Andrew Dessler Tries To Justify The Term 'Climate Emergency' - And Fails

Credit: Cover - ‘In the Court of the Crimson King’ by King Crimson

Are we in a climate emergency? Is there a happening ‘climate crisis’? Andrew Dessler thinks so, but he thinks that the judgement is not a scientific one . . . . . then he changes his mind half way through his substack article and claims it is a scientific one! He seems confused by his own rhetoric.

Is climate change an "emergency"?

Dessler writes:

The term “emergency” is not a scientific one. There is no laboratory test or scientific calculation that will yield the result that climate change is an “emergency” or “catastrophe” or any similar word.

Rather, the decision whether it’s an emergency is a mix of the scientific evidence combined with personal judgment. If you want to leave a world for future generations that looks pretty much like it does now — with polar ice, vibrant forests, and cities that aren't underwater, the very things that make Earth a great place to live — then you can see climate change as an emergency.

But if you’re okay leaving a trashed hellscape of a planet for your kids — think flooding cities, deserts where forests used to be, and wars over clean water — then climate change is just some weird science stuff you wish people would stop talking about, not a ticking time bomb that’s about to explode on humanity.

So there you are, the ‘inevitability’ (presumably justified by ‘the science’) of a far off future “trashed hellscape” of flooded cities and deserts where forests used to be is what really justifies the use of the term ‘climate emergency’ according to climate scientist Dessler. He then goes on to criticise “deniers” for failing to appreciate this perspective and for dishonestly framing the term ‘climate emergency’ in strictly scientific, evidential terms.

This, by the way, is why climate deniers love love love phrasing the argument as “There’s no scientific evidence that climate change is a disaster/catastrophe/emergency.” It’s a nonscientific question, and by phrasing a values question as a scientific debate, they trick people into a debate that deniers cannot lose. No matter what you show them, they can always say, “That’s not a catastrophe” because, whatever harms you show them, they don’t give a shit.

No, Andrew, it’s not that we ‘deniers’ don’t give a shit about the ‘harms’, it’s that we question the attribution of those harms to climate change and thus the justification of the term ‘climate emergency’ because, allegedly, these ‘climate harms’ are becoming more harmful and more frequent. If anyone is engaging in dishonest framing of arguments, it is yourself. You compound your dishonesty by then saying:

A few days ago, a recent Washington Post article highlighted the growing chorus of scientists who increasingly view climate change as an emergency. I count myself among them.

What has shifted my perspective? It’s not that the climate system has done anything unexpected — quite the contrary, the science and the predictions it has yielded have been remarkably accurate. In fact, the climate is still basically following Wally Broecker’s 1975 prediction.

This would be the same Wally Broecker 1975 global warming prediction which I wrote about in 2017:

Doug McNeall tweeted a link to this somewhat enigmatic essay yesterday. It’s by Wally Broecker, the so-called “Father of Global Warming”, an epithet which he earned by virtue of his fairly accurate prediction of global temperature rise (predicted to be mainly due to rising CO2 emissions) in 1975.

It’s pretty obvious that Wally Broecker does not nowadays care much for the accolade, if he ever did:

Dessler continues:

In addition to temperature, we have long predicted that our greenhouse gas emissions would result in sea-level rise, ocean acidification, and more frequent extreme weather events, such as heat waves and extreme precipitation. We now have enough data that we can see these predictions coming true.

So what is it? A value judgement based on a far off future “hellscape” (which is nonetheless made inevitable by an examination of ‘the science’) or a strict scientific assessment of where we are right now, all of which was supposedly accurately predicted by climate scientists? You can’t have it both ways. Here is the ridiculously low info graph which Dessler uses to justify his alternative scientific justification for the term ‘climate emergency’ (which he claimed a few paragraphs up was not a scientific term):

Four data points from a Wally Broecker 1975 prediction and a graph of NASA GISS which ends, inexplicably, just after the last very powerful El Nino of 2014/16. Not hugely convincing it must be said. It cooled quite a bit thereafter and now in 2023, we’ve entered the ‘era of global boiling’ for sure, which you tell us is not due to Hunga Tonga:

Another set of authors also mention Solomon and their paper (titled The Estimated Climate Impact of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai Eruption Plume) is probably the source of Spencer and Christy’s claim of HT warming the planet by a ‘few hundredths of a degree’. In contrast to others, the authors here claim that the HT eruption actually cooled the surface in the southern hemisphere in 2022 because the negative radiative forcing of the aerosols exceeded the positive radiative forcing of the water vapour.

The ‘scientists’ in that Washington Post article which Dessler claims he is happy to count himself among, are not so ambiguous in justifying their use of the term ‘climate emergency’:

After a few years of record-breaking temperatures and extreme weather events, Ripple’s experience is a sign of how climate scientists — who once refrained from entering the public fray — are now using strident language to describe the warming planet. References to “climate emergency” and “climate crisis,” once used primarily by activist groups like the U.K.-based Extinction Rebellion or the U.S.-based Sunrise Movement, are spiking in the academic literature. Meanwhile, scientists’ communication to the media and the public has gotten more exasperated — and more desperate.

Tim Lenton, one of the co-authors on Ripple’s most recent paper and a professor of earth system science at the University of Exeter, said that 2023 has been filled with temperatures so far beyond the norm that “they’re very hard to rationalize.” “This isn’t fitting a simple statistical model,” he said.

Lenton said he isn’t afraid to use terms like “emergency” or “climate and ecological crisis.” “If you say ‘urgent’ to a politician … that isn’t really enough,” he said.

The language has spilled into academic publications as well. As recently as 2015, only 32 papers in the Web of Science research database included the term “climate emergency.” In 2022, 862 papers contained the phrase.

As the impacts of climate change escalate, scientists say that their language has changed to meet the moment.

When it comes to terms like “climate emergency,” Gill says, “it’s a little bit of strategy and a lot of honesty.” While climate scientists are still discussing whether warming is accelerating, she added, “it’s clear the impacts are becoming more noticeable and in-your-face.”

I remember Jacquelyn Gill from our fractious exchanges on Twitter in 2014. She doesn’t appear to have changed much:

I could have been impolite to paleo-ecologist Jacquelyn Gill, even as she accused me of trolling and then of knowing more about dogs than climate.

I’m sure Jacquelyn Gill does know rather more than myself about certain aspects of past climate related to her expertise on paleo-ecology, but I’m equally certain that she cannot claim to know more about the exact causes of very recent climate change than most other people who populate the online and offline debate on AGW/CAGW.

Gill and Dessler: climate activist birds of a feather, both trading under the title ‘scientist’.

It’s important to note that most activists and ‘experts’ arguing for the adoption of the term ‘climate emergency’, unlike Dessler, are claiming that the impacts are dangerously accelerating and that this was not predicted by scientists, even a few years ago. What is happening now is unexpected and unprecedented and this is why we must act with even more urgency to neuter the “era of global boiling” by going Net Zero by this time next Friday.