Laughing off the apocalypse?

There was an interesting interview with Gavin Schmidt recently. He is one of the most senior climatologists in the world, heading up NASA’s department on climate science. Refreshingly, unlike the other senior climatologists, he didn’t sidestep how recent weather was not predicted by mainstream climatology. He told the American science celebrity Neil deGrasse Tyson that climatology significantly underpredicted current warming. He said there was “total failure” to predict what happened in 2023. See for yourself, for 3 minutes from 4 minutes in.

Gavin is one of the more approachable of the senior climatologists. He provided specific written criticisms of my 2018 Deep Adaptation paper. That was in stark contrast to others who misrepresented it, and me, so as to discourage people from considering that the party is over for modern societies.  

Five years later, anyone who reads that deep adaptation paper (rather than those second hand misrepresentations) and compares it to the mainstream climatology from the IPCC, will quickly see which assessment is turning out to be closer to the truth. It’s something the late and great climatologist Will Steffen said at the time. Because the truth is that greenhouse gas emissions are rising, their atmospheric concentrations are rising, evidence of amplifying feedbacks are growing, impacts on environment and society are spreading, policy action is curbing nothing, global capitalists are hijacking the response, and societal commitment is fracturing. People who recognise all this are being gaslit by those mediocre professionals paid to demand we respect the institutions and systems that led us into chaos. They describe that deference to a sociopathic and ecocidal culture as ‘being positive’, ‘having hope’, and ‘believing in humanity’. Such rhetoric pays their bills and saves their face – until it won’t anymore. If you are in any doubt about the current climate situation, I recommend a good round up by David Spratt, who has been one of the leading critics of the watering down of existential risk by mainstream climatologists.

What Gavin Schmidt didn’t say in his interview was that in 2019, a bunch of the very best climate models were predicting a more rapid rise in temperatures than the others: rapid, scary rises. At the time, I thought ‘finally, mainstream climatology will accept what some climatologists and research analysts like me, have been concluding: that the situation is far worse than the IPCC reports.’ I hoped that would mean more climatologists could help shift the discussion in civil society to include:

a) ditching incremental tactics, being bolder on curbing and drawing down emissions, while being clear we no longer know if it will work enough in time;

b) exploring what forms of geoengineering might be safe, effective and cost effective;

c) adapting in a variety of ways, including psychologically and monetarily, for dramatic changes and even breakdown of systems (transformative and deep adaptation).

But no, Gavin Schmidt and others chose back then to not include the ‘hot model’ simulations. They imagined that if those models did not predict past temperatures very well, then they could be considered unreliable at predicting future temperatures. That subjective decision suited the wishes of a managerial class to maintain calm and the idea that we have time for technology and enterprise to fix everything. But it required assumptions about the dynamics in our atmosphere being the same now as in the past. Instead, the new models were better analysing dynamics in the hydrological cycle and capturing some recent changes in that. Another video by a science communicator covered this issue recently. I recommend you watch Dr Sabine Hossenfelder, but must state a caveat; feel free to ignore her over-enthusiasm for nuclear power to reduce harm. I hope she reads Chapter 3 in Breaking Together, to better understand the limits of nuclear power in getting us out of this mess.

The rejection of the scarier model simulations is just one example of how science doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Believe it or not, scientists are not robots. They have culturally-derived assumptions and hopes, as well as understandable interest in using their own skill sets, while maintaining status and income for themselves and their colleagues. That is why climate models were prioritised in the first place – people who loved stats and fancy computing could receive huge multi-year grants. That means a nice house, kids in school, decent career path – we all know those daily considerations. But the dominance of computer modelling is how the conversation could be kept going for years, twiddling the parameters and equations, rather than accepting that existing levels of greenhouse gases, combined with a massive rapid depletion of cloud-seeding forests, meant we are in for a dangerous era of weather destabilization.

Unfortunately, it isn’t just climatologists who have misled themselves, and us, due to their personal and institutional biases.  Many journalists in this space don’t appear to understand the process of science, and the factors that create groupthink to sideline scientific truths for years in favour of the status quo. We see this when journalists attempt to lampoon me for being a ‘one person IPCC’, thereby ignoring the hundreds of scholars who arrive at conclusions far more concerning than the IPCC. We know that amalgamating a volume of scientific papers is not the way to identify what research is most salient to understanding our climate. For instance, I knew that the preponderance of papers coming from climate modelling was a result of institutional imperatives, not the way to gain most insight on our climate. Instead, we could prioritise findings coming from analysis of the oceans, as 90% of all incoming energy goes into the oceans, which cover 70% percent of our planet (perhaps misnamed ‘Earth’). One 2017 study in Geophysical Research Letters from two Australian scientists particularly caught my attention. Drs Benjamin Henley and Andrew King found that if we entered an El Nino period, then “the year in which the global mean first reaches 1.5°C” would be 2025.

When my critics say I “cherry pick” data, they are revealing their ignorance of the skills and rigour involved in salience identification. The challenge is that one needs to not only be smart, motivated and trained in multiple methodologies to be able to identify salient truths, but it also helps to be slightly distanced from the everyday humdrum of a particular scientific discipline, given that each is somewhat self-referential and self-interested. That challenge increases due to what we sociologists call ‘occupational closure’, where experts in a profession are partly motivated by defending the status of their profession and the value of their training and their roles in esteemed institutions. Paradoxically, they can become quite unprofessional and unscientific when criticising important contributions by people outside their tribe (if interested, this is stuff I discuss in detail in Chapter 7 of Breaking Together).

If you have watched the video interview with Gavin, then you might be surprised at how they laugh about the mistakes of mainstream climate professionals. However, laughing off the apocalypse is an understandable form of emotional defence. Unfortunately, it blocks us from potential learning about what went wrong to get us into this mess. A sensible response would be to look closer at why mainstream science got this wrong, including institutional and psychological dynamics, rather than pretending it was a simple mistake in calculation. In addition, a deeper inquiry would include why leading scientists and their friends in media actively crushed the work and reputation of people who were closer to the truth. Anything less than such introspection would, sadly, render someone incapable and redundant for helping us all navigate this new era of disruption and collapse.

I don’t expect vindication, as I upset too many ‘climate users’ over the last few years (the professionals who use climate issues as a career opportunity). But I know more people will break ranks, and inquire into how we avoid repeating the same mistakes of the past in this new era. So, I’d welcome you asking any scientists you know, about how deep they are going to look at why they underpredicted such an existential threat to humankind – and then bashed those who were closer to the truth. Perhaps they might then join the hundreds of signatories of the scholars’ warning on societal disruption and collapse.

CROWDFUND!

After accepting that academia is not very focused on truth or education, and instead involved in performances of superiority, like my colleague in radical climate analysis, Dr Rupert Read, I resigned my full professorship to do other things. In his case, the Climate Majority Project and in my case, to become involved in grassroots resilience efforts, both practical and spiritual. Please check out the crowdfund for Bekandze Farm School.

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