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WillowOne's Positions

Climate Change

My Positions

  1. The climate is warming, and the warming since the mid-twentieth century is driven predominantly by human activity, chiefly the combustion of fossil fuels and changes in land use.
  2. CO₂ and other greenhouse gases (methane, nitrous oxide, water vapour) trap heat in the atmosphere. This is basic physics, understood since John Tyndall's experiments in 1859 and quantified by Svante Arrhenius in 1896. It is not in dispute among scientists.
  3. Climate change is a real and urgent global problem. Addressing it requires coordinated international policy, scientific collaboration, and meaningful reductions in emissions.
  4. Climate action should be guided by evidence rather than ideology, and must balance environmental sustainability with social and economic stability. A policy that collapses living standards will not survive the next election and will therefore not reduce emissions. See Nuclear Power.
  5. Scepticism about specific predictions, policies, or activists is legitimate. Scepticism about the underlying physics is not.

Rejected Positions

Climate change is a hoax

  • Claim: Climate change is a conspiracy to control the economy, redistribute wealth, or secure research funding.
  • Basis: Political motives, distrust of scientists and international institutions, and the "Climategate" email leak of 2009.
  • Reason for rejection: There is a robust consensus from the IPCC, every national academy of sciences, and the overwhelming majority of published climate scientists. The empirical data (instrumental temperature records, ocean heat content, sea level, ice mass loss, glacier retreat, the timing of seasons) all point the same way and are collected by dozens of independent institutions in different countries. A hoax of this scale would require the cooperation of rival governments, including ones that would benefit from exposing it. Eight separate inquiries into "Climategate" found no fraud or misconduct.

Solar activity or natural cycles

  • Claim: Warming is due to solar cycles, Milankovitch cycles, or natural variability.
  • Basis: The climate has changed in the past without human involvement.
  • Reason for rejection: That the climate has changed naturally before is not evidence that it is changing naturally now, any more than the existence of natural forest fires proves that no fire was ever started by arson. Solar output has been flat or slightly declining since the 1980s while temperatures have risen. Milankovitch cycles operate over tens of thousands of years and currently point towards slight cooling. The current rate of warming is roughly ten times faster than the warming at the end of the last ice age. The pattern of warming (the stratosphere cooling while the troposphere warms; nights warming faster than days) is the fingerprint of greenhouse forcing, not solar forcing.

CO₂ is plant food and more of it is good

  • Claim: Higher CO₂ levels will benefit agriculture.
  • Basis: CO₂ fertilisation is a real effect in greenhouses.
  • Reason for rejection: The modest fertilisation benefit is outweighed by heat stress, drought, shifting rainfall, and reduced nutritional content of crops grown under elevated CO₂. The argument is a cherry-pick.

The models are unreliable

  • Claim: Climate models have failed to predict the climate and cannot be trusted.
  • Basis: Individual projections that were too high or too low; the inherent difficulty of modelling a chaotic system.
  • Reason for rejection: Climate models from the 1970s onwards have, in aggregate, predicted the subsequent warming with considerable accuracy (Hausfather et al., Geophysical Research Letters, 2020). Models project climate (the statistical average), not weather. The uncertainty in the models is a reason for caution, not complacency, since it is symmetrical: things could be worse than projected as easily as better.

Sources

Also see