So, I produced a video critical of the new Secretary of Energy nominee, Chris Wright .
Wright had made his own video with a number of claims, including that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had, in Wright’s mind, supported the contention that extreme weather events are not getting worse. I ran that claim by one of the lead authors of that section of the IPCC report, Jim Kossin, and hilarity ensued.
Well, somebody must have watched the damn video.
Last Wednesday, a padded envelope shows up on my doorstep, and it’s a mailing from Mr. Wright’s company, Liberty Energy, a gas / fracking firm based in Colorado.
It’s a glossy coffee table book called “Bettering Human Lives”, well illustrated, coffee table quality, all about what great work Liberty is doing, freeing the poor people of the world from drudgery with the wonders of fossil fuels. An online version is here.
Mr. Wright started Liberty Energy in 2011, and the company has worked with others on geothermal energy and small, modular nuclear reactors.
Mr. Wright holds 2.6 million shares in the company, which are worth more than $55 million based on the current stock price. He has said he intends to step down from Liberty Energy and divest his holdings if confirmed.
A study released last week in the journal Nature Reviews also found that climate change is contributing to “weather whiplash”— periods of torrential rain followed by dry, tinderbox-like conditions — in the Los Angeles area. Experts say this trend set the stage for the Los Angeles blazes, along with other key factorssuch as urban sprawl and a resistance to clearing vegetation around homes.
In the opinion piece that Wright cited on LinkedIn, Lomborg noted that the total acreage burned globally by wildfires has been declining since 2001. This shows that “climate change hasn’t set the world on fire,” Lomborg concluded.
Several climate scientists told The Post that this argument is misleading because it focuses on total acreage rather than certain regions where climate change has fueled more frequent and destructive blazes.
“Acreage does not tell the whole truth,” Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, said in an email. “Places are burning today that never burned in the past. … Climate change has fundamentally altered the nature of wildfire.”
Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, said Lomborg averaged “irrelevant” decreases in the burning of savanna and grasslands with “far more relevant” increases in the burning of forests in parts of the United States and Australia.
“He cites irrelevant statistics to obscure the well-established trend toward more extensive and more intense wildfires in dry subtropical regions of Australia and the U.S.,” Mann said in an email.
“Human-caused climate change is the primary factor in the more widespread, damaging and deadly wildfires we have seen in the western U.S. in recent decades,” he added.
Wright has also argued that climate change is not a crisis and that a warmer Earth has reduced deaths from cold weather. Last year, he reposted another LinkedIn post that asserted: “Cold is way more deadly than heat. … Now obviously burning to death in a fire is pretty grim but that is not what is happening like the climate zealots would like you to believe.”
To justify these claims, Wright has cited studies showing that the rise in deaths from hot weather in recent decades was offset by the drop in deaths from cold weather. But the authors of these studies previously told The Post that Wright had misconstrued their work.
While the authors wrote that there could be a near-term decline in temperature-related deaths, they said it is misleading to attribute the drop in cold-weather deaths entirely to globalwarming while overlooking factors such as better clothing, better heating and car travel. Subsequent research also has shown that climate change could substantially increase the number of temperature-related deaths in the long term, they said.
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I emailed Dr Kossin to get his response to one particular graph.
Here’s what he said.
Our understanding is that global warming increases storm intensity and reduces storm genesis frequency. So there may be fewer storms that form, but when they do form, they reach greater intensities. ACE is heavily dependent on frequency, and less so on intensity.
So ACE paints a specific picture that tends to hide intensity changes. ACE is also heavily dependent on storm duration. So ACE convolves intensity, frequency, and duration into a neat little package, but in doing so, it’s much harder to interpret. We generally seek to deconvolve in science, so to me, ACE is not a good metric for understanding how climate change affects hurricanes.
But because of this, it has unfortunately become a good tool for cherry picking by anyone who wants to claim that climate change is not affecting tropical cyclone behavior. What we really need to be looking at is how the risk and impact landscapes are changing. After all, a storm can spend many days out at sea and rack up a whole lot of ACE, but folks along the coast couldn’t care less.
On the other hand, you can have a storm like Milton that formed and quickly intensified and then plowed into Florida just a couple days later. It didn’t rack up as much ACE but it’s obviously more impactful.
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Another real – life example would be Hurricane Otis.
The rate of Hurricane Otis’s intensification was among the fastest observed in the satellite-era. In a 21-hour period, the hurricane’s maximum sustained winds increased by 105 mph (165 km/h),[2] ranking it as the second-fastest in the basin, only behind Hurricane Patricia in 2015, which increased by 120 mph (195 km/h) in a period of 24 hours.[2] With winds of 160 mph (260 km/h), Otis became the first Pacific hurricane on record to make landfall at Category 5 intensity, surpassing Hurricane Patricia accordingly.
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So anyway, “Bettering Human Lives” is worth looking at if you want to understand the current state of the art for climate denial, and a paradigm that will have considerable influence for the near future.
I don’t have statistics, but it seems highly likely that the decrease in wildfire acreage up to the 1960s is largely due to the conversion of much of the world’s arable land to cropland or pasture.