by Will Jones, Daily Sceptic:
In 2020, Dr. Matthew Wielicki, then still an Associate Professor in the Department of Geology at the University of Alabama, noticed a great deal of anxiety in his students. On the one hand, this was understandable, as the world was just entering the Covid crisis and there was a lot of ignorance and fear about the disease in society at large. However, the anxiety that Wielicki noticed among his students had another cause – fear of climate change and the climate crisis. “And they really were convinced that the planet was going to end in a decade or in 12 years or whatever the clock somewhere in New York on the side of a building said,” says Wielicki. There were female students who were on the verge of tears, saying that even though they came from large families, they didn’t want to have children because of the climate crisis.
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“They just couldn’t imagine bringing a child into a world that’s going to end at some point because there’d be too much CO2 in the atmosphere,” Wielicki recalls. He admits that, as a father of two, it was very heartbreaking to hear. “I couldn’t believe that the field that I was in, earth science, geology, was essentially tricking young students into believing that there was a crisis so big that it should be the number one thing that they think about when they’re planning the rest of their life, and whether or not they should have a family,” he says.
Climate crisis science: models predict the future
This is why Wielicki himself took a detailed look at climate-related issues and started explaining them to his students, as well as talking about them publicly on social media. For young people, the problem is that climate is only discussed in terms of crisis and disaster. For example: what should a young person think when he hears the world’s political leaders like UN Secretary-General António Guterres claim that humanity is on the highway to climate hell? Wielicki says there is little reason to blame the young who attack artworks with tomato soup or glue themselves to the pavement when they hear this. They’re passionate, and the constant proclamation of climate crisis and doom tells them that this is the right thing to do. They are also told that the same climate hell hypothesis is supported by ‘science’. But the problem is that the actual scientific evidence does not support the catastrophe we are being told is happening.
The trouble with today’s climate science, says Wielicki, is that it relies primarily on predictions of the future or climate models. There are different models, some of which we can clearly see have been proven wrong to date, i.e., they predicted too much warming. Wielicki points out that any model is only as good as the assumptions which it is based upon. “We can tweak these models to give us essentially any result we want. I always tell people, that look, all models are wrong, but some are useful. I think models are useful for sure, but never will a model outweigh the observable data,” Wielicki explains. “You cannot convince me that the environment is in a crisis or an emergency until you show that to me in three metrics – severe weather occurrences, the cost in insurance and loss of life. We have not seen any increase in any of them,” Wielicki says.
According to Wielicki, since 1880 the average temperature of the Earth has risen by 1.2-1.5 degrees, based on various measurements. What impact has this had on society? “If you look at that data, it’s very difficult to find any metric which would define the state of the planet as a crisis or an emergency or a catastrophe or anywhere near collapse – yet these are words that are used a lot in the media,” Wielicki says, adding that even the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) doesn’t actually use such words in its reports.
Fewer deaths due to weather
Wielicki cites the example of extreme weather events, which are constantly talked about as one of the inevitable consequences of climate change. In reality, we are not seeing an increase in extreme weather events or the associated increase in social damage. According to Wielicki, over the last quarter of a century, since around 2000, the number of natural disasters has decreased. At the same time, however, mankind has been spewing record levels of CO2 into the Earth’s atmosphere, mainly as a result of China’s rapid industrialisation. Since mainstream climate science sees CO2, especially the human emissions of the gas, as the main cause of climate damage, which should also bring us extreme weather events, there is an immediate and obvious contradiction there, but this is not being discussed or taken into account.
Secondly, Wielicki gives a simple example of how the number of people who have died as a result of bad weather and natural disasters has changed over the last 100 years. “We’ve reduced the deaths associated with weather-related disasters by 96% or 98%,” he notes. On the one hand, this may show that the number of extreme weather events has decreased somewhat, but on the other hand, it certainly shows that humanity is better able to cope with such disasters. The role of cheap and available energy in this coping, i.e., fossil fuels, should not be underestimated either. Stronger buildings, the ability to move people quickly away from the storm areas, the provision of effective material help or, for example, medical aid to the affected areas, etc. – all this can be achieved if you have the resource of energy to do it.
So, according to Wielicki, the data show that CO2 levels in the atmosphere have gone up somewhat over the last century or so, and that the planet as a whole has warmed a little, but not that we are heading for a catastrophe. “There’s no other metric that would argue that society is somehow being harmed right now by the 1.5°C or whatever degrees of warming we’ve had since 1880,” Wielicki says.
“We need to be resilient”
As a geologist, Wielicki undoubtedly has a better-than-average understanding of how our planet has evolved in the first place, and how its climate has been in a constant state of flux. Today’s climate science, however, links climate change primarily to the increasing amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, especially its anthropogenic component. Scientists who doubt or dispute this are labelled climate deniers. Wielicki points out that we know very well from Earth’s relatively recent history that major climate changes, such as the Medieval Warm Period (ca. 950-1250) or the subsequent Little Ice Age (ca. 14th to mid-19th century, precise timing depending on the location), occurred without any significant change in the proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere. “If there’s anything that I argue, it’s that we need to be resilient. We should stop pretending that if we changed or lowered our emissions the climate would stop changing. That’s the true denial of climate right there,” Wielicki says. “What we need to accept is that regardless of the CO2 in the atmosphere, we are going to have climate change and those shifts could occur over timescales of decades or centuries, and we should be prepared. And being prepared means we need access to cheap, reliable energy,” he adds.
