Climate: Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics

There are two high-profile climate guys bucking the prevailing winds on global warming.  They both acknowledge that some warming is happening--the questions are what to do about it?  Will they work? How draconian should the measures be and how much is too much to spend on them?  Even more importantly, they both "fix" numbers that preoccupy the press.  We've discussed some of Steven Koonin's book Unsettled here and here.  The other guy is Bjorn Lomborg and he is providing a big "fix" this week

As the United Nations’ annual global climate summit, COP27, nears, it’s important to look with skepticism at the academic reports many news outlets cite as evidence supporting radical climate policies. Too often, they use highly skewed data that seem to have been carefully selected to support aggressive environmental regulations. One recent and much-cited Lancet report appears deliberately deceptive.

The study offers a frightening statistic: Rapidly rising temperatures have increased annual global heat deaths among older people by 68% in less than two decades. That stark figure has been cited all over, from the BBC and Time to the Washington Post and the Times of India, the world’s largest-selling English-language daily. ...the report commits an amateur statistical fallacy by blaming the increase in heat deaths on “rapidly increasing temperatures.”

Annual heat deaths have increased significantly among people 65 and older world-wide. The average deaths per year increased 68% from the early 2000s to the late 2010s. But that is almost entirely because there are so many more older people today than there were 20 years ago, in no small part thanks to medical innovations that keep us alive longer. Measured across the same time span the Lancet maps heat deaths, the number of people 65 and older has risen by 60%, or almost as much as heat deaths. When the increase in heat mortality is adjusted for this population growth, the actual rise that can be attributed to rising temperatures is only 5%.

Then Lomborg moves the needle from statistical fallacy to damn lie

I’ve actually raised this issue to the Lancet before. Last September the journal published a study with the same fallacious argument, and I sent the editor a detailed letter explaining the problem. The Lancet never corrected it and here it is, over a year later, committing the same error.

Before you go "But 5% is still bad", Lomborg goes on to note that cold kills way more people than heat and, in fact, "Based on today’s population size, the current temperatures cause about 17,000 more heat deaths in older people, but also result in more than half a million fewer cold deaths. Reporting one finding without the other is misleading about the true effect of climate change."

I saw him speak in Palo Alto last year and after his 90-minute pitch and 50+ detailed slides, one gets an appreciation of the complexity involved in "fixing" science.  Here he is on stage

Comments

[Joanne]

I am beginning to question this whole climate change mantra and how sustainable going all electric will be in the future.
It has been an interesting couple of years where just like dealing with Covid you did not have time to accept the solutions because if you don’t something really really bad will happen.
No one is talking about how electric vehicles will require mass mining. A lot of that mining is being done in far away place that use child labor and is going to be so environmentally destructive. Electric vehicles will come at a massive massive costs.
Unfortunately seems everyone is drinking the “kool-aid”.

[Peter Garrison]

The free market would handle this if people would not buy these expensive and impractical electric cars.

But the market isn’t free as California is manipulating the market by halting sales of new gasoline powered cars in the near future.

If California would just stop HSR I could believe that the government had some common sense, but no.

Read Quentin Kopp’s editorial in the DJ about the stupidity of HSR and his remorse in once thinking it was a good.

[Joe]

You can read an excerpt of Kopp's piece here: https://www.burlingamevoice.com/2021/04/high-cost-rail-part-154-kopp-speaks-outagain.html#comments

The link is also there to read the whole tale of woe.

[In Over Your Head]

Are you seriously going to look across the world to find the few scientists going against the tide of overwhelming consensus about the impacts of climate change, and make them your heroes? Is the question really going to be "unsettled" in your mind until you can't find one (hack) scientist who disagrees with the consensus? That's RIDICULOUS and you know it. Do you know what degree Lomborg has? PhD in political science. If you disagreed with his position you would surely point that out. Both Koonin's and Lomborg's ideas are "fixed" by many scientists, but I guess you only see what you want to see.

Let's learn about Koonin:
As Scientific American wrote:
BEGIN QUOTE
If you’d heard only that a scientist who served in the Trump administration and now regularly appears on Fox News and other conservative media thinks climate change is a hoax, you’d roll your eyes and move on. But if you heard that someone associated with former President Barack Obama’s Democratic administration was calling the climate science consensus a conspiracy, the novelty of the messenger might make you take it a little more seriously.

The latter is what Steve Koonin is using to sell his new book, which is being billed as the revelation of an “Obama scientist” who wants you to think that climate change isn’t a big deal. But unfortunately, climate change is real, is caused primarily by burning fossil fuels, and is already hurting people all over the world, including here in the United States.
...
How many people are suffering, and paying in health care costs because of fossil fuels isn’t the kind of thing Steve Koonin thinks you should worry about, though. That’s because his argument in 2021 is as scientifically empty as it was in 2013, when the American Physical Society allowed him to lead a review of their climate consensus statement. …(Spoiler alert: the APS was not swayed by denial.) But instead of accepting that his idiosyncratic view of climate science was considered wrong by climate scientists, Koonin resigned from the process….

Since then, the public seems to be his target, as he racks up media hits in the conservative “news” circuit that pushes climate denial. From the friendly reviews and interviews he’s gotten on that circuit, it’s clear that he’s pushing the same tired story that he failed to get the APS and climate scientists to embrace.

Steve Koonin is hoping you’ll see Obama’s name and trust him when he tells you that he’s better equipped to summarize major climate reports than the authors of the U.N.’s IPCC report and the U.S. government’s National Climate Assessment, who wrote at length about the already sizable and growing costs of climate change.
He’s hoping you won’t recall that each president appoints thousands of people, and Koonin, it turns out, was hired at the Energy Department specifically for his contrarianism. His boss at the time, Stephen Chu, said he “didn’t want to have a department where everybody believed exactly as everybody else” and added that Koonin “loves to be the curmudgeon type.”

Knowing that he was brought in to play devil’s advocate because his beliefs were in opposition to the Obama administration makes clear that splashing his decade-old appointment on his book cover is a marketing gimmick.

When it comes to the science, Koonin cherry-picks and misrepresents outdated material to downplay the seriousness of the climate crisis. In April, climate scientists fact-checked Koonin’s claims as encapsulated in a Wall Street Journal review, and found them to be highly misleading….

The misrepresentations cited as appearing in Koonin’s book are being amplified in right-wing media and beyond. A recent Washington Post column by conservative contributor Marc Thiessen repeats several points Koonin makes.
...
Thiessen is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. For those unfamiliar with the tangled world of organized climate denial, a recent study paints a pretty clear picture: of all the conservative, climate-denying think tanks that get Koch and other industry funding, AEI has gotten the most. It received some $380 million to peddle industry-friendly denial like Koonin’s, much of it through dark money pass-throughs to conceal that it’s coming from conservative and dirty-energy donors.

Koonin isn’t lying about having worked for the Obama administration, but he’s certainly trying to portray himself as something better than he is: a crank who’s only taken seriously by far-right disinformation peddlers hungry for anything they can use to score political points. He’s just another denier trying to sell a book.
END QUOTE
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/that-obama-scientist-climate-skeptic-youve-been-hearing-about/
See also: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-new-book-manages-to-get-climate-science-badly-wrong/
So that’s your hero, Joe.

Now, Lomborg, your political scientist. Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz wrote about his economic misstatements in a review of Lomborg’s book:
BEGIN QUOTE:
…
Bjorn Lomborg has long insisted that there is a consensus — what he calls the Copenhagen Consensus — around his do-nothing agenda, which he claims to be the reasonable scientific approach. … But when one looks at the list of “experts,” one sees the conservative bias — all distinguished economists, but most with a particular bent, and not including any of the true experts in climate science who might have raised an objection.
…
Anyone not familiar with the literature might think from his frequent quoting of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that the panel, representing the scientific consensus, is on board with his ideas. Nothing could be further from the truth.
…
As a matter of policy, I typically decline to review books that deserve to be panned. You only make enemies. Even a slight barb opens a wound the writer will seldom forget. In the case of this book, though, I felt compelled to forgo this policy. Written with an aim to convert anyone worried about the dangers of climate change, Lomborg’s work would be downright dangerous were it to succeed in persuading anyone that there was merit in its arguments.

This book proves the aphorism that a little knowledge is dangerous. It’s nominally about air pollution. It’s really about mind pollution.
END QUOTE
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/books/review/bjorn-lomborg-false-alarm-joseph-stiglitz.html

[Cassandra]

https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/

“Wood smoke prompts spare the air day”

Gee-if we only had something like gas fireplaces to cut down on the wood smoke – oh yeah we do – but soon they’re going to be outlawed.