Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
The Alliance for Automotive Innovation said the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s (NHTSA) Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) proposal was unreasonable and requested significant revisions.The industry group argued the plan would boost average vehicle prices by $3,000 by 2032 because of penalties automakers would face for not being in compliance, adding the figure “exceeds reason and will increase costs to the American consumer with absolutely no environmental or fuel savings benefits.”
(Reuters) โ A group representing General Motors (GM.N), Toyota Motor (7203.T), Volkswagen (VOWG_p.DE) and nearly all other major automakers on Monday sharply criticized the Biden administration proposal to drastically hike fuel efficiency requirements.
The Alliance for Automotive Innovation said the National Highway Traffic Safety Administrationโs (NHTSA) Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) proposal was unreasonable and requested significant revisions.
The industry group argued the plan would boost average vehicle prices by $3,000 by 2032 because of penalties automakers would face for not being in compliance, adding the figure โexceeds reason and will increase costs to the American consumer with absolutely no environmental or fuel savings benefits.โ
NHTSA in July proposed boosting requirements by 2% per year for passenger cars and 4% per year for pickup trucks and SUVs from 2027 through 2032, resulting in a fleet-wide average fuel efficiency of 58 miles (93 km) per gallon.
The American Automotive Policy Council, a group representing the Detroit Three automakers, separately on Monday urged NHTSA to halve its proposed fuel economy increases to 2% annually for trucks, saying the proposal โwould disproportionately impact the truck fleet.โ
The group noted 83% of vehicles produced by Ford (F.N), GM and Chrysler parent Stellantis (STLAM.MI) are trucks.
NHTSA said its rule โis focused on saving Americans money at the gas pump and strengthening American energy independence,โ estimating combined benefits of its proposal exceed costs by more than $18 billion.
The auto alliance said automakers would face more than $14 billion in non-compliance penalties between 2027 and 2032.
Automakers also raised alarm at the Energy Departmentโs proposal to significantly revise how it calculates theย petroleum-equivalent fuel economy rating for EVs in NHTSAโs CAFE program, saying it would โdevalue the fuel economy of electric vehicles by 72%.โ
The Alliance for Automotive Innovation said the National Highway Traffic Safety Administrationโs (NHTSA) Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) proposal was unreasonable and requested significant revisions.
The industry group argued the plan would boost average vehicle prices by $3,000 by 2032 because of penalties automakers would face for not being in compliance, adding the figure โexceeds reason and will increase costs to the American consumer with absolutely no environmental or fuel savings benefits.โ
Winston Frederick Sterzel, also known by hisย YouTubeย pseudonymย SerpentZA, is a South Africanย vloggerย andย video producer. He lived inย Shenzhenย in the Guangdong province of China for fourteen years.
His videos cover a variety of topics relating toย Chinese politicsย and life in China from a Westerner’s perspective.
Weโve been hearing it for years now from Joe Biden. Back in June 2021, he recalled a supposed visit to the Pentagon while he was Vice President during which he claims he asked the nationโs military leaders about the โgreatest physical threatsโ facing America.
โThis is not a joke,โ he said. โYโknow what the Joint Chiefs told us the greatest threat facing America was? Global warming!โ
Biden further explained, โBecause thereโll be significant population movements, fights over land, millions of people leaving places because they are literally sinking below the sea in Indonesia. Because of the fights over what is arable land anymore,โ Biden mused, โwe must commit to an ambitious climate action.โ
Of course, all this was backdrop for the real change in the U.S. military from protecting America and its allies against foreign aggression to prioritizing โclimate change as a grave peril to national security.โ The Armyโs primary mission in the Biden Administration is to develop new risk analyses, threat projections, and other strategies to combat an unseen, unarmed โenemy.โ
Back in January, at a fundraiser for the Democratic National Committee, Biden asserted that, โIf we donโt stay under 1.5 degrees Celsius, weโre going to have a real problem. Itโs the single-most existential threat to humanity weโve ever faced, including nuclear weapons.โ
Just this week, in the face of the Hamas massacre of over a thousand Israelis and foreign visitors, the beheading of babies, the rape and torture of women of all ages, and the additional assaults from Hezbollah encampments in nearby Lebanon, Biden spokesman John Kirby reaffirmed Bidenโs long-held public viewpoint.
In the middle of a hostage crisis, Kirby, who serves as National Security Council coordinator, told reporters that Biden and his administration still believe that climate change is โthe largest threat facing the U.S. and the world since it is capable of โwiping out all human lifeโ.โ
Notice the omission of one key word from Kirbyโs statement โ โimmediate.โ
Back in January, the only obvious threat to world peace was the Russia-Ukraine war, and people feared Vladimir Putin might become willing to unleash his nationโs vast nuclear arsenal rather than face possible defeat.
Even then, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced with grave sadness that its Science and Security Board had moved the hands of the Doomsday Clock forward. They told the world, โThe Clock now stands at 90 seconds to midnight โ the closest to global catastrophe it has ever beenโ in its 75-year history.
With Israel declaring war on Hamas, and effectively against Iran, where might that clock stand now?
To be sure, weather events often bring death and destruction, but these are localized disasters (hurricanes, tsunamis, tornados, and the like). Forecasters have plenty of time to warn the masses, and many make temporary moves to escape what Mother Nature has been bringing to Earth perhaps as long as it has existed.
But a nuclear holocaust will bring little if any warning, just as the Hamas assault on babies and concert-goers on a Sabbath morning was largely undetected in advance.
Unconvinced that Biden is wrong?
According to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, โA single nuclear bomb detonated over a large city could kill millions of people. The use of tens or hundreds of nuclear bombs would disrupt the global climate, causing widespread famine.โ
ICANW adds that it only takes 10 seconds for the fireball from a nuclear explosion to reach its maximum size. The blast kills people close to ground zero and causes lung injuries, ear damage, and internal bleeding further away. The extreme heat causes severe burns and ignites fires over a large area, which coalesce into a giant firestorm. Even people in underground shelters face likely death due to a lack of oxygen and carbon monoxide (NOT carbon dioxide) poisoning.
A recent essay in Time states that explosions, the electromagnetic pulse, and the radioactivity from nuclear explosions arenโt even the worst part. โA nuclear winter is caused by the black carbon smoke from the nuclear firestorms. As the smoke spreads, it โmakes Earth freezing cold even during the summer, with farmland in Kansas cooling by about 40 ยฐ F and other regions cooling almost twice as much.โ
According to a 2022 report in Nature, over five billion of the Earthโs 8 billion people could starve to death, including 99 percent of the people in the U.S., Russia, Europe, and China. The reason? Most black carbon smoke would stay in the Northern Hemisphere where it would likely be produced (as these nations bomb each other to oblivion). Moreover, temperature drops harm agriculture more at high latitudes.
What does all this mean? That Africa, South America, and southeast Asia (including India) might not be that heavily impacted by a nuclear holocaust that would essentially eradicate all life in the Northern Hemisphere? Would the nearly three billion left alive be able to thrive in the absence of the worldโs previously leading economies?
On the other hand, there are those who say leaving three billion alive is not enough. Ted Turner, who once famously suggested an optimum world population of 250 million, more recently argued that the world population must be stabilized at no more than 2 billion, โor weโre just going to have more and more catastrophes.โ
Entomologist Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, told The Guardian in 2012 that the optimum population of Earth is about 1.5 to 2.0 billion people. He sneered, โIf you want a battery chicken world where everyone has minimum space and food and everyone is kept just about alive you might be able to support in the long term about 4 or 5 billion people. But you already have 7 billion. So we have to humanely and as rapidly as possible move to population shrinkage.โ
Back in 2006 University of Texas ecologist Eric Planka โ that yearโs Texas Distinguished Scientist โ told the Texas Academy of Science that 90 percent of his fellow human beings must die in order to save the planet. War and famine, said Planka, could not accomplish his goal.
Disease offers the most efficient and fastest way to kill billions, said Planka. Not AIDS, because it is too slow at killing, but diseases like Ebola are efficient enough to wipe out billions if properly managed. In Plankaโs utopia, โEvery one of you who gets to survive has to bury nine.โ
So maybe President Biden is looking at things from Plankaโs perspective. โNuclear war โ meh. Only kills five billion. Dr. Fauci and his pals in China are working on ways to kill just about everyone โ except those chosen by the state to survive.โ
But no. That cannot be it.
Back in 1964 Americans laughed at Sterling Haydenโs portrayal of an insane Brig. Gen. Jack D. Ripper in the movie Dr. Strangelove (Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb). Ripper orders a preemptive strike on the Soviet Union that only he has the codes to stop, leaving the White House in a panic as they learn of Russiaโs doomsday machine that will launch enough missies to destroy all life on Earth if a single nuclear bomb hits the U.S.S.R.
Today, as members of Congress, university students and faculties, and jihadis from Harvard to Australia cheer the beheading of babies, no sane person is laughing about nuclear war.
And no sane person really believes that carbon dioxide emissions are a greater threat to humanity than a nuclear holocaust.
Duggan Flanakin is a Senior Policy Analyst with the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow.
A former Senior Fellow with the Texas Public Policy Foundation, Mr. Flanakin authored definitive works on the creation of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and on environmental education in Texas.
A brief history of his multifaceted career appears in his book, “Infinite Galaxies: Poems from the Dugout.”
As we slide inexorably into the clutches of Soviet-style cultural narrative control and thought prevention courtesy of โfact-checkingโ institutions and their oddly subjective โfact booksโ, I offer the following conundrum as a hurled wrench into the cogs of the greasy gears of the thought police:
Solar power could soon become a wonderful thing for humanity.
As a heretical writer on an oil/gas centric website โ most likely soon to be flagged by governmental decree and definition a writhing pit of misinformation or disinformation (take your pick โ bill C-11 & spawn wonโt split hairs) โ yes, I offer a ringing endorsement for solar power.
Not as a blanket solution of course; I may be heretical but Iโm not insane. And not as an olive branch to those that think solar can become some kind of backbone of the electrical system. The enthusiasm herein for solar is in reference to the technology as a potential building block for a whole other aspect of civilization that is more desperately needed by a factor of ten than the current collective spastic heave that is our war on carbon emissions.
Solar power may prove to be an excellent solution to one of the worldโs most considerable problems: a lack of potable water.
Water desalination from the sun is not exactly new technology, it likely has been around longer than the worldโs oldest profession. (Hard to pin that point in history exactly but hey it gives context that perks up the ears of most people. Suffice it to say that solar distillation has been around for thousands of years.)
My inbox, spanning email and social media (looking at you Twitter) seems to be filled with one of two things these days โ some modern form of prostitution (aw, look who started following meโฆwait a minute, is it necessary to show everyone thatโฆ) or something to do with renewable energy as a solution to emissions. Both have mastered the art of PR, both make shocking claims, both promise a good time for next to nothing, and both are going to get you in trouble.
However, out of that morass did actually appear some eye-catching information (not the porn โ it might be an eyeful but itโs not information). A Saudi Arabian firm named Acwa Power is one of the many that peppers me with news releases, and one of them somehow stood out in the flow: Acwa Power announced the Hassyan sea water desalination plant that will use solar power to produce 180 million gallons of desalinated water, per day.
Big wild numbers are difficult to contextualize on their own, so hereโs a visual: an Olympic sized swimming pool, 165 feet long and 56 feet wide, holds just under 500,000 US gallons. This Acwa Power project could fill 360 of them, every day.
Of even more significance is that the price of such desalination has been tumbling. In 1970, the cost for reverse osmosis desalinated water was about $5 per cubic meter. By 2005, the cost had fallen to about $1/m3. The Acwa Power project pegs the cost at $0.37. My recent City of Calgary water bill shows a water cost of $1.42/m3 which is about $1.03 US, or triple the price that Acwa is supplying water at.
Consider that falling cost structure along with Acwaโs total desalination capacity. The company can now produce 7.6 million cubic meters per day, or two billion gallons โ enough to fill 4,000 Olympic size swimming pools, every day.
This is pretty fantastic news for humanity. Itโs true that vast solar fields arenโt exactly environmentally friendly, but given that many regions short of water have vast tracts of marginally useful land (fly over much of the southwestern US and look out the window, for example) that might be a fantastic home for solar power if the trade off is to fill a bunch of swimming pools every day, or, who knows, maybe even grow some vegetables or irrigate some trees.
Imagine if in future vast pipelines are built from coastal areas inland, carrying enough water for cities in desperate need, all at low cost. Maybe the pipelines bring sea water inland for desalination, where vast stretches of nearly empty land could be utilized for solar desalination.
Solar could be utilized exactly as it works best โ by providing a service not tied to the persistent timing demands of customers. Other fuels couldnโt touch it, assuming Acwaโs economics are sound elsewhere.
Such is the path forward for the โenergy transitionโ; that is how we are going to make actual progress in utilization of renewable energy. In fact, the term โenergy transitionโ should probably be junked, because it has become so loaded and politicized that it is like a rusted out junk-heap smoking down the freeway.
We arenโt really transitioning away from any particular form of energy; several centuries after coal appeared as a major industrial fuel, the world now continues to set annual consumption records for the stuff. Same as oil. Same as natural gas.
You donโt have to be serious student, only half-interested will suffice, in energy history to quickly grasp the reason for the rise of coal, and what that cheap/easy fuel allowed humans to accomplish; to quickly grasp the significance of oil, and what it allowed humans to do; to quickly grasp the significance of natural gas as some sort of miraculous heating fuel that allowed mass settlement in very cold regions, that allowed manufacture of countless thingsโฆand on and on. Maybe solar power has found its niche where it can be of vast benefit to humanity.
In a nutshell, thatโs the story of energy โ the obvious massive potential of new developments that move humanity forward not in tiny steps but in large strides. But those strides donโt come about by abolishing the existing systems, unless the new technology is so vitally advanced that it renders obsolete any demand for the previous. Notice the nuance there; a transition happens by a draw to the new, not an abolition of the existing. The adoption of automobiles didnโt require the execution of horses. 29dk2902lhttps://boereport.com/29dk2902l.html
Despite the airplay given to opponents in the media, there is no grand villainy in the energy world. The fact that every single person relies on hydrocarbons to the extent they do (which is fully and completely) is quite clearly the consequence of the utility of those fuels over time, not a nefarious scheme for world dominance by producers. In fact, if any technology could have supplanted large quantities of hydrocarbons, it would have been nuclear power โ but many of the most fanatical anti-nuclear people are also anti-hydrocarbons (Greenpeace, for example), while I know very few oilpatch people that campaign against nuclear.
Every single consumer would prefer to have cheaper, cleaner energy, but not at the expense of reliability. No threat is more instinctually horrifying than the thought of running out of fuel when we need it most. Elements of the WEF crowd are even acknowledging this; Bill Gates recently pointed out that โIf you try to do climate brute force, you will get people who say, โI like climate but I donโt want to bear that cost and reduce my standard of living.โ โ And thatโs here in the west; in the developing world, the conversation is far more abrupt than that.
Any โenergy transitionโ has to be built around those cold hard realities. Governments need to stop trying to quash certain industries just because theyโve been led to believe that doing so is the path forward. It isnโt.
You might wonder whether this animosity towards hydrocarbons is more imagined than real. Consider this: Covering Climate Now is an affiliation of over 500 news outlets, organizations, professional howlers, and every group of rag-tag semi-employable grad students that has come together under the climate banner. The organization includes such media pillars as Reuters and Newsweek.
On their Projects page is a project called: Climate crimes โ investigating โbig oilโs complicity in the climate crisis and attempts to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable.โ
Hmm. Ignoring the incredible mental deficiencies and dexterities required to refrain from cataloguing the benefits brought to humanity by hydrocarbons (that is, almost all of them), one has to wonder why they arenโt going after โBig Coalโ. Is it because the developing world would, if in a good mood, throw them out on their ear?
We remain silent on this bullsh*t at our peril. Not just as an industry โ the antics of these clowns will only make reserves more valuable when demand is obviously so high โ but as humanity. It is the less well off, the non-Tesla drivers, that will take it on the chin when our existing hydrocarbon supply chain is pummeled into oblivion.
Please contrast their witch hunt with the fact that there is no issue with speaking on an oil and gas-centric website of the benefits of solar (and hydrogen, and nuclear, etc.) because those things arenโt the competition most make it out to be. Seven billion people are striving to live like the other billion, and the foundation upon which they will make progress is affordable, reliable energy.
Add in the westโs newfound fascination with AI, and data centers, and air conditioners, among many other power-sucking accoutrements, and it is clear that we need all forms of energy, in as much quantity as we can provide.
It is safe to take this idea one step further. Consider that the oil patch has a waste water problem; many oilfields have high water cuts, and that impure water incurs costs to transport and dispose. What if solar power could be harnessed to distill much of that waste water โ the process could provide very valuable new potable water sources in the parched prairies, could lower transportation and disposal costs of waste water, and could reduce emissions associated with transportation, processing and disposal of all that waste water.
I would bet that the oil patch would wholeheartedly embrace the concept of utilizing solar energy long before the Guilbeaults of the world could embrace the value of natural gas and harness it to full potential.
It should be up to the wisdom of our leaders to remember the miracles of the division of labour, and apply it to energy. Not everyone in a village should be a boot maker; not every country should try to be master of all industries; and some forms of energy will work wonders in one area but not in another. Solar power is a decent supplement to a power grid, up to a very limited point, but might be a game-changer in the field of desalination. Find the best use for each niche. EVs might be fantastic city delivery vehicles/cabs/etc. but might never work in the cold rural heartland. So what? Itโs not an issue at all, except that governments are having a phenomenally difficult time accepting the reality that blanket climate initiatives are doomed to fail, in a very painful way.
Sooner or later we will start coming to our senses policy-wise, but there are going to have to be some wake-up calls along the way before we get there.
Energy conversations should be positive and, most of all, grounded in reality. Life depends on it. Find out more in โThe End of Fossil Fuel Insanityโ at Amazon.ca, Indigo.ca, or Amazon.com. Thanks!
Read more insightful analysis from Terry Etamย here,ย or email Terryย here.
Issue trees are a useful approach to breaking down aย problem statementย into component parts that can more easily be acted upon. Issue trees are visual tools that are used in consulting to help the team.
Like Galileo I have two new sciences, not that I am in his league. His were the statics (structure) and dynamics of physical stuff. Mine are the structure and dynamics of complex issues. This is explained briefly below.
The dynamics is about a highly nonlinear information flow that I call an issue storm, which I discovered about 40 years ago but never wrote about because I was making lots of money knowing about it. The science involves mapping and measuring issue storms over time. It also includes prediction to the extent feasible. Like physical storms, issue storms tend to be somewhat unpredictable.
To begin with, we need what I call looping. If A communicates to B and B replies to A, that is a single loop. When a major issue arises in an organization, or community, or country, or globally, there can be a tremendous amount of looping.
Most importantly, this evolving body of looping will have a specific pattern, which will vary from case to case. Imagine if you could just look down in the dark and see all the email traffic as an issue breaks, grows, and spreads, with each email as a streak of light. You could see the pattern, including how it changes over time.
Here is how I made the discovery. The scene was big city building permits. The city was attempting a huge downtown renovation, but it was taking something like a year on average to get a permit for each planned project. There were about 2,000 permit applications in process at a time. So, the core community was the 18 offices that reviewed applications, plus the numerous developers that applied. People were very angry.
We tracked applications and found the pattern causing the delays. First, it turned out that the average application went back 9 times for revision. So they were, in effect, processing 20,000 applications, not 2,000. Thus, the workload on all sides was much greater than thought. Each rejection, revision, and resubmission is a laborious loop.
Second, it turned out that about 60% of the repeated revisions were due to a new energy conservation code that was basically being articulated by trial and error. This is typical for new rule systems. Another 20% was due to two offices enforcing contradictory rules, so whipsawing the applicants.
Once the pattern was found, it was relatively easy to greatly reduce the looping in the two main drivers. The efficiency code was articulated and communicated to the community, and the two-office conflict was resolved. But first, you have to see the pattern.
I call such a body of looping an issue storm. These storms can be very disruptive because they consume a lot of cognitive resources. In fact, they can be paralyzing. Managing them is a major challenge, which most of our management tools do not do well. We need new tools.
On the other hand, in the policy world, issue storms are very important. This is how major policy issues get thrashed out, and final policies get articulated and voted on. CFACT is a storm center for important energy and environmental issues. We even fire up a few storms, like whales versus offshore wind, which is growing pretty big.
In addition to different patterns, issue storms can have vastly different sizes and durations. A quick argument might be a two-person, ten-minute storm with a few dozen simple exchanges. A major issue might involve thousands of exchanges, many involving large groups, and last for several years. The climate debate has been going on for over 40 years, with millions of exchanges. It likely is the biggest issue storm in history.
Typically, we are hit by multiple storms at the same time. Ours is an issue-driven world, which is why we often do not know what issues we will be working on a week from now. Thus, predicting and managing issue storms is a major challenge. I have done a lot of work on that. It all depends on the nature of the storm and your place in it. This is a very broad science, so here are just a few general points.
The most important thing is to understand the concept. Just knowing that issue storms exist and their basic properties should help you anticipate and deal with them to a considerable degree. It may be all you need in many cases.
Predicting issue storms is also important. In some cases, it may be possible to predict that one or more storms will occur. Then, one can take steps so as not to be surprised. There are really two cases here. The nature of the storm might be predictable, or it may just be that something is likely to happen, you know not what.
An example of the first case is when you publish a controversial finding and can expect a negative reaction from certain sources. You should budget your time for dealing with this.
An example of the second case that I have done a lot of work on is when you plan an innovative or unprecedented project. If it has not been done before, it is very likely that you will encounter unanticipated problems. Your Plan should include a rapid response capability, plus added time and budget. Note that this is not contingency planning because the contingencies are unknown.
When a storm hits, you need to think about the pattern and how it is likely to evolve over time. A major consideration for yourself (and those you manage) is how to budget time. Issue storms tend to rapidly consume cognitive resources, especially attention and thinking, so a useful principle is not to involve others unless necessary, thereby conserving resources. Conversely, if you are feeding a policy storm, you need to think about how best to grow it.
Then there are issue trees, which I discovered fifty years ago. See https://www.cfact.org/2020/11/17/the-structure-of-complex-issues/ for a relatively detailed explanation with useful references. The basic idea is that in a big issue, each response can engender multiple responses, each of which brings out multiple responses, as the issue emerges in the message traffic.
Blog comments often exhibit this treelike structure in one place, but it also occurs when the issue is discussed and debated in many different places. The issue tree is a fundamental structure of every complex issue.
Lots of issue tree features can be measured. Given the tree structure, the number of things to think about grows exponentially as the issue evolves. This is how they quickly consume cognitive resources. If the response rate (I call it the branching rate) is 3 responses per response, then the 10th level has almost 60,000 responses, while the whole tree has over 100,000 to that level.
One can also measure the allocation of attention to various sub-issues within the tree. Some may be neglected or missing altogether, while others are overemphasized. There is a second dynamic here, namely how the tree is evolving over time. The issue storm is how the issue is moving among the people. Tree evolution is how the people are moving among the sub-issues.
The deep problem is that while work (and life) has increasingly become issue-driven, we simply do not have the tools to manage the issue storms that buffet us. We do not even have the concepts and language to talk about these things, but I have made a small start. Different issue storms and issue trees have specific natures, consume specific resources, and evolve in specific ways. If we cannot even describe these features, then we certainly cannot manage them. This is a research project in waiting.
But at least we can understand that issue storms and issue trees are there, and we are in them. There is science here to be done and applied. Take time from engaging in an issue to study the critter itself. Above all, stay calm. Rise above the storm.
David Wojick, Ph.D. is an inDr. David Wojick is an independent policy analyst and senior advisor to CFACT.
As a civil engineer with a Ph.D. in logic and analytic philosophy of science, he brings a unique perspective to complex policy issues.
His specializes in science and technology intensive issues, especially in energy and environment.
As a cognitive scientist he also does basic research on the structure and dynamics of complex issues and reasoning.
This research informs his policy analyses. He has written hundreds of analytical articles.
Many recent examples can be found at https://www.cfact.org/author/dwojick/ Often working as a consultant on understanding complex issues, Dr. Wojick’s numerous clients have included think tanks, trade associations, businesses and government agencies.
Examples range from CFACT to the Chief of Naval Research and the Energy Department’s O๏ฌce of Science.
He has served on the faculty of Carnegie Mellon University and the sta๏ฌ of the Naval Research Laboratory.
He is available for con๏ฌdential consulting, research and writing.
The 1973 Arab Oil Embargo: Arab oil producers cut off exports to the U.S. to protest American military support for Israel in its 1973 war with Egypt and Syria.ย
Cars line up at a gas station in New York City on Dec. 23, 1973. The Arab oil embargo caused gas shortages nationwide and shaped U.S. foreign policy to this day.
The Arab oil embargo was not the cause of the energy crisis in this country: it was merely the straw that showed that the camelโs back was broken. There is no โnaturalโ or geological crisis; there is an enormous political one. It is in the nature of a mixed economy that its policies are rationally inexplicable.
โ Ayn Rand, The Energy Crisis, Part I and Part II (November 1973) [1]
Alisa Zinovโyevna Rosenbaum, known to the world as Ayn Rand, (1905โ1982) was a philosopher attuned to the workings of the mind, the economy, and politics. Best known as a novelist, she wrote fiction based on fact and wrote on contemporary issues later in life. She is the inspiration of โfree minds and free marketsโ through her philosophy of Objectivism.
When asked by a Random House salesman to summarize her philosophy โwhile standing on one foot,โ she answered:
1. Metaphysics: Objective Reality
2. Epistemology: Reason
3. Ethics: Self-interest
4. Politics: Capitalism
Rand translated her response into simple language in her inaugural column for the Los Angeles Times in 1962:
1. Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed, or Wishing wonโt make it so
2. You canโt eat your cake and have it too
3. Man is an end in himself
4. Give me liberty or give me death [2]
Randโs commentary about Richard Nixonโs wage and price control program of August 1971 (the public acceptance of which represented a โmoratorium on brainsโ), remains biting. [3] And from Nixonโs beginning, she diagnosed the โenergy crisisโ in terms of the failed mixed economy where distortive regulation expands from its own shortcomings.
If only Ayn Rand were here to write about the global warming/climate crusade. And the energy industryโs back-pedaling and โgreenwashingโ of the issue, trying to placate its enemies. (It did not work, and signs of change are in the air.)
โThe Energy Crisisโ
Excerpts below come from โThe Energy Crisis,โ published just weeks after the Arab Embargo in 1973. As you read Rand below, substitute โfossil fuelโ for โoilโ and โclimate regulatorsโ for โArab OPECโ to come to the present.
โThe oil industry is being destroyed by a bombardment of paperโof governmental rules, regulations, directives, edicts, commands. But that bombardment is more effective than other kinds of air raids: it blasts your power stations, extinguishes your lights, freezes your homes, stops your motors, locks your factories, wipes out your jobs, and leaves a barren land on which nothing will grow again for generations.โ
โThe result of our present economic system is that the men who do the work โ in this case, the oil industry โ know the state of their production at a given moment, but do not know what edict will shatter them next month or next year. The government officials do not know the state of the industry they are controlling โ nor what edict they will feel like issuing next week.โ
โThe Arab oil embargo was not the cause of the energy crisis in this country: it was merely the straw that showed that the camelโs back was broken. There is no โnaturalโ or geological crisis; there is an enormous political one.โ
โIt is in the nature of a mixed economy that its policies are rationally inexplicable, that there are no identifiable causes, no accountable initiators, no ascertainable villainsโand that you are losing your jobs, giving up your automobiles, catching pneumonia in unheated bedrooms, not because some giant evildoers are plotting your destruction, but because some seedy hack wanted an unearned salary, and some crummy professor wanted an undeserved prestige, and some measly shyster wanted a chance to fish in muddy laws, and none of them cared to or could watch the state of the countryโs economy, and the sum of such termite aspirations has eaten through the pillars of the structure so that one kick from a sheik was sufficient to make it crumble.โ
โPrice controls have wrecked the natural gas industry, stopping exploration for new domestic fields; at present, we import increasing amounts of [liquified] natural gas from Algeria, at prices substantially above the price permitted to domestic producers.โ
โโโ
[1] The Ayn Rand Institute, copyright holder of these two essays, has chosen not to make the content from the Ayn Rand Letter available online. Formal citations are as follows:
Ayn Rand, โThe Energy Crisis: Part Iโ (November 5, 1973). Reprinted in The Ayn Rand Letter: Volumes IโIV (1971โ1976). Palo Alto, CA: Palo Alto Book Service, 1979, p. 258.
Ibid., p. 260.
[2] Rand, Ayn. โIntroducing Objectivismโ (1962). In Rand, ed. The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought. New York: The New American Library, 1989, p. 3.
[3]ย Rand, โThe Moratorium on Brains: Part II.โย The Ayn Rand Letter. Vol. 1, No 3 (November 8, 1971). Republished in The Ayn Rand Letter: Volumes I-IV, 971โ976. Palo Alto, CA, 1979, pp. 9โ14, at 13.
We utilize a coupled economyโagroecologyโhydrology modeling framework to capture the cascading impacts of climate change mitigation policy on agriculture and the resulting water quality cobenefits. We analyze a policy that assigns a range of United States governmentโs social cost of carbon estimates ($51, $76, and $152/ton of CO2-equivalents) to fossil fuelโbased CO2 emissions. This policy raises energy costs and, importantly for agriculture, boosts the price of nitrogen fertilizer production. At the highest carbon price, US carbon emissions are reduced by about 50%, and nitrogen fertilizer prices rise by about 90%, leading to an approximate 15% reduction in fertilizer applications for corn production across the Mississippi River Basin. Corn and soybean production declines by about 7%, increasing crop prices by 6%, while nitrate leaching declines by about 10%. Simulated nitrate export to the Gulf of Mexico decreases by 8%, ultimately shrinking the average midsummer area of the Gulf of Mexico hypoxic area by 3% and hypoxic volume by 4%. We also consider the additional benefits of restored wetlands to mitigate nitrogen loading to reduce hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico and find a targeted wetland restoration scenario approximately doubles the effect of a low to moderate social cost of carbon. Wetland restoration alone exhibited spillover effects that increased nitrate leaching in other parts of the basin which were mitigated with the inclusion of the carbon policy. We conclude that a national climate policy aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the United States would have important water quality cobenefits.https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2302087120#
Theyโve got models.
Evaluation using four coupled models to relate carbon pricing to nitrate export to the Gulf of Mexico. (A:ย Left) Integrated modeling framework. The ENVISAGE global economic model determines the change in agricultural input prices due to climate policy. These price changes feed into the SIMPLE-G-US-CS gridded economic model of cornโsoy production which has been calibrated to capture the yield responses to changes in nitrogen fertilizer applications estimated using the Agro-IBIS agroecosystem model. When confronted with these input price changes, farmers alter their fertilizer usage, thereby changing nitrogen leachate. Nitrogen leachate is routed through the Mississippi River Basin hydrologic system into the Gulf of Mexico using the WBM hydrological model. Imposed policies are depicted in white or black boxes, and uncertainties in key model parameters characterized by sensitivity analyses are listed in gray boxes (Table 1). (B:ย Right) Spatial distribution of the relative changes of key factors including crop output (top maps), nitrogen fertilizer applied (Middle), and fraction of nitrate flux ultimately entering the Gulf (Bottom). Callouts identify points in the modeling framework where each factor is calculated. Inset values for each map provide the basin-wide average value for each depicted variable (blue), and the total change for basin export in black. (C:ย Top) Nonlinear response between fertilizer application rate with crop yield and nitrate leachate below the root zone represented, respectively, by Gompertz and quadratic functions. Callout identifies the grid cell location of this example response. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2302087120#
They do note that their prescriptions will reduce agricultural output, although they likely underestimate the impact. Thatโs ok though. We can just buy more from overseas farmers. I kid you not. Emphasis mine.
The carbon prices imposed in this study resulted inย consequential reductions on the order of 7.2% in corn and soy outputย from the Mississippi River Basinโroughly 20,000 tons of corn-equivalent output. SIMPLE-G-US-CS accommodated reduced corn and soy production through reduced domestic use (primarily in livestock feed), as well as diminished grain exports.ย In response to the elevated cornโsoy prices, foreign producers would expand production.
The ocean covers 71% of the globe and drives average temperatures; The SSTs have a constant water content, (unlike air temperatures), so give a better reading of heat content variations and Major El Ninos have been the dominant climate feature in recent years.
The best context for understanding decadal temperature changes comes from the worldโs sea surface temperatures (SST), for several reasons:
The ocean covers 71% of the globe and drives average temperatures;
SSTs have a constant water content, (unlike air temperatures), so give a better reading of heat content variations;
Major El Ninos have been the dominant climate feature in recent years.
HadSST is generally regarded as the best of the global SST data sets, and so the temperature story here comes from that source. Previously I used HadSST3 for these reports, but Hadley Centre has made HadSST4 the priority, and v.3 will no longer be updated. HadSST4 is the same as v.3, except that the older data from ship water intake was re-estimated to be generally lower temperatures than shown in v.3. The effect is that v.4 has lower average anomalies for the baseline period 1961-1990, thereby showing higher current anomalies than v.3. This analysis concerns more recent time periods and depends on very similar differentials as those from v.3 despite higher absolute anomaly values in v.4. More on what distinguishes HadSST3 and 4 from other SST products at the end. The user guide for HadSST4 is here.
The Current Context
The chart below shows SST monthly anomalies as reported in HadSST4 starting in 2015 through August 2023. A global cooling pattern is seen clearly in the Tropics since its peak in 2016, joined by NH and SH cycling downward since 2016.
Note that in 2015-2016 the Tropics and SH peaked in between two summer NH spikes. That pattern repeated in 2019-2020 with a lesser Tropics peak and SH bump, but with higher NH spikes. By end of 2020, cooler SSTs in all regions took the Global anomaly well below the mean for this period. In 2021 the summer NH summer spike was joined by warming in the Tropics but offset by a drop in SH SSTs, which raised the Global anomaly slightly over the mean.
Then in 2022, another strong NH summer spike peaked in August, but this time both the Tropic and SH were countervailing, resulting in only slight Global warming, later receding to the mean. Oct./Nov. temps dropped in NH and the Tropics took the Global anomaly below the average for this period. After an uptick in December, temps in January 2023 dropped everywhere, strongest in NH, with the Global anomaly further below the mean since 2015.
Now comes El Nino as shown by the upward spike in the Tropics since January, the anomaly nearly tripling from 0.38C to 1.06C. In August 2023, all regions rose, especially NH up from 0.70C to 1.37C, pulling up the global anomaly to a new high for this period. September shows a new peak for NH at 1.41, but both SH and the Tropics cooled enough to bring the Global anomaly back down.
Comment:
The climatists have seized on this unusual warming as proof of their Zero Carbon agenda, without addressing how impossible it would be for CO2 warming the air to raise ocean temperatures. It is the ocean that warms the air, not the other way around. Recently Steven Koonin had this to say about the phonomenon confirmed in the graph above:
El Nino is a phenomenon in the climate system that happens once every four or five years. Heat builds up in the equatorial Pacific to the west of Indonesia and so on. Then when enough of it builds up it surges across the Pacific and changes the currents and the winds. As it surges toward South America it was discovered and named in the 19th century It is well understood at this point that the phenomenon has nothing to do with CO2.
Now people talk about changes in that phenomena as a result of CO2 but itโs there in the climate system already and when it happens it influences weather all over the world. We feel it when it gets rainier in Southern California for example. So for the last 3 years we have been in the opposite of an El Nino, a La Nina, part of the reason people think the West Coast has been in drought.
It has now shifted in the last months to an El Nino condition that warms the globe and is thought to contribute to this Spike we have seen. But there are other contributions as well. One of the most surprising ones is that back in January of 2022 an enormous underwater volcano went off in Tonga and it put up a lot of water vapor into the upper atmosphere. It increased the upper atmosphere of water vapor by about 10 percent, and thatโs a warming effect, and it may be that is contributing to why the spike is so high.
A longer view of SSTs
The graph above is noisy, but the density is needed to see the seasonal patterns in the oceanic fluctuations. Previous posts focused on the rise and fall of the last El Nino starting in 2015. This post adds a longer view, encompassing the significant 1998 El Nino and since. The color schemes are retained for Global, Tropics, NH and SH anomalies. Despite the longer time frame, I have kept the monthly data (rather than yearly averages) because of interesting shifts between January and July.1995 is a reasonable (ENSO neutral) starting point prior to the first El Nino.
The sharp Tropical rise peaking in 1998 is dominant in the record, starting Jan. โ97 to pull up SSTs uniformly before returning to the same level Jan. โ99. There were strong cool periods before and after the 1998 El Nino event. Then SSTs in all regions returned to the mean in 2001-2.
SSTS fluctuate around the mean until 2007, when another, smaller ENSO event occurs. There is cooling 2007-8, a lower peak warming in 2009-10, following by cooling in 2011-12. Again SSTs are average 2013-14.
Now a different pattern appears. The Tropics cooled sharply to Jan 11, then rise steadily for 4 years to Jan 15, at which point the most recent major El Nino takes off. But this time in contrast to โ97-โ99, the Northern Hemisphere produces peaks every summer pulling up the Global average. In fact, these NH peaks appear every July starting in 2003, growing stronger to produce 3 massive highs in 2014, 15 and 16. NH July 2017 was only slightly lower, and a fifth NH peak still lower in Sept. 2018.
The highest summer NH peaks came in 2019 and 2020, only this time the Tropics and SH were offsetting rather adding to the warming. (Note: these are high anomalies on top of the highest absolute temps in the NH.) Since 2014 SH has played a moderating role, offsetting the NH warming pulses. After September 2020 temps dropped off down until February 2021. In 2021-22 there were again summer NH spikes, but in 2022 moderated first by cooling Tropics and SH SSTs, then in October to January 2023 by deeper cooling in NH and Tropics.
Now in 2023 the Tropics flipped from below to well above average, while NH has produced a summer peak with August higher than any previous year. In fact, the summer warming peaks in NH have occurred in August or September, so this number is likely the crest.
What to make of all this? The patterns suggest that in addition to El Ninos in the Pacific driving the Tropic SSTs, something else is going on in the NH. The obvious culprit is the North Atlantic, since I have seen this sort of pulsing before. After reading some papers by David Dilley, I confirmed his observation of Atlantic pulses into the Arctic every 8 to 10 years.
Contemporary AMO Observations
Through January 2023 I depended on the Kaplan AMO Index (not smoothed, not detrended) for N. Atlantic observations. But it is no longer being updated, and NOAA says they donโt know its future. So I find that ERSSTv5 AMO dataset has data through August. It differs from Kaplan, which reported average absolute temps measured in N. Atlantic. โERSST5 AMO follows Trenberth and Shea (2006) proposal to use the NA region EQ-60ยฐN, 0ยฐ-80ยฐW and subtract the global rise of SST 60ยฐS-60ยฐN to obtain a measure of the internal variability, arguing that the effect of external forcing on the North Atlantic should be similar to the effect on the other oceans.โ So the values represent sst anomaly differences between the N. Atlantic and the Global ocean.
The chart above confirms what Kaplan also showed.ย As August is the hottest month for the N. Atlantic, its varibility, high and low, drives the annual results for this basin.ย Note also the peaks in 2010, lows after 2014, and a rise in 2021. Now in 2023 the peak is holding at 1.4C.ย An annual chart below is informative:
Note the difference between blue/green years, beige/brown, and purple/red years. 2010, 2021, 2022 all peaked strongly in August or September. 1998 and 2007 were mildly warm. 2016 and 2018 were matching or cooler than the global average. 2023 started out slightly warm, then in May and June spiked to match 2010. Now there is a peak in July, with August and September only slightly lower.
The pattern suggests the ocean may be demonstrating a stairstep pattern like that we have also seen in HadCRUT4.ย
The purple line is the average anomaly 1980-1996 inclusive, value 0.18. The orange line the average 1980-202306, value 0.38, also for the period 1997-2012. The red line is 2013-202306, value 0.64. As noted above, these rising stages are driven by the combined warming in the Tropics and NH, including both Pacific and Atlantic basins.
The oceans are driving the warming this century. SSTs took a step up with the 1998 El Nino and have stayed there with help from the North Atlantic, and more recently the Pacific northern โBlob.โ The ocean surfaces are releasing a lot of energy, warming the air, but eventually will have a cooling effect. The decline after 1937 was rapid by comparison, so one wonders: How long can the oceans keep this up? And is the sun adding forcing to this process?
Space weather impacts the ionosphere in this animation. Credits: NASA/GSFC/CIL/Krystofer Kim
Footnote: Why Rely on HadSST4
HadSST is distinguished from other SST products because HadCRU (Hadley Climatic Research Unit) does not engage in SST interpolation, i.e. infilling estimated anomalies into grid cells lacking sufficient sampling in a given month. From reading the documentation and from queries to Met Office, this is their procedure.
HadSST4 imports data from gridcells containing ocean, excluding land cells. From past records, they have calculated daily and monthly average readings for each grid cell for the period 1961 to 1990. Those temperatures form the baseline from which anomalies are calculated.
In a given month, each gridcell with sufficient sampling is averaged for the month and then the baseline value for that cell and that month is subtracted, resulting in the monthly anomaly for that cell. All cells with monthly anomalies are averaged to produce global, hemispheric and tropical anomalies for the month, based on the cells in those locations. For example, Tropics averages include ocean grid cells lying between latitudes 20N and 20S.
Gridcells lacking sufficient sampling that month are left out of the averaging, and the uncertainty from such missing data is estimated. IMO that is more reasonable than inventing data to infill. And it seems that the Global Drifter Array displayed in the top image is providing more uniform coverage of the oceans than in the past.
USS Pearl Harbor deploys Global Drifter Buoys in Pacific Ocean
The Holy Grail of this field is a single variable that is potent enough to explain, in broad terms, public attitudes to climate change, such as whether it is man-made, whether theyโll be harmed by it, or what priority they might give to fighting it.
A single social predictor for international attitudes to climate change renders the current literature obsolete.
There is a long-standing and extensive literature that searches for โsocial predictorsโ of public attitudes to climate change: the social or demographic factors โ such as political attitude, age, education or relative prosperity, among many other candidates โ that can explain how people view the issue. As predictive power is sought at the national as well as the individual level, further candidate predictors might include, for example, the relative civil liberties of a nation or its exposure to climate impacts.
The Holy Grail of this field is a single variable that is potent enough to explain, in broad terms, public attitudes to climate change, such as whether it is man-made, whether theyโll be harmed by it, or what priority they might give to fighting it (relative to other issues or threats). In other words, a variable that can predict a large part of the level of such attitudes in a population; if not at the dizzy heights of 50%, then maybe 30%, say, where this is at least the largest single factor among (perhaps many) others. The general idea behind this search, sometimes made explicit, is that knowledge of the drivers of attitudes would enable publics to be nudged in the โrightโ direction of supporting Net Zero policies.
However, outside the USA1 the Holy Grail has slipped further and further away. A dozen years or more back, the search still featured attempts to find a single powerful predictor. But as the years passed without success, efforts moved to multivariate analysis; it was hoped that three or four variables might yield greater predictive power when considered together. Unfortunately, these efforts did not deliver dramatic improvements, and also introduced disagreements about which groupings of variables were best. So, more and more variables were then pulled into the search, in a seemingly desperate attempt to find the missing magic that would make prediction possible. This required ever more complex models and increasingly sophisticated statistics.
As a result, the field now features convoluted webs of related variables, some of which themselves are high-level concepts such as โNew ecological paradigmโ, or โClassโ (engaged, pessimistic, indifferent, doubtful). A higher-level concept at the national level is for example โnational attitudes to environmental careโ. Ridiculous variables have been dragged in too, such as the number of climate scientists residing in each nation!
Figure 1, taken from the meta-study of Ruiz et al (2019), is representative of the current predictor literature. The details are not important; the takeaway is that overall it depicts a fiendish complexity.
Figure 1: Public attitudes to climate change: a typical model from the literature.
The huge increase over the years in the perceived complexity of what drives attitudes to climate change has hardly improved, if at all, the power of any group of predictors (while single predictors are much less emphasised). Predictor values are mostly still poor (<20%) or very poor (<10%). The top half of Figure 2 shows a range of typical predictor values from the literature; some are older, some newer, some are from simpler models and some more complex ones, some of them concern individual attitudes while others are national in scope. However, ultimately they all arise from a chronic lack of underlying theory about the attitudes that are being examined. Only one paper features a predictor that exceeds the 30% level.2
Figure 2: Power of predictors in the literature (top) and using cultural causation (bottom)
This situation has now changed dramatically. As my book The Grip of Culture sets out, there is an underlying theory explaining international public attitudes to climate change, which leads to an outstanding social predictor at the national level. In other words, there is a Holy Grail: a single social variable that across nations predicts a high proportion of the public attitudes to climate change (33โ87% depending upon the attitude), and across a wide range of attitudes too; it is national religiosity.
Figure 3 represents the theory in the same manner as the example diagram from the literature, and the bottom half of Figure 2 shows the dramatically increased predictive power from this far more straightforward model. The attitude data comes from many independent sources โ mainstream pollsters such as YouGov, Ipsos, Pew and more, plus academic surveys and the UN and EU.
Figure 3: Public attitudes on climate change: the cultural causation model
The underlying theory is cultural causation: public attitudes are shaped mainly by cultures and their interactions. There is demonstrably a cultural entity, a secular religion, of climate catastrophism, which measurably dominates public attitudes (and policy too) across nations. It also interacts with the older culture of religion (any faith), which is why the predictor of national religiosity (NR) works.3 In other words, public attitudes to climate change (whether supportive or resistive) are largely motivated by the cultural narrative of global climate catastrophe, which has soaked national publics for decades now, and in the context of Figure 3 we can thus consider them to be โself-drivingโ, yet they are also highly influenced by NR.
Unfortunately cultural behaviours are rarely intuitive, and this characteristic is reflected by the manner in which national religiosity acts as a predictor. It is multi-modal, meaning that for a number of different generic types of survey question, NR predicts public responses in a correspondingly different way. To make these ways easier to understand I will focus on โclimate-change most-endorsingโ responses only, i.e. those responses that most emphatically acknowledge man-made climate change, or most emphatically agree with policy actions to combat its effects. (Once we can predict such responses, in practice we also know, approximately, what the climate-change less-endorsing or climate change resistive responses must be, thus there is little extra insight from mapping these in detail).
So for example here are two ways via which national religiosity will work as a social predictor: across nations, the climate-change most-endorsing responses to unconstrained survey questions, strongly correlate with NR. Whereas the climate-change most-endorsing responses to reality-constrained survey questions, strongly anti-correlate with NR.
Unconstrained questions are open-ended and donโt introduce constraints in the minds of survey participants. An example is: โHow serious do you think climate-change is?โ Reality-constrained questions do introduce a constraint into participantsโ minds, for instance a priority relative to other issues. An example is: โWhat do you consider the 3 most serious threats from this list of 10?โ Climate-change is one of the threats on the list.
Here is a third way that national religiosity works as a social predictor: across nations, the climate-change most-endorsing responses to mixed-mode survey questions, as plotted against NR, occupy an envelope between two linear trendlines. A mixed-mode question is one that mixes both unconstrained and reality-constrained elements within the same question. The trendlines forming the envelope boundaries are those that would occur if each element alone was plotted against NR. This is a lesser prediction as there is no linear trend, but nevertheless a defined pattern.
If we think of the above examples as describing โrulesโ that public responses obey in each scenario, then we need seven such rules in total to fully specify how natural religiosity (NR) can predict all international public attitudes to climate change, i.e. as generated by every generic type of survey-question. These rules are briefly summarised below; throughout, โresponsesโ refers to international (non-US) climate-change most-endorsing responses, as plotted against NR.
Rule 1. Responses to unconstrained questions, correlate with NR.
Rule 2. Responses to reality-constrained questions, anti-correlate with NR.
Rule 3. Responses to mixed-mode questions occupy an envelope between two linear trends. These linear trends are what would occur for each element if it was plotted alone.
Rule 4. Responses to extremely-weakly-framed questions, occupy an envelope between two very specific linear trends. These questions donโt have sufficient emotive content to evoke cultural responses; the boundary trendlines are the weakest unconstrained (Rule 1) and reality-constrained trends (Rule 2) that remain coherent.
Rule 4 is easier to understand as: even trivial questions on climate-change arenโt answered rationally, responses simply drift between the available cultural options.
Rule 5. The responses in Rule 1 and 2 may also be โliftedโ on the y-axis, while retaining their expected correlation / anti-correlation according to those rules. This is due to an element in the survey question that is not culturally disputed, so invokes the same level of response across all nations. The trendline boundaries of envelopes as described in Rule 3 and 4, may also be โliftedโ in this manner.
Rule 5 is easier to think about like this: if you want to demonstrate higher support, throw an uncontested truism into your question; it wonโt remove the cultural gradient across nations, but it will push that whole gradient up onto a higher baseline.
Rule 6. The Rule 1 responses also exhibit different trendline gradients according to how emotively aligned to โCatastrophe Narrativeโ each prompting survey question is. The more the emotive alignment, the steeper the trendline gradient. Catastrophe Narrative is the dominant public narrative about climate change, summarized as: โimminent global climate catastropheโ. Because cultures are polarising, these different gradient trendlines all pivot around a common point.
Rule 6 is easier to understand as: more emotive questions invoke more virtue-signalling support from adherents of climate catastrophism, yet also more resistance from those who instinctively reject this culture.
Rule 7. The Rule 2 responses also exhibit a proportional decline on the y-axis according to how strong the constraint in each prompting survey question is. The greater the constraint, the more the responses sink down the y-axis. A weak constraint is say choosing climate change (CC) as 1 of the 6 most important issues of 17. A stronger one would be choosing CC as 1 of the 3 most important from 12; stronger still would be choosing CC as the single most important issue of 10.
Rule 7 is easier to understand as: the more that reality constrains action against climate change in peopleโs minds, the less theyโll support it โ and โfull realityโ produces very little support at all!
The climate-change most-endorsing responses from any international (non-US) survey taken between 2015 to late 2022, should conform to the above rules.4
The Slide-Talk TGoC1 (an X post video, 20 slides, 35 minutes) provides example charts and full details for each rule. This represents a complete paradigm change, which urgently needs to be understood by academia and mainstream pollsters alike; at the moment their efforts effectively amount to blundering around in the dark.
The Slide-Talk shows how the rules work, but not why; for anyone seeking to understand this, my book The Grip of Culture provides a full explanation based upon the straightforward model of cultural causation.
While my book includes a list of technical reasons for why the Holy Grail predictor was missed, this can be summarised as being the result of entrenched bias in social science, which labours under a misapprehension that global climate catastrophe is an output of โhard scienceโ, rather than recognising its true nature โ an emotive cultural narrative that contradicts mainstream science. Of course, if you arenโt looking for a culture, you probably wonโt find one!
The charts in the Slide-Talk make graphically much clearer what is less obvious from the above rules, which is that cultures can have very unintuitive effects. For instance many countries appear to be simultaneously extremely concerned about climate change, yet very keen that nothing should be done about it. Wanna know why? Read the book!
As well as paperback, this link leads to a FREE PDF.
Notes:
General: This post is an expanded version of the Net-Zero Watch article I authored here. (At the time this was released, I hadnโt yet created the Slide-Talk that presents all the rules in a such a clear format).
One of the few things upon which I agree with the literature, is that the situation in the US is different, due to the very high degree of political polarisation there on climate change and many other issues. The theory of cultural causation still holds, but mapping this to the US is more complex. Chapter 11 in the book covers this (political stance is a great predictor, but more subtly 4 cultures are operating, of which one is still climate catastrophism).
Lo and Chowโs result was due to a near miss of the correct theory, but unfortunately this was not followed up. Another study (T1) exceeds 30% for some nations but not others. My search of the literature has not been comprehensive, so I cannot be sure that other papers at least get close to the Lo and Chow result. However, confidence that my selection is reasonably representative is increased by the fact that Hornsey et al. (from which I have drawn the most predictors) is a meta study spanning 56 countries and 171 studies.
All the predictor values from cultural causation in the bottom half of Figure 2 are taken from survey data between 2015 and very early 2020, i.e. pre-Covid. However, the cultural patterns still hold during and post Covid. A similar number of predicted attitudes from national religiosity have been measured in the period mid-2020 up to late 2022 (the latest measurements covered), which are likewise hugely better than the current literature, albeit the R2 values for the linear series are on average a little lower than for pre-Covid. This mild reduction is indeed very likely to be due to Covid, especially regarding reality-constrained attitudes, because Covid is a competing issue or threat.
In addition to the caveat in note 3 above regarding data taken either before or during the Covid pandemic, see further caveats regarding the applicability of the predictor of national religiosity, such as selection bias, in the footnote on page 179 of โThe Grip of Cultureโ. Also, because religion is very suppressed in certain countries, such as China and Vietnam, the predictor doesnโt work in these countries because a) there is no objective measure of religiosity anyhow, and b) as the suppression is very long term, weโd expect the cultural values associated with religiosity to be genuinely different than if the suppression had not occurred.
serpentza
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