What's Going on with the Climate?
by Asa Boxer
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Attempting to understand the climate change subject has been a challenge. Something has always smelled off about the claims surrounding carbon emissions and cow flatulence. That CO2 is the control knob for global weather control is absurd. CO2 is, in fact, an important fertilizer, and the amount produced by human activity is negligible. Indeed, carbon is the basis of all life. Placing the blame on cattle emissions is equally silly and ought to raise anyone’s eyebrows in disbelief. In addition, the hype and politicisation of the issue makes it all the more suspect. The idea of “climate denialism” feels engineered, making the subject unapproachable for discussion, resulting in childish demonisation of anyone who questions the paradigm.
Meanwhile, climate scientists at the top of their field like Richard Lindzen have explained that global warming is not really happening. If it were, we’d see a significant increase in temperature at the equator. He has explained that the notion of global mean temperature is fallacious, since weather is always changing and going through cycles of various time scales. Elsewhere, one discovers that these mean temperatures are influenced by the placement of thermometers, often in microclimates like urban heat islands or other similar spots that don’t represent what they purport. As readers of analogy are well aware by now, so-called “scientific” models can be misleading and subject to confirmation bias. I’ve covered a lot of the reasons for scepticism regarding the anthropogenic climate change claims in the resource paper Climate Heretic, where you can find a number of papers and arguments countering the notion that humans are causing global warming by driving their cars, heating their homes, and eating beef. (If you’d like to read papers by Lindzen and several other scientists and climate researchers, you can find them on the Climate Heretic page.)
Trouble is, most of us are indeed witnessing various forms of climate change. Is it just weather? Some folks will look back and check data to see for themselves whether we’re truly experiencing unprecedented heat. What they find is… not really. In response to this DIY behaviour, activists have begun reporting surface temperatures instead of air temperatures. Surface temperatures are measured at the soil level, while air temperatures are measured at two metres above the surface. Do you recall the 2023 summer reports about Europe reaching unprecedented temperatures of above 45°C? During the same period in Ontario, we were experiencing an unusually cool, wet summer. An acquaintance who sees himself as knowledgeable in these matters claimed we were in “a bubble.” The idea of climate bubbles in this context is so full of science, I am left speechless. The truth was that those extreme temperatures were surface temperatures, while the air temperatures were in the normal low 30°C range. As Julius Ruechel explains in his book Plunderers of the Earth, “they were leveraging the old trick of impressing people by frying an egg on black asphalt” (198). Talk about misinformation! Most people are still convinced that these unprecedented heat waves cannot be denied, since data doesn’t lie. And while it’s true in a sense that data itself doesn’t lie, one also needs to be aware of how data can be bent into a lie. This sort of outright manipulation is fraud, and this sort of fraud isn’t the only instance. The whole field of climate change alarmism is thoroughly corrupt along these lines. Remember the climategate scandal? Not enough has been made of the corruption that was revealed there.
Meanwhile, we are experiencing often ruinous changes in climate. But it’s not being caused by CO2 or cow flatulence. Instead, what we’re seeing are the results of expanding urban heat islands and general mismanagement of water tables, ecosystems, and biomes. Clearcutting for industrial development, mining, and housing has immense impacts on local environments. So what we’re witnessing are essentially micro-climate changes that have spreading impacts. And these sorts of environmental impacts are reproduced globally since countries and municipalities around the world are going about land development in the same ways.
Happily, I came across a series of articles on a Substack called The Climate According to Life that provides a wonderful case study, and I’m going to share some of the conclusions while encouraging readers to read all three articles in the series for themselves (here, here, and here). The focus is on a researcher by the name of Dr. Millan, who was Head of the Mediterranean Center for Environment Studies, and held degrees in Fluid Mechanics, Industrial Engineering, Aerospace Science, Atmospheric Physics and Spectroscopy, Synoptic Meteorology and Weather Forecasting. No slouch. He set out to answer the question of why afternoon storms “were disappearing throughout the Western Mediterranean Basin, with rivers drying up in their wake.” The following is a long quotation from part two of the series:
A classic example of how badly things can go wrong is found in the nearby province of Almeria. In the 1850’s its dense oak forests were clearcut to stoke the furnaces of lead smelters. The collapse to desert was so profound that the area eventually became a film locale for spaghetti westerns. Millan has come to believe the entire Western Mediterranean Basin is at such a tipping point, on its way to becoming an Almeria style desert, a point from which it is very difficult to return. “Once you hit rock,” he says, “you’re done.”
Early in his analysis, he uncovered a key detail. When the morning winds came in, their water content was 14 grams per cubic meter of air, not enough to form clouds, which under those specific conditions would require a moisture level of 21 grams water per cubic meter. The rest of the moisture, 7 grams per cubic meter, would have to come from somewhere else, which brings us back to the land.
At one time, that same sea breeze passed over vast coastal wetlands stretching miles inland, gathering the water vapor rising off of them. Then, proceeding toward the mountains, it would gain even more moisture from the great oaks, each a water tower in its own right. By the time it was climbing up the last high ridges it was saturated not only with moisture but cloud condensation nuclei. One can imagine the thunderheads billowing up, stacked plumes rising two miles in the air, releasing their latent heat to dissipate high over the mountains while dropping cold rain back on the land, rehydrating the vegetation and recharging the aquifers and marshes.
Now, however, rather than marshes and oaks, the sea breeze encounters concrete, steel and degraded landscapes. Not only is it deprived of the moisture it needs to make storms, it’s buffeted by the heat rising off the man-made materials, gaining 16oC before reaching the mountains. What finally reaches the hills finds shrubs and scattered pinions, skeletal remains of the ancient oak forests. Not only is there too little respiring life to provide the missing 7 grams water per cubic meter air to make the rain cloud, but the intense heating of the air mass means it requires even more moisture to produce rain clouds. The pattern now is a few clouds gather in the late afternoon, rise, spread, then wisp away. The warm, moist, now-polluted air, instead of releasing its gathered heat and dropping rain on the land to replenish the system, merely flows back over the Mediterranean Sea.
This roughly explains the loss of summer storms, but the process doesn’t end there. The moist, polluted layers of air pile up over the Mediterranean Sea, layer upon layer, day by day. Those layers, soupy with powerful greenhouse gases like water vapor and ozone, steadily warm the sea below, so that by the end of summer the warmed sea begins supercharging coastal storms, as well as storm tracks that curve down over the Mediterranean on their way back up to central Europe. These storm tracks gather up the warm, moist layers and become supercharged as well, contributing to the devastating floods in Eastern Europe.
So where did the summer storms go? They left with the forests, soils and wetlands. Why are the coastal storms getting worse? In part from a sea-body warmed by the hydrological effects of ruined forests, soils and wetlands. Where are the drenching central European rains coming from? In part from moisture picked up over the Mediterranean that should have emptied out as rain over the inland mountains. What to do about it? One, stop ruining forests, soils and wetlands. And two, start restoring forests, soils and wetlands. Or as Millan puts it in his own imaginative way, start “cultivating storms.”
I will leave you with that as food for thought. This sort of dynamic study provides a window into the true nature of climate complexity. It’s not the sort of thing you can fix with EVs, windmills, and solar arrays. In fact, these projects will only exacerbate the problem because they generally entail more of the sort of land use that lies at the heart of the trouble: more clearcutting (or certainly no effort to restore soils and ecosystems), and more destructive and often toxic mining operations. I further encourage folks to read Julius Ruechel’s Plunderers of the Earth for more on this subject, since he exposes a lot of the fraud rampant in the climate racket and examines in some detail how the phenomena being blamed on climate change are in fact issues of land development and political mismanagement. The encouraging side to the climate story is that despite the complexity, the basic issues are pretty straight forward and essentially fixable. Moreover, owing to carbon-zero targets, industries, countries, and municipalities are making changes that will have a positive impact on soils and ecosystems. Perhaps in due course, the truly legitimate research like that of Dr. Millan will have the influence it ought to enjoy, and we’ll be able to turn this ship of fools around.
Asa Boxer’s poetry has garnered several prizes and is included in various anthologies around the world. His books are The Mechanical Bird (Signal, 2007), Skullduggery (Signal, 2011), Friar Biard’s Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013), Etymologies (Anstruther Press, 2016), Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018) and The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022). Boxer is also the founder and editor of analogy magazine.
Steven Koonin's "Unsettled" is decisively transparent regarding the social/scientific process around climate research and especially reporting. Ought to read, imho.
Also, regarding models and constant tweaking, skullduggery, and general fucking about: we're at "string theory" levels of obfuscation and echo-chambering.
Finally, around Asa's take on model/prediction misunderstandings and mis-pointings -- suggest The Logic of Failure by Dörner.
Important topic.....thanks for the Boxer strategic overflight....
Brave of you to wade into this topic. Thank you for including the long quotation from Millan on afternoon storms in the Med. basin. This information was new to me and very helpful. In my experience, writing on climate often reveals a Covid-era mentality that seeks to impose restrictions and settle for partial solutions that are presented as salvation. The energy needed to produce and fuel EVs is a good example, seldom discussed. In Iowa, where I come from, there are endless miles of enormous windmills, set into prime farmland with masses of concrete. Nobody studied their impact on wildlife; nobody even knows how long these machines will last. Some are not even connected to power grids, and those that are, in some cases, send their energy out of the state of Iowa. EVs are subsidized. Farmers are paid a lot by power company to let the windmills be built on their land. I thought it was good, at the end, to point to some ways forward. There are many large forces at work changing the world even faster than the climate is changing.