Surprise: Revenge of Gaia's specific predictions have thus far actually been too conservative, not "alarmist"

[nathan currier]

Dear Jim, 

I hope that you received my email of last spring, suggesting, among other things, that you might consider 

at least waiting until this summer's sea-ice melt season was over, in terms of your changed positions 

mentioned in the press, your upcoming book, etc. Yesterday we arrived at that minimum, and so I'm writing 

again. But this time I'm making it a sort of open letter  - also sending it to all those who follow the geoengineering 

group of Ken Caldeira and Mike MacCracken, as well as to AMEG, the group I've been in lately that sea-ice 

expert Peter Wadhams also belongs to, and a few others, including Jim Hansen - as I wish to stimulate general 

conversation in this way, and possibly others will want to weigh in, too. After all, you were one of geoengineering's 

most vocal public advocates, but have recently said that you've changed your mind about the climate crisis altogether, 

which has struck many as odd. I'm hoping that this summer's sea-ice might have given you pause.

I was actually attending a meeting yesterday here in NYC, convened by Greenpeace, with Jim Hansen and 

others from the climate world, addressing the "Polar Emergency." I'm sure you've taken note of everything 

that has been going on, in any case, and I've wondered how you feel about what has happened since the spring. 

A great curiosity for me is that, when you were quoted in the press talking about your new change of position 

and book, you mentioned how, "We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world," according to your 

previous views. I just did my own bit of accounting of what you predicted, specifically, in those works, and 

wish to go over some of it now.

The Revenge of Gaia  and The Vanishing face of Gaia were published six and three years ago, respectively, 

and both concern the 21st century and beyond, so they clearly cannot be judged yet in their full implications, 

nor will any of us alive today ever be able to do so. Hopefully they will be wrong, because of human action.

But in fact, when The Revenge of Gaia or The Vanishing Face of Gaia projections are compared in detail against 

what has happened since, it is unquestionable that things are either perfectly on track or progressing more quickly 

than you had projected then.

Of course, there was a somewhat poetic use of language at times in both of them, covering things that no one ever 

expects to see - a "few last breeding pairs" or some such phrase, for example, but this kind of "setting the scene" is not 

science, and so largely irrelevant, and I didn't find a single thing, looking at them last night, to provide evidence yet that 

the reverse is true, and show any specific projection that has failed to come true or is behind schedule in either book. 

Let's go over it.

Most of your specific predictions concerned a projected state shift in the climate system when CO2 reaches around 500ppm, 

based on your own modeling, some of others', PETM paleoclimate data, etc. In Revenge you noted that at current rates 500ppm 

would be achieved "in forty years." It's not explicit in Revenge, but in Vanishing Face you made it clear that you meant multi-gas 

CO2e, so actually at current rates we will get to 500ppm CO2e well before 2046, even without any big feedbacks kicking in, etc. 

For example, while there's some question on accounting in multigas calculations (what GWPs get used, for example), typically it's 

considered we're at 430 or 440ppm of CO2e now. Even were there no methane, CFCs, etc, emitted at all, we'd get there by ~2032 at 

current CO2 emissions rates, I think. In Vanishing Face, p86, you spoke of how "in a few decades" the world would not be 

the same home for its seven billion humans ("apart from a lucky accident or geoengineering"), and even wrote a little later in that 

book (p89) that "for the present" you were assuming the planet would warm "at least as severely as the mid-range of IPCC predicts", 

and followed that by saying that "Nothing is certain; and I have to allow that none of this may happen," spoke about decadal variability 

and then went on to say that there could possibly even be a big volcanic eruption, or we might actually geoengineer successfully, etc. So, 

with all of these broad generalities, they are either surprisingly mild, descriptive of the course we're on, or actually being exceeded. 

And now, we have just come to something far more specific: the ice-albedo feedback is what Hansen likes to call a "fast feedback", 

and so for the first time we begin to get a glimpse of something we can judge, even in the small time frame of the years since your 

two books appeared. The 2012 summer sea ice minimum is past, and it is clear  - thus far, Revenge of Gaia vastly under-projected 

how quickly things might evolve with it. For example, you have on page 54 a comparison of summer sea-ice minima from 1983, 2003, 

and the imagined mid-21st century (in the text you say 2030-2050). After the huge crash of 2007, Tim Lenton and some others essentially 

said that this was likely a jump to a new stable state, suggesting that it might hang around that new level for some time. But now 

we know for sure that even that is not true, and it seems quite clear that it is really part of a death spiral in the summer ice, 

which is on a trajectory far, far faster than your graph suggested, and as you know, at current rates will reach a near-zero 

state in the next 4-8 years (if not before). 

You frequently used the PETM as a model for future climate in both books, which has become quite standard in conventional climatology

for the warming we could add this century. You also got the extremes in weather right - in The Revenge, on p60, you wrote how the 

IPCC TAR shows the gradual rise of warming, but not the unpredicted extremes, floods, and more severe storms. "We should expect 

climate changes of a kind never even thought of, one-off events affecting no more than a region." You went on to use the 2003 heat 

wave in Europe as an example. Just recently, many scientists have finally said the same thing, calling the 2003 heatwave the first 

clearly global warming-engendered disaster, and Hansen has said that, although he projected extreme weather increases long ago, 

even he underestimated how quickly it could increase, and yet there's no sense in either of your books that it might be playing a role 

in hundreds of billions of dollars' damages per year within a few years' time. You mentioned drought as the greatest enemy 

(Vanishing Face, p84), but certainly not that the U.S. might be experiencing its worst drought in instrumental records only three years 

after publication! Nor, in the related discussion of food security, that the UN would be posting a food security alert in a few years. 

So, again - you had it exactly right - in a sense, as a full picture, and despite issues of "poetic license," you could claim to have 

generally depicted coming effects as well as anyone else - but, as far as can be strictly judged 

thus far, when specific dates are available, you have thus far under-projected changes, not over-projected them.

On page 34 of The Revenge, you listed a half dozen feedbacks that would upend climate predictions. 

These different feedbacks inspired the book, as your account of your Hadley Center trip with Sandy shows. 

The first and the last of these, though - albedo and methane feedbacks - aren't presented as being connected 

at all in the list, while in fact, the methane feedbacks are deeply intertwined with the sea-ice, and that's a key 

point here: now that we know the sea-ice is almost certainly going to be gone quite soon in summer, with possibly 

as much change in the coming few years' summer extent losses as over the last few decades, methane 

increases are likely to follow for real, and there are already clear signs that adumbrate that shift, as I'm sure 

you're aware - the hundred of thousands of land-based sources that have been recorded, the big plumes around 

the ESAS marine sources, the sonar readings there, the atmospheric readings breaking 7,000ppb 

taken in one expedition along the coast, the mysterious methane anomaly over the whole arctic ocean, etc., etc.

A final thing, and that is the precautionary aspect: perhaps Carl Sagan cooked the books a bit on nuclear 

winter modeling, as Lynn herself felt and others said afterwards, by over-emphasizing the modeling that seemed to 

show the larger nuclear winter effects. We are all the happier for it today. Imagine if he had picked the other model, 

and we had continued build-ups of ICBMs and 'Star Wars' and so on instead, one can only imagine all the dangers 

we'd be in today, to add to the other climate ones I'm discussing now. Instead, Sagan helped to close down the Cold War. 

The world really needs you back as a leader on climate action, Jim, in part because it seems more and more that we are 

really going to need geoengineering for the arctic very soon, in addition to really aggressive non-CO2 reductions (and obviously, 

this is in addition to decarbonizing the whole economy), I feel sure, and there are very few people who have the capacity of 

public persuasion that you do. You could be a great help to the world again right now, given the rapid evolution of things, 

so I hope that you'll seriously consider what I'm saying.

I've also attached a recent Jim Hansen paper on energy imbalances, in case you hadn't seen it, which I think is close to your recent 

concerns on the seeming lack of rise of warming in recent global surface temperatures, where the energy is going, 

total energy budget, etc.

All best,

Nathan

[Ninad Bondre]

Dear Nathan,

I will refrain from commenting on the bulk of your email. But I would like to ask you to reflect on the paragraph referring to the precautionary aspect.   

The narrative of Carl Sagan helping to end the Cold War undersells the complex sway of history -- the intersecting circumstances, actions and events -- that facilitated a change in course. The contrasting narratives of "impending catastrophe" or "infinite resilience" reflect a similar need to simplify. They capture neither human ingenuity nor its biophysical limits.

Regarding your take on the possible "cooking of the books" by Sagan, one could just as well speculate that it dented the credibility of the scientific community for decades to come. That it has made encouraging action difficult despite apparently incontrovertible evidence. Knowledge endows scientists with a unique privilege (and I dare say power) -- but it still does not confer divinity on them.

Sincerely,

Ninad

_______________________________________________________________
Ninad R. Bondre, Ph.D.   |  Science Editor

International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP)
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Box 50005, SE 104-05 Stockholm, Sweden
www.igbp.net

[David Lewis]

Lovelock was interviewed for The Guardian and provided this description of Garth Paltridge, one of the two people who most influenced him as he changed his mind about climate science:

"There is one sceptic that everyone should read and that is Garth Paltridge. He's written a book called The Climate Caper. It is a devastating, critical book. It is so good. This impresses me a lot."   (full interview transcript here)

For those who haven't acquainted themselves with the views of Garth Paltridge, it happens that the Foreword, Paltridge's Introduction, Overview and a few pages from Chapter 2, i.e. a total of 25 pages from The Climate Caper, are online hosted by Google Books here. Caution: Lord Monckton himself wrote the Foreword.    

A few quotes from the Paltridge book, from what is available online: 

On the IPCC:  "A colleague of mine put it rather well.  The IPCC, he said, has developed a highly successful immune system.  Its climate scientists have become the equivalent of white blood cells that rush in overwhelming numbers to repel infection by ideas and results which do not support the basic thesis that global warming is perhaps the greatest of the modern threats to mankind".  

On climate science:  "...give or take a religion or two, never has quite so much rubbish been espoused by so many on so little evidence". 

On Mann et.al.:  "the hockey stick reconstruction of past climate is indeed fairly close to being nonsense".  

In general:  "The whole business has hardened over the last decade or so into a semi-religious crusade in which climate scientists have developed an arrogance about their aims and activity which brooks no argument either with their interpretation of the science or with the way in which the science is used.  To achieve their ends, they are drawing heavily on the capital of scientific reputation that has been so painfully assembled over hundreds of years."

Stewart Brand (of Whole Earth Catalog fame) happened to be in communication with Lovelock during the time Lovelock formed his new views.  

Brand is an old friend of Lovelock's dating back to 1974 when Brand, as editor of CoEvolution Quarterly magazine.  He says he was the first to publish Lovelock's GAIA hypothesis.  Brand, about half way into this online article, confirms the importance of Paltridge to Lovelock and identifies that there was one other major influence.  Brand:

"James Lovelock...  has softened his sense of alarm about the pace of climate change. He is persuaded by 'sensible skeptic' Garth Paltridge's book The Climate Caper (2009) that climate scientists have become overly politicized, and a paper in Science by Kevin Trenberth" 

Brand quotes Lovelock from personal correspondence:  "Apart from a few friends... my name is now mud in climate science circles for having dared to consort with sceptics.  Amazing how tribal scientists are."

Trenberth's Perspectives piece in Science that Lovelock misunderstood is here 

Trenberth's has this to say about Lovelock's understanding of climate science:  "The fact is he knows little or nothing about climate change." (quote taken from this article)

I'm not sure an appeal to Lovelock's reasoning power is going to be that helpful at this stage....