The Fork in the Climate Road: Eliminate fossil fuels by Monday or “we pass on a dying planet to our children.” An Anthropocene Fairy Tale.

Guest philosophizing by David Middleton

There are three options in tackling climate change. Only one will work

We’re now at a fork in the road: either we cut out fossil fuels completely, or we pass on a dying planet to our children

Mayer Hillman

The world faces a near-impossible decision – one that is already determining the character and quality of the lives of the generations succeeding us.

It is clear from the latest IPCC climate report that the first and only effective course, albeit a deeply unpopular one, would be to stop using any fossil fuels. The second would be to voluntarily minimise their use as much as climate scientists have calculated would deliver some prospect of success. Finally, we can carry on as we are by aiming to meet the growth in demand for activities dependent on fossil fuels, allowing market forces to mitigate the problems that such a course of action generates – and leave it to the next generation to set in train realistic solutions (if that is possible), that the present one has been unable to find.

These are the choices. There are no others. Future generations will judge us on what we choose to do in full knowledge – accessories before the fact – of the devastating consequences of continuing with our energy-profligate lifestyles.

What a legacy we are bequeathing – regions of the world becoming uninhabitable at an accelerating rate, creating potentially millions of ecological refugees; a burgeoning world population, diminishing reserves of finite and other resources, shortages of water and food, calamitous loss of genetic variability, and wars of survival.

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The Grauniad

Basically…

First off… I actually feel guilty about not subscribing to the Grauniad… I have way too much fun ridiculing their idiotic Climatariat propaganda.

Secondly, who in the Hell is Mayer Hillman? And why in the Hell should anyone cares about his opinion… Particularly when he doesn’t know what a “fork in the road” is.

A “fork in the road” does not have “three options.”

Personally, I prefer the philosophy of Yogi Berra to that of Robert Frost. I was also a catcher during part of my “stellar” Little League career.

Mayer Hillman is an architect. I could end the post right here… But there’s way too much fun to be had with this. Starting here:

The Roads Not Taken

We can assume the economic “road not taken” by sane human beings will be Mr. Hillman’s preferred road back to the Pleistocene. So let’s look at some other “roads not taken.”

Back in 1975, our climate thankfully took the high road and opted not to follow the road to “The Ice Age Cometh?”…

According to the Climatariat, the GHG emissions since 1975 saved us from and ice age… Yes, that is a real Science News cover from March 1975. I enlarged the date and improved the resolution. But the cover is real.

While taking the high road, our climate opted not to take Jimbo Hansen’s road to the Eemian/Altithermal…

Scenario C had humans un-discovering fire in 1999.

Our climate has consistently taken the road that avoids all of the really bad models (>95% of the models), and only followed to good models (<5% of the models).

UAH 6.0 vs IPCC TAR (2001)

UAH 6.0 vs AR4 (2007)

UAH 6.0 vs IPCC AR5 (2014)

The climate has even been very selective about following the road with only the best of the good models. UAH 6.0 vs RCP4.5 (a strong mitigation scenario) from Carbon Brief (2017).

It gets even worse if the models are initialized earlier

Even if we used the pause-busting Mears-ized RSS satellite temperature data the “road not taken” is RCP8.5 Nightmare Lane…

“Fig. 1. Global (70S to 80N) Mean TLT Anomaly plotted as a function of time. The black line is the time series for the RSS V4.0 MSU/AMSU atmosperhic temperature dataset. The yellow band is the 5% to 95% range of output from CMIP-5 climate simulations. The mean value of each time series average from 1979-1984 is set to zero so the changes over time can be more easily seen. Note that after 1998, the observations are likely to be in the lower part of the model distribution, indicating that there is a small discrepancy between the model predictions and the satelllite observations.(All time series have been smoothed to remove variabilty on time scales shorter than 6 months.)” Remote Sensing Systems

95% of the model runs predicted more warming than the RSS data since 1988… And this is the Mears-ized RSS data, the one in which the measurements were influenced to obtain key information (erase the pause and more closely match the surface data). The RSS model ensemble is historically forced prior to 2004.

Their “small discrepancy” would be abject failure in the oil & gas industry. And in energy, the “road not taken” has been the Unicorn Expressway…