by Judith Curry and Harry DeAngelo 

We have a new paper published in the Journal of Applied Corporate Finance, entitled “A Critique of the Apocalyptic Climate Narrative.” The paper reflects the JACF’s ongoing interest in publishing articles that analyze important Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) issues in ways that are useful for investors, money managers, and corporate directors, as well as for economists and legal scholars who study corporate governance.

The official link for the publication at Wiley .  The paper can be downloaded from SSRN .  Please use SSRN to download, as is it easier to navigate and so that we can keep track of the download numbers.

The back story on this paper is that Harry DeAngelo sent me a draft manuscript for comments.  I was intrigued by writing a paper on this topic for the corporate/investor audience, and the collaboration was born.

Some excerpts from the paper are provided below:

Summary 

<quote>

The apocalyptic climate narrative is a seriously misleading propaganda tool and a socially destructive guide for public policy. The narrative radically overstates the risks to humanity of continued global warming, which are manageable, not existential. It prescribes large-scale near-term suppression of fossil-fuel use, while failing to recognize the huge costs that such suppression would inflict on humans because fossil fuels are currently irreplaceable inputs for producing food (via ammonia-based fertilizer), steel, cement, and plastics.

The paper details the flaws in the apocalyptic climate narrative, including why the threat from human- caused climate change is not dire and why urgent suppression of fossil-fuel use would be unwise. We argue that sensible public policies would focus instead on developing a diversified portfolio of energy sources to support greater resilience and flexibility to respond to whatever weather and climate extremes that might occur. We identify nine principles for sensible U.S. public policies toward energy and discuss implications of the flaws in the narrative for investors and their agents.

<end quote>

The first three sections provide introductory material that readers of Climate Etc. should be very familiar with.  Here is the outline of sections 2 and 3:

2. Is global warming dangerous?

• Warming over the past 120 years
• Prospective warming over the 21^st century
• Tipping points and surprises

3. Fossil fuel suppression: shooting ourselves in the foot

• Failure of net zero policies
• Geopolitical concerns about fossil fuel suppression
• Moral concerns about fossil fuel suppression
• Other economic, technological, and social impediments to fossil fuel suppression
• Bad energy choices
• Ever-growing demand for energy

Section 4 addresses rational energy policy for the 21^st century, with the full text of this section excerpted here:

<quote>

4. Rational energy policy for the 21^st century

We offer nine principles for operationalizing this approach to U.S. energy policies, with #3, #5, and #6 specifying actions we should take and the remainder highlighting what we should not do.

1. We should not inflict costs on U.S. citizens – reduced overall economic prosperity, constrained individual choice, and diminished national security – by adopting public policies intended to mitigate global warming that will not detectably affect Earth’s temperature in the short or long
2. We should not eliminate fossil fuels before we have technologically viable and cost-effective replacements for the critical inputs they provide in the production of food, steel, cement, plastics, and electricity.
3. We should use “carrots” to foster investment in innovation in energy, materials science, and agricultural science, as well as in the ability of humans to adapt to a changing climate.
4. We should not use “sticks” to punish consumption that generates greenhouse gasses (e.g., banning gas stoves, jet travel, internal combustion engines, and non-vegan food), while having no material effect on temperatures now or in the long run.
5. We should cultivate clean energy (to reduce air pollution) and energy independence (for national defense and economic security reasons) with a diversified set of reliable energy sources to hedge the risks of adverse “unknown unknowns” in the evolution of our political, economic, and physical
6. We should put major emphasis on the resuscitation (and refined development) of nuclear power, which is at least as safe as solar and wind and far safer than coal and oil (based on comparisons of death rates due to both accidents and air pollution per unit of electricity generated).
7. We should not focus narrowly on solar panels, wind turbines, and biofuels. Solar and wind are problematic because of their (i) unreliability and consequent need for a stand-by power system, (ii) low energy density and consequent massive land requirements to deliver energy at scale, and (iii) negative externalities (e.g., from rare-earth mining to produce batteries to address the unreliability problem). Biofuel emissions are at least as bad as gasoline, while biofuel production uses massive amounts of cropland and played a significant role in three major food crises in the last 20 years.
8. We should not engage in backdoor regulation of fossil-fuel use by the Federal Reserve (through bank oversight) and the SEC (through ESG empowerment) that will warp the allocation of investment capital.
9. We should not use our power to impose credit policies toward developing countries (e.g., by the World Bank) that discourage fossil-fuel-based projects and thereby make it more difficult for world’s poorest people to elevate themselves out of poverty.

The three proactive principles (#3, #5, and #6) reflect the physical reality that human flourishing depends critically on the abundant availability of energy and on the currently irreplaceable role that fossil fuels play in the production of food, steel, cement and plastics. Deterrent principle #7, which cautions against a narrow focus on solar, wind, and biofuels, reflects the strong technological limits of these technologies.

The remaining deterrent principles (#1, #2, #4, #8, and #9) reflect the fact that it makes no sense to mandate or constrain choices that will cause humanity to bear costs when those choices will have no detectable effect on global warming in the short- or long-run. These costs have a direct component: Avoidable waste from outlays on unpromising technologies and on consumption goods that simply sound good from a carbon emissions perspective. They also have an opportunity cost component in terms of diverting resources from worthwhile causes, including investments to foster greater resilience to weather and climate extremes as well as to help wide swaths of humanity to elevate themselves out of poverty.

4.1  Implications for investors and their agents

The flaws in the apocalyptic climate narrative have three important implications for the risk-management decisions of private investors and for the corporate directors and money managers who work on their behalf.

• The actual risks of fossil-fuel-generated climate change are not nearly as great as portrayed in the drumbeat of worried discussions of global warming in public discourse that the apocalyptic climate narrative has fostered.
• Those who nonetheless want to do something to help mitigate global warming should realize that the long-run consequences for the planet of the ESG pursuit of a reduced corporate carbon footprint will do little, if anything, to change the climate over the course of the 21^st
• The apocalyptic climate narrative is itself an element of investment. The narrative has gained such powerful traction – especially in the U.S. and other wealthy countries – that it is significantly affecting the allocation of real resources and the stock-market values of companies.

The latter traction creates upside investment potential and downside risk. The upside, of course, is the potential for profits by responding to the demand for green investments. The downside risk is the possibility that many people will eventually come to realize that the importance of suppressing fossil-fuel use has been blown far out of proportion in public discourse.

From a capital markets perspective, the current green-investment situation accordingly has elements of a stock-price bubble that is supported by a false narrative. One can expect that bubble to sustain or grow provided that many people continue to buy into the premise of an urgent need to transition away from fossil fuels and as governments add more subsidies to renewable-energy projects.

The danger is that the bubble will pop or dissolve as it becomes increasingly clear that the Apocalyptic climate narrative is an extremely effective form of environmentalist propaganda that markedly overstates the risks to humanity of continued global warming.

One might be tempted to take investment positions that effectively “short the bubble” and wait for the gains to come rolling in when the bubble pops or dissolves. The problem with such strategies is that substantial valuation errors in the capital market can take a long time to correct. Consequently, arbitrageurs who have finite capital to invest and who make strong bets against the bubble can be wiped out financially before the asset-pricing errors are corrected.

The upshot is that there is no clear path to a “free lunch” of abnormal investment performance from shorting green investments. The reason is that one simply cannot be sure about whether or when the world will come to broad recognition of the flaws in the narrative.

<end quote>

Full text is also excerpted for the final section:

<begin quote>

 5. Bottom line: Sensible alternatives to net-zero policies

The apocalyptic climate narrative is a seriously flawed guide for public policy because it (1) radically overstates the risks to humanity of continued global warming, which are manageable, not existential and

(2) prescribes large-scale near-term suppression of fossil-fuel use, while failing to recognize the huge costs that such suppression would inflict on humans because fossil fuels are currently irreplaceable inputs for producing food (via ammonia-based fertilizer), steel, cement, and plastics.

The answers to four key questions provide a compact foundation for a far more sensible template for public policies toward global warming and the use of fossil fuels.

What would happen if the U.S. enforced a net-zero emissions policy? In 2100, according to climate- model projections. Earth’s average temperature would be lower (than it otherwise would be) by less than 0.2°C, which would be undetectable statistically given normal temperature variation. U.S. consumption and production of goods created with steel, cement, and plastics, and of food grown with ammonia-based fertilizer would immediately plummet because of the essential role fossil fuels play in their creation. A sharp decline in the quality of life would surely ensue.

Is it worth it? Is an undetectable reduction in the warming trend worth a huge sacrifice in the quality of life caused by an urgent move to net-zero? According to the apocalyptic climate narrative, the answer is yes because humanity (ostensibly) faces an existential threat from global warming. However, there is no credible evidence of an existential threat from global warming. Nor, indeed, is there evidence of warming- related costs that cannot be addressed by humanity’s resilience and ability to adapt to extreme climates.

Is an aggressive move to net-zero emissions politically feasible? Public policies that enforce an urgent move to net-zero would be especially hard to sell to the U.S. electorate once voters see the costs they would bear. The resistance would almost surely grow stronger as more voters come to realize that, regardless of their personal quality-of-life sacrifices, global warming is predicted to continue because China, India, Russia, Iran, and many other countries have strong incentives to continue to use fossil fuels.

What then should the U.S. do about global warming? We should encourage investment in efforts to find and improve alternatives to fossil fuels and in adaptation to a changing climate. We should not suppress fossil-fuel use because that would impose serious costs while generating no detectable benefits. Such suppression would put the net-zero cart before the horse, which is finding viable alternatives to fossil fuels in the myriad ways they enable humans to live far longer and much higher quality lives than our ancestors did even as recently as 100 years ago.

<end quote>

The post A Critique of the Apocalyptic Climate Narrative appeared first on Climate Etc..

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May 7, 2025 at 08:01AM

By Paul Homewood

 

A new study has found that the Antarctic ice sheet started growing again between 2021 and 2023, confounding the warnings of doom continually fed to us.

Abstract

To accurately evaluate the Antarctic Ice Sheet (AIS) mass change rate and its spatiotemporal characteristics, we derive the AIS mass change series from April 2002 to December 2023 using an improved point-mass model approach with data-driven regularization matrices and iteratively determined multiple regularization parameters. Then, we analyze the spatio-temporal characteristics of the mass change rate over the AIS, focusing on four glacier basins in the Wilkes Land-Queen Mary Land (WL-QML) region of the East AIS (EAIS), namely the Denman, Moscow, Totten, and Vincennes Bay glacier basins. The results indicate that the AIS contribution to GMSL (global mean sea level) rise peaked at 5.99±0.43 mm in February 2020, followed by a mass gain period lasting over three years, ultimately resulting in a total GMSL contribution of 5.10±0.52 mm by the end of 2023. Moreover, the AIS experienced substantial mass loss during the 2011–2020 period, with a rate of 142.06±56.12 Gt a⁻¹, mainly due to intensified mass loss in the West AIS and the WL-QML region of the EAIS. Further analysis shows that the mass loss rate of the four glacier basins in the WL-QML region during the 2011–2020 period increased by 47.64±8.14 Gt a⁻¹ compared with the 2002–2010 period, with expanded areas of mass loss spreading inland. Notably, the Vincennes Bay and Denman glacier basins transitioned from mass balance and accumulation to intense mass loss, respectively. An in-depth investigation reveals that the increased ice discharge and decreased SMB (surface mass balance) contribute 27.47% and 72.53%, respectively, to the intensified mass loss of the four glacier basins. Overall, the study presents the mass change characteristics of the AIS over the past 22 years, highlights the instability of four important glacier basins in the EAIS, and provides valuable scientific insights for related polar research.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11430-024-1517-1

 

There should be no great surprise about this – NASA themselves show the same sort of recovery since 2020:

https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/ice-sheets/?intent=121

 

But this is where it all starts to get muddied. The NASA graph is deliberately designed to misinform, suggesting a precipitous decline in Antarctic mass since 2000.

This is what the picture actually looks like:

Antarctic ice mass is reckoned to be 24,380,000 gigatonnes. NASA’s claimed loss of  136 Gt a year is just 0.0005% of that.

The ice is said to be about 2 km thick, so they are claiming they can measure the height of the ice to an accuracy of 1 cm across the whole continent, which is plainly absurd.

And we must also remember that ten years ago NASA’s own Jay Zwally found that the Antarctic ice sheet showed a net gain of 112 billion tons of ice a year from 1992 to 2001, and 82 billion tons of ice per year between 2003 and 2008. This totally contradicts what they are claiming now.

So who is right? Is the ice sheet growing or shrinking? The reality is that we simply cannot know, because whatever the changes are they are too tiny to measure with any certainty.

Interestingly, NASA’s article in 2015, covering the Zwally study, reported:

“The new study highlights the difficulties of measuring the small changes in ice height happening in East Antarctica,” said Ben Smith, a glaciologist with the University of Washington in Seattle who was not involved in Zwally’s study.

"Doing altimetry accurately for very large areas is extraordinarily difficult, and there are measurements of snow accumulation that need to be done independently to understand what’s happening in these places,” Smith said.

It is also highly relevant that since September 2018, measurements of the icecap have been monitored by a new NASA satellite, ICESat-2, which naturally is much more accurate than its predecessor. The latest measurements showing a recovery in ice mass therefore must be considered more reliable than earlier claims of mass loss.

All of these Antarctic studies share the same childishly naive view that climate never changed before the 21st century.  What possible significance does a graph beginning in 2001 have, when we have no idea of what happened to the ice sheet during the previous 10,000 years.

There is evidence that the recent recovery is due to heavier snowfall, which the authors describe as “anomalous”. But how do they know the earlier period was not anomalously low?

In fact, NASA reported in 2015:

Zwally said that while other scientists have assumed that the gains in elevation seen in East Antarctica are due to recent increases in snow accumulation, his team used meteorological data beginning in 1979 to show that the snowfall in East Antarctica actually decreased by 11 billion tons per year during both the ERS and ICESat periods. They also used information on snow accumulation for tens of thousands of years, derived by other scientists from ice cores, to conclude that East Antarctica has been thickening for a very long time.

“At the end of the last Ice Age, the air became warmer and carried more moisture across the continent, doubling the amount of snow dropped on the ice sheet,” Zwally said.

The extra snowfall that began 10,000 years ago has been slowly accumulating on the ice sheet and compacting into solid ice over millennia, thickening the ice in East Antarctica and the interior of West Antarctica by an average of 0.7 inches (1.7 centimeters) per year. This small thickening, sustained over thousands of years and spread over the vast expanse of these sectors of Antarctica, corresponds to a very large gain of ice – enough to outweigh the losses from fast-flowing glaciers in other parts of the continent and reduce global sea level rise.

https://science.nasa.gov/science-research/earth-science/water-energy-cycle/cryosphere/study-mass-gains-of-antarctic-ice-sheet-greater-than-losses/

It really is a no-brainer! Polar regions warm because of the influx of milder, moist air from lower latitudes, which in turn brings more snow. We know that Antarctic sea ice has shrunk in the last few years, precisely because of the predominance of northerly winds; the two phenomena are connected.

And we also know that sea ice grew between the 1980s and 2010s, due to the same factors which led to reduced snowfall. Both events are part of the Southern Annular Mode, which describes shifts in the position and strength of the westerly wind belt around Antarctica, which in turn influences the strength and location of the polar jet stream.

But what Zwally has identified is that the same processes have been going since the Ice Age ended.

There is not a jot of evidence that the loss of ice mass claimed by NASA between 2002 and 2020 was in any way unprecedented or unusual.

FOOTNOTE

The NASA article referred to above now states:

https://science.nasa.gov/science-research/earth-science/water-energy-cycle/cryosphere/study-mass-gains-of-antarctic-ice-sheet-greater-than-losses/

This of course is a nonsense and a lie.

Plainly Zwally’s for 1992 to 2008 are just as valid now as they were then. Nor has NASA said that the study was in any way inaccurate or faulty. Indeed, Zwally’s study is up on the Journal of Glaciology.

The inference is obvious – Zwally’s conclusions that the Antarctic ice sheet has been growing for all of this time is politically inconvenient for NASA.

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May 7, 2025 at 06:25AM

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May 7, 2025 at 04:02AM