Andrew Dessler on Texas Heat: Vague but Exaggerated

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- June 29, 2023

“Rob, your question makes zero sense & and I don’t have the patience to deal with people like you. Please crawl back under the rock you emerged from or I’ll ban you from my substack. Seriously: your next comment that displeases me is your last, so make sure it’s a doozy.” (Andrew Dessler, below)

Climatologist Andrew Dessler, a leading figure on the alarmist side of the debate, is a piece of work–extremely smart and knowledgeable but biased and short-tempered. His personality is akin to that of Joe Romm of yesterday and Michael Mann today–arrogant, condescending, petty. Dessler is certain that he knows what is to be known about all things climate and energy. But, really, he does not know what he does not know. (Yes, climate science is highly uncertain, and climate models are a mess.) [1]

As an example of Dessler at his worst, consider this quotation:

Hey assholes. We’ve been telling you for decades that this was going to happen if we didn’t reduce greenhouse gas emissions. You didn’t listen and now it’s all happening. We hope you’re happy. Enjoy the heatwaves, intense rainfall, sea level rise, ocean acidification, and many other things, you fucking morons.

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Here is a recent exchange with Angry Andy on his Substack post, “Is Climate Change Causing the Texas Heat Wave?” His post stated:

Climate change doesn’t typically cause extreme weather. Rather, climate change is an amplifier for extreme weather. You can think of climate change as “steroids for the weather”… So climate change doesn’t cause a hot day, but it can transform a run-of-the-mill hot day into a record-breaking scorcher. Based on this, you might want to ask if climate change is making the Texas heat wave worse. The answer is an unambiguous yes.

I asked in a comment: Isn’t the ‘greenhouse signal’ more minimum temperatures going up (versus maximums)–and more concentrated in the coldest regions of the year during winter? If so, what are the implications for your interpretation here.

Dessler: Global warming tends to reduce gradients, so you do get more warming at night, during winter, and at high latitudes. but climate change certainly does cause warming during the day, in summer, and in the tropics. so this has no implications for the interpretation.

Bradley: It dilutes the effect. So compared to the average, what percentage from (below) 100% is the Texas Dome anthropogenic effect? This is a quantitative discussion, not only a qualitative one, right?

Dessler: why do you ask questions that are clearly answered in the post? pls re-read the last 2 paragraphs.

Bradley: No it isn’t. You should specifically note the distribution of the warming and how it is diminished from the ‘average’ because of summer and afternoons. In general, what is the reduction from the average? 10% …. 25% … ?

Dessler: Rob, your question makes zero sense & and I don’t have the patience to deal with people like you. Please crawl back under the rock you emerged from or I’ll ban you from my substack. Seriously: your next comment that displeases me is your last, so make sure it’s a doozy.

I thought of ending the discussion here but pressed on with an attempt to get my question answered and not get kicked out of his Substack.

Bradley: I am not trying to pick a fight but am politely asking: is anthropogenic warming the least causal (least intense, most benign) during this time of year (summer) and the time of day (afternoons) to relate to your post on the current Texas heat wave?

Dessler: See, it’s not that hard to be polite.

To answer: that’s certainly true for average warming, but I’m not 100% sure if that is true for extremes. For this or any individual event, you have to do attribution studies. But we already know the sign of the answer: climate change made this more severe than it otherwise would be. The only question is the magnitude.

I could have come back with something like “You are waffling around the fact that your Texas summer heat interpretation is weakened by the theory–theory you did not mention in your analysis. This is lawyer-like and not scholarly. And heck, while you are at it, why not mention that loads of concrete that have been added under the ‘heat dome’ in recent years and decades–and even speak to the tens of thousands of huge industrial wind turbines that scientific studies indicate are contributing to local heating.” But that would have gotten me kicked off his Substack. [Update: I just got kicked off from this blog]

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Dessler almost cancelled me [Update: he did]. His Cancel Culture applies to economists too. And remember what Dessler called esteemed scientist Steven Koonin, author of Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Does Not, and Why It Matters? A “climate flat earther” and “old white dude whose vast experience in the halls of power gives him a unique ability to point out the errors that other people make? Nope.”

Final Comment

Dessler is a lawyer for alarmism, not a humble, careful scientist. Remember the Polar Bear Scare?  Dessler warned about “the extinction of Polar Bears” as a cost of climate change in the first editions of his science primer, An Introduction to the Science of Climate Change (2011: p. 220; 2020: p. 237) only to drop it in the third edition (2022). These are the obvious exaggerations–what about all the subtle ones?

And regarding Texas outlier summers? We had one in 2011 that Dessler pronounced as the new normal. But it was not for more than a decade. But come 2023 (to date), and Andy is all over the heat dome as the climate norm. And notice how he stays vague, as in qualitative rather than quantitative. Is he trying to be careful in a sea of weather unknowns and climate mysteries?

Climate alarmism 2023, continuing what began, officially, at least, 35 years ago this month….

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[1] MIT climatologist Kerry Emanuel (author of the 70-page primer, What We Know About Climate Change (MIT Press: 2018) stated: “If I’d written a book called What We Don’t Know about Climate Science, it would have been an encyclopedia.” Also: “… it’s not about this is going to be a climate catastrophe on the one side, or nothing on the other. That’s not the way the world works.”