The know-it-all problem

 

News as propaganda kills trust

Sometimes it is hard to tell whether scientists or journalists are most responsible for the pervasive global warming skepticism in the world’s largest and most powerful democracy.

A Pew Research survey in October found only about a third of U.S. citizens greatly concerned about the future climate, and after the Pew Research Center conducted in-depth interviews with 32 skeptics, it concluded that “climate scientists are valued for their expertise, but also seen as potentially having an agenda; media outlets are not trusted sources of climate information.”

Surprise, surprise.

Case in point: Alaska Public Media, which just days ago reported that “Anchorage broke its November snowfall record halfway through the month after repeated storms. Climatologists say the city could see more heavy snowfall like this in the future.”

This is the same Anchorage that went through a series of extremely snow-short winters in the 2010s that by 2013 had Smithsonian Magazine reporting the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race,  the 49th state’s biggest and best-known sporting event, was destined to become a victim of climate change.

“Rain has been falling in place of snow, and the annual snowfall has been just 29 percent of what it was last year,” it was written there. “Though such a drastic year-over-year change is down to the weather, scientists are attributing a long-term drop in snowfall to climate change.”

This long-term drop in snowfall due to climate change became the theme for the rest of the decade with the New York Times in 2019 cutely headlining “The Mush in the Iditarod May Soon Be Melted Snow.”

Almost magically, the snow and cold returned shortly thereafter, and Anchorage winters have been a pretty snowy normal since. The only real difference between this year and last year is that the snow season has begun in earnest a month prior to the official first day of winter on Dec. 21.

At least Mother Nature had the courtesy to wait until closer to that date before dumping on Alaska’s largest city in 2022. It wasn’t until December 12 last year that Rick Thoman with the Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Policy at the University of Alaska Fairbanks declared an “Anchorage Snowpocalypse, 2022 Edition.”

“For the first 12 days of December,” he reported in his Alaska and Arctic Climate Newsletter, “the National Weather Service (NWS) office near the Anchorage Airport has reported nearly 30 inches of snow, including a seven-day total of 27.8 inches between December 6 and December 12. Other places in the urban area have already exceeded 40 inches for the month.”

By the time Iditarod 2023 rolled around on the first Saturday of March with the official first day of spring fast approaching, Anchorage was a snow-covered winter wonderland primed for sled-dog racing with still more snow then falling.

 

Bad messaging

Given that Alaskans were bombarded with years of warnings that a lack of snow caused by climate change was going to kill the Iditarod only to endure huge dumps last December and this November, it’s understandable they might find themselves a little skeptical of the whole climate change idea when now told that climate change means they will find themselves up to their waists in snow every winter.

And the reality of the situation, at least in the way it is presented, largely makes the experts look like they don’t know what they are talking about.

Public Media turned to Thoman this year to explain why warmer water in the oceans that cover most of the planet is likely to increase precipitation in many places around the world, and then explained “that could mean winters with a lot of rain and no snow, but it could also mean winters with a lot of snow, all at once.”

Funny how no one mentioned how easily the rain-snow switch could flip during all those years of fretting about the death of the Iditarod due to a lack of snow.

“As long as it remains cold enough for there to be snow, we can expect more of these kinds of events in Anchorage,” Thoman told Public Media this year. “Just on the general principle that extreme precipitation events are increasing.”

Or, in other words, the Alaska of the future could be like the Alaska of a generation ago based on state climate records, which show Anchorage witnessing a phenomenon of no snow versus too much snow in the 1950s that looked a lot like that in the 2010s.

“Normal” snowfall for Anchorage – normal being the long-term average – is 74.5 inches a year, according to the National Weather Service, but there is a wide range.

The record annual snowfall, according to the agency, was 134.5 inches in the winter of 2011-12 only to be followed shortly thereafter by the record low of 25.1 inches in the winter of 2014-2015.

These two records coming so close together might say something about climate change in the new millennium, except for the fact that the second-highest snow total, less than two inches shy of the new record, came in the winter of 1954-55 back in the old millennium only to be followed by the winter of 1957-58 which set a record for the least amount of snow.

The 1957-58, low-snow record stood for almost 60 years. Could the same prove true of the 2014-15, low-snow record?

No one can say because the future is impossible to predict, and that’s the problem with so much climate change reporting.

With so much of it premised on an envisioned “climate crisis” threatening all of humankind, the huge, natural variability in weather is underplayed or ignored because it would complicate the narrative, and as a result, a lot of climate-change reporting ends up looking more like propaganda than news.

Instead of being honest with people in admitting the unknowns and accepting the possibilities of some good, like the big increase in Bristol Bay sockeye salmon due to warming, along with all the bad, climate change is nearly always packaged as part of an effort  to drive a “moral panic.” 

That term was first coined in 1972. Arnold Hunt subsequently published a history of it in The British Journal of Sociology in 1997 that traced “the development of ‘moral panic’ in the media, where it was first used pejoratively, then rejected for being pejorative, and finally rehabilitated as a term of approval. It explains why the term developed as it did: how it enabled journalists to justify the moral and social role of the media, and also to support the reassertion of ‘family values’ in the early 1990s.”

“Moral panic research,” Gregory P. Perreault would observe more than 20 years later in the International Encyclopedia of Journalism Studies, “has identified panics stemming from daycare abuse, drug use, youth crime, online pornography, and school shootings….Moral panics are expected to conclude with legal repercussions that may be more a matter of ritual than of practicality.”

A moral panic in the 1960s led to the 1971 start of the nation’s “War on Drugs,” which researchers at the University of Pennsylvania estimate has cost the country more than $1 trillion while showing no success in solving the big problems associated with drug abuse.

“We are still in the midst of the most devastating drug epidemic in U.S. history,” Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at the Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology at Brookings Institution, told CNBC two years ago.

The website reported that “in 2020, overdose deaths in the United States exceeded 90,000, compared with 70,630 in 2019, according to research from the Commonwealth Fund.

“Yet, the federal government is spending more money than ever to enforce drug policies. In 1981, the federal budget for drug abuse prevention and control was just over a billion dollars. By 2020, that number had grown to $34.6 billion. When adjusted for inflation, CNBC found that it translates to a 1,090 percent increase in just 39 years.”

Drug overdose deaths, meanwhile, kept climbing and reached 107,081 last year, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).

Perreault may have understated things when he criticized moral panics for failing to produce practical results. They sometimes just produce more problems as was the case with Prohibition, a problematic period in American history begun by an old moral panic.

You can’t handle the truth

What is going on with climate change now is that some scientists and most mainstream journalists, being smarter than anyone you might know, don’t think average Americans can handle the truth.

So they fudge it.

The truth is that a.) global warming, which is real, produces a whole lot of climate-altering variables scientists are still trying to figure, and b.) while global warming almost certainly will be bad for the middle latitudes of the globe home to most of the human population, it might not be so bad elsewhere, maybe even good in some places, if not for possible ripple effects.

Alaska is one of the places that stands to benefit, but for the latter possibility. Most of Alaska’s food is imported. If global warming has largely negative effects on agricultural production in the Lower 48, Alaskans could end up paying the price.

If.

A study by scientists from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in 2021 concluded corn production could decrease by 24 percent by 2030 due to warming, but wheat production could increase by 17 percent.

Global wheat production, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture numbers, amounts to about 780 million metric tons per year while global corn production is at about 1.2 million tons per year of which about 350 million tons is produced in the U.S.

But most of that U.S. corn, somewhere around 60 percent, is used to feed animals and motor vehicles.

“For example, in the United States in 2020, 35 percent of corn was grown for animal feed, 31 percent for biofuel and less than 2 percent for direct human consumption,” according to the World Resources Institute. “When you drive through miles and miles of cornfields in Iowa, almost none of it ends up on your plate as corn.

“If all harvested crops were used for food, they could meet the daily caloric needs for all of humanity. But because there is so much competition for how crops are used – and ever-increasing demand for non-food crops – they don’t.”

The U.S. grows a lot of corn because the government subsidizes growing it to create ethanol to blend with gasoline for use in motor vehicles, the belief being that the “blended fuel” is more environmentally friendly.

But scientists reporting in the peer-reviewed Proceedings of the National Academies of Science last year concluded the government’s well-intentioned help “increased annual nationwide fertilizer use by 3 to 8 percent, increased water quality degradants by 3 to 5 percent, and caused enough domestic land use change emissions such that the carbon intensity of corn ethanol produced under the (federal) Renewable Fuel Standard is no less than gasoline and likely at least 24 percent higher.”

Needless to say, the human production of carbon dioxide – the main greenhouse gas – gets incredibly complicated as do the other factors working for and against global warming.

Just days ago, for instance, a team of scientists from Australia, France and Ireland reported in peer-reviewed Science Advances that the growing volume of carbon dioxide in the air, which plants consume during photosynthesis, is boosting the growth of vegetation.

This idea was once scoffed at, but the latest research concluded that was because earlier researchers didn’t look at the totality of the process of photosynthesis and all the factors affecting it, including “photosynthetic acclimation to temperature.”

When all factors are taken into account, the researchers wrote, “higher vegetation productivity…increases leaf area growth, canopy conductance, and transpiration, affecting surface energy partitioning, land surface temperature, and associated interactions with the atmosphere with likely mitigating effects on climate change globally.”

Their study has yet to be replicated by other researchers, but if it is confirmed, it suggests the planet is partially protected by a well-buffered ecosystem and warming might not increase as fast as projected in the years ahead.

Similar good news – if one dare say there is any good news associated with dreaded climate change – came this week from a team of scientists from the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia who after carefully examining the history of ancient sea levels on a warmer planet concluded current predictions of future sea-level rise might be overstated.

Their deep dive into what the earth looked like during the Mid-Pliocene warm period some 3 to 3.3 million years ago led them to conclude that there is likely to be a “more stable Antarctic Ice Sheet under future warming scenarios, consistent with midrange forecasts of sea level rise that do not incorporate a marine ice cliff instability.”

“The Mid-Pliocene represents the most recent interval in Earth history with climatic conditions similar to those expected in the coming decades,” they wrote in their peer-reviewed study also published in Science Advances. “Mid-Pliocene sea level estimates therefore provide important constraints on projections of future ice sheet behavior and sea level change.”

Average global temperatures during the mid-Pliocene are believed to have been three and a half to five and a half degrees warmer than present.

Those temperatures helped create a climate that allowed our earliest ancestors to flourish. Stone tools dating to the period suggest humanoids were starting down the long, evolutionary road that got us to where we are today.

It is doubtful those people worried much about the state of the planet’s climate at the time, given they had plenty more to worry about just to survive each day.

Our comfortable lives

One of the great luxuries of contemporary Western lifestyles is that many people now have considerable free time to devote to worrying about the future when it would be more productive to focus on coming up with solutions to the problems awaiting in the net future.

Getting to so-called “net zero” carbon emissions isn’t going to be easy. Many countries have pledged to get there by 2050, but when KPMG, a major international risk consultancy, devised a “Net Zero Readiness Index” in 2021, it found the idea of “net zero” mainly a plaything of the rich.

“Unsurprisingly,” the organization reported, “the Index also shows that a country’s Net Zero delivery capability is directly correlated to its economic prosperity….The average Index score for delivery capability among high-income countries is some seven times higher than among middle-income countries.

“This highlights an acute global challenge in terms of how to improve Net Zero delivery capability beyond the richest
countries in the world, especially given that the middle-income countries in the Index account for 48 percent of global emissions.”

KPMG ranked Norway, which has pledged to reach net zero by 2030, the closest to the net-zero goal, but questioned whether its 2030 deadline is realistic.

The Scandinavian country, which has plans to ban internal combustion engines, is rapidly converting its transportation system to electricity, KPMG said, but looks to be facing problems in producing enough electricity from renewable sources to meet the demand it is creating.

“The biggest issue remains the gap between the domestic and regional demand for renewable power and what Norway can generate,” the plan said. “Building more capacity is increasingly difficult, with some communities opposing new wind turbines because of their visual impact and disruption of wildlife and reindeer husbandry.

“Their construction also affects local environments, in some
cases with implications for biodiversity and climate
change if marshlands and wetlands are disturbed, causing
release of methane. Similarly, hydroelectric power often
requires dams and reservoirs.

“‘We have a challenge balancing those kinds of needs,’ says Johanne Solum Ness, senior associate at KPMG in Norway,” who conceded this is a problem despite Norway being a “special position” due to its huge oil wealth.

Thanks to its riches, Norway is now a world leader in carbon capture and storage that “could allow Norway and other countries to reach net zero without scrapping all fossil fuel use, although this looks likely to be expensive for decades to come,” the KPMG report concluded.

The story was similar for the other European countries leading KPMG’s list of nations closest to net zero. Many of these countries have a huge, economic incentive to convert to renewables given that nearly all of them, aside from Norway, lack hydrocarbon resources.

But even given this incentive, they are struggling. The United Kingdom was ranked second on KPMG’s list, but Simon Virley, the UK Head of Energy and Natural Resources for KPMG, warned that it progress was hampered by politicians “not thinking sufficiently about the consumer.”

He criticized national politicians for their failure to get the English to change their home heating to electricity, commit to wholeheartedly to electric vehicles, fly less and eat less meat

“This needs to change if we are to move forward in the UK,” Virley said. Unfortunately, some of these changes he sees as needed have proven immensely unpopular among the masses.

“Ministers ‘run scared’ of targeting meat consumption in land use strategy,” The Guardian headlined in February, reporting below that “the government has been accused of being ‘pathetically nervous’ about encouraging the public to eat less meat after excluding the aim from a key strategy.

“The Guardian can reveal that the government’s upcoming land use strategy will not include a reduction in area used for animal agriculture in England.”

About 85 percent of the UK’s agricultural land is now used for pasture for grazing animals such as cows or to grow food which is then fed to livestock.

UK energy policies have also undergone a considerable shift since the KPMG report with Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announcing at a September press conference that “while (his government) will continue to subsidize energy efficiency (it) will never force any household to do it.

“The proposal to make you change your diet and harm British farmers by taxing meat or to create new taxes to discourage flying or going on holiday. I scrapped those too.”

He said he was sticking to the pledge of making the UK net zero by 2050, but was quickly accused of wishful thinking and playing politics. His positions have, however, changed the game in the UK with the Labour Party since watering down its green goals as well, according to the BBC. 

Climate-change skepticism is lower in the UK than in the U.S., but even there near-term economic concerns appear to be trumping long-range fears of a global catastrophe.

Only time will tell if this is rational behavior based on reasonable presumptions as to what warming means or dangerous and willful ignorance of the projected worst-case scenarios, and whether all the media ranting about the sky falling will help lead people toward better-informed choices or push them away from them.

Especially in this country, there is a rebellious inclination to ignore to know-it-alls, especially when looking a situation that makes one wonder if the know-it-alls know anything.