Why the 2023 UN Climate Report Matters to Christians

Faith & Science Conversation
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Yes, reduced population will put less strain on the environment and limit carbon emissions and other pollutants. This is 100% factual and one of the most meaningful things that can be done today besides living off the grid.

Demand for oil is supposedly sky-rocketing right now. To claim we aren’t passed the “point of no return” that has been proclaimed for decades now or are not inevitably heading towards it is naive to me. We can certainly push for some mitigation and cleaner energy where affordable moving forward but in 50-100 years it will be about adaptation. I’m sure many want us to just keep throwing billions of dollars their way.

Yes, actually it is. If your having children causes tremendous pain and suffering and deaths to many people in the future, it is very much a valid question to consider. Why wouldn’t it be? You are just unwilling to follow your own arguments through to their logical conclusion. Instead you would rather assume where you choose to draw lines in life must be where I and everyone else should draw their own lines. If you want to convert an outlet in your house and drive an electric vehicle, have at it. I don’t want a car that must be charged nor a battery that cost $15,000 to replace when the warranty is up.

What is and isn’t a fundamental human right is in the eye of the beholder. I believe freedom of choice is a fundamental human right just as I believe my right to bear arms and defend my family is a fundamental human right. For most of world history it was a “fundamental human right” for people to do with their property (slaves and women) as they saw fit! What you claim is not under question actually is. It never ceases to amaze me at how bad people are at trying to see outside the little bubble they live in.

Bingo. Fossil fuels provide tremendous good in the world and as I noted, they basically ended slavery. As a first world country we can certainly make moves towards cleaner energy but expecting the rest of the world to do it and thinking all Americans are in equal financial positions to foot the enormous clean energy bills needed is silly. We have already wasted many billions of dollars on CCR.

Nuclear is great but yes, there are certainly safety concerns but I’m guessing the completely unbiased
World nuclear association is accurate here

  • There have been two major reactor accidents in the history of civil nuclear power – Chernobyl and Fukushima Daiichi. Chernobyl involved an intense fire without provision for containment, and Fukushima Daiichi severely tested the containment, allowing some release of radioactivity.
  • These are the only major accidents to have occurred in over 18,500 cumulative reactor-years of commercial nuclear power operation in 36 countries.
  • The evidence over six decades shows that nuclear power is a safe means of generating electricity. The risk of accidents in nuclear power plants is low and declining. The consequences of an accident or terrorist attack are minimal compared with other commonly accepted risks. Radiological effects on people of any radioactive releases can be avoided.

The problem with many forms of alternative energy is the immensely high upfront costs with switching and the very long time it takes to see any return.

I prefer to live in reality and throw money at fixable problems as opposed to living in make-believe land.

Vinnie

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I think we’re already approaching 40% (It’s over 30 anyway) of our annual electrical energy production in the U.S. mid-west power pool is now from wind. If that keeps growing like it has been, it shouldn’t be too many years before your electric car is driving more on wind power than any other source! In fact it can be already true now if you charge it at night or during other non-peak usage times.

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A carte blanche “freedom of choice” is nonsense. Nowhere in the world does this exist, and at no time has any society ever thought this is either a real thing or a pragmatic thing. You don’t have the freedom of choice to kill people. You don’t have the freedom of choice to take other peoples’ stuff. Heck, you don’t even have the freedom of choice to buy leaded gasoline at the local 7/11.

And that means they can’t have any negative side effects?

We don’t need every country to stop using fossil fuels in order to reduce the amount of CO2 being released.

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Sure it is. Rich kids in rich nations. Poor kids in impoverished nations. More SUV’s. More mopeds. More crisis.

All energy sources, including renewables, have environmental cost. The more kids, the more cost. Population is the fundamental problem. New renewable energy production brought online largely has not and will not displace fossil demand, but go towards increased consumption.

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This is like equating the few kids with ladels to the many other kids with teaspoons when addressing the problem of who’s depleting the stew pot too fast (or who’s scooping the most pollution into a river). Sure - we’re all consumers; even the poorest among us exhales CO2 - thus adding to warming. But to equate that child to how nearly any of us lives who is reading these words - I can’t see how that makes any ethical sense.

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Malnourished families want more food. Nourished families want a fridge. Families with a fridge want air conditioning. Households with air conditioning want everything that the rich kids have, you name it - vacations, BMW’s, symbols of status for mating. Ethical sense tells that they are allowed to seek a better life, and seek it they do. Cities like Mumbai and Nairobi are transformative, and those who immigrate to the west succeed in their new environs and live like the rest of us. The slices of the pie are becoming both larger and more numerous. The increase in energy demand is global, and particularly pronounced in the developing world.

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I think it’s important for environmentally aware, ethical people to have children, if they so desire. They are the hope for the future.

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The question of having children is a valid but simplified and somewhat misleading concern.

Not marrying and having children because of giving the whole life for the service of God is another question so I will omit it here. Anyhow, it is good to remember that apostle Paul recommended such a decision for those who can follow that road.

Who is the most concerned people about the possibilities to live acceptable life in the future and prepared to act to preserve such conditions? Those who have and care for children and grandchildren.

Reducing birth rates allows new births without risking the future carrying capacity. Such a situation is common in modern countries.
There are countries where the birth rate is still high and these countries face problems because of it. Reducing the number of births should be targeted to these countries. A total stop to having babies is not needed in these countries, a reduction in the average number of children in a family is enough. When the average child number declines to two children per family, population size starts to decline. A too rapid decline in the number of children may cause problems in the society, so a gradual and voluntary reduction is usually the best option.

A major problem with children is that we teach these children to consume too much. We should ourselves live as examples that show to children a positive way to live without destroying the environment and the possibilities for good life. Unfortunately, we are seldom ready for such a change. Luckily, our children can show us the example if we cannot be the positive example ourselves. That can change even our lifestyle.

A sensitive question is having pets. Dogs and cats need meat and producing the meat for the pets produces CO2 emissions. I do not speak against having pets, even in our family lives a small dog, but a large dog produces more CO2 emissions than a car using fossil fuels, if I remember right. If someone decides not to have children because of climate change, that person should also consider living without dogs and cats.
There is a need to consider both the advantages and disadvantages of having meat-eating pets and in many cases, the advantages are greater than disadvantages. I recommend rational, balanced thinking in both the cases of having children and pets. Well, I guess these decisions are seldom rational, typically guided by emotions.

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32

I am not too worried about rising sea levels, assuming that the rise happens slowly and not through catastrophic melting of Antarctic ice. The world can adapt to it, although the people living in low-income regions close to sea will certainly suffer and thousands will die in floods caused by storms. Those remaining alive will migrate to other regions and these masses will cause immigration problems in countries that are otherwise less affected by rising sea levels.

What is more worrying is the change in climate that is already reality and known to become a worse problem if we do not act. That has already reduced the availability of fresh water, agricultural production and the health of people through heathwaves and lack of clean water and proper nutrition.
Droughts and extreme weather always happens but previously rare extremes (once in a century) are becoming the rule, if we accept the results of modeling that predicts the probability of such events being >50% every year.

The combined effects of climate change and forest loss is making the situation worse because large forested areas are becoming sources of CO2 instead of being important carbon sinks. Amazon is an influential example of such an area.

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33

I am not convinced linking individual events (droughts and forest fires) to anthropogenic warming is valid. How do you know these forest fires and droughts are once in a century? Based on how many centuries of data?

Vinnie

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It’s a bit like linking cigarette smoking to lung cancer. We can’t say that smoking is the direct cause of any cancers, but there is tons of data that indicate smoking certainly increases the risks.

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They may very well be linked to anthropogenic warning but 100 years of climate data is not enough to establish that they are anything more than noise at this point. I am not sure how any good scientists can say otherwise, though I have no issues being corrected. I like to learn.

Imagine if we have a decade with less droughts… climate alarmists will certainly find a way to apologize for that and claim we have to look at long term averages. Despite CO2 rising tremendously, is that not how 8 years of cooling is explained away? We need to look at the long term climate trends correct? Since that is the case, I am not sure why good climate scientists wouldn’t reject sensationalist claims attributing individual storms to anthropogenic warming or why they would not equally reject misleading statements such as “this is the hottest year.” If its long term averages that matter, maybe we can leave the click bait at the door.

In terms of climate, we know CO2 is a greenhouse gas and we have an unprecedented warming and rise in CO2 since the industrial revolution–when I say unprecedented I am basing it on my understanding that we can trace both back for a million years. We have temperature estimates going back much further as well. That is a lot of data. We have no such data for droughts and hurricanes as far as I know.

Weather is variable. Sometimes it snows here in April. Most of the time it doesn’t. The atmosphere is dynamic, chaotic and complex. It is difficult to predict droughts in the next 3-6 months. The certitude some people possess in attributing specific droughts occurring today to long term climate models boggles my mind.

Vinnie

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The data goes back much farther than that. For example, dendrochronology can be used to determine the severity of past droughts going back 1000 years.

https://www.kgs.ku.edu/Publications/PIC/pic35.html

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1000 is better than 100 but it shows a lot of variation to me.

Just as drought severity varies from west to east, it also varies from north to south. Overall, PDSI data indicate that northern Kansas has on average experienced more severe droughts than southern Kansas in the past millennium, possibly because conditions that created droughts on the northern Great Plains occur more often. Several studies suggest that some droughts may be driven by changes in sea surface temperature (SST), particularly in the equatorial Pacific (Stahle et al., 2007). When the equatorial Pacific SST is cold, droughts are common in the southern plains as frontal weather systems are driven more northward. The 1950s drought fit that pattern. In contrast, the Dust Bowl, centered on the Pacific Northwest and northern Plains, was likely influenced by other conditions. These include warm Atlantic SST anomalies that prevented moisture from entering the Great Plains from the Gulf of Mexico (Schubert et al., 2004), and possibly a random atmospheric variation (Hoerling et al., 2009). The maps in fig. 5 illustrate the differences in spatial patterns between the two major 20th-century droughts.

Megadroughts appear to be most prevalent in Kansas between 850 AD and 1500 AD (fig. 7). The longest one occurred in north-central Kansas from 1317 to 1427. As north-central Kansas was enduring near-continuous drought for 110 years, northwestern Kansas experienced two long-term droughts separated by a wetter period and southwestern Kansas conditions did not reach megadrought proportions (see fig. 6). These differences underscore how much circumstances can vary over a short distance.

The upside is that these were prevalent during the MWP in the northern hemisphere. There has been a noticeable increase in droughts in the last 20 years but again, that is 20 years only. (Per one study)

Exactly, long term average is important. 20 years of increasing drought data seems a bit questionable given the variation observed throughout history.

When the USGS says this:

Climate change has further altered the natural pattern of droughts, making them more frequent, longer, and more severe. Since 2000, the western United States is experiencing some of the driest conditions on record. The southwestern U.S., in particular, is going through an unprecedented period of extreme drought. This will have lasting impacts on the environment and those who rely on it.

I would like to know what record they are referring to.

Is this junk science?

Little change in global drought over the past 60 years

Drought is expected to increase in frequency and severity in the future as a result of climate change, mainly as a consequence of decreases in regional precipitation but also because of increasing evaporation driven by global warming1,2,3. Previous assessments of historic changes in drought over the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries indicate that this may already be happening globally. In particular, calculations of the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) show a decrease in moisture globally since the 1970s with a commensurate increase in the area in drought that is attributed, in part, to global warming4,5. The simplicity of the PDSI, which is calculated from a simple water-balance model forced by monthly precipitation and temperature data, makes it an attractive tool in large-scale drought assessments, but may give biased results in the context of climate change6. Here we show that the previously reported increase in global drought is overestimated because the PDSI uses a simplified model of potential evaporation7 that responds only to changes in temperature and thus responds incorrectly to global warming in recent decades. More realistic calculations, based on the underlying physical principles8 that take into account changes in available energy, humidity and wind speed, suggest that there has been little change in drought over the past 60 years. The results have implications for how we interpret the impact of global warming on the hydrological cycle and its extremes, and may help to explain why palaeoclimate drought reconstructions based on tree-ring data diverge from the PDSI-based drought record in recent years9,10.

Vinnie

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Much of climate change research, especially predictions of what happens in the near future, is based on modelling. Early models were simplistic and less reliable than more developed models. Current models do not give a single estimate, they calculate probabilities.

If you know little of the models, it is natural to be sceptic. The current models seem to give good but not perfect results, so it is good to look at the estimates critically. The current models seem to predict well what have already happened and the predictions seem to match what has happened after the predictions have been published, which is why they are considered fairly reliable. Not perfect.

One problem with lay persons is that when it is hot weather, it is easy to believe that climate change is happening but when a cold and snowy winter hits, that is thought as something that undermines the talks about climate change. It demands some amount of knowledge to understand that climate change can lower temperatures or increase snowfall in certain areas, simultaneously with increasing average temperatures. Climate change may also increase variability, meaning that increasing average temperatures and occasional cold periods fit very well to what has been predicted by the models.

What is a fact is that there is a warming trend and the highest annual temperatures have been recorded during the last decade.

Droughts are related to warm periods because soils tend to dry when it is hot, unless days with sufficient rainfall increases. Rainy days have not been increasing, rather it seems that dry areas have less rainy days, even if the total amount of rainfall would stay the same. If it rains too much during a single day, groundwater reserves do not increase much because soils cannot suck all water. The extra water escapes as surface runoff to the nearest rivers. If it rains only little during a day, that does not either help because the water evaporates in hot climate before it reaches groundwater reserves.
To conclude, warming climate without a simultaneous increase in rainy days leads to an increase in droughts. It is a simple conclusion, easy to understand even without sophisticated models.

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39

Yes, I am used to using spaghetti charts in meteorology, But all models operate on the GIGO principle.
They are only as good as their equations accurate model reality and only as good as the initial input is and are often severely limited by grid spacing. In meteorology error tend to compound over time (can a butterfly flapping its wings in brazil…).

My skepticism probably comes from the 30 credit hours of meteorology I took in college. Comparing the GFS and Euro (ECMFW) in trying to predict winter storms 2-3 days out let alone 7 or 10 is probably guiding my thoughts. Not only do we look at ensemble means for individual models but often times they model the atmosphere different and arrive at different solution 2-3 days out. I am used to chaos and the butterfly effect in meteorology, where small errors in initial conditions amply greatly over time. Instead of a storm dumping a foot of snow on us, it goes OTS (out to sea). Though I remember reading somewhere that climate models are a bit simpler than common weather prediction models. I have not dug into that but I do know a lot of approximation and assumptions certainly go into them and every measurement and idea they are based on do have error bars associated with them as all real science does. One also has to choose how to run a model. They are usually quite complex and require super computers. Now with that being said, I do think the long term weather forecasting models are good overall. We can get generally reliable forecasts up to a week out. But we also get to continually “hindcast” our weather model and improve on them. We have gone through many versions and iterations of them, some now retired, and they still have many problems and inconsistencies. I know in forecast winter storms we certainly favor the Euro over the American model.

I have not fully studied climate models but I am guessing they have to accurately model global circulation, the energy budget, ocean currents, melting glaciers and a ton of parameters…some of which I am guessing are only approximated still and open to further research. They presumably have to know current conditions accurately as well which introduces grid spacing errors and so on. Scientists will naturally disagree on how to employ models as well and disagree on what approximation to use where. That is why we have ensembles. The article I just linked from nature said the following:

The simplicity of the PDSI, which is calculated from a simple water-balance model forced by monthly precipitation and temperature data, makes it an attractive tool in large-scale drought assessments, but may give biased results in the context of climate change6. Here we show that the previously reported increase in global drought is overestimated because the PDSI uses a simplified model of potential evaporation7 that responds only to changes in temperature and thus responds incorrectly to global warming in recent decades. More realistic calculations, based on the underlying physical principles8 that take into account changes in available energy, humidity and wind speed, suggest that there has been little change in drought over the past 60 years.

So again, I can get behind a climate model if its been tested and is used to predict long term averages (exactly what it should do), assuming it has enough data. I cannot get behind using individual weather events as climatological data points in a global climate change discussion. I also am bringing my generic knowledge of how models work and their uncertainty in meteorology with me to how I imagine climate models (for better or worse).

Which is exactly why I will not given in to sensational nonsense that attributes individual droughts and forest fires to climate change. It is bad science and it opens an avenue for climate deniers to attack it and politicize the issue. Long term averages are needed.

Care to clarify that as it was much hotter on our planet in the past.

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Do you mean since the industrial revolution? I agree that the last 40 years or so of warming seem to go beyond what any natural forcing would allow. The doubling of CO2 is likely to blame.

Whether accurate or not, this looks anecdotal. All that matters for science is data and making sure your trends cover a long enough period to not be dismissed as noise. And the study I linked from 2012 showed droughts did not increase in 60 years despite increased CO2 and warming. A lot of times what we might think would happen is science may or may not because there are a lot of sinks and feedbacks in the atmosphere, and holes in out data that have to be approximated.

Vinnie

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Citation needed here. I would expect that given increased evaporation, what goes up must come down, and that local effects are due to redistribution.

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You complained that we only have 100 years of data. This isn’t true.

Why does variability through history put the current drought in question? Did you expect rainfall to be constant over the last 1,000 years? I don’t understand what you are getting at.

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Wrong conclusion, I’m afraid. How about more intense rainy days and more flooding. And that’s exactly what seeing, and droughts elsewhere, or more extremes in the same region (California is a great case in point). It’s not that hard to understand, with or without sophisticated models.

Yes.

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No, I complained about using climate data over 100 years. I know tree rings would give us proxy data going back further in many places and they show what I expected, a lot of natural variability long before we started burning fossil fuels. The 1000 years of Kansas data (for how many regions… and how accurate is it comparted to actual climate records the last 100 years?) shows that intense droughts and wet periods were very much naturally occurring before the industrial revolution. If you want to link specific droughts and the last decade or two of data on droughts to global climate change you will need to do better.

I am not the one attributing specific droughts to anthropogenic warming. Nor am I claiming an increase in droughts the last 20 years can be demonstrably liked to anthropogenic warming. I also pointed out a nature journal article from 2012 challenging using Palmer Drought Severity Index and claiming droughts have not actually increased the 60 years prior.