Climate Feedback Unscientifically Confuses "Disasters" & Weather Events & Endorses Pseudoscientific Claim That We Are in A "Sixth Mass Extinction"
Climate Feedback authors introduce pseudoscience into their “fact check”
An organization calling itself “Climate Feedback” is falsely claiming that humankind is causing a “Sixth Mass Extinction” and unscientifically confusing “disasters” with weather events:
Climate Feedback incorrectly claims that climate change is making natural disasters worse.
The IPCC defines disaster as "Severe alterations in the normal functioning of community or society due to hazardous physical events interacting w/ vulnerable social conditions leading to widespread adverse human, material, economic, or environment effects…"
Climate Feedback’s Daniel Swain claims, “there is a long and growing list of extreme event/disasters types regarding which the scientific literature strongly supports links to climate change. These include, but are not limited to: extreme heatwave intensity and frequency, drought intensity, wildfire extent and severity, and the flood hazards associated with tropical cyclones/hurricanes”
Swain is inappropriately conflating weather events like heatwaves, droughts, and wildfires with "disaster." He is using the word "disaster" differently than the IPCC.
By contrast, I am defining disasters as IPCC does, as "Severe alterations in the normal functioning of community or society," not hurricane strength of fire season length.
Recall that I claimed, "The build-up of wood fuel and more houses near forests, not climate change, explain why there are more, and more dangerous, fires in Australia and California."
And that's true. In Apocalypse Never I note that higher temps increase the risks of fires in Australia and California — but that those risks are outweighed by the build-up of wood fuel & new development.
Swain must justify a) why he is conflating weather events and disasters and b) why he is using disasters differently from IPCC
Climate Feedback falsely claims humans are causing a “sixth great extinction.”
Claims that the extinction rate is accelerating and that “half a million terrestrial species . . . may already be doomed to extinction” rest upon something called species area model. Conservation biologists Robert H. MacArthur and E. O. Wilson created the model in 1967. This model rests on the assumption that the number of new species that migrate to an island would decline over time. The idea was that as more species competed for declining resources, fewer would survive.
Fortunately, the assumptions of the species area model proved to be wrong. In 2011, the British scientific journal Nature published an article titled “Species-Area Relationships Always Overestimate Extinction Rates from Habitat Loss.” It showed that extinctions “require greater loss of habitat than previously thought.”
Around the world, the biodiversity of islands has actually doubled on average, thanks to the migration of “invasive species.” The introduction of new plant species has outnumbered plant extinctions one hundred fold. The “invaders” didn’t crowd out “natives,” as Wilson and MacArthur feared.
“More new plant species have come into existence in Europe over the past three centuries than have been documented as becoming extinct over the same period,” noted a British biologist.
Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Sixth Extinction, acknowledges the failure of the species area model in her book. “Twenty-five years later it’s now generally agreed that Wilson’s figures . . . don’t match observation,” she writes.
Kolbert says the model’s failure “should be chastening to science writers perhaps even more than to scientists.” And yet it was not chastening enough for her to modify her book’s title claim.
In truth, nobody needed to know the model’s fine workings to know it was wrong. If the species area model were true, then half of the world’s species should have gone extinct during the last two hundred years.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) says 6 percent of species are critically endangered, 9 percent are endangered, and 12 percent are vulnerable to becoming endangered.
The IUCN has estimated that 0.8 percent of the 112,432 plant, animal, and insect species within its data have gone extinct since 1500. That’s a rate of fewer than two species lost every year, for an annual extinction rate of 0.001 percent.
The huge increase in biodiversity during the last 100 million years massively outweighs the species lost in past mass extinctions. The number of genera, a measure of biodiversity more powerful than species count alone, has nearly tripled over the course of this time period.15 After each of these past five mass extinctions, the biodiversity in the fossil record dips between 15 to 20 percent, but each extinction is followed by much larger growth.
On May 4, 2020, I asked directly Josef Settle, the co-chair of The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), “Is it scientifically accurate to say humans are causing a sixth great extinction?” His answer was, “It’s not; we don’t say that; it’s rather a popular catchy expression… It’s not helpful for all of these activities to come across as being alarmist — that’s also a matter of credibility. You have to look at the evidence. Sixth mass extinction shows up in the media, but not because we said so, rather because certain circles prefer using this term.”
Some conservationists say the erroneous claims of a sixth mass extinction undermine conservation efforts. “To a certain extent they’re claiming it as a way of frightening people into action when in fact, if it’s actually true that we’re in a sixth mass extinction, then there’s no point in conservation biology,” noted one scientist. “People who claim we’re in the sixth mass extinction don’t understand enough about mass extinctions to understand the logical flaw in their argument.”
Conservationists, it turns out, are skilled at maintaining small populations of animals, from yellow-eyed penguins of New Zealand to mountain gorillas of central Africa. The real challenge is expanding the size of their populations.
Climate Feedback authors introduce false information and non sequiturs about whaling, fires, and other topics
The authors of the Climate Feedback post introduce other errors, which I have documented in my responses to an annotated version of the article to which its authors are replying.
One author, Zeke Hausfather, suggests I was not invited by the IPCC to be an expert reviewer. I was, and I have published the invitation.
Two authors, Daniel Swain and Hausfather, admit my claim, “Fires have declined 25% around the world since 2003,” is accurate, but somehow misleading. In reality, they are imagining me to be making claims I didn’t make.
Hausfather admits may claim is accurate but then claims it is "misleading" and claims I'm "conflating all fires with forestland wildfires" but that is false. Nowhere do I do that either in this article or Apocalypse Never. Hausfather is attributing things to me that I simply did not claim.
Hausfather admits my claim — “The amount of land we use for meat — humankind’s biggest use of land — has declined by an area nearly as large as Alaska,” — is correct, but once again appears determined to attribute claims to me that I have not made, saying "as Shellenberger seems to suggest," but, again, I say no such thing in this article or in my book.
Hausfather admits my claim, “The Amazon is not “the lungs of the world,” is correct, but similarly suggests it is somehow misleading. And, again, he imagines me to be saying something I am not saying.
Hausfather admits my claim, “Carbon emissions are declining in most rich nations and have been declining in Britain, Germany, and France since the mid-1970s” — is true, but then adds that it "overstate[s] the long-term success that rich countries have had"? But the only way "my" claim could do that is for Hausfather to interpret me as saying something I'm not saying. There is a pattern here. Hausfather admits my facts are correct but is apparently so triggered by them that he has to attribute to me things I have never claimed.
Hausfather admits I am correct that wood fuel is far worse for people and wildlife than fossil fuels but then adds that biomass "is quite controversial and opposed by most environmental advocates." However, in Apocalypse Never I point to significant evidence of continued environmentalist support for biomass. Had Hausfather bothered to read Apocalypse Never, he might have been less prone to attributing things to me that I didn't say.
Hausfather admits that my claim that “Preventing future pandemics requires more not less ‘industrial agriculture’” is correct but goes on to say, "However interesting, this argument has little to do with climate impacts." This is the fourth time Hausfather has misattributed claims to me that I did not make. I never said that fact had anything to do with climate change.
Hausfather and Swain say that my claim, “The build-up of wood fuel and more houses near forests, not climate change, explain why there are more, and more dangerous, fires in Australia and California,” is wrong, but it’s not. Wood fuel and more houses do indeed explain why there are more and more dangerous fires in Australia and California.
For Apocalypse Never, upon which this article is based, we reviewed all the best available science, and interviewed the top forest scientists. Here is the full passage that explains the science.
Economic development outweighs climate change in the rich world, too. Consider the case of California, the fifth-largest economy in the world.
California suffers from two major kinds of fires. First, there are wind-driven fires on coastal shrubland, or chaparral, where most of the houses are built. Think Malibu and Oakland. Nineteen of the state’s twenty most deadly and costly fires have taken place in chaparral. The second type is forest fires in places like the Sierra Nevada where there are far fewer people.
Mountain and coastal ecosystems have opposite problems. There are too many fires in the shrublands and too few prescribed burns in the Sierras. Keeley refers to the Sierra fires as “fuel-dominated” and the shrubland fires as “wind-dominated.” The only solution to fires in the shrubland is to prevent them and/or harden homes and buildings to them.
Before Europeans arrived in the United States, fires burned up woody biomass in forests every 10 to 20 years, preventing the accumulation of wood fuel, and fires burned the shrublands every 50 to 120 years. But during the last 100 years, the United States Forest Service (USFS) and other agencies extinguished most fires, resulting in the accumulation of wood fuel.
Keeley published a paper in 2018 finding that all ignition sources of fires had declined in California except for electric power lines. “Since the year 2000 there’ve been a half-million acres burned due to powerline-ignited fires, which is five times more than we saw in the previous twenty years,” he said. “Some people would say, ‘Well, that’s associated with climate change.’ But there’s no relationship between climate and these big fire events.
What then is driving the increase in fires? “If you recognize that 100 per- cent of these [shrubland] fires are started by people, and you add six million people [since 2000], that’s a good explanation for why we’re getting more and more of these fires,” said Keeley.
What about the Sierra? “If you look at the period from 1910 to 1960,” said Keeley, “precipitation is the climate parameter most tied to fires. But since 1960, precipitation has been replaced by temperature, so in the last fifty years, spring and summer temperatures will explain 50 percent of the variation from one year to the next. So temperature is important.”
But isn’t that also the period when the wood fuel was allowed to accumulate, I asked, due to suppression of forest fires? “Exactly,” said Keeley. “Fuel is one of the confounding factors. It’s the problem in some of the reports done by climatologists who understand climate but don’t necessarily understand the subtleties related to fires.”
Would we be having such hot fires in the Sierra, I asked, had we not allowed wood fuel to build up over the last century? “That’s a very good question,” said Keeley. “Maybe you wouldn’t.” He said it was something he might look at. “We have some selected watersheds in the Sierra Nevadas where there have been regular fires. Maybe the next paper we’ll pull out the watersheds that have not had fuel accumulation and look at the climate fire relationship and see if it changes.”
Fires in Australia are similar. Greater fire damage in Australia is, as in California, due in part to greater development in fire-prone areas, and in part to the accumulation of wood fuel. One scientist estimates that there is ten times more wood fuel in Australia’s forests today that when Europeans arrived. The main reason is that the government of Australia, as in California, refused to do controlled burns, for both environmental and human health reasons. As such, the fires would have occurred even had Australia’s climate not warmed.
The news media depicted the 2019–2020 fire season as the worst in Australia’s history but it wasn’t. It ranked fifth in terms of area burned, with about half of the burned acreage as 2002, the fourth-place year, and about a sixth of the burned acreage of the worst season in 1974–1975. The 2019–2020 fires ranked sixth in fatalities, about half as many as the fifth-place year, 1926, and a fifth as many fatalities as the worst fire on record in 2009. While the 2019–2020 fires are second in the number of houses destroyed, they razed about 50 percent less than the worst year, the 1938–39 fire season. The only metric by which this fire season appears to be the worst ever is in the number of non-home buildings damaged.
Climate alarmism, animus among environmental journalists toward the current Australian government, and smoke that was unusually visible to densely populated areas, appear to be the reasons for exaggerated media coverage.
The bottom line is that other human activities have a greater impact on the frequency and severity of forest fires than the emission of greenhouse gases. And that’s great news, because it gives Australia, California, and Brazil far greater control over their future than the apocalyptic news media suggested.
Hausfather claims that solar energy only requires 3.6x more land and wind 5.8x more land than fossil fuels, but those numbers are incorrect, and Hausfather has cherry-picked them, while ignoring better data.
The estimate that 50% of US land would be needed — up from just 0.5% today — to generate 100% of our energy from renewables, comes from multiple real-world studies by Vaclav Smil, David MacKay, and many others.
The dilute nature of sunlight means that solar farms require large amounts of land and thus come with significant environmental impacts. This is true even for the world’s sunniest places. California’s most famous solar farm, Ivanpah, requires 450 times more land than its last operating nuclear plant, Diablo Canyon.
Solar panels can become more efficient and wind turbines can become larger, but solar and wind have hard physical limits.
The achievable power density of a solar farm is up to 50 watts of electricity per square meter. By contrast, the power density of natural gas and nuclear plants ranges from 2,000 to 6,000 watts per square meter.
The 100x number of increasing land use needs if the US were to be 100% renewables comes from the book Power Density by Vaclav Smil. We checked Smil's calculations and confirmed them. And they are aligned with the two orders of magnitude difference found between solar and wind plants and natural gas and nuclear plants.
Hausfather claims, “Neither restrictions nor substitutes were the primary factor in the decline in industrial whaling during the 20th century.”
This is false. Hausfather simply doesn't know what he's talking about. I have a whole chapter in Apocalypse Never that draws on the best-available science. Had he read the book before commenting, he would have avoided embarrassing himself into making false claims in a supposed fact check.
Here the key passage:
A series of breakthroughs made whale oil newly useful for different products. In 1905, European chemists invented a way to turn liquid oil into solid fat for making soap. The process was called hydrogenation because it involved blowing hydrogen gas over nickel fillings into the oil. Then, in 1918, chemists discovered how to solidify whale oil while eliminating the smell and taste, allowing it to be used for the first time as margarine.
But then, industrial chemists succeeded in making margarine almost entirely from palm oil, eliminating the need for whale oil. By 1940, palm oil, much of it coming from the Congo, had become cheaper than whale oil. Between 1938 and 1951, the use of vegetable oils used for margarine quadrupled, while the use of whale and fish oil declined by two-thirds. The share of whale oil as an ingredient in soap fell from 13 percent to just 1 percent. Whale oil as a share of global trade in fats declined from 9.4 percent in the 1930s to 1.7 per- cent in 1958, resulting in declining whale oil prices in the late 1950s.
Journalists realized what was going on. In 1959, The New York Times reported that “the growing output of vegetable oils . . . has forced down the market value of whale oil and may, in the end, save the whales.” By 1968, Norwegian whalers were reduced to selling whale meat to pet food manufacturers. The Times reported that “the market for once-prized whale oil has slipped from $238 a ton in 1966 to $101.50. It has lost out to Peruvian fish oil and African vegetable oils.”
This time, rising scarcity of whales did incentivize their replacement with vegetable oil. A group of economists concluded that “economic growth brought with it a declining demand for whale products, whilst decreasing stock levels fed back into more and more expensive harvesting effort . . .”
Whaling peaked in 1962, a full thirteen years before Greenpeace’s heavily publicized action in Vancouver, and declined dramatically during the next decade. The United Nations called for a ten-year moratorium in 1972, and the United States banned whaling under the Marine Mammal Protection Act. By 1975, the year of Greenpeace’s celebrated Vancouver action, an international agreement between forty-six nations, which prohibited all hunting of the humpback, the blue whale, the gray whale, and some species of right, fin, and sei whales, was already in place.
It was vegetable oil, not an international treaty, that saved the whales. Ninety-nine percent of all whales killed in the twentieth century had occurred by the time the International Whaling Commission (IWC) got around to imposing a moratorium in 1982. The Commission’s moratorium on whaling in the 1980s, according to the economists who did the most careful study, was a “rubber stamp” on a “situation that had already emerged. . . . Regulation was not important in stabilizing populations.”
The International Whaling Commission set whaling quotas, but they weren’t low enough to prevent over-whaling. “In theory, the IWC was meant to regulate the killing of whales; in practice, the IWC functioned more like an international hunting club.” Concludes the leading historian of the period, “The thirty years of work by the IWC have proven a fiasco.”
Those nations that thundered the loudest against whaling after the Greenpeace action didn’t themselves hunt whales. “Strong anti-whaling positions became a rather convenient way of portraying a green image as virtually no material costs were involved for nations without whaling interests.”
Rising prosperity and wealth created the demand for the substitutes that saved the whales. People saved the whales by no longer needing them, and they no longer needed them because they had created more abundant, cheaper, and better alternatives.
Today, the populations of blue whales, humpback whales, and bowheads, three species for which there is great concern, are all recovering, albeit slowly, as is to be expected due to their large size and thus slow rate of reproduction. Not a single whale species is at risk of extinction. Nations harvest fewer than two thousand whales annually, an amount that is 97 percent less than the nearly seventy-five thousand whales killed in 1960. The moral of the story, for the economists who studied how vegetable oil saved the whales, was that, “to some extent, economies can ‘outgrow’ severe environmental exploitation.”