potential false/pseudoscienctific posts to the topic climate change (btw what really should be discussed first is the anthropogenic part to global warming, a much more specific sub-topic with rather limited progress over the last 50 decades.
Sorry Yebo Kando, there is nothing pseudoscientific about Gavin’s work or posts on this blog. It feels like you have an agenda, and I’m not going to engage with it further.
Well, it might just be misconception by me and I am happy if you or others could clear it up.
The facts seem easy enough in this case (see bellow)
As for my agenda, something seems very wrong in the posts/topics I mentioned above and global warming is a very important topic, so I want to find the correct information.
And like I said this seems spot on for your blog post and also the right place to discuss and clear up my misconceptions, I assumed when you wrote about pseudoscience and misconceptions you would have a drive to improve the understanding of people like me with facts?
Actually, that happened here to me (rarely) before, I got two fairly examples for that:
MarkR reacted to a question of mine pointing to https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1674-4527/ac981c/meta
showing a significant error in the Connolly et al. paper in a discussion of TSI changes directly affecting global temperature.
Short, precise, very helpful destroying a misconception of mine (which I since then communicated to other btw, just like your article suggested)
And certainly MA Rodger very patiently correcting multiple misconceptions of mine about tropospheric temperature products (in the comments here https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2025/03/wmo-update-on-2023-4-anomalies/ )
There he also says something very interesting
“””Thus it is not inconceivable that a warming results after a delay of 12 months, even a strong warming.””” followed by “””Yet the general consensus””” of which I could not cares less,
the sins of that consensus towards M. E. proxy reconstructions seem quite obvious to me I say let’s focus on proven/disproven facts instead unfortunately that discussion also stopped there before this misconception could be cleared up, but I cannot really blame MA Rodgers here, his patience with me was outstanding!
As for agendas I am all up for a discussion who here could loose a significant amount of fame and private funding/salary/pension if their view on anthropogenic funding would turn out to be overstated or false!
(Certainly all of the people I mentioned above including you, but like Susan Anderson’s post empty of any arguments that seems off topic in a scientific forum)
>> there is nothing pseudoscientific about Gavin’s work or posts on this blog.
I suggested to start with this one as it seemed very clear what problem I see with his post, so I picked it an easy example, let me simplify it as much as I can:
The image https://www.realclimate.org/images/cmip6_seaice.png shows shaded areas which are the rather big uncertainty ranges of his model ensemble mean,
yet his description
“””Actually, this isn’t bad. The CMIP6 ensemble mean for September area trends is now -11 %/decade (observed 13 %/decade) and the March trends are spot on. Note that the observed loss in ‘area’ is slightly larger than the trend in ‘extent’ (13 %/decade vs. 11 %/decade)”””
(which is a direct quote from his post)
does not mention them.
So one seems to show uncertainty of the model ensemble mean (the graph) one does not (the description of the graph), could you please explain how that is not uh confused?
You said yourself that uncertainties are important and I think here including them would change his interpretation significantly.
Of course you can choose to engage as much as you want, alarmists not discussing problems with their science in public is a very common phenomena and speaks for itself, but this “misconception” will then happily say alive to haunt you, so do all the others.
Re: “It feels like you have an agenda”
And that feeling is accurate. Hence why they invented false claims to evade evidence on anthropogenic sea level rise acceleration:
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2025/07/the-endangerment-of-the-endangerment-finding/#comment-837366
Same for their disinformation to avoid acknowledging accurate model-based warming projections:
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2025/09/critique-of-chapter-6-extreme-weather-in-the-doe-review/#comment-839195
Figen,
There are many scientific disciplines that are considered multi-disciplinary. They are multi-disciplinary because they include strong components of each of the foundational sciences. For climate science this includes physics, chemistry, biology, and mathematics & statistics, and the other cross-displinary fields of geosciences and astronomy/astrophysics (the latter for the overriding role of the sun and tidal forces).
To provide solutions to the climate crisis, the disciplines of engineering starts to play a role, specifically chemical engineering and material sciences. This is essentially the problem domain of how to get rid of the excess CO2. And to understand fossil fuels and what will replace it, the dying field of petroleum engineering — note that Stanford University replaced their petroleum engineering department with the Department of Energy Resources Engineering .
And the scary part in all this is that computational fluid dynamics is barely scratched in typical physics curriculum. To find scientists that are fluent in this discipline. one often has to go to aersopace or mechanical engineer departments, not to mention computer science separtments.
A new chart =>
https://imagizer.imageshack.com/img922/6185/sauywu.jpg
Paul Pukite,
Totally agreed. We just couldn’t find a fluid dynamics course to add to our climate science curriculum at Grand Valley. Physics ddin’t have one, and neither did engineering. I actually have two degrees in engineering, so I put that hat on and my physics colleagues and I developed a course we called “Physical Climatology” which is half fluid dynamics and half climate modeling.
The problem is climate science has so many components – engineering beign an important one too. But Maors have to eb limited by credits and e already have 77 credits. So it became a balancing game.
Thank you for your comment!
You have a long history of tone trolling, willfully misrepresenting evidence on climate models, etc. So no reason for informed folks to take what you say seriously.
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2025/09/critique-of-chapter-6-extreme-weather-in-the-doe-review/#comment-839204
I’m not sure who the”you” this comment is referring to.
I’m referring to Yebo Kando, the person you said this about:
“It feels like you have an agenda, and I’m not going to engage with it further.”
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2025/11/raising-climate-literacy/#comment-841550
Thank you!
I think this might be the first time I agree with you! There is not need to take what I write seriously, it is quite obvious that I made and probably will make many mistakes, no question.. so also no need to endless repeat yourself with that or insult or mention my person at all (at least one of those is against forum policy btw)
Just stay with the science like most of the others here and help if you can, that example of G. Schmid’s post might be simple enough for you – otherwise your and Susan Anderson’s posts are easy identifiable as cheap attempts of distractions no one really needs.
Just allow the readers to think themselves, helpful input is always welcome.
How about two easy yes/no questions for you, since you have a long history to go completely off topic (please do not blame me for ignoring your irrelevant posts sometimes)
Are there larges areas of uncertainty marked of the graph I linked?
Does G. Schmid mention those uncertainties when he describes trends visible in those graphs?
Again, not interested in your usual denialism, bad faith, sealioning, tone trolling, etc. You’ve previously invented false claims to evade evidence on anthropogenic sea level rise acceleration:
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2025/07/the-endangerment-of-the-endangerment-finding/#comment-837366
And disinformed to avoid acknowledging accurate model-based warming projections:
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2025/09/critique-of-chapter-6-extreme-weather-in-the-doe-review/#comment-839195
In both cases you kept doing that, no matter how much evidence was cited showing you were wrong. No need to think you’d do any better in your current round of sealioning and fabrications about models.
>> Again, not interested in your usual denialism
If anything your long history of repeating posts seems to provide clear evidence that no one really cares what you are interested in.
I wrote back then about Atomsk’s Sanakan many writings with numerious repetitions and no straigth answers
“The posts [so] far seem non-responive”
and still mean it, back then he seemed very confused.
(see for example his current avoidance of the very straigth and easy yes/no questions)
But on of my main point was that older CMIP5, newer CMIP6 and 4 year olds with a crayon can make forecasts.
For at least two of them it has been shown that the physics and resolution of various parameters was lacking. It seems equally absurd to claim CMIP5 models were skillful as using drawing of 4-year olds to project climate trends.
What is needed first is an evaluation of the missing effects in older models.
He, Barton Paul Levenson and Susan Anderson seem to assume that te readers cannot see through this bahavior and I am very grateful to Scott and others over time to help putting and end to this! I actually do believe that this is vey harmful beavior to climate scicene and see no use of it besides elongating te debatte (which of course helps those at the meat pots)
>> evidence was cited showing you were wrong
claiming older models would have skill, when it has been shown without any doubt that they were lackign in resolution and physics is exactly the oposite of providing evidence!
But you are not answering my two easy questions foryou or advancing science in any way.
Re: “But on of my main point was that older CMIP5, newer CMIP6 and 4 year olds with a crayon can make forecasts.“
You were already debunked on this, despite you acting otherwise:
Re: “For at least two of them it has been shown that the physics and resolution of various parameters was lacking. It seems equally absurd to claim CMIP5 models were skillful as using drawing of 4-year olds to project climate trends.“
Again, you were already debunked on that disinformation of your’s:
Re: “claiming older models would have skill, when it has been shown without any doubt that they were lackign in resolution and physics is exactly the oposite of providing evidence!“
Same old disinformation from you that was debunked above, with your requisite garbled spelling. You really are a persistent denier, repeating the same disinformation on post after post, in the hopes of finding new people to fool:
Re: “For at least two of them it has been shown that the physics and resolution of various parameters was lacking. It seems equally absurd to claim CMIP5 models were skillful as using drawing of 4-year olds to project climate trends.“
How many times does this needs to be explained before it finally sinks in? Again, persistent denialist:
This is like trying to explain geoscience to a Flat Earther, who then responds with garbled sentences.
Atomsk’s Sanakan wrote
“”” Re: “claiming older models would have skill, when it has been shown without any doubt that they were lackign in resolution and physics is exactly the oposite of providing evidence!“
Same old disinformation from you that was debunked above, “””
So you seem to be saying that CMIP5 and CMIP6 models have the same resolution and the cloud aerosolphysics was not fixed for the CMIP6 models? You are very unique with that opinion and your links defintely do not provide any evidence for that, no matter how often you are repeating yourself.
Flawed models cannot be used any meaningful scientific argument and definitely should not be used in important questions like how much do humans contribute to global warming.
Your insults violate forum rules!
Regardless, the actual topic you are still evading is actually completely independent of this!
G. Schmidt posted this graph
The image https://www.realclimate.org/images/cmip6_seaice.png
and wrote about it
“””Actually, this isn’t bad. The CMIP6 ensemble mean for September area trends is now -11 %/decade (observed 13 %/decade) and the March trends are spot on. Note that the observed loss in ‘area’ is slightly larger than the trend in ‘extent’ (13 %/decade vs. 11 %/decade)”””
which does not seem to describe what is shown on the graph omitting very significant uncertanties for the CMIP6 ensemble mean rendering the models seemingly useless.
There are two easy questions about that:
Are there larges areas of uncertainty marked on the graph?
Does G. Schmid mention those uncertainties when he describes trends visible in those graphs?
Once you are done spinning, please come back to the topic you are posting on.
Re: “So you seem to be saying that CMIP5 and CMIP6 models have the same resolution and the cloud aerosolphysics was not fixed for the CMIP6 models?”
Disingenuous misrepresentation. What I actually said was climate models don’t need to be perfect on resolution and cloud-aerosol physics to accurately project global warming and implied TCR (i.e. warming per unit of forcing). Other factors are more dominant, such as the water vapor feedback. Being reasonably accurate on those factors allows for reasonably accurate projections. Similarly, an astronomical model on Earth’s orbit does not need to perfectly include the mass of every object in the universe. The mass of the Sun and the Earth are sufficient to predict the Earth’s orbit to reasonable accuracy.
Re: “You are very unique with that opinion and your links defintely do not provide any evidence for that, no matter how often you are repeating yourself.”
Goalpost move. The point of citing those papers was that they debunk your claim that model predictions were not skillful. I quoted where the papers quantified model skill in terms of a skill score. Since you can’t cogently address that point, you act as if the papers were cited for a different straw man you fabricated.
Re: “Flawed models cannot be used any meaningful scientific argument and definitely should not be used in important questions like how much do humans contribute to global warming.”
Nirvana fallacy. Models don’t need to be perfect to make accurate predictions, as noted in the above example of orbital mechanics. Models also don’t have to be perfect to be used for other purposes, such as causal attribution. For example, epidemiological models have imperfections such as not including all carcinogens. Yet epidemiological models are still appropriately used in causally attributing cancer risk to smoking and then quantifying that risk.
Re: “Your insults violate forum rules!”
Tone trolling. If you don’t want people to accurately describe your problematic claims and behavior, then stop engaging in it. Drop the ideologically-motivated, biased double-standard you apply to climate models, but which you conveniently don’t apply to models in another science fields.
Re: ”Regardless, the actual topic you are still evading is actually completely independent of this!”
Nope. It debunks the disinformation you said in your initial comment:
“where I wrote:
>> models made accurate forecasts
Which ones? CMIP6 or the older ones? G. Schmidt showed they have different outputs and as a consequence of that Wiliam’s questions are quite justified and still lacking good answers.
A bunch of 4 year olds can scribble lines on a diagram making “forcasts” too, they are about as meaningless as bad models.”
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2025/11/raising-climate-literacy/#comment-841488
Thank you Dr. Mekik for a useful commentary and thanks to our RC hosts for posting her opinion here. Certainly raises several areas I need to personally reflect upon concerning my advocacy, particularly at the local and state level.
Thank you!
Wow! File under “Only wishing to observe the obvious…”
I check this sleepy morning and find a nice burst of assorted discussions arising as a result of what you’ve written and your interaction with comments. Makes me smile. :-) Thanks Dr.
:)
It is a funny point. Me personally I like to compare todays situation with medieval ages. Back then everyone was supposed to live by the bible, but basically no one could read it. Printing was not invented yet, there were few copies, they had to be in latin, people were poor, few could even read, and if so not latin. Knowledge of the bible was restricted to clerics. The church “educated” about god’s will in a way that was most favourable to its own interest.
We also know how it went on. Gutenberg invented printing and did the proper thing, print the bible in latin – useful for clerics, but no one else. Then Luther and others could not help but translating AND printing it, so that everyone could learn. It is fair to say that left a mark.
What would happen with climate science if people knew what is really in the models? I know, it is something coded in the back-end, usually not by the scientists publishing model behavior. Many times the latter are just as much detached from the physics, or should I say the interpretation of said physics, as anyone else. I know too many examples.
But what would happen if people really knew? Would model physics stand the test of scrutiny and public discourse?
Yes climate physics in climate modeling absolutely stands the test of scrutiny and public discourse – as long as the public is well educated an climate literate. That’s what peer review is all about. What “really” goes into climate models is no secret. Literally everyone who is interested can know every detail about it. There is NOTHING coded in the back-end. LOL. You just need to take a lot of classes in computing, coding, higher math, statistics, physics, chemstry and Earth science to understadn what climate models are calculating. That is why we are developing college climate science curriculum so everyone can understand.
Hi Figen,
When you say, “That’s what peer review is all about”, are you also referring to this article in Nature:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-025-02399-7
Let’s look together at a statement: “Human health—especially loss of life, but also illness, disability and poor well-being—is one of the most visible categories of climate change impacts. However, most work on the health impacts of climate change has stopped a step short of end-to-end attribution, focusing on long-term trends in health outcomes and their relationship with temperature and precipitation, or on the health outcomes of specific extreme weather events3,4,5”
I would assume that Nature is peer reviewed, is it not? If it is, why did they use a reference that is not peer-reviewed, in a prestigious journal as Nature? (FYI it’s the Wellcome trust reference). The other 2 references were by the same author, Ebi, et. al. in 2017 and 2020, of which neither study is able to refute the very real and tangible fact that heat related deaths are decreasing, not increasing.
I would assume that a peer reviewer with even a modicum of curiosity would have taken the authors of this article to task for flying in the face of the observational data we already know about.
Not Nature. No, they would rather publish studies they know will be picked up and amplified by the media, and containing references untethered to reality. Nobody really knows this because nobody really looks at the references. I do.
This is likely part of the reason why catastrophic climate scenarios are now largely being ignored, not just by Trump, but most everyone else too. It’s hard to push a narrative that doesn’t seem to be panning out.
neither study is able to refute the very real and tangible fact that heat related deaths are decreasing, not increasing
Hmm.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2822854
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/climate-change-heat-and-health
https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-heat-related-deaths
Ron,
Thanks for being astute. I’m also aware of this JAMA study. Unfortunately, it is a really the past 3 years (2021 to 2024) that bring it above the background rate of around 0.22 heat deaths per 100K person-years. In other words, if you want to live by 3 year trends, you also get to die by 3 year trends. Would you be willing to bet that JAMA will publish a correction to this article 3 years from now when this trend has reversed? Don’t hold your breath.
The EPA study is what the JAMA authors used, so that is redundant as they both used CDC wonder data.
The who reference refers to Lancet countdown, in which the heat related deaths are actually a result of modelling, see the following:
https://lancetcountdown.org/explore-our-data/
Please see the caveat paragraph: “The analysis for heat-related mortality assumes the exposure-response function is constant. It does not capture changes in response to heat exposure that might happen over time, as a result of acclimation and adaptation. Not capturing these changes could result in an over-estimation of heat-related deaths in later calendar years. Annual average mortality rates are used, rather than daily mortality rates. Given baseline mortality can be higher in colder months, this may lead to an overestimation of overall mortalities.”
In other words, they’re guessing.
Now, please look at the following references:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/deaths-from-natural-disasters-by-type?time=earliest..2024&country=~All+disasters
Mortality from all natural disasters down 98% from 1931 and 2024. While mortality from extreme temperatures is up, overall mortality is down. Also, consider that when it comes to deaths from “extreme temperatures”, its about a 90/10 split cold vs. heat.
https://files.emdat.be/reports/2024_EMDAT_report.pdf
Extreme temp deaths down 49% in 2024 compared to 2004-2023 baseline. Wow!
https://www.jacc.org/doi/abs/10.1016/j.jacc.2024.03.425
Global CV deaths from extreme temps down over time.
https://ehjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12940-016-0102-7
Susceptibility to heat decreased over time.
https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/wcas/13/1/wcas-d-20-0083.1.xml
Heat related mortality down.
Scott, what I conclude from the data you supplied is that you don’t know how to interpret data. Even by your own admission, extreme temperature deaths are rising. Moreover, in a world that now bristles with measuring devices and has satellites buzzing around monitoring weather, of course extreme weather deaths would be down. Economic losses, however are growing rapidly.
Is this you?
https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995
Ron,
I guess you didn’t see my response with my five references. I will list them again for you:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/deaths-from-natural-disasters-by-type?time=earliest..2024&country=~All+disasters
https://files.emdat.be/reports/2024_EMDAT_report.pdf
https://www.jacc.org/doi/abs/10.1016/j.jacc.2024.03.425
https://ehjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12940-016-0102-7
https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/wcas/13/1/wcas-d-20-0083.1.xml
And I’ll add one more:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-020-02825-z
This one finds no trend after controlling for population changes.
Please be aware that WHO articles like this one are not peer reviewed. Also note that the single reference WHO uses to state that heat related deaths come from a Lancet article that admits that they are doing educational guessing:
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/climate-change-heat-and-health
Lancet admits, “It does not capture changes in response to heat exposure that might happen over time, as a result of acclimation and adaptation. Not capturing these changes could result in an over-estimation of heat-related deaths in later calendar years”.
So, who are you going to believe Ron? 6 separate studies using direct observational instruments, or one single study using modeling that is unable to correct for adaptation?
Thanks and have a great day
Scott, anyone: Regarding the issue of heat-related deaths, how do you scientifically assess the following recent report in Lancet:
.
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2025/11/unforced-variations-nov-2025/#comment-841497
Hi David,
The first one is from the Guardian, so it goes into the round file.
The second one is from Lancet planetary health.
Let me provide you some context. Please review the following link very closely:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/deaths-from-natural-disasters-by-type?time=earliest..2024&country=~All+disasters
Notice that deaths from all disasters is down 98% from 1931 to 2024. INTERESTINGLY, despite the exceeding low number of deaths in 2023 and 2024, somehow, some way they suddenly are almost all caused by temperature extremes!
Methinks something is a little fishy going on. Someone is putting a thumb on the scale! Either way, global overall mortality rates continue falling with time and technological advancements. There is literally no way to spin this into anything catastrophic.
See: https://vizhub.healthdata.org/gbd-compare/.
See also reality in action: https://files.emdat.be/reports/2024_EMDAT_report.pdf
Extreme temp related deaths down 49% in 2024 vs. 2004-2023 baseline!
I bet you don’t see that in Lancet, do you?
Scott, temperature deaths is tricky because in the first world we are increasingly using air conditioning (mainly) to ameliorate the temps. That’s adaptation. But it skews the data. It doesn’t mean that the temps have not risen, they have, which mitigation is trying to address. Just that, in the first world at least, we are adapting. As your quote says, “It does not capture changes in response to heat exposure that might happen over time, as a result of acclimation and adaptation.”
So you’re right that global disaster deaths have plummeted overall because we’ve made the world a safer place, but still heat-related deaths themselves are increasing, not decreasing so far. Those links I provided are valid AFAIK. If you disagree I’d suggest you publish your data.
Here’s some more.
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/climate-change-heat-and-health
https://ourworldindata.org/part-two-how-many-people-die-from-extreme-temperatures-and-how-could-this-change-in-the-future
This article (under ”What do these findings mean?)acknowledges that heat is increasing but that of deaths (in first world countries at least):
“Societal adaptation and/or socioeconomic development contributed, up to now, to a general decline in heat-related mortality.”
https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1002617
Meaning that our use of air conditioning (adaptation) is skewing the data.
This comment from Our World in Data says:
“This trend does not mean that disasters have become less frequent, or less intense. It means the world today is much better at preventing deaths from disasters than in the past. This will become increasingly important in our response and adaptation to climate change.“
https://ourworldindata.org/century-disaster-deaths
Some people think that we should only employ adaptationist policies (increasing air conditioning use) and forget about mitigation, where we actually try to address the reason for the still fixable need for air conditioning (because we want to keep a few fatcats in the FF industry happy). I think that’s bass ackwards. But, hey, that’s me. People can row down the windows and wear gas masks in a car that’s leaking CO or you can actually FIX the problem.
Again though, if you disagree with the methodology of the Lancet article, I would suggest that you publish your findings
Hey there Scott, thank you for replying. A follow-up in response:
I think I understand what you’re driving at. But this what alarmed me going thru the Lancet report. Putting aside how the media writes as a separate issue and focusing on the report’s findings, my concern is best expressed by a succinct observation Gavin has already made in this thread:
“The issue is not how many deaths there are, but whether there are changes in those numbers as a function of temperature changes. i.e. it’s a question about the derivative, not the integral.”
An admittedly imperfect way I’d make the point I’m driving at would be if we were to talk about the change (decrease) in deaths from bacterial infections since the rise of antibiotics in the last 80-90 or so years and then try to tease out the steepening trend (increase) in deaths and adverse outcomes due to the rise of antibiotic-resistant infections (a rise attributed in part to mankind’s overuse/misuse of antibiotics).
The development and deployment of antibiotics made tremendous improvements to society via reductions of deaths, hospitalizations, etc. over the last 8-9 decades. The appearance, and subsequent increasing number and prevalence, of microbes resistant or immune to our arsenal is becoming a real negative impact on patient outcomes and is clearly demonstrable.
Do you have any thoughts on particularly Gavin’s or my l-o-n-g-e-r (dumber?) way of saying the same thing?
Hi David,
Thanks for the professional response. It’s refreshing to be able to discuss differing perspectives with other respectful, intelligent people.
In a nutshell, my entire professional life is filled with evaluating risks and benefits. Every day, many times per day. I am constantly considering the risk/benefit profile with every patient. Medication effects vs side effects. Surgical effects vs. complications. Risk planning, risk tolerance and outcome evaluations using up to date medical literature.
I live and breathe the question posed by Gavin all day, every day. That’s my job, for over 20 years.
Please consider the following regarding heat vs. cold related deaths:
https://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lanplh/PIIS2542-5196%2821%2900081-4.pdf?utm
Then consider this in regards to deaths from extreme temps:
https://files.emdat.be/reports/2024_EMDAT_report.pdf
In the Lancet article, there were about 283,000 fewer cold related deaths and 116,000 more heat deaths between the two periods. Granted, this study is a counterfactual modeling study, meaning it is already suspect due to confounding variable of adaptation. Even at that, net deaths from extreme temps decreased by about 167,000 between the two periods. That is not a net increase, it is a net decrease. This may also explain why the second EMDAT study shows a 49% decrease in extreme temp deaths.
Of course, as I’ve shown before, there are a multitude of studies showing that heat deaths are not in fact increasing at all but decreasing.
If you disagree with me on this point, that’s fine, but you’ll need to explain how to account for the increasing heat deaths in the face of the following:
Global life expectancy increasing (except during COVID):
https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy
Global crude death rate falling (except during COVID):
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/crude-death-rate?tab=line
Global temp related deaths rank 30th out of 31 causes of death:
https://ourworldindata.org/causes-of-death
And global excess mortality returning to baseline after COVID:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores-average-baseline
All of these are used to provide context for the claim that heat related deaths are increasing against a historical background. From this data, it appears that the claim can’t be substantiated. Thanks and have a good day.
Scott,
What is your source (peer reviewed refeernce) for this statement: “the very real and tangible fact that heat related deaths are decreasing, not increasing.”
Hi Figen, please see my response to Ron above. And thank you for asking me politely.
Hi Scott,
From that first link,
“In assessing the socioeconomic, behavioral, and physiological factors that affect thermal vulnerability, the precise roles of human adaptation, improved healthcare, and overall heat awareness is difficult to discern. Nevertheless, with more frequent and intense heat events likely to continue as a result of anthropogenic climate change, and an aging population around the world, collective human vulnerability to heat will likely continue to grow (Huber et al. 2017; Sanderson et al. 2017; Broadbent et al. 2020).”
It does not dispute (that I could see) that heat has been increasing. But it suggests that increasing awareness is responsible for the decrease in deaths in people 65 and over. It also says,
“Further, an increase in the number of heat events over the past decade across the United States may have contributed to the end of a decades-long downward trend in the estimated number of heat-related fatalities”.
The next link looks at the use of adaptation methods. It found that out of 9,183 papers on the subject only two found no connection between the use of air conditioning and lack of mortality. Later though it says,
“Where a decrease in mortality was seen, potential explanations included the introduction of heat health warning systems (HHWS), increased prevalence of air conditioning, improved urban design and living standards”
“As the climate has warmed, the use of air conditioning and heat warning systems/health messaging are also offered as hypotheses for decreased heat related mortality, where these interventions are present. There have also been substantial changes in building design over time.”
The Conclusion states,
“Adaptation to heat has implications for future planning, particularly in urban areas, with anticipated increases in temperature due to climate change.”
The third says,
“From 2000 to 2019, cold-related excess death ratios decreased, while heat-related ratios increased, resulting in an overall decline in temperature-related deaths.” demonstrating that overall deaths are down because cold related deaths are down. But again it says that heat related deaths are up. In it’s Conclusions it says,
“Effective mitigation and adaptation strategies are crucial, especially given the increasing heat-related cardiovascular deaths amid climate change.”
The next, while acknowledging that that year was below the average for heat deaths reported. Note these words,
“Other Asian countries also experienced severe heat waves and record-breaking temperatures in 2024,” … ” However, the actual human impact is likely underreported and not fully reflected in EM-DAT” … ” In the USA, preliminary estimates suggest 1,006 deaths, though this only includes data from the cities of Phoenix (Arizona) and Las Vegas (Nevada)” … “but final figures were not yet available at the time of reporting.”
“Effective mitigation and adaptation strategies are crucial, especially given the increasing heat-related cardiovascular deaths amid climate change.”
Couldn’t quite figure that next lin out. Seemed to include weather as every kind of weather event.
The next says that while first world nations were able to adapt to heat, still,
“The European heat wave of 2003 caused up to 70,000 fatalities (Robine et al. 2008). This shows that developed countries can also be severely affected by extreme events.”
That final link you provided says under Conclusions,
“Nonetheless, the study by Mitchell et al. (2016) attributed fatalities caused by extreme heat to anthropogenic global warming. In particular, that study showed that anthropogenic global warming increased the risk of heat-related fatality by 70% in Paris and by 20% in London. However, adaptation can mitigate the number of fatalities during such weather- and climate-related events.”
Not sure what you mean by one study. I see four studies referenced at the bottom.
I looked for that link from the Lancet. I’m sure it exists,, I just couldn’t find it. But it doesn’t mean that. they’re guessing. Your quote says,
“It does not capture changes in response to heat exposure that might happen over time, as a result of acclimation and adaptation.” Does not. They are assuming bau for now. Because of that it,
“could result in an over-estimation of heat-related deaths in later calendar years”. That’s because we don’t know the future or how much people will use adaptation measures.
Hi Ron. Regarding your comment, “I looked for that link from the Lancet. I’m sure it exists,, I just couldn’t find it.” in your 7 Nov 2025 at 12:39pm to Scott, I believe the Lancet report (in various ways) he invokes can be found for download at the following:
https://lancetcountdown.org/2025-report/
I realize Scott has retired from this discussion for the time being, but thought I’d pass it along if you’re still interested. Sorry I didn’t notice before just now.
S: Not Nature. No, they would rather publish studies they know will be picked up and amplified by the media, and containing references untethered to reality.
BPL: Gosh darn that most prestigious science journal in the world! They can’t be trusted like ignorant internet yahoos can.
BPL:
Look at the references. The Wellcome study is not peer reviewed. That’s a cold hard, fact, sir (or ma’am).
Barton,
Here is the link to the article referenced in the Nature journal article:
https://wellcomeopenresearch.org/documents/9-245/pdf
Please refer to the box on the upper left that states, “Not peer reviewed”. What does “Not peer reviewed” mean to you?
Scott
“Please refer to the box on the upper left that states, “Not peer reviewed”. What does “Not peer reviewed” mean to you?”
So is your problem that in an article that has 55 references ONE is not peer reviewed?
Scott, I will guarantee you that if you look at the style guide of any high-quality science journals, the references will have a style for reports produced by think-tanks, professional societies and national academies. These reports are usually synopses of existing work and expert opinion–not original scientific research. As such, they do not go through peer-review at journals. I can guarantee you that they are reviewed by subject-matter experts. This includes the Wellcome Trust, which has a long record of producing quality research.
It appears that your entire objection is to the organization. As such, you seem to have come up with a completely new logical fallacy–not ad hominem, but rather, ad ordinationem. Kudos!
Hi Ray,
Then by your own admission, journals should therefore not use the words “peer reviewed” as anything to be valued in the scientific research. Am I correct? Or am I only correct when the words “peer reviewed” only count for the article you want it to count?
In football: My touchdowns count, but yours don’t.
Is that fair to me?
RL: It appears that your entire objection is to the organization. As such, you seem to have come up with a completely new logical fallacy–not ad hominem, but rather, ad ordinationem. Kudos!.
Sorry, Ray, but it looks like Scott’s dishonest rhetoric has already been named “poisoning the well” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_the_well). It’s an informal fallacy, a pre-emptive rhetorical move to induce readers to dismiss “ad hominem” any argument from anyone associated with the organization.
Ignorant, motivated obstructionists like Scott really can’t come up with anything new. Otherwise, you’re right as usual.
Profuse thanks to the moderator(s)!
Scott, spoken like a man who has never published anything and has no idea how science works. Peer review has a role, but it isn’t the only standard.. Maybe learn how science works before spouting off.
Again: Scott is a relentless motivated obstructionist on TheClimateBrink. He’s already declared himself impervious to evidence that climate change is catastrophic. Therefore, responding to his comments isn’t recommended.
Since I can’t resist, however: Scott compares global mortality from hot and cold weather. However he arrives at his conclusions, attribution analysis has estimated that 16,400 people died in Europe’s heat waves this summer, that would have survived if not for anthropogenic climate change (https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/grantham-institute/public/publications/institute-reports-and-analytical-notes/Climate-change-tripled-heat-related-deaths-in-early-summer-European-heatwave.pdf). The families of those attributable victims may not be comforted to know that deaths due to cold weather have declined.
Mal, good descriptor:
“relentless motivated obstructionism” takes up a lot of space and time here. The hashing, response, rehashing, reresponse, rerehashing, rereresponse, on and on ad nauseam, is not a productive activity. To some extent, I categorize it as vanity posting. Perhaps ‘get a life’ is a useful response. Effective action does not result from these activities.
For qualifications of authorities, a CV/list of publications should establish that our hosts didn’t offer RealClimate as a forum for time wasting quibbles and nitpicking (and downright delusion and lies), but to share their knowledge and insights. We’re lucky to have them. They are not here to provide a forum for telling them what’s wrong with them. Those who do so should look in the mirror for the source of their accusations, which look like confessions to those of us able to look under the hood. It would be better to get on with trying to help ourselves (humanity, that is, and its future under these increasingly obvious threats).
HI Mal,
I am curious, what is it about large scale human outcomes that you have difficulty understanding? That is what public health studies are all about. That’s why trend lines over decades are all about. Climate science has wielded the heavy hammer in regards to trend lines over decades when it comes to warming temperatures for years (of which I agree that it has indeed warmed over decades BTW), but when it NOW comes to using the same style of science (large-scale, multidecadal data points), it is no longer acceptable to use, because, well, it shows that over decades, almost every parameter of human health outcomes has improved. This is an undeniable fact. It is so undeniable, it astounds me that we are even debating the fact that human flourishing is the highest right now as it has ever been recorded in history (with a blip for COVID in 2020/2021).
I’m not saying that heat wave deaths aren’t terrible, they are! But what about cold deaths (of which there are many more of BTW).
[Response: This is such a dumb argument. The issue is not how many deaths there are, but whether there are changes in those numbers as a function of temperature changes. i.e. it’s a question about the derivative, not the integral. If d(heat deaths)/d(T) is more positive than d(cold deaths)/d(T) is negative, then the net effect of temperature change is to cause more temperature-related deaths. And if you look at the temperature mortality curves (e.g. here), this appears to be true. Stop playing games. – gavin]
Heck, what about alcohol related traffic deaths? Those are horrible too, right? Why don’t we just make alcohol illegal?
When you focus on one single thing without looking at and considering the surrounding variables, you are doing yourself and the world around you a grave disservice! Thanks Mal and have a good day.
Re: “This is such a dumb argument. The issue is not how many deaths there are, but whether there are changes in those numbers as a function of temperature changes. i.e. it’s a question about the derivative, not the integral. If d(heat deaths)/d(T) is more positive than d(cold deaths)/d(T) is negative, then the net effect of temperature change is to cause more temperature-related deaths. And if you look at the temperature mortality curves (e.g. here), this appears to be true. Stop playing games. – gavin”
Exactly. It says a lot about the integrity and/or competency of contrarians like Scott that they run such as asinine argument. It’s been tedious to hear that nonsense from denialists for years:
Scott said: “I’m not saying that heat wave deaths aren’t terrible, they are! But what about cold deaths (of which there are many more of BTW).”
Adding to Gavins comments about it being a dumb argument.
From The Guardian: Extreme temperatures kill 5 million people a year with heat-related deaths rising, study finds
More people died of cold than heat in past 20 years but climate change is shifting the balance.
More than 5 million people die each year globally because of excessively hot or cold conditions, a 20-year study has found – and heat-related deaths are on the rise.
The study involving dozens of scientists around the world found that 9.4% of global deaths each year are attributable to heat or cold exposure, equivalent to 74 extra deaths per 100,000 people.
It’s prompted calls for better housing insulation and more solar-powered air conditioning, as well as warnings that climate change will increase temperature-linked deaths in the future.
Researchers analysed mortality and weather data from 750 locations in 43 countries between 2000 and 2019, and found the average daily temperature in these locations increased by 0.26C per decade.
The study found more people had died of cold than heat over the two-decade period. But heat-related deaths were increasing, while cold-linked deaths were dropping.
Monash University’s Prof Yuming Guo, one of the study’s lead researchers, said this trend would continue because of climate change, and total mortality rates may go up.
“In the future, cold-related mortality should continue to decrease, but because the heat-related mortality will continue to increase, that means there will be a break point,” Guo said.
He said in Europe there had already been an overall increase in the rate of deaths associated with temperatures.
“If we don’t take any action to mitigate climate change … more deaths will be caused.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/08/extreme-temperatures-kill-5-million-people-a-year-with-heat-related-deaths-rising-study-finds#:~:text=The%20sun%20rises%20over%20Melbourne,linked%20deaths%20in%20the%20future.
————————————————
Have shown this study to Scott previously. But he ignores things: The Guardian: Prospect of warmer winters does not mean fewer deaths, study finds. New scientific study pours cold water on the theory that mortality rates will drop in winter months as the climate warms, reports Climate News Network.
Global warming is unlikely to mean that fewer people in northern latitudes will die from cold during the winter, according to a study by scientists in the US.
Despite arguments that an increase in death rates caused by global warming and increased summertime temperatures will be offset by a matching drop in mortality as winter temperatures also rise, the study cautions against assuming any such link as research suggests otherwise.
The study, carried out over several years, looked at temperature-related seasonal mortality rates, particularly among elder people, in a total of 39 cities – the majority in the US, and three in France.
It concludes: “Our findings suggest that reductions in cold-related mortality rates under a warming climate may be much smaller than some have assumed.”
The research, carried out by a team led by Professor Patrick Kinney, a specialist in public health at the Columbia University Earth Institute in the US, is published in the Environmental Research Letters journal.
“We found that excess winter mortality did not depend on seasonal temperature range and was no lower in warmer vs colder cities, suggesting that temperature is not a key driver of winter excess mortality,” the study says.
Although the researchers acknowledge that seasonal temperature patterns can have an effect on health, many other factors influence mortality rates in winter among elderly people.
Diseases such as influenza – often transmitted when younger generations of families meet up with their elders at family celebrations – play a far greater role in mortality than the cold.
“Most older people who die over the winter don’t die from cold – they die from complications related to ’flu and other respiratory diseases,” Kinney says.
Most previous studies investigating the links between temperature rises and death rates have focused on the impact of summer heat.
A prolonged heatwave across Europe in 2003 – which many scientists say can be attributed to climate change – is believed to have caused between 30,000 and 50,000 deaths. Elderly people in urban areas – often left stranded in their baking apartment blocks – were particularly badly hit.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jun/26/prospect-of-warmer-winters-does-not-mean-fewer-deaths-study-finds#:~:text=10%20years%20old-,Prospect%20of%20warmer%20winters%20does%20not%20mean%20fewer%20deaths%2C%20study,smaller%20than%20some%20have%20assumed.%E2%80%9D
To all attempting to provide reasoned arguments against rising from the dead climate denial (thanks magats and enablers).
You will not succeed. Zombies don’t die. They’re here to provide distraction and/or primp in the psychic mirror*. Reality won’t break in until the floods/fires/toxins come to their dooryard. Then the insulation won’t help (look at Jamaica for what’s in store: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/06/hurricane-melissa-jamaica-relief
* “mirror, mirror on the wall, who is fairest of them all”
Response: [This is such a dumb argument… Stop playing games. – gavin]
It’s gratifying to see him schooled by the headmaster, but Scott has no other reason to comment here. Assuming he’s not an AI agent or disinformation professional, but a volunteer culture warrior IRL who thinks AGW is primarily a collectivist stalking horse, he’s a paradigmatic victim of the Dunning-Kruger Effect (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/dunning-kruger-effect). He evinces unwarranted confidence that he knows more of climate science than 97% of those who do it for a living, emphatically including our host! Scott’s already declared himself impervious to any argument that AGW is a threat to life and property (https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/climate-skeptics-have-new-favorite/comment/103237035):
There is no way, no how that you are going to convince me that we are living in “terrifying” times.
Note his use of “we”, disregarding the mortal terror of those whose lives are cut short by each new record-breaking extreme weather event. Climate realists recognize that lukewarmist rhetorical tactic. Scott simply won’t see any convincing casualty figures. He seems to think he’s an anti-collectivist champion, bringing the fight to the enemy on data-driven fora. He expects filtered facts and clumsy sophistry to ‘win’ against encyclopedic expertise. Admitting error would be admitting defeat. He’s here for purely narcissistic reasons, and is unlikely ever to see himself as others see him. I predict Gavin’s blunt rebuke will fail. Of course, I’d be happy to be shown wrong ;^).
Argumentum ad hominem? You bet your ass! Many more qualified experts than I have long since considered Scott’s arguments on their merits and resoundingly rejected them, as recently as today. I take issue with the man himself. Sue me.
Scott: – “This is likely part of the reason why catastrophic climate scenarios are now largely being ignored, not just by Trump, but most everyone else too. It’s hard to push a narrative that doesn’t seem to be panning out.”
Humans cannot adapt to temperatures above 52 °C (125.6 °F), as this is well above the temperature where the body’s ability to cool itself becomes impossible, leading to hyperthermia and potentially death. Prolonged exposure to temperatures above 40 °C (104 °F) is dangerous even with low humidity, and survival limits can be reached above 46.4 °C (115.5 °F), especially for older adults. While humans can adapt to heat through physiological and cultural means, there is a fundamental physiological limit to how much heat the human body can withstand.
A 2017 research paper, reported by The Conversation, suggested that Sydney and Melbourne are on course for 50 °C summer days by the 2040s if high GHG emissions continue. The article included:
https://theconversation.com/the-reality-of-living-with-50-temperatures-in-our-major-cities-85315
The all-time maximum temperature for Penrith, NSW, Australia, was 48.9 °C, recorded on 4 Jan 2020. On that day, Penrith was the hottest place on Earth and set a new record for the Sydney basin.
https://www.bom.gov.au/climate/current/month/nsw/archive/202001.sydney.shtml#recordsTmaxDailyHigh
Since 2017 paper was published the rate of GMST warming has accelerated to ~0.4 °C/decade most recently.
https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-6079807/v1
Thus, it seems to me 50 °C summer days may well arrive sooner.
One study is challenging our understanding of how humans cope with extreme heat:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-09-02/deadly-heat-limits-tested-in-world-first-human-experiment/104242788
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poQklIrdEI8
A 2023 Nature Communications study paper applies physiological and biophysical principles for young and older adults, in sun or shade, to improve current estimates of survivability and introduce liveability (maximum safe, sustained activity) under current and future climates.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-43121-5
If climate change mitigation efforts are not implemented or large-scale migration does not occur, a significant portion of humanity (i.e. billions of people) may face exposure to mean annual temperatures that are warmer than those experienced in almost any location today, within the next few decades.
https://globaia.org/habitability
Geoff Miell:
“ If climate change mitigation efforts are not implemented or large-scale migration does not occur, a significant portion of humanity (i.e. billions of people) may face exposure to mean annual temperatures that are warmer than those experienced in almost any location today, within the next few decades”.
Right. We need both mitigation AND adaptation. My God, it’s an insult to say only adaptation is necessary. What do they take us for?
“The UN Environment Emissions Gap Report 2018 amplifies
the reasons for concern. The report assesses that, despite
progress being made in reducing greenhouse gas emissions,
the mitigation ambition is still far from sufficient to limit
global warming to the targets of the Paris Agreement (UNEP,
2018). Continuation of mitigation efforts in line with the
current Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) would
lead to a global mean temperature rise of about 3.0°C to
3.2°C above preindustrial levels by the end of the century.
The ambition must be to roughly triple current efforts to get
the world on track towards achieving the goal of the Paris
Agreement of limiting global warming to well below 2°C and
increased around fivefold for a 1.5°C scenario (UNEP, 2018).
Next to urgent and unprecedented mitigation, the ambition
to adapt to the intensifying climate-related impacts also
needs to be strengthened and accelerated. While limiting
global warming through mitigation will be the most
critical factor in keeping the future adaptation challenge
manageable, the adaptation efforts needed even under the
1.5°C global warming scenario far surpass current levels and
are set to affect the poor and vulnerable most, particularly
in developing countries.”
https://unepccc.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/adaptation-gap-report-final-version.pdf
Geoff Miell, you’re quite right. Even middle ground warming scenarios could make significant areas of the planet too hot to survive. Scott assures us that global mortality rates have gone down due to advances in medicine and technology. So perhaps we can all live permanently inside next to our air conditioners, and robots can do the outside work. The huge costs of that and downgrading of quality of life apparently don’t matter to Scott. For Scott who is apparently a doctor, cure is better than prevention.
Wow! his is avery helpful post. I had not realized we are approaching the limits of habitability.
Ron R. (at 6 Nov 2025 at 2:08 PM): – “Right. We need both mitigation AND adaptation. My God, it’s an insult to say only adaptation is necessary. What do they take us for?”
Unfortunately, it seems to me there are limited adaptation strategies for lethal heat air temperature conditions:
1. Use active cooling technologies (e.g. effective, reliable, affordable to operate air conditioning); or if that’s not available then
2. Move to a cooler location.
The third option is to risk death.
I’d suggest perhaps most current air conditioning systems (at least in Australia) don’t seem to handle ambient air temperatures much beyond about 46 °C.
For example, the Daikin Cora series air con spec for outdoor operating range is:
Cooling: -10 to +46 °C
Heating: -15 to +18 °C
https://www.daikin.com.au/products/residential/split-system-air-conditioning/cora
Nigelj (at 6 Nov 2025 at 4:29 PM): – “So perhaps we can all live permanently inside next to our air conditioners, and robots can do the outside work.”
I’d suggest the crops and livestock in the fields won’t be air conditioned. So perhaps one may be cool enough in one’s air conditioned spaces, but one’s fridge and pantry may well be empty. What would one eat then?
https://www.csiro.au/en/news/all/articles/2025/october/heat-stress-agriculture-labour
Figen (at 7 Nov 2025 at 9:42 AM): – “Wow! his is avery helpful post. I had not realized we are approaching the limits of habitability.”
Thanks for your comments. I’d suggest most people aren’t aware we/humanity are approaching the limits of habitability and how little time is remaining to act effectively to avoid a worst-case scenario. You may find my Submission (#26) to the NSW Parliament Joint Select Committee on Net Zero Future re their inquiry into Emissions from the fossil fuel sector of interest, particularly:
Slide #17: What are the consequences for us?
Slide #18: Wet bulb temperature adaptability limit
Slide #19: Human Cost of Global Warming (unfortunately, the pdf document doesn’t animate the world map, but if you click on the link you can find the animated world map showing the expanding purple zones as the world warms from +1.5 to +4.4 °C GMST anomaly)
Slide #20: What’s REQUIRED to avoid civilisation collapse?
https://www.parliament.nsw.gov.au/lcdocs/submissions/91844/0026%20Geoff%20Miell.pdf
Thanks for finding all that, Geoff. This is what global warming means!
figen: I had not realized we are approaching the limits of habitability.
That’s part of the public perception problem: the tragic consequences of AGW are sneaking up on us! You’re surely aware of the rising hyperthermia-related death toll to date, correlated with the decadal trend of GMST (e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-021-01058-x; https://www.nature.com/articles/s43017-024-00635-w. Free versions of both are available via Google Scholar). After the PNW heat dome of 2021 (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-36289-3.pdf), when up to a thousand people died in two states and two provinces while I huddled in my heat-pump-equipped MFH, I get nervous when I hear about “wet bulb” physiological limits.
The upshot is that for a growing subset of the global population, the limits of habitability without cooling refugia have already been exceeded, and GMST is still rising. More widely available artificial cooling will save some lives, but that entails yet more demand on energy and natural resources, and there are multitudes who must live and/or work outdoors. Areas like the Persian Gulf and Bangladesh may have to be abandoned, but climate-related mass displacement is already creating global security issues. IOW, it’s complicated!
I’m pleased to see information exchange is reciprocal on RC. Will you discuss the habitability issue in your course?
For clarity: “MFH” is an acronym for “manufactured home”.
Scott says: “This is likely part of the reason why catastrophic climate scenarios are now largely being ignored, not just by Trump, but most everyone else too. It’s hard to push a narrative that doesn’t seem to be panning out.”
Scott attacks the ‘CAGW’ straw man, or ‘catastrophic anthropogenic global warming’. It’s Scott erecting a vague target so that. by comparison, it looks like his position has more support than it actually has. The geologist and science journalist Peter Hadfield discusses that ‘CAGW’ straw man from 13:41 to 14:26 of this video. The science communicator Dave Farina also addresses it from 1:26:10 to 1:26:56 of this video. Dave there discusses this paper:
Atomsk’s Sanakan: Scott attacks the ‘CAGW’ straw man, or ‘catastrophic anthropogenic global warming’.
I acknowledge that ‘catastrophic AGW’ is a old dog whistle for sarcastic lukewarmists, but it sure looks to me like AGW is sufficiently catastrophic for growing numbers of people. I’m not the only climate realist who thinks so: for example, the word got past atmospheric and public-health specialist review when applied to the 2021 PNW heat dome (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-36289-3.pdf). I still plan to use it carefully, however, for the reasons you cite. Because by his own words, no casualty figures can ever be catastrophic enough for Scott and his culture-war confederates.
You really want me to give examples???
Held, Soden 2000:
Figure 1 is a nice depiction of the GHE, just because there are so many wrong depictions circulating. But then..
“The increase in opacity due to a doubling of CO2 causes Ze to rise by ≈150 meters. This results in a reduction in the effective temperature of the emission across the tropopause by ≈(6.5K/km) (150 m) ≈1 K, which converts to 4W/m2 using the Stefan-Boltzmann law”
Wrong! A classic 3.7W/m2 CO2 forcing is the sum of “fluxes” at the tropopause, roughly 2.4W/m2 less up and 1.3W/m2 more down. Similar things go for a 4W/m2 estimate. Within the troposphere Ze only rises about 90 meters.
Kiehl, Trenberth 1997 (and later iterations..)
“The estimate was based on their calculation of the clear-sky OLR in the 8–12-µm wavelength region of 99 W m-2 and an assumption that no such radiation can directly exit the atmosphere from the surface when clouds are present. Taking the observed global-mean cloudiness to be 62%, their value of 40 W m22 follows from rounding 99 x (1 – 0.62)”
This is a quote from Costa, Shine 2011 describing how KT97 came to their estimate of the atmospheric window. But since Trenberth 2011 endorsed that paper, we now it is accurate, plus there is a similar section in KT97. The problem is, it is wrong. The effective cloud cover, considering optical thickness and fractional cloud cover, is only about 30%. It is the same mistake John Clauser made btw.
Ternberth et al 2008:
“Wilber et al. (1999) estimate the broadband water emissivity as 0.9907”
No, the broadband (hemispheric!) emissivity of water is about 0.91(!!!). Wilber et al is a highly condensed case of incompetence, but that is another story. But also the Kiehl/Trenberth series has a lot of “moments”, so to say.
R. Benestad suggested this, here on this site:
“A bold proposal: One way to view the greenhouse effect is the vertical distance between the place where incoming energy is deposited and where the average outgoing heat loss takes place.”
This is what I like to call the “radiative osmosis” GHE concept, and it is wrong. Where, or at what altitude, solar energy is absorbed barely matters within the convective system. If you follow this idea, the oceans would equally generate a GHE, as they are far more transparent to SW- than to LW radiation.
G. Schmidt, equally on this site:
“This implies that there is a level in the atmosphere (called the effective radiating level) that must be at the effective radiating temperature (around 252K). This is around the mid-troposphere ~ 6km. Since increasing GHGs implies an increasing temperature gradient, the temperatures must therefore ‘pivot’ around this (fixed) level. i.e. everything below that level will warm, and everything above that level will cool.”
The issues with it have been discussed, so I can skip any further analysis. I guess the point I am trying to make is pretty clear. If the most well known climate scientists run into that much trouble, occasionally, not always, then we have a problem with climate literacy. And it is obviously not getting any better downstream..
More emphasis on Surface energy balance might help.
The unknown surface transmitted LW part is really just inferred. ~160 W/m2 avg solar energy going in (to surface) ~100 W/m2 turbulent fluxes upward. That leaves around 60 units to be accounted for by longwave radiation (net cooling upward flux) going somewhere.
A diagram showing 40 W/m2 transmitted (to space) seems to imply 20 W/m2 LW is being transferred from surface to atmosphere, perhaps based on the assumption that there is a discontinuity where surface and air-adjacent are slightly different temperature in climatological mean. It’s unclear whether that discontinuity is physically real or merely an artifact of a layered stepwise model structure
In any case, renewed emphasis on surface energy budgets restores foundational concepts in climatology, which was traditionally in service of agricultural users. The astrophysical planetary framework should not displace that wisdom, as doing so appears to have created major gaps in how issues in water and temperature management are conceptualized.
ES: Would model physics stand the test of scrutiny and public discourse?
BPL: They only have to stand the test of peer review and the scientific consensus. Public opinion has no effect on scientific findings.
ES: Would model physics stand the test of scrutiny and public discourse?
BPL: They only have to stand the test of peer review and the scientific consensus. Public opinion has no effect on scientific findings.
Sadly, scientific findings have little if any effect on public opinion, either. No science can withstand against ignorant scrutiny or privately-funded, government-sanctioned obscurantism. Frequent news media reports of increasingly catastrophic weather events may do more to secure a majority for collective decarbonization. Whatever it takes, only 2.3 million more votes are needed in 2028 than Vice President Harris received last year, i.e. 1.5% of the total vote. It doesn’t seem so hard when you put it in proportion!
“They only have to stand the test of peer review and the scientific consensus. Public opinion has no effect on scientific findings”
Sure, science is not democracy and it should not care about public opinion, neither by pandering to it, nor by trying to influence it. But the very same is true regarding “scientific consensus”, because it is still no democracy. The number of pivotal scientific findings going against the consensus is legion.
If peer review has any merits, if done properly, remains at question. Relevant, high quality science, like that of Einstein for instance, does not require peer review. In fact there were few enough scientists even understanding his work. Why would you possibly seek to surpress such excellence with gatekeepers of far lesser competence?
I think the core problem is the democratization of science, in the sense that we are measuring science by numbers, like head counts or budgets, and everyone can become a scientist, even with a 2-digit IQ. Sure then you will want set to a lower limit towards what may get published. But I think that is just masquarading the underlying problem. You should never stop a scientist from embarrassing himself.
And it does not work anyway, the limbo contest is in full action. Peer review and “consensus” do little to restrain it, it looks like they are rather promoting it. There are so many unbelievable examples, let me just name one: Liu et al 2015, Nature. The central claim of the paper is 49.9 was 40% less than 71.3. 24 “scientists” came to this conclusion, and the peer review of Nature said yep, that is correct. Limbo..
https://pubpeer.com/publications/89C2C14AFF0DA198B3660BBFE778E2
Actually Professor Mekik among the biggest misconceptions about climate change literacy is the belief by many that given positive attitudes and government funding humanity can successfully mitigate a changing climate. The belief that if we rapidly lower CO2 emissions toward zero by 2050 global temperatures can be kept below the 1.5-2.0 degree C threshold. The problem with that policy is the fact that we cannot complete the transition to renewable energy and EVs without using vehicles that run on fossil fuels, thereby adding CO2 in the process.
It is certainly an uphill climb, but it is not impossible. And I cannot imagine any benefit from doing nothing about climate change – and government funding matters a lot.
If we don’t transition, we’ll be emitting more fossil fuels and making the problem worse. Some mitigation is better than no mitigation.
If I need a life saving operation, having that operation might temporarily put me in more pain and hinder my mobility more than the affliction, but if the choice is between that and death, I’m having the operation.
KT: The problem with that policy is the fact that we cannot complete the transition to renewable energy and EVs without using vehicles that run on fossil fuels, thereby adding CO2 in the process.
BPL: Fewer and fewer vehicles will be fossil-fueled as the transition continues.
Exactly.. but during that time more CO2 will be added. It’s unavoidable.
BPL: Fewer and fewer vehicles will be fossil-fueled as the transition continues.
Ken Towe: Exactly.. but during that time more CO2 will be added. It’s unavoidable.
And your point would be …?
Deniers routinely use their “all or nothing” rhetorical setup – in which EITHER we reduce emissions to ZERO and IMMEDIATELY, or .if we can’t – then there is no point in doing anything: let’s abandon the transition and continue INCREASING our emissions. happily ever after..
Exactly! Obviously there’s a transition period! It’s silly to suggest it’s all immediately or nothing at all. Oh brother.
If KT is going to insist that it’s got to be punctuational change rather than the usual gradualist, let him make the change rather than just complaining about it. The rest of us are doing the best we can. ;^)
“Exactly.. but during that time more CO2 will be added. It’s unavoidable.”
So what? You are stating the obvious. What you miss is in the long run electrification reduces the rate emissions are added and we get to zero emissions.
KT ”Exactly.. but during that time more CO2 will be added. It’s unavoidable.”
Nigel: So what? You are stating the obvious.
Right. It’s like saying let’s just stay with the original models of everything we’ve invented because we didn’t transition from, for example, a wind-up phone to a smart phone in one fell swoop. Black and white tube tvs and later color tubes to a modern flat screen because in the interim we still used them. From a Model A to the Kia EV4 because we insisted that change has to be immediate or forget it.
Let’s go back to the Wright Flyer (first airplane) because we didn’t transition right now. to the Eviation Alice (had to look that one up :). Let’s go back to filthy coal and dirty, unbreathable skies because we didn’t make the change to solar and other alternative energies immediately.
Come on, KT. Give it up. We know there’s an evolutionary transition period for everything. As far as speed, we’re transitioning as fast as we can. And in the case of coal and oil, that’s with SIGNIFICANT opposition from those who stand to profit from it. Otherwise the world would likely be in a much better state than it is now.
Can you imagine intensive lobbying from the makers of wind-up phones?
(The preceding is not to imply that the final inventions I lay out are the final ones. As I say, it’s an evolutionary progress)
[“For the lurkers”: I’ll wax verbose once again, because I have time. I want to establish my qualifications to have an opinion first. Lots o’ links. I’ll make my points by the end, but y’all skip if TL;DR. You know you will 8^D! If you do, though, I’m likely to ghost your oblivious responses.]
Good post, Dr. Mekik. I support your proposal for a climate modeling curriculum, with reservations.
So, I have an MS in Environmental Science from 1983, and I don’t recall hearing much about climate except as a determinant of ecosystems. I’d enjoyed an undergrad Meteorology course, and would gladly have taken a graduate course in climate physics and modeling, as I’d covered the basic physics to that point. I then spent two years in a PhD program in Ecology and Evolution before finding an easier way to make a living. That science is as complex, and competitive, as it gets, and I didn’t want to work that hard .
I can’t say the lack of specific training impeded my understanding of Jim Hansen’s announcement five years later. I’d started as an IT (Unix) support contractor at Goddard Space Flight Center just before his Congressional appearance. As I recall, the Earth and Remote Sensing scientists I was working for talked about it for a few weeks, but most of them accepted his claims immediately. Hell, I was there mostly to play with fast computers, but it wasn’t rocket science*! Even GHW Bush and a bipartisan Congressional majority took AGW seriously (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/george-h-w-bush-understood-that-markets-and-the-environment-werent-enemies).
Imagine my dismay when, within the next decade, the public sphere, including the new-born Internet, was flooded with epistemologically ludicrous climate-science denial, and all subsequent attempts to enact rational policy were ruthlessly squashed by petro-plutocratic propaganda and strong-arm politics (https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/kochland-examines-how-the-koch-brothers-made-their-fortune-and-the-influence-it-bought)! While to a non-DK-afflicted “educated lay” person** I might seem relatively well-informed, I didn’t make science my profession. That may be one reason my education hasn’t helped me persuade any physics-naive but “skeptical” (at a prudent, ‘common sense’ level) lay people that their information deficit has been filled with garbage: climate change is real, anthropogenic and tragic, and anyone telling them otherwise is taking advantage of their ignorance and ill-aimed distrust. I’m pretty sure my personality hasn’t helped, either 8^|.
Now I’m just an old guy who knows how Cassandra felt, except that the range of projected future climate disasters is reasonably constrained in time and magnitude, having held up well to peer review over the decades. Against that, there’s a 30+ year, multi-$billion disinformation industry, nurtured by carbon capitalists seeking to forestall collective interference with their trillion annual profits. With so much more-or-less specious falsehood flooding the public knowledge pool for so long, a few more climate-science literate individuals may not move the dial much. I’m a big fan, however, of John Nielsen-Gammon’s scientific meta-literacy proposal (https://web.archive.org/web/20130516120733/http://blog.chron.com/climateabyss/2013/02/scientific-meta-literacy/):
The solution to this problem is not scientific literacy, but what I call scientific meta-literacy. Forget that dream about enabling the public to independently evaluate scientific claims on their merits – that’s just not going to happen. Instead, enable the public to distinguish between reliable and unreliable sources of scientific information.
Point 1: even that’s a big ask, not just because the (IMHO ridiculously self-evident) losers in collective decarbonization have so much invested in mass deception, but perhaps because it’s merely boring [please don’t bother, z]. As Dr. Mekik notes, some opinion trends are meliorative, but too many Americans are still happy to be fooled. They need to be aware of how they’re being buried by torrents of pernicious nonsense on all channels, professionally crafted for the benefit of fossil fuel producers and investors (https://open-research-europe.ec.europa.eu/articles/4-169/v2). A curriculum in detecting bespoke bullshit might make more headway, and would include basic scientific meta-literacy.
Point 2: I wonder what enrollment would be? For now, my hopes, if I can call them that, are on news of increasingly catastrophic (to the victims, at least) weather disasters (e.g. https://www.the-independent.com/climate-change/category-6-hurricane-melissa-climate-change-b2857684.html) to put the vote for substantive climate policy over the top, sooner than we might expect given this year’s political reversals.
/wax off.
* Except literally.
** Part of being an “expert” is picking your audience ;^).
D’oh. To clarify:
Jim Hansen’s announcement five years later. was in 1988;
their trillion annual profits should be “their trillion-dollar annual profits”.
Do you happen to remember what the global average temperature was in 1988?
Berkeley Earth gave 14.49C for 1988. The average for 2024 was 15.10C. That’s a rise of more than 0.6C in 37 years.
I should know better, but: how is that relevant, Ken? We have machines to track that data for us, using any temperature scale we please. Our subject here is climate change. We’re interested in GMST’s rate of change over time. For simplicity without information loss, we work with anomalies: departures from the 1850-1900 average, i.e. the baseline.
You no doubt know all that, Ken. Do you think it’s somehow a weakness for the consensus? Lots of peer climate scientists, who are collectively way smarter than li’l old you, find that rate of warming at least somewhat alarming, you know. Do you think Drs. Muller, Hausfather, inter alia, are lying? Why are you so desperate to obstruct decarbonization that you’ll expose the same ignorant arguments, unmodified by expert correction, to public ridicule repeatedly.
Why do we talk about climate change, Ken? It’s because not only do increasingly severe weather disasters cost the world – yes, even you – more and more money to repair and adapt, but at least 100s of thousands of people have died who would all but certainly still be alive if not for that rate of increase to date. Yep, as climate scientists have long predicted, hotter heat waves, stronger hurricanes, etc. are showing up in global mortality data. You can verify the numbers are greater than zero yourself, applying your scientific meta-literacy. Do you have to? A single death is a tragedy, for the victim if no one else. Believe it or not, anthropogenic global warming to date is already a tragedy for more and more victims and their families around the world. How much certitude do you need to stop disinforming, Ken, and advocate capping the warming trend ASAP? How much aggregate tragedy is enough? WTF is wrong with you?
Thank you for reading my article and for your thoughtful comments. It is hard to disagree with you.
About enrollment, we just implemented our climate science major and minor at Grand Valley this fall, literally 3 months ago and we already have quite a few students enrolled. So there is hope and promise there.
Thanks Mal
Special thanks to Figen Mekik for clarity and responsiveness, as well as brevity when needed.
:)
Thanks Susan Anderson!
We proposed a BS in ‘Climate Science’ within the Dept of Atmospheric Sciences and when we had to defend it with our faculty senate, we were heavily questioned on why we needed another climate degree when there already ‘BS in Climate and Environmental Change’ (housed in the Dept of Biology) and BA in ‘Climate and Arctic Sustainability’. We used arguments similar to those noted in this blog.
I am happy to see this laid out clearly and plan to share this with my faculty and undergraduate advisors who also do not understand how to guide students to their desired path!
Thank you. Your comment is very kind and totally resonates with me. It was a similar situation for me which led me to articulating these ideas. There’s a big difference between climate studies and climate science.
Very interesting post thank you Figen.
I like the idea that you have come from an earth science background, I am always worried that the statistics and modelling done within climate science does not have enough input from fields that have grown up with such concepts. Just the mere idea that an ensemble mean of models is somehow more accurate than any individual run is so far from the truth and yet seems to be accepted as fact??? One thing I would stress that you teach is the proper understanding and handling of errors
Thank you for reading my article, and welcome to my world about quantifying errors. I’ve had a career in higher education well beyond a quarter century and if there is anything I want to leave behind in my students minds, it is the importance of the quantification of error.
I am however confused about your statement “Just the mere idea that an ensemble mean of models is somehow more accurate than any individual run is so far from the truth and yet seems to be accepted as fact??? ”
First, I don’t think anyone acepted modelign output as “fact.” There are ridiculously few facts in science. Each modelign output is ahypothesis that needs further testing, and that has smaller error bars as the model si fed with more accurate data. Remember errors are additive, they don’t cancel each other out. So the eroor margins of the daat going into the models adds to the error margin of its output.
That is one of the reasons modelres like to do “ensemble means.” Basically trying to reduce the error bar through taking the mean of repeated calculations.
Figen, I did not say that people accept modelling output as fact, I said people accept that averaging models improves accuracy as fact. This is true only if the modelling errors are random but the difference in model output are mostly to do with the model rather than random errors in the initial state. Averaging two systemically derived incorrect numbers does not make a more accurate number
Ah, noted. Thank you for clarifying Keith Woollard.
Keith, how are the model outputs “not random” if you have models which are randomly constructed?
Is it all a very intricate conspiracy?
KW: Averaging two systemically derived incorrect numbers does not make a more accurate number
BPL: Suppose one is higher than the target and one is lower?
in Re to Barton Paul Levenson, 5 Nov 2025 at 7:16 AM,
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2025/11/raising-climate-literacy/#comment-841635
Hallo Barton Paul,
I think that the broad spread of model outputs (differences between results offered by different models) are primarily caused by imperfection of the individual models in their representation of the reality. It is my understanding that if so, all these imperfections can be seen rather as causes of a systematic error than of a random error. In other words, we can reasonably suppose that maximally one model in any assessed ensemble thereof can be right, and all others should be, actually, discarded.
If you, hypothetically, finally identify the right one and it will be, unfortunately, just that which gave the most extreme results, you will find out that the mean of all models (that you originally considered as the best available representation of the correct results and thus as the most reliable basis for your previous decisions) was in fact very far from the truth. In yet other words, I do not see any reason for the assumption that all the assessed models cannot be biased in the same direction.
I suppose that this is the core of the objection raised by Keith Woollard. By the way, I think that the same objection (against the assumption that the mean from results provided by multiplicity of models may be more reliable than results of any individual model of the assessed set thereof) raises also James Hansen.
Greetings
Tomáš
Keith, this may be a repeat… I’m not sure if I hit the post comment button or not. But it is brief:
If we assume the models are created independently, and not part of a conspiracy, why are their outputs not “random”.
KW: the mere idea that an ensemble mean of models is somehow more accurate than any individual run is so far from the truth
BPL: Yeah, the idea of “averaging” or “showing error bars” is so anti-science.
BPL: Well, he is actually sort of “correct” in one way, If one takes the average of, say, 50 runs of a probabilistic but fairly accurate model it is quite likely that one individual run will be more “accurate” than the ensemble mean. True.
True, but where he goes wrong is that he simply cannot predict WHICH run will be so “accurate” in advance whereas the ensemble mean is more likely to be closer the observed values than single randomly chosen runs. This follows kinda’ directly from the Central Limit Theorem which is well known to all scientists who have to deal with stats and error bars which is practically every single actual scientist.
Sorry, I have been away. I realise some may not look this far back in the comments but will persevere anyway and address some of the comments.
To Figen….. “modelres like to do “ensemble means.” Basically trying to reduce the error bar through taking the mean of repeated calculations.”
– no, absolutely incorrect and you need to understand this if you are going to teach an understanding of modelling. The reason you have an ensemble of model outputs that differ is that they use different values in different algorithms. They may also use different initial values but that is a relatively insignificant variable. The differing parameterisations of the models ARE NOT random, they are chosen by humans and reflect the users ideas. Even if they were chosen randomly between two controlled endpoints that STILL does not give you an improved ensemble – all that is doing is giving you a sensitivity analysis – that is typically called Monte Carlo analysis – it is not done to improve accuracy. Noise needs to be (pseudo) random for averaging to be beneficial, For example 100 people measuring a piece of wood with the same tape measure would give a more reliably accurate answer than one person. But that is not to say that one of those people didn’t get a more accurate answer than the ensemble (in reply to BPL’s first comment)
Zebra, created independently is not random, nor is it even close.
jgfld… close and much of what you say is correct. However a couple of issues. I have already address your “50 runs….” when I mentioned sensitivity analysis. I Assume you are suggesting minor random changes to either some parameter or some initial value – again it isn’t improving accuracy, it is only showing how that change affects the output. I absolutely agree that we cannot predict which run is most correct. This is always a problem – life would be so much simpler if we knew the answer before we did the research :-) However CLT doesn’t apply here as the samples are not independent.
And your second comment BPL… Nothing wrong with averaging, Already mentioned about pseudo random noise and there are many situations were it helps.
BUT
calling this “showing error bars” is a huge problem. Multiple model outputs ARE NOT error bars and ensemble displays do not necessarily encompass the range of possibilities.
And just for the record, the reason I have used pseudo random rather than the more correct random is that noise is not really random, it is just signal we don’t want. In signal processing, we talk about noise being random if it has frequency far outside our desired signal. In weather modelling, we might consider noise to be small temperature measurement inaccuracies or highly spatially varying barometric pressures. I am unsure what may be classed as pseudo random noise in climate modelling.
Keith, you just illustrated the point I was trying to make; I used quotation marks around “not random” for a reason. In my eternal (and perhaps hopeless) quest to reduce the confusion in these discussion, I try to get people to use precise language… that can be by providing a personal definition before the fact or referencing an authoritative source.
What you are doing is using your personal definitions, without acknowledging it. And you are also ignoring basic scientific principles.
The 100 people who are measuring the piece of wood could have large variations in various relevant areas… eyesight, mental capacity, education, and so on. So the outcome is not that different from what the different models produce in that it is deterministic.
It’s OK to call something pseudo-random if you are applying the concept of “randomness” from the quantum world, but you don’t get to pick and choose that label in the classical world just where it happens to be convenient for the point you are trying to make.
The range of choices for how the models are constructed is constrained by a level of consensus about the physics. Either you accept that consensus, or you are suggesting that there might be more “entities” we don’t know about. Not good science.
Thought experiment: Let’s give 100 of Figen’s students the interactive software that allows them to set parameters and so on. Are you saying that would not produce a pseudo-random set of outputs?
Yes, zebra, I can see that we could class the “100 students” idea as random in the sense of noise cancellation. In fact I had a fairly similar long paragraph written, but deleted before posting in an effort to be somewhat concise.
Basically it was in response to BPl and the error bar issue. The way to build error bars on a model (assuming the model is correct) is to come up with an agreed range for all parameters and then Monte Carlo through all permutations (effectively what you have said) This will likely give a Gaussian suite of model runs that you could generate an ensemble mean for, and the extrema could be thought of as the error range. I am not going to pretend to know how big that range may be.
If you did this for all the models it would give a range of expected outputs.
We would be talking about significant compute requirements
Je trouve qu’il est trop facile de traiter de “sceptiques” et parfois même de “négationnistes”, des scientifiques compétents en matière de climat (qui comprend diverses sciences) parfois de renommées internationales, parfois prix Nobel de physique ou de chimie. Pour lire les commentaires dans les deux camps, je me suis aperçu que les “climato-réalistes” scientifiques, ont souvent proposé un débat scientifique publique, et que cela leur est refusé depuis au moins 25 ans. Pourquoi ? Des scientifiques tels Robert B. Laughlin, Kary Mullis, John Clauser, Richard Lindsen, William Happer, John Christy, Judith Curry, Steven Koonin, Nir Shaviv, Brigitte Lanoe, Vincent Courtillot, François Gervais, Alain Préat, Franco Prodi, Roy W. Spencer, William van Wijngaarden, et de nombreux autres, seraient-ils tous des “complotistes”, ou des gens qui manquent de connaissances en climatologie ?
[Response: En effet, ils s’en fichent de connaissances en climatologie par-ce qu’ils abhorrent les solutions. Il y a aucune argument scientifique qui reste respectable. – gavin]
Gavin.. “Indeed, they don’t care about knowledge of climatology because they abhor solutions. There is no scientific argument that remains respectable.”
What solutions have any credibility…can be accomplished without seriously damaging all economies?
Remember what took place during the pandemic travel lockdowns when emissions were rapidly lowered.
Ken Towe your comments are just such a ridiculous apples and oranges comparison. Of course stopping air travel in a matter of months and people stuck at home, will hurt the economy. Its a huge sudden shock. This is very different to scaling down use of ICE cars over a 20 year period while also simultaneously replacing them with EVs. If anything this boosts the economy.
Ken, I’m trying to get a better handle on what appears to be a persistent theme in your comments here. So, if you’re willing, may we put aside the climate change science discussion for a bit and focus on economics (a subject more inline with my prior education and background)?
Your premise of certain serious (long-lasting?) economical distress for nations (due to the transformation of several business/industrial segments currently responsible for significant GHG emissions) seems based on an underlying assumption that financial impacts to people, business and governments are neither foreseeable or manageable. Thus resulting in an unavoidable and unacceptable level and duration of economic pain for individuals, business, and governments.
Is that an accurate reading sir? If not, will you please expand? And, can you provide some evidence in support? I think I understand why you are using the COVID pandemic as a corollary, but if you can expand on why you think that’s an appropriate example in support of your position, that is helpful.
KT: What solutions have any credibility…can be accomplished without seriously damaging all economies?
BPL: Replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy and eliminating clear-cutting of forests. Electrification of transport and industry. New forms of cement that don’t give off carbon dioxide when they set. More mass transit. Insulating buildings. Stuff like that.
What a catastrophe of determined fake skeptics cited here. A little exploration might be in order, if anybody thinks any of these people are more credible than the vast majority of scientists giving their life’s work to understanding and exploration of reality.
https://www.desmog.com/climate-disinformation-database/
https://skepticalscience.com/
Financial connections for some of the above here, with a little work:
https://www.opensecrets.org/
And some arbitrary choices from the massive information available to those with an open mind:
The social anatomy of climate change denial in the United States – https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-50591-6
Looks like science, lies like propaganda. Inside a new wave of climate misinformation – https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2025/11/looks-like-science-lies-like-propaganda-inside-a-new-wave-of-climate-misinformation/
Bien dit à vous deux.
Jean-Pierre Demol: …Are scientists like Robert B. Laughlin, Kary Mullis, John Clauser, Richard Lindsen, William Happer, John Christy, Judith Curry, Steven Koonin, Nir Shaviv, Brigitte Lanoe, Vincent Courtillot, François Gervais, Alain Préat, Franco Prodi, Roy W. Spencer, William van Wijngaarden, and many others all “conspiracy theorists,” or simply people who lack knowledge of climatology?
What tone trolls conspicuously ignore is the documented investment of $billions in fossil fuel profits on manipulating the public’s attitudes toward climate change (https://open-research-europe.ec.europa.eu/articles/4-169/v2). It’s not fallacious to draw on prior knowledge of someone when addressing their nominally scientific arguments in public fora, when they persist in those arguments despite repeated rejection by their ostensible peers. Flaunting one’s scientific credentials does not confer innocence until proven guilty!
Having tracked climate-science denialism since 1988, I’m not familiar with all the names in that list, but I recognize several notorious pseudoskeptics, if not “conspiracy theorists” narrowly categorized. Given the reputations they each bring to their public criticisms of mainstream climate science, some have presumably acquired sufficient knowledge, i.e. “justified true belief”, for them to support their putative peers’ quantifiably lopsided consensus drawn from the same shared knowledge. Yet the soi-disant “skeptics'” claims have already been considered and repeatedly rejected by nearly all their alleged peers. Some of the names, e.g. Mullis (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1089/gen.39.09.01), are obviously unqualified to claim climate expertise, but evince the Dunning-Kruger Effect (whoo boy).
[Other listed names belabored on request. This is already too long, and I’m not done yet. MA]
Since the fundamentally collective nature of science virtually guarantees it’s the (pseudo)skeptics who are fooling themselves, their persistence is narcissistic at best. Genuine, “naive” skepticism is updated by verifiable evidence, and recognizes that people who study this stuff together for a living may know something the skeptic doesn’t. Assertive pseudoskepticism, OTOH, is unresponsive to reasoned, authoritative correction: “You cannot reason a person out of a position he did not reason himself into in the first place” (Swift).
In any case, the call for un débat scientifique publique is a transparent obstructionist ruse, exploiting popular ignorance of scientific culture and practice. The scientifically meta-literate know that the climate-science consensus is the outcome of 200 years of iterative debate among trained, mutually-disciplined professional skeptics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_skepticism) in scientific venues of record. One hopes genuine experts know better than to expose themselves in public to the unrestrained, dishonest rhetorical tactics of glib denialists (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini's_law).
I’ll belabor the following denialists on M. Demol’s list unasked:
Christy and Spencer are Evangelical Christians and members of the “Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation”. Spencer even signed the group’s published declaration of denial (“We deny…”) that their deity would allow “dangerous” climate change (https://cornwallalliance.org/evangelical-declaration-on-global-warming/). AFAICT, that’s a forthright repudiation of science’s commitment to follow the evidence where it leads. IOW, their empirically-based critics got nothin’!
Happer is an old cold warrior explicitly motivated by right-wing ideology, and is a favorite of Donald Trump’s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Happer). He’s a founder of the overtly right-wing CO2 coalition, which is at least partially funded by fossil-fuel profits (https://www.desmog.com/co2-coalition/). Consider the source, and follow the money!
Clauser won a Nobel Prize for Physics, and promptly joined Happer’s CO2 Coalition. His pseudoskeptical claims were examined by Gavin Schmidt two years ago (https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2023/11/clauser-ology-cloudy-with-a-chance-of-meatballs):
GS: At no point in his long and, by all accounts, successful, career has he ever published a paper on climate[1]. He has not penned an article, nor even a blog post or a tweet on the topic, and so any scientific basis for his opinions (if any) has been opaque… until recently. In the last few months he has given two interviews in which he goes into to detail about what he describes as a ‘missing element’ in climate science and what he imagines the consequences are for climate change. The first interview was for the Epoch Times (a far right-wing newspaper and media organization affiliated with Falun Gong).
And so on ad nauseum down the list. They all may have superficial “scientific” credentials, but their non-scientific agendas are discoverable.
Bonjour.
Vous en êtes encore à mentionner F. Gervais ou V. Courtillot… et pourquoi pas Claude Allègre pendant que vous y êtes !
Ces gens là n’ont jamais proposé aucun débat par publication interposé (le seul valable en science), mais uniquement un show par médiatique écrans interposés…
Et certains “scientifiques” que vous mentionnez sont également à l’origine du “magnifique” rapport sur le climat commandé par le ministère de l’énergie US…
Bref, il est dommage que vous ne répondiez jamais aux réponses…
“A Communications major minoring in Climate Science” is almost certainly learning very little science. Such a person would only be qualified to spread propaganda. Of course, that’s the real goal.
How many Communication majors, regardless of their minor, could derive Arrhenius’ estimate of climate sensitivity? I’m going with zero as a first-order estimate.
Sure JB, but deriving Arrhenius’ estimate of climate sensitivity is not one of the goals of a climate science minor. The over-arching goal of the minor is to provide the foundational principles of climate system science just enough for the students to learn that the scientific foundation of climate models is much more complicated than just statistical projections. If a communication major can understand the complexity of climate modeling and how errors propogate, they can inform the public of the scientific foundation to climate science – hence be and help create climate literate individuals.
The goal of a minor is not to create a climate scientist, but rather a climate literate person.
JB: Such a person would only be qualified to spread propaganda. Of course, that’s the real goal.
And how do you know this when the rest of us don’t? Are you saying we’re all dupes of Big Solar (Wind, Nuclear, Battery,…)? Well, if we can find RealClimate online, we can find everything you think you know. It turns out annual revenue from renewable energy investments is in the low $billions; Big Carbon’s pockets are much deeper: annual profits in the $trillions. You can look it up. They could buy us cheap! Are you sure you’re not the one who’s fooled?
Scratch a denier, expose a paranoid conspiracist.
Dr Mekik,
“Creating academic programs specifically focused on Climate System Science with a bend toward climate modeling is crucial at these times of swift and dangerous climate change. Lay people (the voting public) need to better understand the scientific basis for the causes and predictions related to anthropogenic climate change so humanity can make better informed decisions about mitigation efforts.”
I’m afraid I have to disagree with the concept. My input here has for a long time been oriented towards better communication with “the public” on the topic. And my primary experience in teaching (Physics) has not been with elite students at elite universities, but with the very diverse population of a community college. Some smart kids saving money, some fulfilling a requirement and enjoying a challenge, and many who even needed remedial classes on admission. But none likely to transfer to MIT.
By definition… “lay people”. And, I note that you mix in the idea of a Communications major minoring in Climate, which tells me that perhaps you have some sense of the inherent flaw in your suggestion.
As I often point out, and you seem to recognize to some extent, “lack of understanding” on climate is, at the most fundamental level, because of lack of education in the basics… not just of physics, but logic and scientific/quantitative reasoning in general. And of course, those who purvey misinformation are adept at exploiting this.
So perhaps you could expand on how you think immersion in the arcane universe of modelling, at the level necessary for studying climate, would be useful in engaging the current iteration of “my” long-ago students? I would think that that level of specialization would actually be a disadvantage.
I would suggest, rather, that you design courses for the hypothetical Communications major that deal with all the fundamental misconceptions as they apply to climate physics. And build some very game-like interactive models… they would be the “laboratory” component of the course.
In addition to zebra, 4 Nov 2025 at 8:37 AM,
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2025/11/raising-climate-literacy/#comment-841546
Dear Professor Mekik,
Based on my experience from my country Czech Republic, I support “zebra”s idea that a useful approach for improving climate science literacy among students could be analysing the most frequent misconceptions circulating in popular media and in the public. As it is, unfortunately, my experience that these misconceptions are sometimes even created and spread by teachers and climate change mitigation activists, it may not be easy but the more desirable may be the improvement in this direction.
To bring a specific example, I was quite surprised when leaders of certain institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic (that has “global change” in its title) asserted in a public debate that changes in latent heat flux cannot have any influence on global mean surface temperature (GMST) because the heat transported this way allegedly “remains in the climate system” and finally must return back to Earth surface. They asserted that their opponent (who taught that latent heat flux contributes to the circumstance that the present GMST is about 15 °C instead of about 30 °C that might be expected if it would have been regulated merely by radiative heat transport) is a pseudo-scientist because his view allegedly violates the law of energy conservation.
I think that it will be a significant achievement if better climate science education prevents further spreading such misinformation.
Best regards
Tomáš
Thank you!
Zebra,
I like your suggestions, I don’t know why you think we disagree or that my argument is flawed. There are simple versions of climate models, and even post-Covid, students who arrive in college with VERY POOR math skills are still teachable.
Math can be learned, fast too – it is just a matter of exposure and practice.
I am not sure what you mean by “arcane universe of modelling … would actually be a disadvantage.” I don’t think of modeling as arcane – there are levels of skill and compleity to it. In fact I am developing a course with colleagues in our college of computing where studnets will be writign code for “mini-models” focusedon one or two components in the figure in my article. Simple equations, simple codes. Like that.
Figen: students who arrive in college with VERY POOR math skills are still teachable.
Heh. When “new atheist” PZ Myers was asked by Edge.org to expound on the lofty question “What scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit”, he began by saying (https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11272):
As someone who just spent a term teaching freshman introductory biology, and will be doing it again in the coming months, I have to say that the first thing that leapt to my mind as an essential skill everyone should have was algebra.
Yes!
But sometimes students arrive without it. Gotta meet them where they are and educate them as much as possible.
While I was contracted to provide tech support at GSFC, my clients asked me to write a soil heat transfer subroutine (Fortran77), which I did drawing on my ecology and environmental science training. Simple equations, simple codes! Fun, and just challenging enough, but AFAIK my code never made it into my clients’ “global change” models. 45 years later, here I am, retired and spouting off on RC ;^D!
Figen, thanks for taking the time to reply to comments… a treat for the regulars here. OK, what I was trying to say:
My impression, which may have been incorrect, was that the goal was for graduates of your program to go out into the world and teach and communicate with regular folks, whether students filling a science or elective requirement at whatever level, the minor in climate, or journalists, or, in the worst possible case, politicians.
But someone who follows a course of study heavy on modeling is probably more invested in the math/computing aspect, rather than what I call the causal narrative, and/or practical things like the technologies of observation and measurement.
The thing is, people like to teach what they like to do, so such an individual is not necessarily suited to communicating with and engaging that Communications major. To keep it short, here’s an example of what I would consider an appropriate (and cheap) example of how to address the question of climate v weather:
-You have a physical lab consisting of a double pendulum, with a paper grid behind it.
-You have each member of a team make a video of the behavior at a particular initial displacement with their own phone, and create a written record of various displacements and loops and such.
-The team combines these and creates a qualitative description of the relationships.
-And this is important: You provide an existing interactive simulation for comparison and validation.
So, no difficult equations, no coding, not even a little algebra really needed. Just a visceral sense of how the details (the weather) relate to the global change in energy long term, and what the challenges of describing it might be like. (And it can’t hurt to let them do what they love… use their phones. Everyone has gotten an A in that prerequisite.)
But the emphasis as you proceed from there should be, as I said originally, dealing with the lack of generalized reasoning skills and knowledge, That’s where misconceptions and intentional misinformation do their damage. If you don’t understand/internalize Ockham’s Razor or Conservation of Energy, all the details don’t matter. But regular folks can learn those things, even if they aren’t very good at “math”.
Hi Zebra,
Your proposed way of addressing climate vs weather is were teaching only begins. But science is not about “visceral sense.” Our visceral senses are fallible and biased. And I cannot measure what stduents have learned with their visceral senses.
Math is an integral part of science. You can teach very foundationl principles without math, but all students end of doing with that is memorizing what the instructor presents. Math allows students to solve problems for themselves.
Theer are levels to math. A climate science minor isn’t required to take calculus, but they are required to take statistics and basic trigonometry and algebra.
I’m not a climate modeler by the way and when I say develop curriculum with a bend toward climate modeling, I am not suggesting our majors who graduate with a degree in climate science will be climate modelers. To become a climate modeler, you have to go to graduate school. What I am suggesting is undergraduates graduate with a deep understanding of all the components of climate models (like in my figure) so they can interpret the outputs accurately, scientifically. Climate modeling has a lot of computation but it aslo has a lot of physics and Earths science.
Lastly, one of my peeves is when people say something like they aren’t using the math they learned in school in life – trying to make it sound like they were taught unncessary things. The reality is using the math they were taught in their lives is a choice, and those who do not only lead more interesting lives but have a strong defense against developing dementia later in life, and their dementia is more manageable.
Figen,
Thanks for clarifying my misunderstanding about the design of your programs. It’s a worthwhile endeavor and I hope you are successful in implementing it.
Climate Science is a physical science focusing on the causes, direct effects, and changes in climate through all of Earth’s history including the Anthropocene (the “Human Era”) through computational models involving the chemistry and physics of climate change;
There is more to it than using climate models – analysis and interpretation of climate records is also a big part of climate science.
Of course, this is very true.
“Schematic illustrating fields and topics contributing to creation, modification, and usage of climate models. Contributing topics and fields are not exhaustive!”
I love that graphic. It shows that climate science is integrative and is not solely the esoteric domain of some myopically reductionist nutty professors. Education should definitely reflect that, IMO.
Back when I was a wide-eyed undergrad full of wonder, and before I became the jaded crank that I am today, I learned that there was a major in hydrology being offered at university. As it turned out, I couldn’t switch majors because it was for grad students only, because the department head had some rather snooty ideas about undergrads as a group. Peeves me to this day. Whatever. (BTW, I see now that the hydrology program has since been opened to undergrads.)
Anyway a science program that includes an undergrad major in climate scientists doesn’t seem like a bad idea to me.
In addition, college students in all majors are usually required to take electives in science. Why not a course or two of (forgive me) “science appreciation” that includes among other things, a heavy dose of meta-literacy at its core?
The overarching elephant in the room, however, is support:
Thank you and very good points!
Thanks Radge. The naive “lay” knowledge deficit is flooded with more-or-less sophisticated disinformation; unjustified false belief, if you will. Honest, garden-variety skepticism has to be nourished by flushing that mental space with justified true belief, including knowledge of the strategy and tactics of the biggest losers in collective decarbonization. Attacks on honest scientists must be seen to be motivated by politics and profit. How can that best be taught in college?
Excellent question. In my courses, I try to teach it through structured debates. Students say they learned more from debates than any other part of the course. :)
Thanks for your generous responses. Your class sounds like a success as you intended it, and I’m not casting shade on it. But are your students reading Gelbspan, Mayer, Oreskes, etc. on the disinformation campaign against collective intervention in fossil carbon producer profits? Does that come up in these debates?
Hmm, I meant to say throwing shade. I’m not doing that either!
I appreciate your comments Mal. Students are prett ingenious in finding resources, including those you mention because hefty grade points depend on it. And they are more aware of the disinformation campaigns than many posters on this blog, it seems. A solid generation of science-literate people are up and coming.
Just an addendum to my above comment. The hydrology department I referenced had two sides, a science emphasis and a policy/legal emphasis, perhaps easier to understand and implement since hardly anybody denies the technical, very present and critical, even existential, threats involving water.
And perhaps apropos of nothing in particular, it wasn’t so long ago that suggesting climatologists should spend more time communicating with the public, elicited barks and snarls as if someone was trying to steal their favorite bone. I would hope that there’s now a clearer understanding of where the real threats lie.
Thanks for stressing the need for quality climate literacy, beyond environmental education (see the article about the difference attached to this great post : https://www.linkedin.com/posts/david-wilgenbus-83bb43312_over-the-past-years-a-few-questions-keep-activity-7375912994985365504-nSv9/). This said, to address the key voters literacy point rightly made, the bulk of the effort should go in primary and secondary schools, not higher education. Organisations like the Office for Climate Education (https://oce.global), the Smithsonian (https://smithsoniansecondopinion.org/climate-change/teaching-resources-smithsonian-180964437/) or many others go a long way in providing quality scientific and pedagogical resources, training and capacity building for teachers and education institutions.
Internationally, the UN’s Greening Education Partnership (https://www.unesco.org/en/sustainable-development/education/greening-future), which groups more than 100 members states and 1700 stakeholders, aims at sharing best practice on climate literacy.
Last but not least, there is a vast literature in social sciences that demonstrated that knowing something is not enough to act upon it. There has to be a positive narrative that will lead to action (and votes !).
Thank you. All excellent points you are making. I agree.
Ken Towe your comments are just such a ridiculous apples and oranges comparison. Of course in the pandemic, stopping air travel in a matter of months and people stuck at home, will hurt the economy. Its a huge sudden shock. This is very different to scaling down use of ICE cars over a 20 year period while also simultaneously replacing them with EVs. If anything this boosts the economy.
Ending AGW is a political problem. It can’t be solved by doing science alone. The interests of fossil capital and the religious/totalitarian belief in endless, exponential growth stemming from the spontaneous illusion of enormous energy concentration in fossil fuels surely is the problem, because these societal forces have overwhelming power: they easily crush all scientific evidence by “flooding the zone with shit” as one well-known trumpian strategist has put it. Where he and his ilk stands politically both he and the world’s richest oligarch, Elon Musk have shown clearly by using the socalled “roman salute” invented around 1918/19 in the fascist movement started by Mussolini. This totalitarian political tendency stands for the dictatorship of big capital. Historically it’s roots are in the socalled “great war” which began in august 1914. It marked the transition of capitalism into *total imperial war* among the great powers about the control of the global resources, especially iron, coal, oil, land for agricultural production, and for manpower and markets. Since then this machine of total war has never stopped it’s expansion, and it has mainly been driven more and more by fossil fuels, especially oil. By now it has almost completely destroyed the power of democratic movements for mitigation of AGW, and mainly trough war propaganda and fascisation of societies by new forms of fascist and totalitarian propaganda, which began under the Reagan years after 1979/80, described in the book “Amusing ourselves to death” (1985).
The results concerning the attempts to stop AGW are very well described here: https://m.youtube.com/shorts/ED6wjkay5Es . In short: they have failed, they have been totally outmanouvered by the repressive “tolerance” of the “lukewarmers” combined with the enormous powers of the media industry, the military-industrial complexes and fossil capital. By now the AGW is racing past the 1,5 degree “goal” (guess who came up with the PR trick to call it a goal and not a limit…) towards the 2,0 degree “goal”, which will be passed in 2037 (in twelwe years from now), three degrees in 2060 and four degrees in 2083, according to this research: https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-6079807/v1 by Stefan Rahmstorf and Glen Foster. The CO2-level was already in 2020 the highest in at least 23 (twenty-three) million years https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/gsa/geology/article/48/9/888/586769/A-23-m-y-record-of-low-atmospheric-CO2 . These figures will of course not even be mentioned at the COP 30, they and the whole scientific mountain range of data documenting AGW are treated as Copernicus, Galilei etc. was treated by the pope back in the late medieval times: as if what they tell us came from the devil.
Mankind is being controlled by it’s psychopaths, more than ever, whith the same old tricks, just on an industrial scale. The medieval dream of “homunculus” is today “developed” into artificial “intelligence”: a gigantic lying machinery, driven mainly by – surprise, surprise – fossil fuels…. Trump is preparing for war against Venezuela, a nation which – just by pure accident of course – has more oil reserves than the whole Middle East.
It isn’t rocket science to see what’s going on. But most people chose not to. We’ll have to fight on, but to me it’s clear that only much more than a miracle can save mankind from itself.
What makes you think that it’s all up to democracies?
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/can-china-fill-vacuum-climate-leadership–ecmii-2025-11-04/
As previously reported, Chinese emissions are down in 2025–1% in the first half of the year. I’m very fond of the rule of law, and government by the people–but apparently you don’t need those things to manifest an aversion to climate-induced cultural suicide.
Addressing climate literacy in the US should happen as soon as kids can read, and be continued through graduation from 12th grade. New Jersey (which made history yesterday) did some good work there:
New Jersey requires climate change education. A year in [2023], here’s how it’s going – https://www.npr.org/2023/08/20/1191114786/new-jersey-requires-climate-change-education-a-year-in-heres-how-its-going
https://njclimateeducation.org/
https://www.nj.gov/education/climate/
Another excellent initiative is community gardens, particularly helpful in schools. I’ve also noticed that many schools have fields of solar panels (windmills would be good there too). This can attract youngsters who attend ‘shop’ and who are interested in engines and machines, and those who enjoy gardening, cooking, and the outdoors, along with getting their hands dirty. Some schools conduct field trips for things like measuring water quality.
— [change of subject]
Sometimes it’s hard not to get into the weeds in the endless argumentation about science and statistics which rage here. I am not qualified there, but have been science adjacent in a variety of roles, sometimes at the highest level (multiple Nobelists) since early childhood, so perforce have educated myself about science denial and the personalities and rationalisms of fake skepticism, and the temptation to fine tune at the expense of larger views. I know a lot about physicists, but as a math challenged individual cannot respond to those who attack me personally by reason of my lack of skills. I also love a good turn of phrase, and apologize if sometimes it gets a little too sharp. It’s hard not to be impatient with those who use their skills to divert and distract, especially those who cherry pick authorities whose motives and/or work are deeply suspect.
Here at RealClimate, remember our leaders have been at the point of the spear in the ‘wars’. This is a good list: https://ossfoundation.org/projects/environment/global-warming/myths/climategate/
I won’t dig out the links, but note that Mike Mann & others not named at this link were then part of the group. This forms one reason for my claim that Mann and Hansen are more in agreement than not:
– 2010/11 RealClimate – One Year Later
– 2010/07 EPA’s Basis for Denial of Petitions
– 2010/07 RealClimate – The Muir Russell report (online version)
– 2010/07 RealClimate – The Muir Russell report PDF
– 2010/06/04 RealClimate – Penn State Reports
– 2010/04/14 RealClimate – Second CRU inquiry reports (The Oxburgh Report)
– 2010/04/30 RealClimate – First CRU inquiry report released
– 2010/02/16 RealClimate – whatevergate/
– 2010/02/03 ESSC – Michael Mann’s statement on findings
– 2009/12/18 RealClimate – More Independent Views: Myles Allen and Ben Santer
– 2009/12/18 RealClimate – Kim Cobb’s View – Georgia Tech
– 2009/12/18 RealClimate – Jim Hansen’s Opinion on the Temperature Data
– 2009/12/15 Realclimate – Are the CRU Data suspect – An Objective Assessment
– 2009/12/02 RealClimate – The CRU Hack More Context
– 2009/11/23 RealClimate – The CRU Hack Context
– 2009/11/20 RealClimate – The CRU Hack
Note: the OSS links to each of these items at the end of the article (repeat: https://ossfoundation.org/projects/environment/global-warming/myths/climategate/
1. Early education promo here was not meant to denigrate higher education needs.
2. Spoke with windmill expert, turns out that is more problematic in terms of engineering, stress, size, wind (complex at ground level) and siting for smaller institutions. He suggested bigger sites. I had a little fun dreaming of windmills at stadiums and sports venues (what a hope).
I continue to recommend following the weather for those who can’t or won’t do the practical physics etc. Here’s my regular, where Jeff Masters, Bob Henson, and others talk about and collect data and scientific insights along with their primary focus on extreme weather, especially tropical.
https://yaleclimateconnections.org/topic/eye-on-the-storm/
Also, Climate Central which has developed support for attribution science and hired some of the best fires from the Trump administration (Zack Labe comes to mind, but he’s not the only one):
https://www.climatecentral.org/attribution-science
in Re to Susan Anderson, 5 Nov 2025 at 3:15 PM,
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2025/11/raising-climate-literacy/#comment-841669
Dear Susan,
I have sought for the US climate literacy standards / requirements, and found one 18-page document from the year 2009
https://cdn.oceanservice.noaa.gov/oceanserviceprod/education/literacy/climate-literacy-2009.pdf
and one 52-page document from the year 2024
https://lunacreates.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Climate-Literacy-Guide.pdf
It is an interesting comparison. From my point of view, the 2024 version comprises basically the same information as regards climate science as the 2009 document, only formulated in a more authoritative tone. While the 2009 document first only mildly admits that the anthropogenic climate change is caused by “greenhouse gas emissions and land use” and only in detailed explanations reveals that the land use anyway represents GHG emissions, the newer document from the very start strictly excludes any doubt that the present climate change could have any other cause than anthropogenic emissions of non-condensing greenhouse gases.
It is therefore quite remarkable that the 2024 version additionally asserts, for whatever reason, that its teaching is also in accordance with an “indigenous knowledge”.
Honestly, if some indigenous people contributed by their knowledge to this educational material, I would have expected rather something more holistic, like “although climate science has not studied these relationships yet, we believe that perturbations inflicted by human activities to natural ecosystems might have also somehow contributed to the observed climate change.”
Instead, the volume treats the poor ecosystems solely as victims of the damages caused by the climate change itself, without any other human contribution.
In a summary, the teaching of the 2024 document is very straightforward:
Stop anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases and restore their atmospheric concentrations back to their pre-industrial levels as soon as possible – you will save both the mankind as well as the nature.
Remarkable is also the rich artistic accompaniment of the volume that strongly resembles the Watchtower magazine. I really enjoyed smart descriptions of the pictures, like:
“Ecogenia, the first NGO in Greece to promote sustainability through civic service, is working to mobilize young people to accelerate localized climate action. Inspired in part by AmeriCorps, collaboration with the California Conservation Corps enabled both programs to build capacity for increased climate action.”
If this material will serve as the basis for climate literacy education, good luck with it.
Greetings
Tomáš
TK: I was featuring the state of New Jersey in a plea for public education in younger people’s education. You’re right, our political masters have refused to have real national standards for literacy (not just about climate); in fact, in red states they are outlawing fact- and science-based education.
I was taking a break from this truly bad situation to point up a positive example.
Thank you again Tomas for your incisive remarks.
The attention and framing has definitely shifted from place to planet. Where prior to 1992 what passed for so-called environmentalism was largely ecological and local: focused on land, water, species, and care. Now, as we know, the subject has been re-conceived as astrophysical and statistical – emphasizing radiative forcing and global mean temperature targets over community biophysical function and realclimates. In that transition, conservation stewardship lost its political visibility. Where it persists, such initiatives are now rebranded as “climate adaptation” in a frame engineered to attract funding. This climate adaptation theme is further minimized in favor of incentives that increasingly follow carbon metrics (mitigation theme), not ecological and humanitarian outcomes. Such programs target carbon counting over landscape integrity, soil fertility, or catchment stability, as if somehow such things passively fall into place. Perverse incentives rebrand conservation stewardship as carbon optimization schemes, displacing and absorbing local stewardship institutions into super-ministries of climate and all the nasty politics and flip-flopping that follow. Funding agencies require a “climate relevance” for grants and thus sideline projects lacking clear carbon accounting. Environmental teaching programs subordinate stewardship expertise to climate communication or carbon counting specialists. Biosystems are reduced to levers that regulate global atmospheric chemistry; functional ecologies are reduced to a carbon instrument; and numerical models erode older traditions of moral and relational responsibility to realplaces. There can be little dispute that super-ministries and transnational OECD and World Bank spending programs show huge rise in climate-labelled funding, while non climate-branded stewardship budgets in decline in real terms. The paradox is ever more money, teaching, and rhetoric dedicated for planet-saving, yet diminishing resources and education, and even active resistance towards the foundational principles that actually sustain our communities.
in Re to JCM, 7 Nov 2025 at 2:11 PM,
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2025/11/raising-climate-literacy/#comment-841778
Hallo JCM,
I think that in efforts to protect and/or restore landscape integrity, soil fertility or catchment stability, conservationists like you must adapt to the mindset of the recipient (public / politicians / officials).
I think that it could be perhaps, somewhat paradoxically, easier with Trumpists, because they might be willing to abandon carbon counting as an unnecessary burden (and perhaps even enjoy it). If so, all you need may be convincing them also that strong healthy ecosystems will make America great again.
Your task may be tougher with progressives. I am quite afraid that they will insist in carbon counting under any circumstances. With them, your chance may perhaps consist in emphasizing that their preferred goal (carbon annihilation through carbon counting) is already done (“INHERENTLY COMPRISED”) in your stewardship projects, because they arise from the INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE (that nature is our mother). You only focus more (than ever before) on this EQUALLY IMPORTANT (so far somewhat neglected but now commendably promoted) aspect of their policy.
The same reality may look very different when observed from different angles :-)
Greetings
Tomáš
Greetings Tomáš. You stated “l think that it could be perhaps, somewhat paradoxically, easier with Trumpists, because they might be willing to abandon carbon counting as an unnecessary burden (and perhaps even enjoy it). If so, all you need may be convincing them also that strong healthy ecosystems will make America great again.”
I appreciate that’s your opinion. You’re just flat wrong and a bit naive about the motivations that drive MAGA . I live in a very pro-MAGA district, in a state that’s overall even more MAGA. I’m a lifelong Republican. I might not know that much, but I know my party and my nstate. Conservatives like me who respect the immense contributions of, and continued need for robust science, and who have given much time, money and even sweat working on protection and restoration projects thru the years are not exactly in ascendency these days.
The very real need for increased focus and new/increased action on healthy ecosystems, on AGW mitigation/adaptation, on land use, on protection of threatened/endangered animals and plants, etc. aren’t just difficult to bring about currently, they’re essentially impossible until Trump is gone from the scene. At least at larger scales.
We are trying to save what has not already been scaled down, postponed, or eliminated. Even on energy projects, almost every utility-scale renewable project that I am aware of that is not already in progress is either being held up in permitting hell by Trump’s folks, or has been postponed indefinitely (a couple have already just been outright cancelled).
Education of our state’s children is one area that we may be able to make some progress on in the areas I outlined. That’s why I was so pleased to read Figen’s commentary. She’s given me some things to consider. And that’s why I always read JCM’s and your comments, I find them usually interesting and sometimes instructive.
As I’m not a liberal, I will leave your comments about them to others.
in Re to David, 9 Nov 2025 at 10:35 PM,
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2025/11/raising-climate-literacy/#comment-841849
Hallo David,
Thank you very much for your kind feedback and for correcting my naivety.
Hiigh appreciation to your continuing efforts.
Greetings
Tomáš
In my estimation, most our all of these objections from the professional denialists are tempest in a teapot things. Something wasn’t worded perfectly, wasn’t construed in a way that they liked, a minor demonstrable error occurred and they make a huge TEMPEST out of them! Insisting that it throws the whole of climate science into question!
I looked it up, among the names this strategy is called, I like this one, hypercritical nitpicking.
Anyway. Whatever.
Let’s recap:
I’m told by Mal that I’m an “obstructionist” because I refuse to see the catastrophe that is all around us despite painfully obvious literature stating otherwise.
I’m told by Atomsk that while humans may be flourishing, the only reason why is the pesky variable of technology and adaptation, otherwise we’d be having a catastrophe.
I’m told by Barton to “stuff it” because I accurately pointed out the fact that ad hominem plays an oversized role in a blog that’s supposed to encourage scientific discussion.
I’m told by Atomsk that I’m ideologically motivated, and that my reasoning is poor because I noticed a trend between global warming and human flourishing, thus negating the entire purpose of the IPCC, an organization that has been established to derive meaning from historical trends using detection and emergence.
I’m told by Ray that I don’t know how to interpret data in light of heat related deaths decreasing over time, by providing links to several studies showing just that.
I’m told by Gavin that that I’m “playing games” and making a “dumb argument” by pointing out that the heat mortality curve makes it look like there is net increase mortality from heat after negating for cold related deaths, despite evidence to the contrary (hint: it’s about 9:1 cold:heat deaths in multiple studies Gavin).
See: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736%2814%2962114-0/fulltext?utm
See: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196%2825%2900054-3/fulltext?utm
See: https://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lanplh/PIIS2542-5196%2821%2900081-4.pdf?utm_source
Mal and Atomsk don’t realize that are at odds with each other. It sounds like Mal and Atomsk need to have a debate on whether we are catastrophic right now or adapting to the catastrophe. For me the answer is simple: At what point in time would I like to live in? 1700’s? 1800’s? Nah, I’ll take right now.
As I have stated before, and will state again, I am merely trying to help you all gain perspective. Public opinion is going against you for reasons I have listed previously. You can choose to stick your head in the sand and continue to tell us to “stuff it”, or you can listen to professionals and experts outside your climate community who are trying to help you from potential embarrassment. I have no ill will toward anyone here, but I’m also experienced and have doctoral level expertise in these areas as a physician studying climate for almost 20 years. The momentum is shifting away from climate alarmism. I’m very sorry.
The people helping us ‘gain perspective’ are not those trying to derail the purpose of RealClimate, which is to inform and educate. An assumption of false superiority does not give anyone in this comment section authority to sit on high and pass judgment on real science and real reality, which is obvious and all around us. Unfortunately, our moderators are far too tolerant of these efforts.
The adamantine conviction that climate reality and science are either not real or dishonest has a certain zombie quality. Either that, or it is a deliberate effort to derail genuine discussions with honest visitors.
Unfortunately, this kind of trolling feeds on argument. It should be given the silent treatment.
This is RealClimate, not fake skeptic central. Asked and answered …
”Re: I’m told by Atomsk that while humans may be flourishing, the only reason why is the pesky variable of technology and adaptation, otherwise we’d be having a catastrophe.”
I didn’t say that. In fact, I called you on your ‘catastrophic AGW’ straw man. I don’t use terms like ‘catastrophe’ since denialists and contrarians like you abuse those terms. For example, by creating a false dichotomy between catastrophe vs. your position. That’s as ridiculous as the tobacco industry claiming that unless smoking meets their vague, flexible definition of ‘catastrophe’, then they’re right in their optimistic view on smoking’s effects. This is a great example of how you willfully and disingenuously misrepresent what people say to suit your ideological agenda.
Re: “I’m told by Atomsk that I’m ideologically motivated, and that my reasoning is poor because I noticed a trend between global warming and human flourishing, thus negating the entire purpose of the IPCC, an organization that has been established to derive meaning from historical trends using detection and emergence.”
Another disingenuous misrepresentation. I didn’t even mention the IPCC. What I said is that you distort attribution by doing things like conflating attribution with detection and emergence, not controlling for time-varying confounders, etc. It’s the same reasoning other science denialists use when they want to distort causal attribution to suit their ideological agenda. For instance, vaccine denialists who oppose vaccine mandates by distorting causal attribution of mortality benefits to vaccination. You’re distorting attribution in climate science to suit your policy preferences.
Try honestly representing what people say, for once.
Re: “For me the answer is simple: At what point in time would I like to live in? 1700’s? 1800’s? Nah, I’ll take right now.”
Another great illustration of your ideologically-motivated, poor reasoning. Causal attribution is a scientific question, not a question of personal preference about when one would want to live. But since you’re so driven by your policy preferences, you conflate those preferences with science. It’s like an anti-vaxxer so opposed to living under vaccine mandates that they conflate that with the scientific question of what effects vaccines cause. Sorry, but I’m not like you nor like vaccine denialists. When I would like to live is irrelevant to isolating the causal impact of anthropogenic climate change, just like whether I want to live under vaccine mandates is irrelevant to isolating the causal impact of vaccines.
Re: “Public opinion is going against you for reasons I have listed previously. ”
Baseless claim as empty as vaccine denialists saying the public is turning against immunologists, epidemiologists, physicians, etc. That is irrelevant to the evidence on vaccine’s impacts, just as your comment is irrelevant to the evidence on anthropogenic climate change. Non-expert’s views are not a barometer of accuracy in science. Again, as an immunologist, I can say that if you took the causal reasoning you apply to climate science and used it in clinical science, then you would not have gotten through medical school. Also, your tone trolling and concern trolling are still not working.
Re: “I’m told by Gavin that that I’m “playing games” and making a “dumb argument” by pointing out that the heat mortality curve makes it look like there is net increase mortality from heat after negating for cold related deaths, despite evidence to the contrary (hint: it’s about 9:1 cold:heat deaths in multiple studies Gavin).”
You don’t link back to what was originally said since that makes it easier for you to willfully misrepresent it. The point was that the causal impact from warming is about the net change in heat-related and cold-related deaths, not the gross amount of heat-related deaths relative to cold-related deaths.
So your position is as ridiculous as refusing to admit that x is greater than 0 in the following equation, because you’re focused on 90 being greater than 10:
x = (88 – 90) + (13 – 10)
Scott: “ the net increase mortality from heat after negating for cold related deaths, despite evidence to the contrary (hint: it’s about 9:1 cold:heat deaths:
See: https://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lanplh/PIIS2542-5196%2821%2900081-4.pdf?utm_source
Aaa, the famous paper 2021La ncet paper by Qi Zhao and … 80+ (?) authors, heavily promoted by Lomborg and his denier possie, as a proof the AGW is GOOD for us ….
Have you read your own source, Scott? If yes then you MUST KNOW HOW how “credible” are their methods and therefore that “9:1 cold:heat deaths”, right?
If, on the other, you don’t read your sources and just promote the lies fed to you by other deniers, then you have come to the right place – here on RC we have already covered the credibility of your source and its results before – e.g. in July 2023 in response your denier colleague Thomas W. Fuller
and then to some fellow named … “Scott” a month later:
Piotr 6 Aug 2023 at 9:31 PM
Since neither Thomas W. Fuller or that “Scott” replied to the critique of their source – let me quote some of these answers:
=== thread “Back to basics” 2023 =====
Scott: 1 Aug 2023 at 6:14 PM “Just getting started… ”
Piotr: Maybe before you just getting started, you check your sources and ask yourself about their methods, namely:
– do they CONTROL for non climatic factors,
– their correlations are not spurious
– that they offer plausible MECHANISM for the cause and effect
The devil of the epidemiological studies is in their methodology – we have discussed it In this very thread – eg. my post from July 12 2023 https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2023/07/back-to-basics/#comment-813103
on the infamous Lancet paper that became the cause célèbre of the climate deniers, who used it after Lomborg to “prove” that global warming saves lives!
=== Lancet Planet Health 2021;5: 415–25 ===
The paper models the excess mortality data from 2000-2019: cold causing =8.52% excess death, and heat causing =0.92%. However, I question how they assigned the excess deaths to cold or heat, and how they failed to control for the non-climatic confounding factors.
In that study, Qi Zhao et al. didn’t identify the heat or cold-related death based on any etiology of diseases – instead they simply …. fitted the temperature changes against the local mortality!
By this logic, if a war broke in the country – they would attribute the resulting deaths to …. cold or heat.
As result, they got some very “interesting results: for Eastern Europe, which had the lowest mean temperatures out of all regions in the study – and with winters that famously defeated both Napoleon and Hitler – that Lancet study calculated …. HEAT-associated-mortality in this region to be …. 5 TIMES the GLOBAL AVERAGE!
Conversely, the subSaharan Africa, with its oppressive heat and humidity – is according to our authors – a poster boy for deaths from … COLD – it has DOUBLE the global average for deaths from COLD. The Sub-Saharan Africa ! ;-) Yet such ABSURD results were not …. a problem for the author and not a peep on that from Lomborg, Thomas W. Fuller nor “Scott” – quite the opposite, they STILL present the results of that methodology as an unquestionable proof of their claims even after those problems have been shown to them.
So I guess these are SELECTIVE SKEPTICS – they are skeptical of ONLY those claims that run counter to their existing beliefs or theories. Those that in their mind confirm their beliefs – they swallow uncritically, hook, line, and sinker.
Ladies and Gentlemen – Thomas W. Fuller, Scott and Bjorn Lomborg!
As usual, we have an entertaining comment section with lots of sarcasm, insults, name calling, etc, starting with the first reply to the first comment! BWAHAHAHAHA!
How many Climate Science degrees do we need in the USA? I don’t see the need for very many. More people with brains should be working on actual solutions to AGW, don’t ya think?
It is also my opinion, that NOBODY should be awarded a degree in Climate Science if they cannot do a hand calculation, using basic thermal radiation principles, showing the warming that a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere would produce. The calculation should include how each major layer of the atmosphere is impacted, and how each layer impacts the final result and should show all of the math involved. I guess I’ll have to do it myself one of these days and post it online so I can FINALLY get my Nobel Prize in Climate Science, that I will of course give credit for to President Trump, just like the recent Nobel Peace Prize recipient did. Was that cool or what? I think if this calculation were posted on the internet for all to see, it would make a meaningful impact on the number of people who believe AGW is real. That’s what you want, right?
FYI, Bill Gates, one of the smartest guys around, says don’t get too bent out of shape over climate change. Two sources on the same story – pick the source you like the most:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/bill-gates-claims-climate-change-won-t-destroy-humanity-after-all/ar-AA1Pn0Eu
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/28/bill-gates-climate-crisis-pivot
On Bill Gates, this is more useful.
Scientists criticize ‘straw man’ arguments in Bill Gates climate memo. Tech billionaire relying on ‘false binary’ with call to focus less on emissions and more on aid for poor
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/nov/06/bill-gates-climate-memo
Bill Gates made a lot of money being smart about some things. That does not make him (or Lomborg) credible on climate science or climate reality. Pick your successful billionaire is not a winning strategy for our future.
Look around you. Things are getting very real.
Hi Mr. Know it All,
You say “It is also my opinion, that NOBODY should be awarded a degree in Climate Science if they cannot do a hand calculation, using basic thermal radiation principles, showing the warming that a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere would produce. ”
I could not agree with you more, and we do not award degrees to folks who can’t do that.
Yes Bill Gates has interesting ideas that I think need to be taken seriously if we are serious about mitigating climate change. It is not all black and white, BUT climate change has to be mitigated and fast. There’s no way around that for our colective well being and our futures.
I recently served as a panelist on the environmental and climatological hazards of AI. Like all things in life it isn’t all one thing. But what I learned in prepping for the panel discussion is less greenhouse gases are emitted using ChatGPT to write an essay than are emitted preparing and eating a hamburger.
Thank you for the reply! Do you have a link where can I see that hand calculation online?
I reviewed the course syllabus:
https://www.gvsu.edu/catalog/2025-2026/program/climate-science-major.htm
I would think for a BS in Climate Science you’d want a course specifically on Heat and Mass Transfer. For that, I think you would need a 3rd semester of Calculus, and a semester of Differential Equations. Might want a course in Thermodynamics as well.
I don’t post calculations and similar things online because then stduents find them. We are fighting AI as it is.
While I personally agree with your suggestions of thermydynamics and more math, we are restricted by how many credits a major can be. So we chose to go in a borad multidiciplinary way and give enough math and phycis foundation so that students will eb prepared to take the courses you mention in graduate school.
I wish we could ignore Bill Gates on the climate crisis. But he’s a billionaire, so we can’t. Money talks – and his essay denouncing ‘near-term emissions goals’ at Cop30 mostly argues the case for letting the ultra-rich off the hook – https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/nov/08/bill-gates-climate-crisis-billionaire-essay-cop30
Also, fwiw, please be aware that Lomborg makes a loooot of money with his shtick.
Hi Susan. I wasn’t previously aware (or forgot) about the financial connection between Gates and Lomborg that you and others have talked about. Makes sense though. Oh fyi, I didn’t see that you had already posted the bit in the Guardian already in this thread (just wrote a comment about it in the Nov UV where I focused on and linked to the study Monbiot discussed.
David et al. – I was not implying a direct financial connection (of which I was unaware), only the overall income Lomborg derives from telling wealthy people what they want to hear, without respect for the truth. We’ll all get rich and fix it later is convenient but that does not make it true. Many other fake skeptics have financial ties, some of them quite direct, to big fossil and/or related profitable activities.
Susan, I didn’t say you were implying a direct financial connection. Your comment about Lomborg’s “shtick” income simply perked my curiosity, so I went digging and found essentially what Secular Animist did.
Susan Anderson wrote: “I wish we could ignore Bill Gates on the climate crisis. But he’s a billionaire, so we can’t … please be aware that Lomborg makes a loooot of money with his shtick”
Gates has funded Lomborg’s denialist “think tank” for years, to the tune of $3.5 MILLION …. so it is hardly suprising that Gates’ memo regurgitates Lomborgh’s shtick.
“Bill Gates’ charity has donated more than $3.5 million to a think tank run by the Danish academic and climate crisis denier Bjørn Lomborg … donations went to the Copenhagen Consensus Center, which … was created by Lomborg, who for years has argued in op-eds, lectures, and broadcast media that there are more important global issues to prioritize than climate change … Those views align closely with a controversial memo Gates recently published …”
https://www.desmog.com/2025/11/05/bill-gates-donated-climate-denier-bjorn-lomborg-copenhagen-consensus-center/
SA: Thanks for these specifics!
Hi Scott. I’m slow. I couldn’t figure out why you linked to those studies. I was going to ask you but I have a dog and she sent it before I was ready. :^/
Are you possibly implying (conflating) the idea that heat-related deaths are lower than they otherwise would have been (if some of us didn’t have adaptation measures in place) with the actual occurrence of those heating events? Saying that one (lower mortality) means the other (therefore accelerating heating events aren’t happening – i.e. climate change science is wrong)?
If so, you are aware that there’s oodles of evidence that the earth is warming, right? It’s just that we’re getting better at adapting to it. Your own links say that.
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2025/11/raising-climate-literacy/#comment-841774
Even you say that (if I understand you correctly) when you speak of the “confounding variable of adaptation.”
I mention it when I say, “ That’s adaptation. But it skews the data.”
Because heat deaths are lower does not mean that the temperatures are falling.
Anyway, we as humans can adapt, but that leaves out the rest of the planet, as I’ve said before. There’s 10,000,000 or so species on this planet, not just one.
Hi Ron,
This will be my last comment for now. Yes, the earth is warming. And yes, heat deaths are down because of adaptation and mitigation (e.g. air conditioners). And yes, more heat deaths would be happening without air conditioners.
You might want to remind your colleagues that the Zhao study is the poster child for the WHO statement regarding heat deaths.
See here: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/climate-change-heat-and-health.
Scroll to the bottom and you’ll see it. Also if you click the lancet countdown link, they refer to it as well.
Ah, the irony is so rich….for your colleagues anyway.
But you’re different. For that, thank you.
Signing off…
Scott: – “This will be my last comment for now.”
Oh dear, what a pity you weren’t able to respond to my comments at:
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2025/11/raising-climate-literacy/#comment-841708
Are my comments just too inconvenient for you to respond to?
Scott: – “Yes, the earth is warming. And yes, heat deaths are down because of adaptation and mitigation (e.g. air conditioners).”
Billions of people will not have access to affordable, effective air conditioners. Those many people will have only two choices:
1. Move to a cooler location; or
2. Stay and risk death due to increasingly more frequent lethal heat conditions.
I’d suggest the crops and livestock in the fields also won’t be air conditioned. Rising heat impacts food security by directly harming crops and livestock, disrupting supply chains, reducing farm worker productivity, and exacerbating existing inequalities. This leads to lower crop yields, higher food prices, and increased hunger, particularly for vulnerable populations.
How would one adapt to perhaps not having enough food to eat?
I get it, but
1) the WHO also cites other works that are non-Zhao which arrive at qualitatively the same conclusions as Zhao, namely that higher ambient (especially heat) temperatures are linked to increased mortality.
2) The temporal period Zhao covers is 2000-2019. But many of the climate-change-related trends since then are more recent or extending into the 2020s and find the same thing.
Thank you though for the kind words offered. Take care.
Or are you saying that no matter how high the temperatures get we humans can adapt to it, at least in the first world, (of course there’s the 3rd world to consider too, unless we’re fine with suffering in that quarter).
So the strategy seems to be to experimentally force the whole world to endure hotter conditions just so we can prolong ONE obsolete industry titan, its CEOs and executives? How selfish and short-sighted is that?
Ron R.: Anyway, we as humans can adapt, but that leaves out the rest of the planet, as I’ve said before. There’s 10,000,000 or so species on this planet, not just one.
Thanks, Ron. As climate realists are well aware, “adaptation” to climate change is going on right now: those people, cities, countries, and species that have the resources are adapting by repairing, rebuilding, and strengthening, or by abandoning and rebuilding elsewhere; the less adaptable are getting by on luck and the capricious mercy of the better-adapted; while those with the least capacity to adapt are simply dying.
Assuming Scott isn’t being paid by some carbon-capitalist sucker just to taunt us without restraint, that’s what makes him a lukewarmer: as long as he and the people he cares about are seemingly unaffected, the cost of AGW to anyone else, human or not, doesn’t register. He wants to keep on socializing his private emissions costs as he always has, happy to let people he’s never met pay with their homes and lives. He’s already told us he doesn’t want to see any freakin’ data: anyone calling for decarbonization by collective intervention in the otherwise-free energy market is trying to make him pay instead, and must have a broader political agenda. Of course he’s going to obfuscate, obstruct, and deny!
IOW, he’s a stereotypical lukewarmist disinformer. But what drives singly-named Scott to baldly challenge the epistemically unbeaten peer community of international climate science, as represented by RC and TCB? It’s presumably in response to feeling threatened, but AFAICT, it’s also a narcissistic personality thing, with a large dose of illusory superiority (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_superiority). Again, personalities are like anuses: everybody’s got one, but it’s hard to see our own without a good mirror! IMO, Scott’s personality is the source of his Dunning-Kruger affliction: it’s a metacognitive-awareness deficit.
Again assuming Scott’s a real-life volunteer obstructionist, that’s about as far as I’ll go with amateur psychologizing. Falling back on Biblical metaphor: if Scott is David the shepherd boy, then his sling casts no deadly stones, and climate scientists are a whole army of Goliaths. Or how about the Black Knight (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKhEw7nD9C4)? “None shall pass!”
Lastly, the words of Jerry Taylor, ex-professional Libertarian disinformer, obtain yet again (https://theintercept.com/2017/04/28/how-a-professional-climate-change-denier-discovered-the-lies-and-decided-to-fight-for-science/):
Just because the costs and the benefits are more or less going to be a wash, he [Taylor’s friend Jonathan Adler] said, that doesn’t mean that the losers in climate change are just going to have to suck it up so Exxon and Koch Industries can make a good chunk of money.
A word to the wise, no?
Mal, yeah, it’s simple AFAIC. Once again, we need both adaptation (thanks Exxon and Koch brothers!)and mitigation. We need to actually fix the problem or it’s just going to get worse. To expect the whole world to just adapt so that a few CEOs, executives and shareholders can make a killing now is really too much.
This is the only living planet in the entire universe that we know of, or at least are ever likely to travel to. For us, there is no Planet B.
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71UaVEf3nWL.jpg
As the late Carl Sagan said in Pale Blue Dot
“The earth is where we make our stand”
I realized this is probably the best forum to ask for help with this, from our hosts and contributors. I am trying to use EdGCM or EzGCM in my class but I can’t access it. My email requests are going unanswered. Does anyone have any advice? I need for a course I am teaching.
Thanks!
As soon as I read the title of this post — “Raising climate literacy” — I knew that the comment thread would be VERY LONG and COMPLETELY DOMINATED by DENIALIST TROLLS.
And so it is.
In just this one comment thread, the DENIALIST TROLLS have “contributed” a greater volume of “content” to this site than all the scientists who run the site have published in a year.
It’s sad.
Hi Secular Animist,
You make a great point. I talk to a lot of confused students and their parents about climate change; and my fair share of denialists in real life. Some are genuinely uneducated and after some conversation can at least accept there is some science behind the projections that they need to learn about, and it is like talking to your doctor.
Sure at the end of the day it is your body which you have been living with your whole life and the decisions are yours to make, but the doc has scientific insights about your liver or whatever it is that can help you make the best decisions for yourself.
I take care of my elderly mom, and she has had physicians who understood her very little and kept telling me statistics, and she has had physicians who are what I would call true scientists who examined her carefully and found the right course of action for her specific conditions and preferences. My point is I learned from both types of physicians and although they can’t know mom the way I do, I don’t know squat about medicine. Their experience with geriatric care far surpasses mine. I have one mom I am caring for. They have 1000s of patients and medical science under their belts.
Climate Sci is like that too. You need to be educated in it at least a little to ask the right questions and tell apart pseudoscience from real science. You need to understand that your own cursory knowledge about climate modeling is just not enough. Most denialists can accept this actually.
But the propaganda driven denialists are different. They have an agenda, not just genuine curiosity and skepticism. So that makes me wonder, what outcome they want?
Like how do I benefit from determinedly NOT believing my mom’s doc?
Even oil companies are now investing in renewable energy and hiring climate scientists. What is all the denialist fighting about? Who benefits from it?
Figen: Even oil companies are now investing in renewable energy and hiring climate scientists. What is all the denialist fighting about? Who benefits from it?
While your questions may be rhetorical, the answers come from investigative journalists, historians of science and increasingly from social scientists: see Disinformation as an obstructionist strategy in climate change mitigation: a review of the scientific literature for a systemic understanding of the phenomenon (https://open-research-europe.ec.europa.eu/articles/4-169/v2). Who benefits?
– individual, family and corporate FF producers and investors, whom I’m calling “carbon capitalists”, i.e. those who’ve profited beyond all historical dreams of avarice by keeping the social cost of transferring all that geologic carbon to the atmosphere out of their accounting, and wish to continue doing so. Their own scientists told them about AGW before most consumers ever heard of it (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abk0063)!
– Utilities and other energy providers, as well as any producers of goods and services heavily capitalized for FF energy who wish to avoid short-term transition costs. Energy providers with a long enough planning horizon, OTOH, are investing in nuclear or renewable energy, while producers of all other goods and services are electrifying what they can in response to market forces; their political impact either way is harder to document, but may be relatively minor.
– American voters who’ve socialized their personal carbon emissions on the “free” market all their lives, and however irrationally, fear having to internalize their marginal costs going forward, or even backward in reparation. They may be skeptical of collective action in general, with some historical justification. See last years’ election results.
– Politicians sustained in power by carbon capital, which far outspends all competing interests. AFAICT, the political power of carbon capital is the ultimate reason why in 2025, the US government is in the hands of aggressive science denialists. I remind readers again of what Jane Mayer, author of 2016’s Dark Money, wrote in the New Yorker in 2019 (https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/kochland-examines-how-the-koch-brothers-made-their-fortune-and-the-influence-it-bought):
If there is any lingering uncertainty that the Koch brothers are the primary sponsors of climate-change doubt in the United States, it ought to be put to rest by the publication of “Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America,” by the business reporter Christopher Leonard. This seven-hundred-and-four-page tome doesn’t break much new political ground, but it shows the extraordinary behind-the-scenes influence that Charles and David Koch have exerted to cripple government action on climate change.
Dr. Mekik, your curriculum design sounds worthy, and I wish you every success. Still, the more Americans are aware of the dimensions of carbon capital’s influence on our politics, the faster we’ll decarbonize. IMHO, of course! Thanks for your indulgence 8^).
Thank you Mal Adapted. This is very helpful.
“What is all the denialist fighting about? Who benefits from it?”
Trolls tend to be narcissists who simply get pleasure from manipulating people and causing them discomfort,
From the standpoint of basic psychology, denialism “refers to the refusal to accept established facts or realities, often as a defense mechanism to avoid uncomfortable truths.” (Thank you AI.) Inconvenient truths, but a response to cognitive dissonance as well. It’s easier for someone to get an idea into their head, even a bad one, than to get it out, like some zombie arguments, especially when bad ideas get a lot of social reinforcement– sort of like an energy budget for your brain I guess.
It has been a topic of conversation off and on here at RC since it’s inception. I wish I’d been diligent enough to track and compile all the material on the matter that has come up here (and elsewhere). It’s a layered rabbit hole down numerous areas of study.
I didn’t actually count for this one, but I’m pretty sure that this and every other thread is “completely dominated” by people foolishly answering the trolls.
The more words you write, the more the trolls are winning. They are the drug dealers, and people who keep responding to exactly the same logical, quantitative, and scientific fallacies and falsehoods….. over and over, and over and…….. exhibit all the symptoms of the addict.
They have power over you. That’s what their “payment” is.
It really would be nice to see actual scientific discussions on many of these topics, but maybe that’s too difficult?
Zebra, not that you asked, but (imo) any lasting resolution in response to your question rests solely with the hosts and what they want this site’s comment section to represent. I wish they’d ask for volunteers to help with the running of the site and maybe incorporate some changes to increase public use of what I consider a valuable site. I’d gladly help if I can; don’t care if my assignment is a tedious bore. I’ve gotten much from their posts thru the years! To repay that, to contribute even in the smallest way, would be my honor.
Now excuse me, I need to attend a “C.A.” meeting ;-)