Physicist Howard Hayden notes that trivial causes have effects, but trivial effects
Below is an editorial from The Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP), August 5, 2024
Causes & Effects: Commentators on energy and environment are frequently distorting cause with effect. This includes calling trivial influences as The Cause. As a reminder, AMO physicist Howard Hayden distinguishes between Cause and Effect. Hayden writes in the Energy Advocate:
“Building the Empire State Building moved the center of mass of the planet. So did building the Grand Coulee Dam and letting it fill with water. The bright lights of cities at night send energy to outer space, thereby cooling the planet. The more people you have around you, the more ionizing radiation you get from the potassium in their bones. We can write hundreds of such undeniably true statements that are of trivial consequence.
“The true statement that has frightened all too many people into irrationality, however, is: Adding CO2 to the atmosphere warms the planet.
“In logical terms, the addition of CO2 to the atmosphere is a cause, and temperature rise is an effect. It is physically impossible: 1) for the CO2 increase since the last glacial maximum to be responsible for the temperature rise we have in the present interglacial period; 2) for the CO2 rise since the Little Ice Age to be responsible for the temperature rise by the 21st century; and 3) for the temperature rise measured since satellites began taking data.
CO2 ‘forcing’ can’t account for warming
“The ‘radiative forcing’ caused by the CO2 increase is totally inadequate to block the additional heat radiation from the warming surface from going to space. Even with the positive feedback the IPCC assumes for H2O, the radiative forcing is still inadequate to account for the warming.
“Nevertheless, adding CO2 to the atmosphere does warm the planet. A couple of decades ago, that was called Global Warming. The logical statement (of trivial consequence) was ‘Increasing CO2 causes global warming.’
“Then the terminology changed to ‘Increasing CO2 causes climate change.’ Political inventions like the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a US NOAA government website climate.gov, NASA’s science.nasa.gov/climate-change, and the German
http://www.umweltbundesamt.de/en/to…,
to name just a few, came into being.
“Non-governmental groups, including many news organizations also took up the cudgel: Greenpeace, NPR, The Guardian, and many others—too many to mention—became obsessed with ‘climate change.’ Indeed, NPR can’t seem to get through a news broadcast without some zealot from the Climate Desk blaming something (or many things) on ‘climate change.’
“Important for the propaganda effort was a switch in logic. ‘Climate change’ used to be an effect; now it has become a cause. For example, the search engine Yahoo finds 15 million times that the expression ‘caused by climate change’ and 43 million times ‘due to climate change’ have been used on the internet. (Google no longer reports the count, nor does Microsoft’s Edge.)”
Hayden gives specific examples. Perhaps the most notorious is declaring the destruction of parts of the Great Barrier Reef caused by cyclones as general destruction by climate change. TWTW adds another notorious example: the former Administrator of NOAA labeling a slight decline in the alkalinity of the ocean, a solution with strong acids and bases by a weak acid (CO2), as ocean acidification. Such claims are deliberately misleading, less than utterly honest.