A tireless critic of the global warming theory, journalist Latynina has published a new opus in Novaya Gazeta titled “Global Warming Church”. She argues that global warming and rising concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere only benefit us, and all those who think otherwise are “dangerous leftists and sectarians from the global warming church that has nothing to do with science”. Sounds like a verdict. But what are the grounds for it? None at all. The text is full of scathing metaphors, references and quotes. But there is even more slyness, unsubstantiated assertions and outright distortions.
On climate forecasts
The fact that long-term predictions of climate dynamics and the effects of observed global climate change are not the same as clichéd end-of-the-world predictions is somehow embarrassing to say the least. But I will have to. Latynina equates the two on the grounds that neither actually comes true.
It happens, of course, that climate forecasts do not come true or come true at the wrong time. After all, climate is a complicated system and it is impossible to foresee everything in advance. This is why, by the way, scientists often use scenario predictions to try to simulate (mathematically translate into models) the possible behaviour of the climate system under various conditions. What else is there to do, if it is not possible to reproduce the climate system in a laboratory or if the climate itself is capricious and changeable? However, the fact that not all predictions will come true and that some scenarios remain hypothetical and unrealized in practice does not necessarily mean that scientists are reading the coffee grounds and messing with our heads. Therefore, there is no equal sign here.
But that is not even the point. If you look carefully, Latynina is not talking about the quality of climate predictions per se, but that climate predictions often sound apocalyptic from the mouths of various public figures and politicians, but they are far from always accurate. This is all the less reason to accuse climate scientists of being unscrupulous. Because in most cases it is not a question of the quality of models and forecasts, but of their interpretation.
As you know, all forecasts, including climate forecasts, are characterised by a measure of uncertainty and are probabilistic. But politicians and public figures speak a different language, one that is alien to the probabilistic vocabulary. In addition, they tend to exaggerate. Otherwise they would not be politicians and public figures. The result is a distortion of what is predicted to be communicated to the public. Of course, one can quibble over this, but to dismiss climate forecasts as untenable is overkill.
Albert Gore was hasty when he said that the North Pole would be free of ice by a particular year. There must have been reasons for climate scientists at the time to believe this could happen, but there was of course an estimate of the chance (probability) that it would, and that chance was not 100 per cent certain. But the politician Albert Gore took the risk of claiming it would happen, and lost.
The 45th Vice-President of the United States, Albert Gore, giving the opening speech at the Kyoto Climate Conference. Photo by: Katsumi Kasahara / AP Images
Does it follow that the original prediction, which stated that the North Pole could be completely ice-free by such and such a year with such and such a probability, was wrong? No, it does not follow. It only follows that the bet made by Gore did not play out. But this is not the first or only time that Gore’s policy has been unlucky. He was particularly unlucky in 2000, when he did not win the presidential election, having won the majority of votes and being one step away from victory.
And as for the ice at the North Pole, it is indeed melting fast. And not just at the North Pole, but all over the Arctic. Greenland ice sheet now melting seven times faster than in the 1990s. This year 217 billion tonnes of ice melted there in the month of July alone and 12.5 billion tonnes in one day on 1 August, an all-time record. This was also the year Greenland recorded its first major wildfires. And in Alaska this year, for the first time ever, the sea ice has completely melted. Permafrost is melting (alas, as it turns out, not eternal, but only perennial) in our Siberia. Especially fast in the area of Vorkuta, Salekhard, Chita, Ulan-Ude, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. It is estimated that by 2025 the bearing capacity of the ground in Yamal will decrease by 25–50%; by the end of the century the permafrost will thaw to a depth of 3–4 metres, its boundary will move northwards and cities such as Igarka, Yakutsk and Magadan will find themselves in the permafrost melting zone.
It is also possible that UNEP was a little overzealous in its prediction of the number of climate refugees. It is even possible that it was an “if-then” scenario forecast and it did not come true because there were not enough “ifs”. But that does not mean that climate refugees do not exist. They exist, and there are quite a few of them. It is true that, so far, most people have migrated internally.
In 2018, more than 16 million people in more than 40 countries were made homeless and displaced by climate-related and hydro-meteorological disasters. In 2017, the figure was even higher, with climate and hydro-meteorological disasters forcing 18.8 million people to displace and seek new domestic shelter, while the total number of climate migrants worldwide was estimated at between 22.5 million and 24.0 million. The World Bank estimates that by 2050 the number of climate migrants in just three of the world’s most vulnerable regions — Latin America, South East Asia and Southern Africa — could be as high as 143 million.
People watch as their homes burn in a fire in Colorado. Photo by: milehightraveler / iStock
The frequency and scale of disasters associated with climatic and hydrometeorological hazards is also quite clearly increasing worldwide. The damage they cause is also increasing.
Ocean levels are also rising, as predicted. Over the past 100 years, it has risen by 20–21 cm. One third of this rise has taken place right in front of our eyes in the space of 25 years. As a result, we are now witnessing some of the fastest and most accelerating rise in sea level in history, facilitated by two factors directly related to the observed global warming — the thermal expansion of the ocean due to its warming and the influx of water from the land due to melting glaciers and snow cover.
So, no, the climate forecasts do not lie. They may still be confused in some detail, but they predict the main trends accurately enough. And Latynina, by indiscriminately denying them and equating them with empty, irresponsible predictions of the end of the world, is lying. She also deliberately misleads the reader by calling climate predictions what public figures and politicians say about climate change, when, at best, their words are a reflection of climate predictions, and they are obviously inaccurate.
On climate science
Similarly, Latynina is being deceptive when she groundlessly asserts that there is no science behind climate predictions. Literally, she puts it this way: “Greta Tunberg’s speech or Ocasio-Cortez’s The Green New Deal has nothing to do with science. Similarly, Extinction Rebellion has nothing to do with science.” That’s all. And Latynina makes no other arguments.
But this is pure misrepresentation. Because nobody says that Greta Tunberg, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (the correct name is Ocasio, but Latynina always knows best J) or Extinction Rebellion is science! Science is done by scientists in offices and laboratories, not by young eco-activists or young congresswomen or street protesters. Science lives in books and journal articles, not in public speeches from the podium of the United Nations, not in political manifestos, and not in street appeals to the authorities demanding immediate and decisive action.
But Latynina does not seem to like reading scientific books and articles. She is like the Chukcha from the anecdote who said that he is not a reader but a writer. Instead of referring to scientific texts and trying to figure out what experts have arguments and reasons, Latynina freely writes that if those who publicly talk about the dangers of global warming have nothing to do with science, then what they say about the dangers of global warming is not science and has no scientific basis.
It is a deliberately false thesis, a fabrication. The logic is obviously flawed here. But it is not an accidental mistake of the author, as it may seem. This is a special trick that Latynina actively uses to baffle the reader. There are a lot of such falsifications in the text of the article. Almost in every paragraph.
For example, she writes: “There was already a period in the Earth’s history when the CO2 content [in the atmosphere] exceeded the present [level] by almost 20 times”. Yes, there was. But there were no humans on Earth then! And the current concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is the highest in the history of mankind. Do you understand the difference? Latynina talks about the history of the Earth, forgetting or intentionally ignoring the fact that human history is much shorter — only 250–300 thousand years.
Or, “A few million more years of sediment and life on Earth would have stopped on its own”. What does millions of years have to do with it?! When scientists talk about the dangers of current global warming, they are referring to the next hundred years. Moreover, in the last 800,000 years or more, the atmospheric concentration of CO2 has remained more or less constant, fluctuating around a mean value, but showing no signs of sustained rise or fall, until humans learned to extract and burn fossil fuels on an industrial scale, use other natural resources, collect forests and raise livestock, releasing into the atmosphere tens of billions of tonnes of CO2 and other greenhouse gases annually. И now that, thanks to humans, atmospheric concentrations of CO2 and other greenhouse gases are rising at an unprecedented rate, and the planet’s climate is warming at an unprecedented rate, many species are indeed in very real danger of extinction this century.
Photo by: Max Zolotukhin / iStock
The current concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is not 407 ppm, as Latynina writes, but more than 410 ppm. In 2018, the annual average CO2 concentration was 407.8 ppm, the year before it was 405.5 ppm. In May 2019, CO2 concentrations exceeded 415 ppm for the first time. The last time such a concentration of CO2 was reached was 3 million years ago, during the Pliocene, when sea levels were 15–20 metres higher and average temperatures were 3–4 °C higher than today.
When Latynina cheerfully writes that the upper limit of CO2 concentration, which is uncomfortable for humans, is set by the US Navy at 8000 ppm, and NASA believes that if a space flight exceeds 1000 days, the concentration of CO2 on the space station must not exceed 5000 ppm, she is lying. Because the US Navy and NASA are not referring to a safe concentration of CO2 as a greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, but to an allowable concentration of CO2 as a health hazardous gas indoors to avoid ill health and not to cause harm to human health. I accept that trained sailors and astronauts can tolerate such high concentrations of CO2, but in normal life the tolerances are set well below these critical levels. For example, for offices, homes and flats, a CO2 concentration of between 800 and 1400 ppm is considered safe.
Latynina’s claim that the only reliably observable effect of increased CO2 concentrations to date has been to green the planet is also a fallacy. Yes, biota does consume some of the anthropogenic CO2, but not all of it. Some of the excess CO2 is also absorbed by the ocean. This will not pass unnoticed as it leads to an increase in its acidity which is detrimental to many marine species. Altogether, the ocean and terrestrial biota absorb about half of human-generated CO2 emissions. But the other half is trapped in the atmosphere and increases the greenhouse effect, warming the planet’s climate rapidly.
The average warming over the last 100 years has been 1 Celsius. That’s a lot, over 8.5%. And that’s too fast. The Earth has never warmed that fast. Not only that, it’s not warming evenly. In the Arctic, it’s warming four or five times faster. Glaciers and permafrost are melting. There are more forest fires, floods, droughts, storms and hurricanes, and heat waves. The climate system is going haywire. Climate scientists are talking in all seriousness about increased climate nervousness. The World Economic Forum in Davos puts climate risks to the economy at the top of the list. People are suffering from increased frequency of natural disasters, forced to migrate in search of new homes and safer conditions, dying from exacerbation of chronic diseases during heat waves.
It turns out, however, that one can ignore all this and be quietly happy that the Earth is getting greener and there is more CO2 in the atmosphere. One may even believe that this is all that matters, that in this way the Earth is returning to its optimum. At the same time Latynina does not remember, does not want to remember that when there was this very optimum, there were no humans on Earth.
Also she writes: “When someone tells you that the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere will increase and we will all boil like in a pressure cooker, then ask the person saying this to explain how it is possible that we all did not boil in this pressure cooker 500 million years ago in Cambria, when there was 20 times more CO2 in the air. I immediately want to ask, who are these “we all” who didn’t boil down 500 million years ago in Cambria? Does Latynina remember when humans appeared on Earth? Or does she trace her lineage back to some fossil creatures that inhabited the Earth in Cambria? There are plenty to choose from.
Another lie is that warming supposedly stopped in the 1990s. In fact, warming continued. It is just that during that period, it was mainly the ocean column that was warming and not the land surface. In any case, we are now seeing rising temperatures both outside and inside.
But Latynina is not interested in these details. She has a different aim. She finds a 2001 article by Zeitz and Jastrow (whom she mistakenly calls “Jastrow” in her own way) and quotes it: “We find that the science is clear that global warming over the last 100 years is unlikely to owe much of it to human activity.” Well yes, 18 years ago there might still have been some doubts about this. But in 2019, there are no such doubts any more.
In 2017, the US Global Research Programme’s 4th Climate Change Assessment Report by 15 US agencies came out, and it says in black and white that over the past 100 years, humans and their associated greenhouse gas emissions have been the main driver of global warming. And it also says that natural drivers of climate variability have had a generally insignificant cooling effect on climate over the past 50 years. There you go! As they say, checkmate.
A new study released in 2019 shows, based on analysis of satellite data over the past 40 years, that the level of certainty in concluding that humans are the driver of global warming in the 20th and 21st centuries is 5 sigma. Translated into plain language, this means that the probability of error is negligible — less than 0.0001%.
But Latynina has not read these books, of course. But she easily, single-handedly dismisses climate dynamics models. “If a model does not fit the facts and does not make correct predictions, then that model is invalid. That’s the way science works.” All true. Only the models are not tested the way Latynina writes. For some reason, she decided that the temperature increase must happen every year if the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere increases every year. She seems to have forgotten that the climate is a complex system and is not determined by a single parameter. All other things being equal, an increase in CO2 concentration leads to warming. But other things being equal, there was no other things being equal.
Generally, climatologists in the middle of the last century were convinced that the planet’s climate should be cooling. So when Academician Mikhail Budyko at a conference in Leningrad in 1971 started saying that the climate will warm in the near future, and in the 21st century it will warm by several degrees due to human activities, it caused a furor. But he turned out to be right. Latynina was not.
Latynina is also lying about the consensus, which allegedly does not exist. She cites one letter denying the danger of climate change to humans and says that it was supposedly written by “500 scientists working in climate science and related sciences”. But this is not entirely true. No actual climate scientists have been found among the signatories. But there are plenty of scientists from “allied sciences” who have never worked on climate change.
To this I can cite another letter in which more than 11,000 scientists from around the world speak out about the climate emergency and call for immediate decisive action. And a couple of years ago there was another letter in which 15,364 scientists from 184 countries warned mankind about adverse climate change and called for more action to mitigate it. Clearly, these letters prove nothing on their own. Neither does the letter to which Latynina refers. But it is a good reason for a journalist to think about it and try to make sense of it.
No way! Latynina doesn’t even think about it. She lumps together everything she can think of that could be used to disprove the anthropogenic climate change theory. Even the 1992 paper by Fred Singer, Roger Revell and Chauncey Starr, which once caused a huge scandal, was the subject of a court case and remains in history as a model of scientific dishonesty by one of the co-authors, Fred Singer. Interestingly, all this is written about in the text at the link Latynina cited in her article. But Latynina herself does not seem to have read the text. Otherwise she would not have dared to write what she wrote.
In fact, Roger Randall Dougan Revelle, the preeminent scientist and pioneer of the modern theory of human-induced climate change, did not abandon his scientific views at the end of his life and did not write what is attributed to him. But he did point to the lack of scientific data and the uncertainties involved and argued against too drastic, too precipitous and especially unilateral steps that could cause economic problems without producing the desired climate effect.
And he was not alone in this. The need to balance costs and benefits when planning and implementing measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions was also mentioned by the current Nobel laureate in economics, William Nordhaus, whose words are quoted in the 1992 article quoted by Latynina.
Photo by: labsas / iStock
At the same time, Roger Revelle believed it was imperative not to sit back and wait for better data and conclusions, but rather to take urgent, sensible measures which would slow, delay global warming, based on the precautionary principle. And often his proposed measures went far beyond what American politicians were proposing at the time, even advanced ones like Albert Gore, who studied and consulted with Roger Revelle on climate change for many years.
Latynina, of course, did not write any of this. But she did manage to misspell the name of the institute where Revelle worked — Shipps Institute of Oceanography instead of Scripps, and for some reason she called Revelle the founder of the institute, although he was born in 1909, and the institute was founded in 1903.
In an attempt to downplay the achievements of climate science, Latynina stops at nothing and even goes so far as to say that “nuclear physics is a more serious science than climate science”. Moreover, she does not give any arguments, but reports it as a matter of fact. And then she introduces the reader to the opinion of a nuclear physicist, as if in advance making it clear that this is a real, serious scientist, not unlike any climatologist, and he knows exactly how things are. And if he says that anthropogenic climate change is a pseudo-science, then it is so. That’s not a good move. Undignified. And a total liar.
Speaking of Russian scientists who disagree with and criticise the theory of anthropogenic climate change, Latynina predictably named first the famous St Petersburg bard and former oceanologist and specialist in underwater ridge magnetism Alexander Gorodnitsky. I have already examined in detail his 2017 programmatic climate article. I won’t retell it. There is nothing in it. From the word go. Which is not surprising, since Gorodnitsky has never been involved in climate and it is unclear why he suddenly decided to try a new role at his old age.
Interestingly, in this article Gorodnitsky argues not with science, but with Albert Gore. Which makes him akin to Latynina, who also for some reason does not name the climatologists who write about human influence on the climate, but gives the names of Greta Tunberg and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who are not climatologists at all.
Latynina presents the whole of modern climatology based on a theory of anthropogenic climate change as the IPCC. But what this organization is, how it works, and even how its name is translated into Russian, Latynina does not know. For her it is a mythical sect of global warming church and a major enemy to be exposed and morally defeated by a gang of crooked ignoramuses.
The reality is not as Latynina presents it. The IPCC aka the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (not the commission, as Latynina says) was set up in 1988 (not 1991, as Latynina says) by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) with the approval of the UN General Assembly. Its mandate is not to conduct independent studies. It produces assessment reports on what is happening to the climate and what the consequences are and will be for the planet and for humanity, based on publications in scientific journals.
The IPCC is made up of leading climate scientists, as well as representatives from other branches of science, from different countries. That is, it is not a separate group spun off from the rest of the science, but it is precisely that consensus of scientists who separately conduct research and meet from time to time (not even physically, but mostly virtually, using electronic communication channels) to prepare an overview and present the world with the most accurate picture of what current science knows about climate change, how certain/uncertain that knowledge is, what projections there are for the near and distant future and what can be done to avoid uncontrollable changes. Latynina’s attempts to pit the IPCC against science therefore look, to put it mildly, unconvincing.
Latynina also uses the term “warmers”, as if in a pejorative sense. But she does not deny the fact of global warming herself. So she is a “warmist” too? At least Gorodnitsky denies the fact of global warming and talks about cooling, which is supposedly well noticeable since 2006–2007, which looks ridiculous against the background of a string of record warm years exactly in that period. And Latynina acknowledges the warming, but considers it, like the rising concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, a huge boon for humanity. We are all terribly lucky, she says, and all will be well..
Except I’m not sure her excitement is shared by the people of Siberia, which has burned twice and drowned twice this year, or by the people of Australia, where unprecedented forest fires are raging this year. The people of Central Asia and Latin America will not be too happy when the glaciers that feed their rivers disappear, I imagine. The inhabitants of small island nations will not be very happy to see their islands go underwater.
I could go on listing the adverse effects of global climate change, which Latynina has carelessly swept under the carpet so as not to disturb her enjoyment of the lush greenery sweeping the planet once again, as millions of years ago, amid rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations, for which we all owe the coal, oil and gas companies, and other major greenhouse gas emitters, a big human thanks, cause through emitting CO2, the planet’s biosphere has benefited and literally given it a second chance after it nearly killed itself by removing the carbon dioxide it needs as a building material from the atmosphere and which is now returning there again, heralding a new blessed time of abundance and prosperity, which Julia Latynina prefers, following Matt Ridley (Matt is correct, of course, but Latynina has a transcription for everything) to call Global Warming, but Global Gentrification. What essentially cynicism!
Cover photo: iStock / Eder Maioli
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