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The Cost of Deceit
“Most of the dozens of essential climate variables monitored each year in this report continued to follow
their long-term trends in 2014, with several setting new records. Carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous
oxide—the major greenhouse gases released into Earth’s atmosphere—once again all reached record
high average atmospheric concentrations for the year. Carbon dioxide increased by 1.9 ppm to reach a
globally averaged value of 397.2 ppm for 2014. Altogether, 5 major and 15 minor greenhouse gases
contributed 2.94 W m–2 of direct radiative forcing, which is 36% greater than their contributions just a
quarter century ago.
“Accompanying the record-high greenhouse gas concentrations was nominally the highest annual global
surface temperature in at least 135 years of modern record keeping, according to four independent
observational analyses.” Blunden, J. and D. S. Arndt, Eds., 2015: State of the Climate in 2014. Bull. Amer.
Meteor. Soc., 96 (7), S1–S267.
Tony Noerpel
In my last article I’d used the term ground truth [1]. Let’s assume we invented a blood test protocol for
Lyme disease. To test the protocol, we might take blood samples from 100 people who were known to
have lime disease and blood samples from 100 people who were known not to have the disease. If the
protocol positively identified all of the samples with Lyme disease and did not falsely identify any of the
clean samples as positive, we would conclude that out blood test worked and could then confidently
apply it as a credible test for Lyme. Which blood samples were actually positive and which were
negative would be known beforehand and is “ground truth”. If instead we tested blood samples from
200 individuals selected at random and had no idea whether or not any of them actually had Lyme
disease we would not know “ground truth” and the results from applying our protocol would be
meaningless. The concept of ground truth is important to all sciences. Can we apply it more broadly to
other aspects of life?
I have reported [2] that according to a National Science Foundation poll [3], 27% of Americans think the
Sun orbits the Earth. That the Earth orbits the Sun once each year and that the Earth spins on its own
axis once every 24 hours are ground truths. If we knew that a candidate for public office didn’t know
this, wouldn’t that be grounds for not voting for him? Anyone with an adequate education and curiosity
should know some elementary facts about the world we inhabit. And while that knowledge itself might
not be directly useful to a county supervisor or a mayor, it would be helpful to a congressperson voting
on NASA’s budget.
Human-caused climate change is also ground truth. There is no science which supports denial. Without
earning an advanced degree in a relevant science discipline and reading a lot of text books and journals
in addition to the IPCC reports or the National Climate Assessment [4], which is hard work and takes a
large amount of time, one can still be confident that global warming is ground truth. As we have seen
Ben van Beurden, CEO of Royal Dutch Shell said [5]: “Let me be very very clear, for us climate change is
real and it's a threat that we want to act on. We're not aligning with skeptics.” He is highly motivated
and has had a team of scientists looking for any science supporting denial.
We have recently learned that Exxon Mobil executives were aware global warming was real and very
serious as early as 1981 [6-7]. An Exxon Mobil spokesman Richard Keil, said Exxon "believes the risk of
climate change is clear, and warrants action." Yet since 1980 the company has invested over $30 million
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with politicians [6], lobbyists and a small number of scientists with the intent of misinforming the public
in order to maximize profit. Obviously these people were not being paid to tell the truth.
Unsurprisingly ExxonMobil’s dishonesty has had a steep cost which we can show graphically. Figure 1
shows human carbon dioxide emissions from all fossil fuel sources and cement manufacture since 1750
[8]. Land-use emissions are not included. The red curve shows the emissions reductions which would
have been required in 1980 to stay below 2 degrees of global warming with 67% probability. We would
only have had to cut emissions by 0.5% per year [9]. This would have been doable. Unfortunately,
because of the misinformation campaign funded by large multinational corporations such as Exxon
Mobil, Shell and Koch Industries and indeed virtually all multinationals including Google and Microsoft,
fossil fuel use has doubled in the last 35 years. While these companies have made billions in profits, we
have placed ourselves in a very tenuous position in terms of our survival. As a result in order to limit
global warming to 2 degrees with 67% probability now requires annual reductions of 7% (the green
curve). That may be technically feasible but not by a species which could not manage 0.5% reductions.
And anyway there would still be 33% probability of catastrophe. Within a few years it will not be
technically feasible to stay under 2 degrees C of warming.
In figure 2, I’ve plotted the annual global temperature anomaly up to June, 2015 [10-11]. The data is
from NASA GISS. The first data point is the average over the year from July, 1880 until June 1881 and
the last data point is over the year from July 2014 until June, 2015. You may find it interesting that the
year spanning July, 2010 - July, 2011, the most recent local minima was warmer than July, 1997 - June,
1998. In other words, global warming did not stop in 1998. It did not slow down. There was no hiatus.
In fact, we may never again see a year as cool as 1998 again. We are in the middle of a rather strong El
Nino which is expected to last through the year. In this case, 2015 will be the warmest year on record
beating the previous record 2014 by a solid margin. 2016 promises to be even warmer. If this scenario
unfolds, we may experience a cooling La Nina during 2017 and 2018. This is what happened after the
exceptional 1997-1998 El Nino as is evident in the figure. But that dip was still hotter than any year
before the 97-98 El Nino.
So how do we apply ground truth to the political debate? Human-caused climate change is ground
truth. If a candidate denies this he is not just suffering from the Dunning-Kruger [12] effect of selfconfident ignorance but he has sacrificed his free will and moral judgement for ideology and probably a
lot of money. Don’t vote for him.
CONTEST: Stump the World’s Top Scientists
Again, the best way to convince oneself that there is no science supporting denial is to get an advanced
degree in a relevant field and then read a bunch of text books, the IPCC reports, and science journal
articles. That is a lot of work and takes a lot of time. Instead, I propose a simple experiment. Whether
you consider yourself a skeptic or a climate hawk or are confused, uninformed, unsure, vaguely aware,
or fairly certain about the issue of global warming, think of the one denier argument which you find
most compelling. You can submit it as a comment below. If I cannot describe what is wrong with the
argument (taking advantage of the accumulated physical science knowledge and standing on the
shoulders of the world’s top scientists), you can win a growler fill at Corcoran’s Brewing Company or
Belly Love Brewery in Purcellville. To qualify, the entry must include a source for the argument from the
main stream media or from a blog or a candidate’s speech, or whatever source you feel is reliable or
not. If you can, look for supporting science in the peer-reviewed literature. If not, don’t worry, just
provide your source and I will do the research for you.
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I will be relying on the IPCC reports and other science research so I am confident you do not have a
chance. However, I will also award a growler fill to the most amusing argument. You will need to
provide a source because part of the amusement is in the pomposity of the source. As a tip, the
Republican presidential primary is fertile ground for stupidity on almost any topic.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_truth
[2] Tony Noerpel, Are we sufficiently science literate?, December 10, 2013
http://brleader.com/?p=12551
[3] http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind12/append/c7/at07-10.pdf
[4] National climate assessment http://nca2014.globalchange.gov/
[5] Tony Noerpel. Shell Games June 16, 2015, http://brleader.com/?p=17479
[6] http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jul/08/exxon-climate-change-1981-climate-denierfunding
[7] http://insideclimatenews.org/news/08072015/email-shows-exxon-was-studying-its-climate-impact80s
[8] Boden, T.A., G. Marland, and R.J. Andres. 2010. Global, Regional, and National Fossil-Fuel CO2
Emissions. Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Department
of Energy, Oak Ridge, Tenn., U.S.A. doi 10.3334/CDIAC/00001_V2010
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis/tre_glob.html
[9] http://www.skepticalscience.com/CCFBRCP85.html
[10] http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata_v3/GLB.Ts+dSST.txt
[11] for a description of NASA GISS methodology see New NASA data
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/updates_v3/ersst4vs3b/
[12] Tony Noerpel, Blue Ridge Leader, March 17, 2015, http://brleader.com/?p=16610 and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
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