Global Warming – A Good Thing?

22 February 2022 , categories: climate, science

Matt Ridley recently wrote in Spiked Online that global warming is good for us and made some strong arguments for taking a contrarian view on the current climate crisis.

Introduction

Matt Ridley is a prolific science writer as well as being a member of the UK House of Lords, an unusual combination. Unfortunately, as with the House of Commons, he is greatly outnumbered by science and engineering luddites who hold sway over public policy. Ridley recently wrote an article published in Spiked Online Why global warming is good for us and made some strong arguments for taking a contrarian view on the current climate crisis.

As an aside, I am not saying that there is anything wrong per se with MPs qualified in the humanities but for issues like energy, manufacturing and R&D, much more weight needs to be given to the opinions of those with specific skills and experience in these areas. In the UK government, Select Committees are the chosen mechanism to channel such skills, but as we have seen with NetZero, the process is fundamentally broken since there has been no serious debate in parliament and certainly no engagement with the public. Find out more at NetZero Watch.

The world is getting greener!

Returning to Ridley’s article, he begins with the claim that:

Global warming is real. It is also – so far – mostly beneficial

He also emphasises that:

the biggest benefit of emissions is global greening, the increase year after year of green vegetation on the land surface of the planet.

Ridley refers to a tweet by Bjorn Lomborg (visiting professor at the Copenhagen Consensus Center) which highlights NASA data showing that:

global greening has added 618,000 square kilometres of extra green leaves each year, equivalent to three Great Britains.

Lomborg draws conclusions from the Nature article Vegetation structural change since 1981 significantly enhanced the terrestrial carbon sink which states that “Satellite observations show that leaf area index (LAI) has increased globally since 1981” and this is illustrated graphically in the following chart:

Global map indicating the trend of LAI from 1981 to 2016

The green and blue areas denote areas with increased leaf coverage.

A NASA article Carbon Dioxide Fertilization Greening Earth referring to a separate Nature paper (unfortunately no longer available) emphasises that:

From a quarter to half of Earth’s vegetated lands has shown significant greening over the last 35 years largely due to rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, according to a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change on April 25.

It also goes on to outline the proportion of greening due to CO₂ fertilisation (emphasis mine):

Results showed that carbon dioxide fertilization explains 70 percent of the greening effect, said co-author Ranga Myneni, a professor in the Department of Earth and Environment at Boston University. "The second most important driver is nitrogen, at 9 percent. So we see what an outsized role CO₂ plays in this process."

Assuming an accurate representation of the missing Nature paper we can at least ask Why isn’t this fact covered in the main stream media? since it’s difficult to understand how a greener world could be a bad thing? Have a look at this NASA video and see what you think.

Rising CO2 levels greening earth

Deaths are dropping due to higher temperatures

Ridley cites research from the Lancet published in Science News Cold weather kills far more people than hot weather. From the summary (emphasis mine):

Cold weather kills 20 times as many people as hot weather, according to an international study analyzing over 74 million deaths in 384 locations across 13 countries. The findings also reveal that deaths due to moderately hot or cold weather substantially exceed those resulting from extreme heat waves or cold spells.

The paper clearly shows two things:

Normal temperature variations are more harmful than extreme variations – which is counter-intuitive at first glance but makes sense on reflection. Seasonal deaths due to respiratory conditions always peak in the winter months and so one would expect coincident increases in mortality due to these conditions.
Extreme cold kills more people than extreme heat – which does seem to make sense from our own experience and a common sense view of the the world – not that the latter can always be relied upon.

Ridley doesn’t discount that temperature increases may rise further but he does explain that changes will be asymmetric geographically, seasonally and diurnally – so that higher temperatures will continue to be beneficial for the foreseeable future.

As before, one has to ask why this isn’t covered in the main stream media?

Weather is not getting more volatile

It’s commonly held that increasing temperatures will lead to increased volatility in the weather with more hurricanes, for example. Ridley emphasises that there is no good theory available to explain why this might be so and says:

The decreasing temperature differential between the tropics and the Arctic may actually diminish the volatility of weather a little.

Ridley cites the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to back this up and refers back to the geological record which shows that extreme weather was more likely in colder periods. For example, we no longer experience decade-long mega droughts, of the sort that ravaged Africa, drying up Lake Victoria at least twice (as referenced in this Conversation article):

Those mega droughts happened 17,000 years ago and 15,000 years ago respectively, when the world was much colder than today and cooler oceans meant failed monsoons.

Incidentally, in my post Deaths from natural disasters I explore how the human species is more resilient than you might think to natural disasters such as floods and droughts.

Food production keeps increasing

This takes us neatly onto our fourth topic of food production, because one theory covered in the paper Was agriculture impossible during the pleistocene but mandatory during the holocene? argues that:

Recent data from ice- and ocean-core climate proxies show that the last glacial climates were extremely hostile to agriculture – dry, low in atmospheric CO2, and extremely variable on quite short time scales.

Whilst technology is a major factor in the development of modern farming, it is impossible to ignore the fact that food production keeps increasing since crops can be grown at more northerly latitudes, for longer and with more rainfall in what were dryer regions. As Ridley says:

Global cereal production is on course to break its record this year, for the sixth time in 10 years.

Of course there are the Malthusians and Erhlichians amongst us who will argue “but this cannot continue!” However, as demographic analysis shows, the world population is due to peak at around 11 billion in 2100 as the following chart demonstrates:

World population projection by the UN, 1950 to 2100

But we are all going to drown as the sea rises over us!

Ridley is open about the challenges of climate change as well as the benefits. One of the scariest tropes put out by climate alarmists is that many parts of the world, particularly coastal areas and small islands are going to disappear under the water in coming years. However, Ridley believes that even here there is room for optimism highlighting this chart from climatewarmingcentral.com:

Post-glacial sea level rise

This shows that the sea level shot up between 10,000 and 8,000 years ago, rising by about 60 metres in two millennia, or roughly three metres per century. However:

today the change is nine times slower: 3mm a year, or a foot per century, and with not much sign of acceleration

NASA sea level rise since 1993

Again, climate alarmists will point to the worse case scenario for our hypothetical future based on something called the RCP8.5 scenario, where RCP stands for Representation Concentration Pathway. This is the worst case, most extreme scenario presented by the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) and is already undermined by recent data. Like recent pandemic modelling, RCP8.5 produces wholly unrealistic numbers yet is presented as the Business As Usual scenario by the mainstream media. For a better understanding of why this is a problem have a look at How Billionaires Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg Corrupted Climate Science. Future trends are not well understood (computer modelling of complex chaotic systems is exponentially hard!) but we can surmise from past data that RCP8.5 lies far outside the the likely envelope for our future.

As an exercise, considering that sea level rises have been promoted as a leading indicator of Catastrophic Man-made Global Warming for 2 decades, it ought to be straight forward to compile a long list of islands and low-lying coastal areas that have disappeared under the waves. Or is it?

Conclusion

Coming back to our question as to why we don’t hear more about this good news in the mainstream media, Ridley makes an argument based on human nature:

Environmentalists don’t get donations or invitations to appear on the telly if they say moderate things.

Funding is much less likely be awarded if you suggest that things are looking pretty good all things considered. I would also argue that and the old saying “follow the money” applies even more so when you think about the huge international market in carbon credits and the many renewable energy companies harvesting billions annually in public subsidies.

I would also add that many public bodies, particularly the likes of the environment agencies, have a vested interest in being impotent victims of climate change rather than admit their own failings in land management and flood defense policy and investment.

So as Ridley says:

No wonder we don’t hear about the good news on climate change.